Because I haven’t intentionally antagonized our good friend LarryE in a while, and because I think there’s a more than a little bit of truth to it, I give you this:
I’ve been getting really depressed lately about politics. I was at first depressed because the public option was dying, but now I’m much more depressed because of the anti-Obama frenzy I’ve been seeing coming from progressives.
I don’t know if these progressives are not old enough or simply have chosen to forget the year 2000, but there was a sizable disenchantment on the left with the Democratic mainstream then as well. And it manifested itself as both lack of enthusiasm for Gore and a movement for Nader. The lesson is clear — if you’re not willing to settle for a moderate and fight for a Gore, then you will get eight years of a Bush. I hate to think who that Bush could be in the next cycle.
But, but, but, Obama is so disappointing! Sure. I get it. And we should let him know it. But withdrawing support from Obama? When he has to deal with birthers, and tea partiers, and beckites, and the assorted nuts du jour? It’s bound to backfire. There is absolutely no
upside to vitriol against Obama, and there is so much downside. Think of how much better off this country would be if we had a centrist, semi-corporate-friendly Democratic president from 2000 to 2008. Not ideal by a long shot, sure. But we lost so much in those years.
Another Republican future scares me.The myth of the equivalency of the parties, that it will be easier to make things better if we let them get worse — these are the most dangerous ideas to us at this point. It’s the biggest threat to my hope, at least.
At the same time, I also think there’s a lot to this:
I think people are pissed right now less at the fact that they didn’t get what they wanted, and more at the fact that they feel like their people didn’t really fight for it. Leaders don’t always get what they want. But people recognize when true leaders at least give it a shot. And people judge that leadership by what they say in public and how hard they see them publicly pushing for it. Closed door negotiations don’t count.
They wanted to see Obama push the public option and say that it was crucial, important part. His broad outlines of “cuts the deficit, improves coverage” is too bland and not something people can rally around, and he gives the impression that he’s ceding power and leadership to a less capable bunch in the legislative branch.
They wanted to see news stories about how “staffers close to the majority leader” say that chaimanships and other perks were on the line for any Democrat who talked about filibustering this crucial bill.
They wanted to see congressional leadership and the president campaign hard for an “up or down vote on healthcare” the way the Republicans did so effectively for the judge appointments.
But none of that happened, and the things that people care about died with a whimper.
I know there’s been a lot of game theory from people about how that would never work, etc. But the fact is that you can show leadership for big ideas and there’s always still room to compromise at the end. At least then it would be clear that there was no other way, that you put up the good fight, better luck next time.
Instead they feel like the people they voted for and trusted to lead them failed. And it’s hard to imagine making that same emotional commitment again in the future. Self defeating, yes. Temporary, maybe. But we’re talking primal stuff here – people don’t like wimps, not matter what party.
Both links via TPM.
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
Great.
Was the first piece followed by a position paper directed at Elin about all the ways in which it is likely that Tiger will be more redeeming than her next husband?
Of course this is an apt analogy, both Tigre and Obama are mixed race!
Oh, and of course there’s this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/01/tiger-woods-obama-on-emgo_n_375466.html
I’m also disappointed that Guantanamo Bay is still open.
I hate that Obama is pumping more money into faith based programs
I’m sad to see my neighbors homes forclosed on while BofA ramps up higher interest rates on credit cards and big bonuses for top level execs
I want to know why we are escalating the war in Afghanistan
Schools in Indiana (where I live) are undergoing drastic funding cuts–maybe even to high school basketball
Weather seal? Really? I’ll put it with my Dick Cheney plastic wrap
Why do we still have DADT? He could eliminate it with a signature.
Why is their cowtowing to Lieberman? Strip him of his chairmanships and send him away. Yeah Al Franken.
Why are federal prosecutors still left (in large numbers) from the Bush administration?
When will my neighbors find new jobs so they can send their kids to schools?
The list goes on forever (but the party never ends)
I voted for Obama and probably will again, but it is not all clear to me that I will send money, organize, or work the tables for him. Yes, he’s better than Bush, massively better, but I’m often left wondering “when we will”
Dave
Try as you might to antagonize me, I’m not going to get into another argument about third parties. I meant it when I said that last time.
I can’t really be too disappointed in O. because I was never a big supporter in the first place. About a month before the 2008 election, I called him “a centrist, a moderately liberal but still a corporatist Democrat who more than once has shown his willingness to burn principle at the altar of political expediency and whose biggest potential lies not in making things better but in merely making them no worse.” I also called him “not a peace candidate but just a ‘I knew Iraq was a dumb idea’ candidate.” A few weeks before the 2008 election, I said I’d prefer him to McCain “in the same way I’d prefer skin cancer to lung cancer.”
Which is why the day after the election, despite saying “I greeted the outcome with a certain sense of relief. Not excitement, not enthusiasm, but yeah, a certain sense of relief,” I also said that
(As a sidebar, I added recently that “Okay, I was wrong about the opponents’ ability to recognize reality, but not the supporters.”)
Even so and despite all that, even I can still be bitterly disappointed in the absolute and total lack of leadership he has displayed on health care reform. I said throughout the process that what we needed from him was “a little less Dali Lama and a lot more LBJ.” We never got it. We never got anything beyond “Well, I’d kinda sorta like this kinda thing to be in it but hey, it’s not that big a deal, y’know?” The only thing it was clear he wanted was a bill and it didn’t matter a whole lot what was or wasn’t in it. And that is as least part of the reason why we are where we are.
Which means that at the end of the day, taking the suggested attitude of the first TPM commenter, that of “Disappointed? Sure, but we must support him anyway! No matter what! Remember the Maine – I mean, 2000! Do you want a GOPper president? OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD!” will have one and only one sure result: You will continue to be shunted aside, ignored, and “disappointed.”
.-= LarryE´s last blog ..A catching up addendum – privacy/secrecy =-.
I’m with Larry on this, with one exception:
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell can be taken out and shot with zero difficulty on Obama’s part, and it’ll earn him a hell of a lot more praise from his “supporters” than it’ll win him (new) complaints from his opponents.
I get the whole “He’s a centrist accommodationist who doesn’t give a damn about progressive causes.” The thing is, killing DADT isn’t progressive. The only way to support DADT is if you really do hate gay people.
Then again, Obama has been tepid repudiating even torture at Gitmo, so… what the fuck. Digg was right; if you want to vote for a non-teabagger Republican, all you have to do is vote for the folks with the little (D)s on their names.
Larry:
You’ll have to forgive me as I missed your and T’s last discussion on this. Could you give me a Cliff’s Notes version of the this third party debate you speak of?
Though I didn’t see it at the time I’ve been in complete argeement with you (damn, there I’ve gone and done it again
) on the analysis you made after election day. In fact that’s the reason I have always and still continue to believe Barack Obama will be a one-term president, unless of course the Republicans go full-retard and Huck things up again.
Judd -
Uh, well, I’ll do the best I can in one or two sentences and T. can excoriate me for getting it so wrong. But I’ll try to be fair.
I support the idea of third party candidacies (not every one every time but as a general principle) on the grounds that you can’t get what you don’t ask for and that so long as a given political party feels no threat to its electoral chances (from the left, in the Dems case; from the right, in the GOPpers case) those concerns can be and will be safely ignored. Put another way, the risk of loss in the short-term is worth it for the potential of gain in the longer term.
T. opposes such candidacies (again, I’m assuming, not every one every time but as a general principle) on the grounds that it only helps elect the major party candidate further from your view by taking support from the one closer to your view and the best course is to take what you can get now. Put another way, the risk of loss in the short-term is just a risk of loss in the short-term with no potential for longer term benefit.
Of course, the focus was on parties to the left of the Dems, but the principles involved apply both ways.
I won’t get into another discussion because every time we did, T. and I wound up having to apologize to each other a couple of days later for things we said. So I’ve just decided it’s a subject I won’t get into again.
OTOH, I don’t agree Obama will necessarily be a one-termer. For one thing, the GOPpers don’t have a serious challenger at present; for another, there will be a good number of folks like in the first quote in T.’s post; for a third, the power of incumbency is considerable; and for a fourth, while Obama’s leadership skills leave a lot to be desired, it would be a gross error to underestimate his political skills. None of this guarantees a second term – although the first comes closest; seriously, what GOPper presently on the scene do you see as a serious contender in a general election – but it does make it hard to simply declare him a one-termer.
.-= LarryE´s last blog ..A catching up addendum – privacy/secrecy =-.
Just to drop a quick comment in without having fully read the comments, I fully support the idea of having more than two parties — it’s just that our current electoral system makes that wholly impractical. Until we hold a constitutional convention (or whatever else is necessary) and remove the winner-takes-all (even a small plurality winner, a la first term Arnie) aspect from our system, the only pragmatic choice we have is to vote for the least of evils. It never feels good, but it beats the alternative, as the first commenter points out.
If I had my druthers, we’d have something more like a parliamentary system. But me wanting it so doesn’t make it so, and I won’t pretend we have a system we don’t have just because I’d prefer it to be that way.
Larry:
As someone who voted for Michael Badnarick in 2004 because I found both major party nominees utterly unacceptable I can hardly fault anyone for doing the same.
I think what’s gone on in the Democratic Party over the last three national elections lends a lot of support to your argument. The liberals who indirectly elected Bush in 2000 and showed they wouldn’t put up with crap in 2004 after Howard Dean flamed out led to the party’s leftward turn and the ascension of Barack Obama, the most liberal president we’ve had since at least LBJ.
As to why I believe Obama is likely to be a one-termer has to do with what I understand of political history and my read on the economy. Americans have been voting for prosperity since we threw Martin van Buren out on his ass; they can deal with times being bad so long as there’s a real sense things are getting better as we saw in 1936. If the commercial real estate market implodes (something I think is a very realistic possibility) we’ll be faced with a new round of banking disasters from a whole other round of bad investments. If the economy is still shaking when/if that implodes then it could get really messy. Should it come to pass I think that has the serious potential to retard employment growth for a longer time than a politician seeking re-election would care to see. On top of that there will be a lot of liberals who contributed time and money as part of Obama’s organization in 2008 are liable to be left feeling sorely betrayed by the lack of action on health care and other pet issues Obama promised to advance; they may still all show up and vote but you need your base to do that, knock doors, stuff envelopes, fill coffers and get voters to the polls.
If the economy remains in the shithole the social regressives may bite the bullet and join the business class in supporting Romney. He’s not as skilled a politician as Barack Obama but his prior experience (hello Salt Lake Olympics references ad nauseum) can be parlayed into something that enough people might be willing to get behind. The Massachusetts budget deficit when he took office and when he left it is something that can easily be condensed into soundbyte length, the full explanation of that cannot. If they can convince David Petraeus to take the VP slot I think they’d be fairly formidable, especially if unemployment remains high.
Judd:
I wish Obama were as liberal as you claim. Sadly, that’s a crock of hooey. In fact, he’s a center-right politician who has done a brilliant job disguising himself as a liberal, but without actually every fighting for liberal causes. On that count, I have to say that LarryE was right and I was wrong.
I mean, Christ, Nixon was more liberal than Obama.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Flaming Bag of Poo =-.
See, here’s the thing that bothers me so much about most political debates. People will say things that sound like they make sense (“The liberals who … wouldn’t put up with crap in 2004 … led to … the most liberal president we’ve had since at least LBJ.”) until you actually check them against reality and find them entirely unrelated to it (“Howard Dean flamed out.” “The Democrats have taken a turn to the left.” “Obama is more liberal than Clinton, and Jimmy Carter.”)
See, if a grade school or even high school kid were to read what Judd wrote, it would seem pretty reasonable, but that’s because kids don’t actually know anything about the facts of the matter. Fuck, Obama may not even be as much of a left winger as Richard Nixon. I mean, sure, he’s not a paranoid asshole like Nixon, but his policies are solidly centrist for the 1980s. Sure, that makes him a liberal in the year 2009, but that’s because George Bush was, to not put too fine a point on it, a fascist — and I don’t mean that in the usual Godwin sense, but in the sense that he was for military expansion, enlargement of the military industrial complex, and subordination of government oversight to corporations.
So, um, Judd, what the fuck are you smoking? Sure, you’ve proved yourself a civil, pleasant, and even thoughtful commenter, but how can anyone take anything you say seriously if your connection to reality is so warped that you think Obama is “the most left-wing president since LBJ”? Where are you getting your “facts”? Because it’s sure as hell not reality. I’d really love to know, because if we could end the insanity of the right wing by just pointing them to a source of information that’s at least orthogonal to reality instead of negatively correlated with it, that’d be much easier than trying to reach some sort of compromise on hard issues like economic socialism.
P.S. Ah, I see TG has beat me to pointing out Nixon.
T:
Really, managing to be less liberal than Richard Nixon isn’t hard to do. Honestly, how hard is it to not set wage and price controls. Stupid fuckhead Nixon….. *continues muttering to self*
Obama is about as liberal as I claim. There is, however, a difference between him and his administration. Obama the man I’m sure would love to nuke the private insurance industry and go single-payer today. I also feel pretty confident in saying he’d love set Wall Street on fire, bail out of Iraq and leave well enough alone in Afghanistan. The list goes on. The trouble is the inherent flaw in our system that stacks the deck in favor of good politicians. Obama the politician doesn’t want to lose a fight to a corpse (i.e.: the current batch of Congressional Republicans) and so by launching a rudderless ship on the health care issue, just to name one issue, he can claim victory regardless of what Congress actually manages to spit out. Despite the 06 and 08 elections, the United States is still fundamentally a much more conservative nation than it is a liberal one and so a liberal who wants to win nationally is constrained and that’s reflected by the first year of the Obama Administration.
Or maybe he just doesn’t know what he’s doing and has found speechifying is a lot easier than governing.
Nice try, Judd, but you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. On no planet is Obama “the most liberal president since LBJ.” Pretty much what Dan M said on the matter.
As for the country being “fundamentally a much more conservative nation,” I’m going to have to call bullshit on that one, too. It’s one of those paradoxes of having a nation where a lot of the individuals are politically illiterate, but most Americans self-identify as “conservative” even as they tend to lean liberal on most issues when you cut through the spin and get to their actual preferences. A fine example: 60-70% of Americans support a more robust public option than what’s in the House bill, provided you don’t actually call it a “public option” — if you describe what it is without using that name, support is pretty overwhelming. Give Americans a choice between tax cuts and a balanced budget, and they’ll choose the balanced budget by a 2-to-1 ratio. Offer them a chance to lower their taxes by making cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and they’ll oppose this by a similar margin. Roughly half of Americans self-identify as pro-life, yet something like 70% say abortion should be legal “in most or all cases.” Americans like to say
theirthey’re conservative, but they’re really not.P.S. You live in “the bluest state” in the Union? There’s some debate as to which state that actually is, but I’m assuming you’re a Masshole.
T:
I didn’t state it very well. Nixon’s administration might be more liberal than Obama’s thus far (I’m not willing to tie myself to that position quite yet though) but I think Obama the man is more liberal than Nixon was.
Even if I accept your premise that most Americans like to say (read: think) they’re conservatives when they’re really not that is still a big problem for liberals, in particular when dealing with the politically disengaged masses. “I’m a conservative and this person’s a conservative so I probably agree with them and disagree with the other guy.” Cutting through the spin takes time and effort; much simpler to just go with what sounds good. If the label didn’t carry sway then why would people who aren’t conservative try to claim they are (see: Mike Huckabee and Georgedubya) and liberals have tried rebranded themselves “progressives”?
Aloha!
which part of our constitution enshrines that system?
Nomen,
Good catch. In fact, the opposite is provided by Article I, Section 4:
Mind you, that doesn’t really change TG’s point.
By the way, that section also has the first sentence in the Constitution that uses a comma to separate its subject from its predicate, as discussed here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001672.html
Nomen:
I was mainly referring to presidential elections. For other levels of office, some states already have runoff clauses; I’m not entirely sure why this hasn’t resulted in more third-party candidates winning at that level. I think part of it has to do with the fact the most visible third parties are actually less appealing to the masses than the major parties — they’re generally either well to the left of the Democrats, or well to the right of the Republicans. It would be interesting to see what might happen if, say, a fiscally-liberal-but-socially-conservative party emerged (or vice versa).
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Happy Holidays =-.