When Peterson unsurprisingly refused to budge, and even less surprisingly was given everything he asked for, here's how President Obama handled it, emphasis mine:
... So I believe that this legislation is extraordinarily important for our country; it's taken great effort on the part of many over the course of the past several months. And I want to thank the Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Henry Waxman; his colleagues on that committee, including Congressmen Dingell, Ed Markey, and Rick Boucher. I also want to thank Charlie Rangel, the Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and Collin Peterson, the Chair of the Agriculture Committee, for their many and ongoing contributions to this process. ...
Clearly, there are only two logical paths suggested as to how you can get treated gingerly by the leadership of the Democratic Party and their favorite NGOs, turn them into your personal genies, then get them to thank you in public for all the work you did to cross their purposes. Either ...
1) you can be immovably obdurate, or
2) you can be a conservative.
These two options are not mutually exclusive, of course. It can be left as an exercise for the reader to determine the relative importance of being obdurate or conservative, but I can't think offhand of any staunch progressives who are as effective in getting what they want as Peterson.
In any case, a sure lesson seems to be that if you're a progressive and you want Democrats to be nice to you, you should shut up. If you want them to give you what you want and to be nice to you, maybe you should go into another line of work.
Environmental groups' representatives will often say that the most important thing for them to do is to stick together, then after that, to get legislation nominally regulating greenhouse gas emissions passed. But that's just upside down.
The most important thing for them to do is to attempt to stabilize the climate: that's what most of their donors give them money for.
You could apply that same lens to the Democrats, though. They've got it into their heads that they need to stamp the word "climate" onto a piece of legislation and pass the damn thing.
That's not what we voted for when the country sent a candidate to the Oval Office who'd been running on a far more progressive, science-based climate platform than even the first draft of the Waxman-Markey bill.
We voted for a cake and what we're getting is a serving plate with a suspiciously cake-shaped crumb and frosting print on it.
No one can say anything about that, of course, because accusations of cake theft are a far more serious breach of etiquette than being spotted afterwards with frosting on your face and crumbs down your front.
Indeed, cake ... okay, enough with the pastry metaphor. (Speaking of cake, it's time for us to decide: round or square. What say you?) You get the point.
The leadership and the leading NGOs appear to want progressives to play nice, be quiet and not even try to win this round. That's their criteria for being nice to us. Their criteria for being nice to someone like Peterson, who curiously thinks that farmers are pro-flood, is for him to put up a huge fight against everything they said they wanted.
Consider this part the umpteenth in the ongoing series: Mainstream elected Democrats don't want what progressives want and they'd rather look like incompetent dunces than give it to us, so don't fool yourselves. |
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