If Senate Dems had been this productive before lame duck session...
by kos
Fri Dec 24, 2010 at 09:00:05 AM PST
Let's see ... DADT was repealed, tax deal was passed, New START was ratified, the 9/11 responder bill has had GOP on the defensive, the DREAM vote reminded Latinos which party stands by them, and big food safety bill was passed. What did I forget?
While not all of this was ideal (particularly the tax bill), it's amazing what even the broken Senate can accomplish in less than three weeks once Democrats and the White House decided to tighten the screws. Rather than look lost and ineffective, Democrats looked decisive and strong. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has never looked more competent.
If this Democratic Party had showed up earlier this year, things may have turned out much differently this November. DADT and DREAM would've helped narrow the intensity gap, the tax debate could've helped better frame the difference between the two parties, and the 9-11 responder bill could've given birth to a million effective attack ads.
But digby sagely cited TPM's Brian Buetler's take, then adds a bit more:
Clearing The Decks
by digby
Brian Beutler wonders why the Republicans didn't fight harder on some of the lame duck agenda and concludes:
Republicans must at some level have understood that some of these things weren't going away. DADT would've stayed on the agenda. 9/11 responders would have stayed on the agenda. DREAM will stay on the agenda. And I'm guessing they made the simple calculation that it would be easier and wiser to give Dems these victories now, rather than fight it out with them publicly next after the GOP takes over the House with a caucus that's divided over these things.
Now the issues are off the table, and that creates more space for them to set the agenda.
I think this is right. And I think we know what that agenda is, don't we?
I also believe that while DADT, START and the 9/11 responders bills were hostages they would have killed if they had to, they were ok with allowing them to live if they got the tax cuts, which set the table for everything that comes next. After all, DADT was endorsed by the military, START was endorsed by every Republican statesman dead or alive, including retired Generals by the bus load, and the 9/11 responders bill was to benefit a bunch of cops and firemen. At the end of the day, the GOP has always been a sucker for a man in a uniform.
I think it works like this: the success of the lame duck session is being widely attributed to the President and the Village is pushing that meme very hard. From the GOP perspective this works in their favor. They get to blame all the individual items the public doesn't like on the Muslim communist usurper which is, at this point, all they care about. (Hence, "they ate our lunch.") It's very useful to have a Democratic president get credit for unpopular GOP proposals that aren't going to work, like the tax cuts.
Of course, the president gets to take credit for the popular proposals as well, but these were all issues that either the public doesn't care much about like START or are like the repeal of DADT, which despite its 77% public approval, Republicans are leery of supporting en masse because of the strong objections from part of their base. The one thing they defeated was a popular immigration bill that was very important to their base to defeat.
I think they're happy to have a Democrat sign on Bush's signature issue and especially happy to have the administration use their rationale for doing it. If the economy doesn't improve, the Democrats will own the failure and can't use it against them. If it does, it will be attributed to Republican voodoo economics working to create Morning in America. I think they now feel they have a good argument going into 2012 regardless of how it goes. They are good at using the levers of opposition to advance their own goals.
I really don't think we should hear any more talk about 11-dimensional chess. The GOP is playing two-dimensional Chineses checkers and they're whipping Obama's butt. Obama? He's playing tiddlie-winks, and he still thinks he's Bobbie Fischer. But (h/t bmull) at least he's got Booman fooled:
Time To Give Props
by BooMan
Thu Dec 23rd, 2010 at 10:19:27 AM EST
At this point in his presidency I think it is fair to say that Obama is already in the conversation as best president since Abraham Lincoln. His only real competition is FDR and LBJ, and I think it's a safe bet that Obama will neither beat the Nazis nor start an unwinnable war in Vietnam. In other words, he's in a battle with FDR to be the best president since the Civil War.
Maybe some of you think that I am joking. I am not. Maybe some of you think I am damning with faint praise. Maybe I am. But that doesn't mean that I am wrong. I am not wrong.
Whatever else is wrong with the economy, we're obviously not about to run out of kool-aide anytime soon.
p.s. Jimmy Carter was a "failed president" in many ways. But he brokered the only peace deal worth anything to Israel, and tried to alert us to the need for an alternative energy program early enough that if we had heeded him, we'd be in really good shape today. The same of course, applies to our failure to follow-up on the Egypt-Isreal peace deal. These came from Carter himself, not from any forces of historical inevitability. Does Obama have anything remotely close to comparing with those two accomplishments? No. He does not.
On Friday, responding to Ken Silverstein's fairwell post as Harper's Washington editor (no hard feelings, he left to keep his sanity, shrewd dude to the end, he), digby dug up a highly prescient piece Silverstein wrote in 2006,"Barack Obama, Inc, the birth of a Washington machine". It's worth repeating the passage digby quotes in whole:
Since coming to Washington, Obama has advocated for the poor, most notably in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and has emerged as a champion of clean government. He has fought for restrictions on lobbying, even as most of his fellow Democrats postured on the issue while quietly seeking to gut real reform initiatives. In mid-September, Congress approved a bill he co-authored with Oklahoma's arch-conservative senator, Tom Coburn, requiring all federal contracts and earmarks to be published in an Internet database, a step that will better allow citizens to track the way the government spends their money.
Yet it is also startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation's manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama's top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a "leadership PAC," a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians' campaigns-and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.
Already considered a potential vice-presidential nominee in 2008, Obama clearly has abundant political ambitions. Hence he is playing not only to voters in Illinois--a reliably Democratic and generally liberal state--but to the broader national audience, as well as to the Democratic Party establishment, the Washington media, and large political donors. Perhaps for this reason, Obama has taken an approach to his policymaking that is notably cautious and nonconfrontational. "Since the founding, the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary," he told me during an interview at his office on Capitol Hill this summer. "What that means is that for a political leader to get things done, he or she ideally should be ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. I want to push the envelope but make sure I have enough folks with me that I'm not rendered politically impotent."
The question, though, is just how effective--let alone reformist--Obama's approach can be in a Washington grown hostile to reform and those who advocate it. After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to the right, and the political system in general has become thoroughly dominated by the corporate perspective, the first requirement of electoral success is now the ability to raise staggering sums of money. For Barack Obama, this means that mounting a successful career, especially one that may include a run for the presidency, cannot even be attempted without the kind of compromising and horse trading that may, in fact, render him impotent.
With reportage like that, one has to wonder why we ever needed anyone else covering DC while Silverstein was there. Did he miss anything? Not that I can see. More importantly, perhaps, did he blow any smoke, or drink any kool-aid? No, not a bit. But to broaden things out a bit to lessons that others might learn from Silverstein, just look at how much predictive power there was in simply noting who it was the Obama had chose to do business with. "He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on," Silverstein wrote, and then he proceeded to name names. By the time you came to the end of that paragraph, was there any possible way you could believe his transformational--sometimes even "revolutionary"--rhetoric was meant to be taken seriously? How could it, when these were the people Obama had already lined up to help him sell it? You'll note that there were no mavericky outsider geniuses in this bunch. James Carville would seem like a cross between Karl Marx and Dan Draper compared to the folks Obama hooked up with--a totally off-the-shelf entourage, just the same as his off-the-shelf Versailles Dem rhetoric about "be[ing] ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead."
Of course his campaign was way more exciting than that, thanks mostly to the contributions of his fans. When has show business ever been substantially different? Sales execs always think they're tragically hip. And these were--and still are--no different. But what they were actually doing was already a couple of decades old, as Naomi Klein pointed out on Democracy Now! last December, which I wrote about in a diary, "Naomi Klein nails brand 'Obama'". Here's the excerpt I quoted from the interview:
There's been a lot of chatter this morning about Newtie's comments touting Dinesh D'Souza's absurd new book, The Roots of Obama's Rage setting forth the idea that Obama inherited some sort of African Colonial philosophy from the father he never knew. (It's in the blood dontcha know.) I know this has absolutely nothing to do with race on Newtie's part because racism in America is dead and Republicans would never try to exploit it anyway, certainly not by promoting the idea that that Obama is a primitive angry black man. He's just being his usual "intellectual" self, giving us all (poison) food for thought, sort of like when he blamed liberals for Susan Smith drowning her children.
And yes, that does make me want to do yet another post on Newtie's neo-KKK proclivities, but it's not my idea of comic relief. That comes a little farther down where digby quotes from the Booklist review of D'Souza's earlier book. She writes:
D'Souza once again turns his eye for social criticism to liberals, this time asserting their responsibility for the rise of anti-Americanism abroad and perhaps even the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The cultural Left in the U.S., by pressing for sexual freedom for women and gays through birth control, no-fault divorce, and support for gay marriage, has not only undermined American culture but also provoked the ire of religious conservatives in other nations, most prominently Islamic fundamentalists. Contrary to President Bush's assertions that terrorists and their supporters hate American freedom, D'Souza asserts that what they really hate is our licentious culture. He notes that American conservatives have more in common with Islamic Fundamentalists than with American liberals.
Whaaaa? "American conservatives have more in common with Islamic Fundamentalists than with American liberals." Hey, isn't that pretty much the very same thesis that Markos has which is causing conservatives all across the land to label him a hater and all the gentlefolk in Versailles to roll their eyes like like a pair of dice in the Paradise Inn at 4 AM in the morning?
As Sarah Palin would say, "You betcha!"
And the Publishers Weekly review is even more to the point:
Conservative pundit D'Souza (Illiberal Education) roots the blame for the 9/11 attacks in the left wing's "aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family" in this mostly lucid but unconvincing argument. Pointing to Hillary Clinton, [inarticulate Bush supporter] Britney Spears and [closet Britney fan?] Noam Chomsky, he decries those who have teamed up with Hollywood and the U.N. to foist an irreligious, sexually licentious, antifamily liberal culture-epitomized by Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues and gay marriage initiatives-on a Muslim world that rightly reviles it. By deliberately attacking Islamic values, the left tacitly allies itself with al- Qaeda in its effort to defeat Bush's war on terror and thus discredit conservatism at home [???], he asserts. But D'Souza's claim that Islamic extremists are inflamed solely by America's music videos and feminists-not its U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or American support for Muslim dictators-is too single-minded. For example, he paints Abu Ghraib poster-girl Lynndie England as the personification of liberal sexual depravity, without acknowledging that the U.S. Army sent her to Iraq, not the left. Charging that liberals aid terrorists while sympathizing with the terrorists' culturally conservative worldview, D'Souza's critique of American cultural excess trips over its own inconsistencies.
Jeeze "mostly lucid"??? If that's "mostly lucid", I don't think we really need any gibberish to fulfill our minimum daily requirement for like the next ten years.
Back in the old days, it was so simple: Liberals were more like socialists than conservatives were. And socialists were sort of like Communists without the tanks, nukes or Gulags. Ergo, liberals were all secret Commies at heart. It's nice, neat and simple. No fuss, no muss. Nowadays, not so much. But this is ridiculous!
No wonder they decided to go with this whole "secret Muslim" thing. It's much less complicated and free from all the booby traps that "Booby" D'Souza keeps falling into every time he turns around.
Digby calls her piece, aptly, "Punk'd By A Grand Bargain Fantasy ... Again", and it begins thus:
Can the Obama administration just retire the notion of "Grand Bargains" please? That sort of thing simply cannot work when you are dealing with a polarized electorate and an opposition party which has declared all out legislative war. To think they will negotiate in good faith is just ridiculous beyond belief
This article about Rahm's strategy for the climate change legislation is fascinating. I continue to believe these guys get way, way too fine with this stuff and it just won't work against political thugs who are committed using the hard, blunt instrument of obstruction. I don't know what it's going to take for them to get this.
In fact, Rahm, the supposed political genius, played right into their hands:...
And, indeed, that's precisely what the story shows. By being obsessed with "putting points on the board", regardless of what those points stood for, Rahm essentially made it child's play for the minority Republicans to make a fool of him. As Digby says:
I guess that's supposed to be brilliant. They only want to do things that are successful? Well, yes, although many people would define success as being more that "putting points on the board" when your job is to run the country. (Indeed, what he's admitting to is that he has the mindset of a Wall Street baron --- all that matters is tomorrow's share price. It is very revealing.)
Moreover, even by his own standards, he's an abject failure. "Claiming victory" for passing Republican policies isn't exactly getting them anywhere. And failing to pass policies that will deal with this recession and relieve some of the pain actual citizens are feeling isn't buying them any love from anyone.
Because climate change didn't look like an easy point-scoring opportunity, Rahm essentially prevailed in pushing it to the margins, creating a de facto stealth strategy. The article itself goes on to note:
Does Washington care about unemployment?
In 1983, Ronald Reagan's Washington regarded high unemployment as a national emergency. Today, with unemployment kissing 10 percent, Barack Obama's Washington scarcely seems perturbed. Why?
....Today, the unemployment rate is kissing 10 percent. Global financial markets are sending us a message that the excess demand for high-quality financial assets is growing again.
Yet, unlike 1983, there is no sense of urgency in Washington.
.... When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world's policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn't a second Great Depression.
Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as "the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability."
The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world's advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment's conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.
G20 drops support for fiscal stimulus By Chris Giles and Christian Oliver in Busan
Published: June 5 2010 11:54 | Last updated: June 6 2010 17:25
Finance ministers of the world's leading economies have been so spooked by the sovereign debt crisis that they have decided they can no longer wait until economies are growing strongly before they remove fiscal stimulus.
The meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Busan, South Korea, at the weekend also dropped proposals for a global banking levy, giving countries leeway to do what they thought best for their domestic circumstances.
The communiqué of the meeting made clear the G20 no longer thought expansionary fiscal policy was sustainable or effective in fostering recovery because investors were no longer confident about some countries' public finances.
Item: Spinning off from the a discussion of the later, Digby writes:
I get it. It's true. There is an in-group mentality common to virtually every human social group you can name. It's not just the right, it's present on the left as well. But there's still a helluva difference between a group that thinks anyone who's not a member in good standing is going to Hell, and a group that thinks virtually every religion has something good to teach--a group like the Unitarians, where I grew up. And this isn't the only way that left and right may appear similar at one level--often limited to process--but then look quite different when you actually take a closer look, oh, say for example at the substance of what they're about. After all, the left gave us Martin Luther King and the NAACP--both demonized as "Communists" during the height of the Civil Rights struggle--while the right gave us all-Americans like George Wallace and the KKK.
One of the great tests of politics in the present time is just how much reality is able to break through Versailles' profound confusion on just such basic matters. It was demonstrated once again this week in slightly-more-sophisticated-than-usual piece by AP writer Charlest Babington, "Voters hate partisan sniping, but fuel its growth", which Digby took note of on Wednesday. She quoted the following passage:
In a January poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 93 percent agreed there is too much partisan fighting between Democrats and Republicans. In a March Associated Press-GfK poll, 84 percent said it was important that any health care plan have support from both parties in Congress.
Voters' behavior, however, often works against such sentiments.
"People will tell you they don't like partisanship, but their solution is, 'The other side should give in to us,'" said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, author of "Voice of the People: Elections and Voting in the United States."
She then observed:
Uhm yes. They want their agenda to be enacted and they don't like the idea that their opponents are standing in the way. When one party say, wins a super-majority, they think they have a perfect right to expect that it will happen. It's a mistaken idea they learned back in civics class in high school, I imagine.
Now, Republicans have good reason to define bipartisanship as Democrats capitulating because there is a history of doing just that. Democrats, not so much, but that's no reason they shouldn't think that "two way street" might be defined as the Republicans doing the same thing when the Dems are in the majority. (Alas, they have learned the hard way that this is not going to happen.) I fairly sure it's only the vaunted "centrists" who define bipartisanship as a Chinese menu or splitting the baby. Everyone else thinks that elections actually mean something.
While the above passage takes note of one crucial asymmetry between left and right, it's hardly the only one here. After all, the "Democrat's healthcare plan" that passed into law was actually based on the GOP's plan crafted by the Heritage Foundation back in the 1990s and implemented by George Mitt Romney in Massachusetts just a few short years ago. Furthermore, Abramowitz's statement:
"People will tell you they don't like partisanship, but their solution is, 'The other side should give in to us,'"
ignores the rather unsurprising fact that Pew recently found that Republicans were far less interested in compromise:
Even though she died when I was only 12 years old, one of the most important and influential people in my life was my Grandma, my mom's mother. I was the youngest son of a youngest daughter, so she was pretty old when I came along, and not in very good health, but she spent a lot of time with me when I was little. I had a moderate form of cerebral palsy, and I suspect she spent extra time taking care of me because of it, taking me for short walks to strengthen my legs. She spent long hours playing card games with me, reading to me, and listening to me prattle on about every subject under the sun.
After she died, my mom told me a story about her that has remained with me as one of those touchstone stories about how people should treat each other. In 1933, at the height of the great depression, my Grandfather, who was a Methodist minister in Rosalie, NE, died of pneumonia. 4 months later, a drunk driver killed my mom's 10 year old brother John. Faced with that kind of grief and loss, and having nothing except a $3,000 life insurance policy from the Methodist conference, my Grandma decided to move to northeast Lincoln so that her 5 remaining children would have a chance to go to college at the Nebraska Wesleyan, a Methodist school where minister's kids go for a much reduced tuition. Grandma found jobs, was able to keep the family together, but remained very poor her entire life.
The story that moved me so much, though, was this: in the great depression, there were a lot of homeless men that rode the rails from town to town. They had their own society and network, providing each other information about who the people were in every town along the railroad line that were kind of enough to provide meals to the hungry. In Lincoln, word spread very quickly that my Grandma was one of those people. As poor as she was, she never turned down a hungry man down for a meal in her kitchen, and my mom remembers that pretty often, these men would knock on their door and ask for a meal.
Feeding the poor when you are poor yourself has become a metaphor for me. No matter what, good people can and will look out for each other.
I tell this story today because of how moved I am by the support of so many good folks who don't have a lot themselves for Openleft. John Amato of Crooks and Liars helped us even though he was doing a fundraiser himself this same week. Digby, who ain't exactly rolling in the dough, was kind enough to send some love our way. I know that most of our readers aren't exactly corporate mogul types, but your generosity continues. Most moving of all to me, Americans for Financial Reform, a poorly funded group running on fumes while going up against the several tens of millions being spent by the financial industry, voted to give us a remarkable $1,000 contribution to support our work.
While there are a few organizations in progressive politics who have some dough, mostly we don't. Our groups are almost always out-spent. Our blogs are way underfunded. Great young activists go too long without a job, or get underpaid when they are lucky enough to get one. But we help each other make it through, just like my Grandma feeding the poor when she was poor herself. That's what good people do, and that's what our movement has to do. Thanks to all of you who have helped.
I am very, very partial to Chris, David, Natasha, Adam, Paul, and all the other great folks who write for Openleft. And there are many, many wonderful writers in the blogosphere. But now that the Air America contest has closed its voting, I can admit this to you: Digby is my all-time favorite blogger. (You didn't think an old political hack like me wasn't going to campaign for a free cruise ticket on a trip with Rachel Maddow, did you? Have you heard the old joke about the scorpion and the frog? I can't help it, it's what I do.)
She wrote yesterday that she needs some folks to pitch in. I'm sending money. I hope that all of you who have been so generous in giving to Openleft when we pitch you will be kind enough to give to Digby. She is one of the best writers there is writing on the issues and strategies we all care about, full of clarity and courage and wisdom and humor, and is just one of the most decent people I know. Our movement desperately needs her to keep writing fulltime. You can give by heading here.
From Boehlert I see that the Washington Post featured the Teabagger March on the front page today and devoted a lot of space to explaining that these are just regular folks from all around America expressing their thoughts. I've been getting the sense in the media for the past few days that they are about to take a U-turn on this story, even as they continue to highlight Joe Wilson and his outburst.
The "just plain folks" narrative is quite at odds with some other ones--such as the Ayn Rand superman one, about which more later this weekend--but consistency has never been a big deal with Versailles. And speaking of lack of consistency, there's the annoying fact that while Democrats have not fared that well among less-educated whites (though not as badly as Versailles supposes), this is not primarily because of lower-income whites, as Larry Bartels explained some time ago in "What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?":
Digby writes about this McClatchy article, highlighting an online poll of Canadians about their (our) health care system.
While the results are generally positive for the Canadian system in comparison to the American one (though McClatchy characterizes it as a "split verdict"), my inner social scientist is always nervous about trusting opt-in online polls too much, and I know this topic actually comes up fairly regularly in Canada so here's a broader overview on the subject of comparative polling. It turns out we do have polling firms here that do real phone polling so there's no need to worry about the possibly libertarian bent of online poll respondents.
First up, this Harris-Decima scientific poll from July 5th gives an even brighter picture than McClatchy's effort, which as it relates to comparisons gives us this:
By an overwhelming margin, Canadians prefer the Canadian health care system to the American one. Overall, 82% said they preferred the Canadian system, fully ten times the number who said the American system is superior (8%).
Some of my favorite progressive bloggers are teaming up with one of my favorite progressive filmmakers to air a new ad in Arkansas calling out Blanche Lincoln for selling out on the public option.
For weeks I've been working on an action so we could get busy defending the best option we have and I think we've come up with a great idea. We are going to target Blanche Lincoln first with TV ads, with the help of Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films, and expose her actions to her constituents in Arkansas. This will be the first play because she is up for re-election in 2010 and has already received the second most money from the HIC of any Senator.
Watching the health care debate unfold is frustrating and predictably enervating. These kinds of debates are often followed by a deepening of public apathy and a sense that government can't help solve the big problems. And this plays into conservative hands since they are the ones who want to stoke that belief so that the citizens don't get it into their heads that they can get an equal shake with those who think they own this country.
We can't let that happen with health care. It is just too important on every level, for individuals, business and the country at large. It's time to get involved. To that end Blue America is launching a campaign to raise money to run some television ads. We've got to get these wavering Democrats off the fence about a public plan choice or this thing is going to fall completely apart before it even starts.
Perhaps it's not surprising that Lincoln is showing so much compassion for the poor insurance companies. She's taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from them over the years. In fact, she's already received $14,500 from insurance companies for her 2010 campaign, the second highest of any senator up for re-election next year. And the only reform they support is reform that will get the taxpayers to pay the overpriced premiums for the 47 million uninsured without having to change their ways. The fact is that insurance companies are not in any danger of going out of business because of the public plan choice unless they continue the kind of practices that have brought us to this crisis.
Digby's been writing TV scripts for a whole week to try to salvage health care reform from the tender mercies of Democrats who have grown worthless to working families after millions and millions of dollars in legalized bribes from the Medical-Industrial Complex and the Insurance Giants. Robert Greenwald is standing by with a camera crew ready to start shooting. The first batch of ads are going up on TV in Arkansas and, man, do we need help. We have a new Blue America Page that I want to urge you to visit today.
Recently, I critiqued the DSCC's "petition" asking Norm Coleman to get out -- saying there was no "theory of change" about why people taking that action would have any impact.
To be constructive, I gave a free piece of advice to the DSCC on how to organize people strategically: ask people to give $1/day until Norm goes away. If Republicans in DC saw the DSCC's warchest growing by the day, their incentives would reverse -- instead of telling Norm to keep going, they'd tell him to get lost.
The DSCC didn't take that advice. But Howard Dean's Democracy for America was all about it, and partnered with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (which I co-founded) to make it happen at NormDollar.com. Instead of raising money to help generic Democrats, we're raising it to support bold progressives in 2010.
Since Saturday, over $20,000 has been raised -- prompting news coverage in the New York Times, ABC, Politico, Huffington Post, and great support at Digby's blog, MyDD, CrooksandLiars, FDL, Senate Guru, The Seminal, The MN Progressive Project, and others blogs.
Here are some of the (truly appreciated) comments, rounded up from Huffington Post and MyDD:
A beautiful campaign. I usually don't start to donate until election season starts, but with this I'll definitely donate. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Now this is a constructive campaign program! My buck's in the mail.
I like this campaign so much that I'm in for two dollars a day.
From $5000 to over $7500 in one hour. Love it. The first time I donated again since the elections.
Up to $12,000. Wonderful pace, people. Tell your friends! This will work... send Coleman's financial backers a message they will understand.
Done! Told all my friends, family and acquaintances. This is a delicious way to counteract the deplorable legal foot dragging.
I just donated. Take note haters...this is how it's done...no ridiculous hats with teabags hanging off...just smart thinking and smart planning.
In 2008, one first-time progressive candidate in a key congressional district went through four campaign managers before losing.
Another spent $47,000 to retain a media firm that never produced a single TV ad. Another spent $40,000 on field consultants -- enough to pay 10 field staffers for two months, but which only bought a few hand-holding consultant calls. And others wasted thousands of dollars and weeks of staff time designing C-rate websites.
Every election cycle, inexperienced candidates who run on bold progressive ideas -- candidates who political insiders predict "can't win" -- come within a few points of victory. But too many lose winnable races due to the mistakes and inefficiencies of their campaigns.
Who is getting the backs of these progressive candidates? Who is helping them run competent, efficient campaigns so they can win? Right now, nobody.
...The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) will fill this void - providing needed infrastructure and strategic advice to progressive candidates so they can run first-class campaigns and win.
One thing I realized at MoveOn -- and that many folks across the blogosphere have written about in recent election cycles -- is that it makes no sense for the progressive community to raise tons of money for candidates who then spend it inefficiently, including on bloated consultant costs. We need to step up and help progressive candidates not just raise money, but run effective campaigns and win.
I'm going to break the rules for a standard "What Digby Said" post by actually adding a couple things. First, go read her eviscerate the notion that Bush was sailing in popularity until God Himself smote him with Katrina, forgetting the little matter of Terri Schiavo.
Back? Ok, check out Bush's comprehensive approval chart:
It isn't a coincidence that Bush's disapproval rating shot past his approval rating for the first time at the end of Q1 in 2005. The Act for the relief of the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo was passed on a special session of Congress on March 20th, a Sunday and Bush actually interrupted one of his many vacations to fly to DC and sign the bill just after 1am on Monday morning. He even stayed up past his bedtime.
I've been genuinely mystified by the disappointment and surprise being expressed by many liberals over the fact that Obama's most significant appointments thus far are composed of pure Beltway establishment figures drawn from the center-right of the Democratic Party and, probably once he names his Defense Secretary and CIA Director, even from the Bush administration -- but not from the Left. In an email yesterday, Digby explained perfectly why this reaction is so mystifying (re-printed with her consent):
The villagers and the right made it very clear what they required of Obama --- bipartisanship, technocratic competence and center-right orthodoxy. Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn't ask for anything. So, we have the great symbolic victory of the first black president (and that's not nothing, by the way) who is also a bipartisan, centrist technocrat. Surprise.
While there's certainly some truth to this, I believe it's clearly overdrawn, since a good many people were convinced that Obama's policies were already quite progressive--he was against the Iraq War, remember?--and it wasn't just cultural signifiers they were depending on. We've certainly had no shortage of such commentators here making such arguments. And Wednesday, Nate Silver weighed in with what purports to be a fairly comprehensive sorting of Obama's policy initiatives into their ideological positions, showing a huge overall tilt in the progressive direction. I think Nate's categorization is somewhat questionable, but I do think that the impression he has is one that is widely shared: Obama appears quite progressive to many who have supported him, and that is a major reason why they have felt little or no need to pressure him. Digby is correct in saying that there's misperception involved, but it's just not as simple as she indicates.
A further complicating factor is that there's no obvious relationship between holding out for a policy promise and choices involving personnel. I'm definitely not saying that policy and personnel have no relationship. I'm saying it's something that needs to be understood in terms of a larger framework.
In short, I think that there's a good deal that's problematic with Digby's comment--and yet, I think the main thrust of it is absolutely correct: The left gave Obama a pass, so pleased with what he had to offer that they put little energy into asking for more, while established Beltway/special interests showed no such reluctance.
STATE BLOGS
