Month: January 2010

Hit Me Baby One More Time

by digby

It’s quite a morning. The gasbags are excited and joyful that the president is finally going to make all the little people finally sacrifice something for the good of the country. Or the markets. Oh what’s the difference?

On Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd drilled Obama’s conundrum down to this simple calculation:

The question is is the pain that this is causing him on the left going to get him anything in congress the right?

Gosh, I don’t know, do you? The right has been so cooperative so far, that I’m sure they’ll jump on another opportunity to help him. That’s just the kind of people they are. So, I’m sure it will be well worth it politically to sacrifice everything his own party cares about.

Steve Liesman CNBC anchor added that the markets were fine with the spending freeze as a first step, but they were looking to the president’s deficit commission to go after social security and medicare. (The Senate had just voted down the congressional deficit commission.)

And then Ron Brownstein explained what this was really all about:

Andrea Mitchell: The president in his speech is trying to look like a smaller government guy precisely because of the voter anger at all the bail outs, all the spending that he was kind of roped into but has left a very bitter aftertaste…

Brownstein: As you suggested before that any serious economist, really anyone over 12 with a calculator can tell you that the only way to truly address this deficit and debt problem, we’re going to have to do all of the above. We’re going to have to tackle the entitlements, we’re going to have to tackle the discretionary spending and ultimately we’ll have to look at raising more revenues. Senator Pete Domenici, the former Republican chair of the Senate finance committee made that point yesterday when announcing an independent commission, everything has to be on the table.

What the president has done, the importance of it is political as much as economic. You give yourself a stronger hand to argue for putting everything on the table by starting with the aspect of the budget that is most important to Democrats, congressional Democrats. These domestic discretionary programs, the spending on education, on energy, on health that is key to Democrats. He’s saying look, I am willing to take the hits from my own party to put a hold on this for a few years. And I think that gives him more credibility to kind of ask everybody to come to the table with their own sacred cows whether it is the entitlement spending or for that matter, the revenue side. So, no this is not the solution, but it may be a step toward a comprehensive solution and for that matter many other problems that we face.

Brownstein is a nice little Peter Pan living in a Never-Never land where Republicans will see that Democrats are sacrificing all their priorities and feel compelled to meet them halfway and raise taxes on their rich patrons. Chuck Todd did point out that Grover Norquist was putting the squeeze on Republicans not to ever vote to raise taxes for anything under any circumstances, but the whole panel just looked on dumbly.

Then CNBC’s Leisman solved the issue for us all by reminding us who really runs this country:

There’s two ways this will be solved: either before markets make Washington do it, or after markets make Washington do it.

There you have it. Now go out and buy something you useless parasites!

Update: The deficit commission yes votes were as follows:

YEAs —53
Alexander (R-TN)
Bayh (D-IN)
Begich (D-AK)
Bennet (D-CO)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Bond (R-MO)
Boxer (D-CA)
Carper (D-DE)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Collins (R-ME)
Conrad (D-ND)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Durbin (D-IL)
Enzi (R-WY)
Feingold (D-WI)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Franken (D-MN)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hagan (D-NC)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Johnson (D-SD)
Kaufman (D-DE)
Kerry (D-MA)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Kohl (D-WI)
Landrieu (D-LA)
LeMieux (R-FL)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Lincoln (D-AR) Lugar (R-IN)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reid (D-NV)
Schumer (D-NY)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Tester (D-MT)
Udall (D-CO)
Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (D-VA)
Webb (D-VA)
Wicker (R-MS)
Wyden (D-OR)

It appears that both sides wanted a bipartisan vote on this. But why? If deficit reduction is such a proven vote getter, why are all factions in the congress refusing to get on board with it?

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Hail Bopp

by digby

First, here’s a reminder of the first serious teabagging initiative in Republican politics:

The Republican National Committee is headed to Hawaii this week for its winter meeting. One of the top issues on the agenda, being put forward in a series of resolutions on Friday by Indiana committee member James Bopp Jr., is whether the party’s candidates will be conservative enough — and what steps the party can take to enforce it.

Bopp is offering two key resolutions. The first is a test that requires GOP candidates to show that they hold conservative positions on eight out of ten key conservative positions, such as opposing President Obama on health care and the stimulus, in order to receive RNC funding. This has been commonly referred to in the media as the “purity” test. The other, which Bopp calls the “accountability” resolution, would empower the chairman to cut off party funding for a candidate if the chair judged them to be insufficiently conservative. In an interview with TPMDC, Bopp explained that the resolutions serve an important need of maintaining the party’s credibility.

“Well, we would just like to pass some forceful provision that requires accountability and puts our money where our mouth is, not just talk,” said Bopp. “We’re great at talking a game, but people don’t trust us to follow through, and that’s what we’re trying to fix. So if we put our money where our mouth is, I think people will believe us.”

“The party already has the power to determine who receives RNC funding,” said Bopp, explaining the accountability resolution. “This would empower him [RNC Chairman Michael Steele] to consider ideology. Currently, he does not believe he can do that, he has told me. He believes, and I think most chairman did, that his duty as chairman is to support all candidates without regard to ideology. This would empower him to consider ideology.”

Who is James Bopp, you ask? Well, that’s very interesting. He’s the lawyer who put together the Citizens United case that just unleashed corporate cash into our system:

James Bopp Jr. likes to begin speeches by reading the First Amendment. He calls opponents, including President Obama, “socialists.” He runs a national law practice out of a small office in Terre Haute, Ind., because he prefers the city’s conservative culture.

And for most of the last 35 years, he has been a lonely Quixote tilting at the very idea of regulating political donations as an affront to free speech.

Not anymore. Mr. Bopp won his biggest victory last week when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations, unions and nonprofit groups have the right to spend as much as they want supporting or opposing the election of a candidate.

Mr. Bopp was not present in the courtroom. His client — not for the first time — replaced him with a less ideological and more experienced Washington lawyer when the case reached the justices.

But it was Mr. Bopp who had first advised the winning plaintiff, the conservative group Citizens United, about using its campaign-season film “Hillary: The Movie” as a deliberate test of the limits on corporate political spending. And he shepherded the case through appeals to the Supreme Court as part of a long-term legal strategy that he says he has just begun.

“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down,” he said in an interview. “And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law.”

“We have been awfully successful,” he added, “and we are not done yet.”

The Citizens United case “was really Jim’s brainchild,” said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

“He has manufactured these cases to present certain questions to the Supreme Court in a certain order and achieve a certain result,” Mr. Hasen said. “He is a litigation machine.”

And what’s next on Bopp’s agenda?

Mr. Bopp said the next step in his 10-year plan is to roll back the disclosure rules.

“Groups have to be relieved of reporting their donors if lifting the prohibition on their political speech is going to have any meaning,” he said. Requiring groups that buy political commercials to report their donors is almost as punitive, he said, “as an outright criminal go-to-jail-time prohibition.”

From everything I’ve read about this man, he is not sponsored by corporations — he’s just a useful idiot for their cause, somehow truly believing that corporations have his best interest at heart. (After all, he’s not a first amendment absolutist, but rather a zealot about the “freedom” to spend money in politics. Secretly.)

This is a very interesting person worth keeping a close eye on. He’s a far right activist lawyer who’s developing these election cases in this era of right wing judiciary dominance, while simultaneously working within the Republican party to ensure that the big money that’s newly freed is spent on strictly approved conservative initiatives. He’s a one man wrecking crew.

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Two People To Fire Right Away

by tristero

In comments to my previous post, commenter Graham Firchlis rightly asked:

OK, then. Don’t wuss out like Carville. Name some names. Who, and please be specific, is to blame [for the inexcusable debacle of Massachusetts]?

Aside from Coakley herself, who is political history, that is not easy to determine. Still, in the NY Times article I linked to, we read:

Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said he had “no interest in sugarcoating” the defeat in Massachusetts. Several party leaders said they expected Mr. Menendez to remain in his position for the rest of the election cycle…

Fire him. Don’t work around him, as the rest of the passage I excerpted suggests they’ll do. Just fire him. (Note: I’m sure there’s some euphemism I don’t know about for firing the chair of the DSCC – “stepping down to spend quality time with my family,” maybe? – but whatever it is, now’s the time to deploy those euphemisms and get rid of him).

Politico adds another name:

…in private conversations, Hill sources say White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has blamed Coakley, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake for failing to see Brown’s surge in time to stop it.

Celinda Lake was the main pollster for the Dem Mass race? Assuming Politico’s right, fire her.

Man, oh man, I can practically smell the rage I’m gonna get in comments. Fire Menendez? He’s Hispanic, Dems need Hispanic voters, and besides, he’s a pretty good guy. No doubt. And he’s in the wrong job. Time to move on.

And Celinda Lake? Tristero, you blithering idiot, she’s done great work!. Did you actually look at her site? Well, in fact, I did. Here’s what’s on her front page:

Not so much as a hint about what happened, despite the fact that the page was updated today with a link to an article Lake co-wrote for Huffington on a different subject. Oh, and did you see that “read more here” link in the picture above? Well, I’ve copied the link here. Read it and weep.

Fire Lake Research.

Can’t replace her firm ’cause no one’s as good as they are, when they’re good? Well, find out who was in charge of the Coakley-related polling at her company and demand their immediate termination. Regardless, it’s time to start cultivating closer relationships with Lake Research’s competition.

Sound impolitic? No. What’s impolitic is permitting the successor to Ted Kennedy to be a former nude model who plans to vote against Kennedy’s signature issue.

Go ahead. Flame away at me in comments. Call me ignorant, childish, naive about how politics works, vindictive – whatever, I can take it. Go ahead: Pin the blame entirely on Coakley, on the “brilliant” campaign run by the male Palin clone, on the economy. on the disappointing Obama. Tell me how it’s totally unfair to single out just these two people for punishment when it’s the zeitgeist, the weltanschaung, the whole megillah.

Then, let’s find out how to fire these incompetents and replace them with people who can do a good job.

SOS

by digby

Katie Couric sits down with a couple of teabaggers to find out what they really believe. And it turns out that they believe in individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, free markets, limited government, low taxes, a strong national defense and protecting our borders against the immigrant invasion. They think the government has usurped the constitution and see themselves as uber-patriots fulfilling the founders’ intent. They believe fervently in American exceptionalism and that the nation is under mortal threat from foreign enemies without and traitors within. They are divided on social issues but insist that they are irrelevant to their movement — they repeat Republican talking points verbatim but insist they are not Republicans. In other words they are standard issue conservative movement wingnuts without the cross.

If you don’t want to bother listening to them, you can just listen to Glenn Beck and you’ll get the picture. These guys aren’t as entertaining but he’s obviously their leader.

Or you can read this insightful article about the ties that bind the teabaggers to the old right wing nuts. Same as it ever was:

Beck and the Tea Party movement of which he is a central figure are often portrayed as a new and exotic political phenomenon. Pollsters treat the Tea Party movement like a third political party, and indeed, it is especially popular at the moment among unaffiliated voters new to politics.

[…]

For all its apparent freshness, however, the Tea Party movement is neither new nor novel, historians and political scientists say.

It is firmly rooted, in its ideology, rhetoric and — there’s no polite word for it — its paranoia, in the post-World War II American right.

Every few years, usually though not always during a Democratic administration, the movement reappears, with a similar set of grievances: The expansion of government is moving us toward socialism; there’s been a dangerous weakening of the national security apparatus but also, paradoxically, the threat of police state provisions at home; an alien subversive of nefarious intentions, composed of cosmopolitan elites and corrupt “one worlders” has infected the government.

In the 1950s, conservatives were angered when their champion, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, was shoved aside by Republican elites in favor of the moderate Dwight Eisenhower.

Kathy Olmsted, a University of California, Davis historian of the period, notes that they accused the one-time Supreme Allied Commander of being a communist agent, an allegation made repeatedly by candy tycoon Robert Welch.

Consider the far-right rallying cry during the presidency of Bill Clinton: Jackbooted government thugs were on the loose; American soldiers were fighting under the U.N. flag; the 1993 tax increase — and yet another failed attempt at health care reform — the marks of a closet socialist.

The most fitting parallel, however, may be the early 1960s, when right-wing activists believed the civil rights movement was the work of the Soviets and, as Ronald Reagan alleged, Medicare a push for socialized medicine.

“The tropes, the rhetoric, the cultural profile — there are profound similarities,” says Rick Perlstein, who has completed two books of a trilogy on the history of the conservative movement and is widely viewed by conservatives and liberals alike as its key chronicler.

read on …

This is the right wing I grew up with — before the God Squad was recruited and turned the movement into the panty sniffing morals police. I know them very well. They are racists and conspiracy mongers and they have absolutely no business being anywhere near real power. The Big Money boyz know they have nothing to fear from them — indeed, they sponsor them. They are good Republicans even if they don’t know it.

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All Things To All People

by digby

It’s been my biggest complaint about Obama from the beginning. They always do this “one from column A and one from column B” thinking they can please everyone. But to sound tough on bankers and then enact a spending freeze (on “non-security” spending, natch) is too clever by half. Combined with the deficit fetishism, it will tie his hands at the time he needs the most flexibility on jobs — and further destroy liberalism in the process. But Evan Bayh will be happy, so that’s good.

I just don’t know what to say. We are all neo-Hooverists now.

Update: I’d missed this earlier. Via Atrios:

Democrats are trying to toughen budget rules to make it more difficult to run up the deficit with new tax cuts or federal benefit programs, a move Republicans say is a recipe for tax increases.

The proposal by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., would make it harder to extend permanently some tax cuts that expire at the end of this year, renew health care subsidies for laid-off workers that expire next month, or offer more help to states for Medicaid for the poor.

Some middle-class tax cuts would not be affected, and extended unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless may also be exempt.

The move to stiffen budget rules is aimed at softening opposition among moderates to letting the government extend itself another $1.9 trillion into debt. President Barack Obama is expected to crack down on domestic agency budgets when submitting his budget next week, but tougher steps like raising taxes and cutting benefit programs are longshots in an election year.

What was that David Plouffe was saying about bedwetters?

Update II: Grand Bargain redux:

It is the growth in the so-called entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that is the major factor behind projections of unsustainably high deficits, due to rapidly rising health costs and an aging population.

But one administration official said that limiting the much smaller discretionary domestic budget would have symbolic value. That spending includes lawmakers’ earmarks for parochial projects, and only when the public believes such perceived waste is being wrung out will they be willing to consider reductions in popular entitlement programs, the official said.

“By helping to create a new atmosphere of fiscal discipline, it can actually also feed into debates over other components of the budget,” the official said, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity.

How about if we end one of our wars? Or create some jobs? Anybody?

As we know, Democrats are always rewarded for being fiscally responsible. If he’s lucky they’ll only censure him instead of impeach him.

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The Clean Up Crew

by digby

I’m hearing all over the TV today that the stimulus didn’t help anybody and it’s a big fat waste of money and shouldn’t be repeated. (Presumably, we should enact more tax cuts for millionaires so they can provide jobs for artists who’ve been dead for three centuries.)According to polling, the American people think t=it hasn’t worked and they are pissed off.

But that’s just because the stimulus mainly kept things from getting worse and it wasn’t big enough to get much political bang for the buck. That doesn’t mean it was useless. Let’s just say that without the federal aid for my state that we would be living in a dystopian nightmare far worse than people could imagine — and believe me, people are imagining the worst here. It was one of the good things the administration accomplished in the first year, even though it was less than we might have hoped. (The other was the 2010 budget, which was by all accounts the most liberal budget in recent memory — and which passed without a single Republican vote.)

These two things, inadequate and imperfect as they may have been, were the most important economic initiatives the administration undertook and probably have provided the most tangible federal relief and support to people throughout the country. And, as usual, they are being denigrated and dismissed because when it comes down to it, they are unpleasant cleaning jobs required after the frat party binging of the Bush years wrecked the place. Nobody ever appreciates the maids and janitors.

Seriously, click that link to the California recovery sight and see where that money is going: education, transportation, public safety and yes, even the vaunted tax cuts. (Indeed, if you want to criticize the stimulus, I’d say that devoting 30% of it to tax cuts after Bush had already run a round of tax cuts that didn’t work, was the real waste of money.) This state is still badly hurting but there is no doubt it would have been even worse without it. And it’s a symptom of our dysfunctional government both here in California and in Washington that there’s no chance to build on it for a sustained jobs program.

Sadly, the stimulus was always likely to be a one shot deal. We knew there was little hope they’d ever get another chance in a country where government spending, even in an emergency, is considered a form of satanism. And they made a huge mistake in allowing the Maine twins to take a dull hacksaw to the bill and cut out some of the most useful items. But the nation is indisputably better off than it would have been without it and this villager nonsense today, aided and abetted by their preening, unctuous GOP patrons, is sickening.

And if what we’re seeing from the administration is any indication, we’re not going to see a decent jobs program for 2010 because of it. Robert Kuttner points out that while Obama’s new tone regarding the banks (and the apparent ascendancy of Paul Volcker) are welcome, his backing of Bernanke somewhat diminishes the populist message:

Even more ominously, Obama thus far is on the wrong side of the deficit-versus-jobs debate. Budget Director Peter Orszag and other deficit hawks in the administration have long been urging Obama to support a proposed fast-track commission that would bypass usual legislative procedures and compel an up-or-down vote on a compulsory deficit-reduction package designed to slash Social Security and Medicare spending.

This is, of course, appalling politics. It signals: we had to spend a ton of taxpayer money to rescue the banks and prop up the ruined economy. Now, gentle citizen, though you have paid once through the reduced value of your retirement plan and your house, you will pay again through cuts in Medicare and Social Security.

[…]

The politics of the deficit commission are all tangled up with the politics of how much to spend on a new jobs bill. In December, the House, with no assistance from Obama, narrowly passed a $154 billion jobs will, which also provides fiscal relief to the states and extends unemployment and health benefits for jobless workers. But the word from the White House is that Obama will not support that high a number, and will give more prominence to deficit reduction. So despite the rhetoric about Obama getting past the health-bill morass and emphasizing jobs, jobs, jobs, he hasn’t yet put his money (ours, actually) where his mouth is.

You can only assume that the administration believes they did the best they could to clean up the mess, they have no more room to maneuver and now it’s time to pull back — and pave the way for the Republicans to reap the electoral rewards. The irony is that if the Republicans come back into power with the economy still weak, they’ll have no trouble blaming the Democrats for everything from the Taliban to male pattern baldness for the next quarter century while insisting that the only possible solution to all of it is to cut more taxes for the wealthy. And so it goes.

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Media Criticism For Dummies

by digby

Howie Kurtz on live chat:

Knoxville, Tenn.: Why do so many media outlets, when mentioning “Fox News”, say “which some say has conservative views”? This seems to be the equivalent of saying “The Washington Post, which some say is a newspaper…”

Why is the rest of the press corp afraid to call a spade a spade, particularly when (as in this case) it is so virulently blatant?

Howard Kurtz: Because some say a distinction must be made between Fox’s opinion shows (O’Reilly, Beck, Hannity) and its news programming. Just as you have to make a distinction between The Post’s news pages and its left-leaning editorial page.

First of all, “some say” there isn’t any distinction between Fox news and its opinion shows. Unless you call a minutes a day of “news” jammed into various rabid wingnut opinion shows, they don’t have any news to speak of. And even that “news” is suspect since the reporters all get the same talking points from management every day and when caught off camera, are found doing things like this.

But that’s not the astonishing thing about Kurtz’s comment. It’s this:

Just as you have to make a distinction between The Post’s news pages and its left-leaning editorial page

Hahahahaha! That’s a good one …

Meanwhile, John Amato caught a very interesting exchange Between a Boston Herald Reporter, Margery Egan and Kurtz on Reliable Sources this week-end:

On Boston newspapers’ coverage of the Massachusetts Senate race:

EAGAN: Well, she[Martha Coakley] got very good press from “The Boston Globe,” not from my paper, “The Boston Herald.” But you know something? People don’t like — TV journalists and newspaper journalists do not like to talk about the influence of talk radio. Let me tell you something. There was a nonstop hammering of Martha Coakley on the AM stations here, on the huge sports stations here. She was the evil incarnate and Scott Brown was the next coming. And, you know, the New England Patriots in the playoffs lost early on. It was as if there was this transference from Tom “Terrific” Brady, the quarterback of the Patriots, to Scott “Terrific” Brown. You look at the rallies for Scott Brown, they were very white, they were very suburban, they were Gillette Stadium fans, and there was almost this…

KURTZ: But just briefly, did you mean to say earlier that “The Boston Globe” tilted towards Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, and your paper, “The Boston Herald,” tilted towards Scott Brown in the news coverage?

EAGAN: Well, I would say my paper was pretty much cheerleading for Scott Brown. We’re the conservative paper in town, and The Globe, I think, was — they were evenhanded somewhat, but I think that they were definitely cheerleading for Martha Coakley, absolutely. They’re the liberal paper in town. That’s the way it always is.

The two rival papers do break down that way. But what she said about talk radio is important. And nobody wants to talk about it for some reason.

And the sports talk radio influence is something I was unaware of until Amato started writing about it. He says in this piece:

I cover the sports media on C&L all the time because I think it’s important to show how they act like the Beltway media elite — they have their own Village. And their political reach is greater than people think, because the sports talkers are uniformly right-wing and they love to bash liberals, just like their “opinion show” counterparts.

I follow baseball closely and watch my share of football and the Olympics etc., but I hate sports talk radio and always have. And right wing talk is modeled on it: macho blowhards screaming into the ether. What I didn’t know was that they often get into political discussions, which validates the wingnut talking points among sports fans who don’t follow politics closely (aka “independents”.) That’s creepy, and it explains a lot.

I had the privilege of living in Boston during the Celtics vs Lakers (and Doug Flutie BC) and I’ve never been in a more sports-mad town. Combined with Coakley’s Curt Schilling gaffe, if the sports guys also transferred their Brady mancrush onto Brown, it undoubtedly had an impact.

Not that media critic Howie Kurtz was interested in that at all. Why would he be? He’s too busy fending off criticism of the Washington Post’s leftist editorial page.

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Running Against Yourself

by digby

Remember how just a week ago the Democrats were saying that they were finally going run against the catastrophic Republican policies of the Bush administration? Think again. From MSNBC this morning:

Andrea Mitchell: Bashing former president George W. Bush? That’s no longer a winning strategy for Democrats. The tactic seemed effective in 2006 and 2008 but now the blame game has lost its power. Democrats tried playing the Bush card in all three of the recent statewide races they lost all three times.

John Harris editor of Politico joining us now. What’s going wrong with that?

Democrats thought this was a horse they could ride for a good bit longer, through the 2010 elections and still riding the old mare into 2012. Turns out it’s just not the case. Running against president Bush, as unpopular as he was when his term ended, just doesn’t seem to be getting political juice in these races.

A good story today we had in Politico today Jonathan Martin, talked to a bunch of Democratic consultants. It’s time to throw out this strategy, it’s just not working.

Right. I think a far better approach would be for the Democrats to take the blame for the economic downturn themselves. Americans will respect that and reward them for their honesty.

And the political media is there to help them do that:

Mitchell: The other strategy they seem not to be able to have is, here they have people concerned about jobs, and the economy yet they don’t have an economic advisor they are prepared to put out on the Sunday talk shows?? I understand the white house political types going out, but what about the fact that neither their treasury secretary or their economic advisors are politically acceptable to them to be a spokesperson for the administration?

Harris: Well at the moment, those guys and their presence themselves seems to be a little off message. The administration itself is trying to strike a more populist note, saying we’re getting tough on big banks we’re not the administration of Wall Street. But those two people because of their actions early in the administration are seen by the base of the party as representatives of Wall Street. Whether that’s fair or not fair, their presence does not send the message the administration wants right now.

Of course, they blame that perception on “the base” and leave the question of whether it’s true or not up to the viewer. In the end one concludes that the administration is hiding its economic advisors because they want to pander to their base which unfairly sees them as beholden to Wall Street. Therefore, both the president and his base are weak, stupid and craven.

Mitchell then interviewed Michael Isikoff about the bin Laden tape from this week-end. And you’ll be shocked to learn that the president has to move right on national security as well:

Mitchell: Let’s talk about the political impact here because I’m beginning to hear from a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans that they do not want to go to civilian trial that they do not want to see Khalid Sheik Mohammed tried in New York City.

Isikoff: We talked about this last week. The trial of khalid Sheik mohammed may now be in doubt because of the shift in mood in the congress. you also had the testimony last week from Director of national intelligence Dennis blair that seemed to raise questions about the approach taken with the nigerian suspect, about putting him through the civilian court. A lot of congressional Republicans have jumped on that.

The basic premises of Obama’s approach to counter terrorism policy have come into question since this Detroit incident and are now up in the air.

So, the upshot is that Democrats not only cannot run against Bush, they must adopt his policies. And if they are hiding the unpopular economic advisors it’s because they are pandering to their unreasonable base, so that’s a problem as well.

Can a Villager draft Cheney movement be far behind? (And I’m talking about the Democratic ticket.)

BTW: The Republicans have run against Jimmy Carter for the past 28 years. In fact, they’re still running against him. Here’s Rush from a couple of years ago:

RUSH: … President Carter wanted to turn things around. He warned that rising materialism would not ‘fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.’ He said it was a crisis of American spirit. In response to this crisis, Carter wanted the authority to ration gasoline, form an ‘energy mobilization board,’ create a bureaucracy to guarantee that we would ‘never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977,’ set oil import quotas and develop solar power. ‘These efforts will cost money,’ Carter explained, ‘a lot of money….'” Now, this was a genuine malaise. He was right. The country was dispirited, but it was because of him! Coming out of Watergate, he puts all these things out there. It was an absolute mess. It is not a mess today, but Democrats are trying to recreate the same mind-set.

Republicans understand two simple things. You must name your enemy and you must imbue that enemy with the characteristics people hate about themselves. The Democrats used to do it quite well themselves, but after Carter they lost their nerve. (I think the Villagers joining the Republicans with their utter disdain for anything that smacks of liberal idealism completely spooked them and they have never recovered.) If the party cannot run against the catastrophic failure of Bush governance, much less against the catastrophic failure of Republican ideology, then they literally have nothing to run on but empty slogans. And that doesn’t cut it once you’re in office and you haven’t delivered. They need to name the culprits — if they don’t, they’ll become the enemy themselves, by default.

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How Many Have Been Fired So Far?

by tristero

I three questions for the hive mind, which I can’t seem to find a really decent answer to:

1. Who, in the national or Massachusetts Democratic party, has been fired since the Coakley/Brown debacle?

2. What contracts with consultants, pollsters and media advisors have either the national or Massachusetts Dems terminated?

3. If people and groups have been let go, who has been hired to replace them? (Here’s a partial answer, David Plouffe, but it’s short on details.)

I would say that a good metric to gauge how serious the Democrats are about hanging on to Congress in the fall would be the extent to which they’ve decided to get rid of dead weight, and hire competent political operators.

(And run electable candidates, of course, but that is a somewhat different issue, involving, as it does, first having competent people to locate and recruit electable candidates.)

From what I can tell from the above Times link, the post-Massachusetts strategy doesn’t seem so much to fire anyone as it is to establish a parallel organization to circumvent potential future failures. There are social/political advantages to this tactic, of course. You end up not antagonizing potential allies, and you avoid ugly confrontations as well as threats to tell all the nasty secrets of a campaign to the press. But let’s face it: with allies like the people who ran Coakley and failed to see the warning signs of imminent disaster, who needs enemies? As for hopefully avoiding the airing of dirty laundry in public, it’s just not gonna happen, not in the media climate of the early Third Millenium. We’re going to know all the sordid details sooner rather than later even if no one gets fired.

And there are problems with being nice to the folks that screwed up Massachusetts, that is, in taking Kerry’s advice to avoid a “circular firing squad.” First is the fact that one of the well-known hallmarks of incompetent people is that they don’t know they’re incompetent. Leaving them around, even if they are “subverted,” as the article put it, enables them to create an enormous amount of havoc. At the very least, it’s a complete waste of money.

There’s also another issue. The people who screwed up are using a combination of truly bad, and badly false, arguments to excuse their failure. Obama is too far left! (In our dreams.) It was primarily the economy! Healthcare reform is very unpopular! Coakley was the worst senatorial candidate in the history of the Republic!

As long as they have even a smidgeon of power, the Dem strategists and consultants who failed so miserably will still have the power to influence the party’s strategy. And sure enough, we are hearing about how Obama has to tack right (a very bad idea), we’re getting a renewed populist focus on the economy (probably a good idea), Dems are abandoning healthcare reform (awful), and Coakley ‘s been demonized (deserved, but utterly besides the point). The finger points everywhere but at the Democratic party operatives who were in charge of electing party members to Congress, and the army of consultants, pollsters, and necromancers who they hired to help them. To say the least, they deserve a huge share of the blame for what happened.

UPDATE: Joan Walsh squarely blames Obama. Sure, he screwed up royally this past year – in so many ways – but he’s not who I’m talking about here. Obama didn’t exactly ignore Coakley’s problems; they were details that he probably assumed his team was on top of. After all, being president, he had much more to worry about than filling Kennedy’s seat. It’s the folks who were empowered to work full time to make sure Democrats kept their majorities (and supermajorities) that I’m focused on here. I don’t mean to excuse Obama, but I’m not gonna let the people who were directly responsible for the debacle off the hook, either.

Here’s an interesting aside in this game of letting the losers stay on. James Carville blames none of his fellow Democrats by name for Massachusetts (if you follow the link, you may have to register at FT to read the op-ed), and he also adopts the “circular firing squad” trope. Naturally, I can’t, and won’t, argue against Carville’s suggestion to pin on Bush the ultimate blame for all the catastrophic situations we find ourselves in. But it was Democratic strategists who failed to see and implement that patently obvious tactic, specific Democratic strategists, and Carville fails to call them out. What makes Carville’s reticence to blame particular Democratic leaders interesting is that this is the same James Carville who, immediately after the game-changing 2006 midterm victories for Democrats, blamed Howard Dean by name for not winning even more races. A further aside: Who did Carville want to replace Dean with? Harold Ford. Anyway…

Another good metric to learn whether the Dems are being serious is the speed at which they move to fire the fools. Times a’wasting, people.

Base Depression

by digby

So, there was a demonstration for Health Care reform in the beating heart of liberalism, San Francisco, this week-end. Emails went out exhorting people to come to the Federal Building at 11:00 on Saturday morning.

Republicans, tea-baggers and their corporate sponsors are doing
everything in their power to make sure that health reform is defeated
in 2010. At this critical juncture we can’t afford to let up. We may
not have millions of dollars like they do – but we do have millions
upon millions of voices all throughout the state who are calling on
Congress as we speak to step up to the plate and finish the job they
started.

As you can imagine we’ve got limited time to make as big an impact as
humanly possible. And that’s why we’re asking for your help to make
this event as powerful as can be. So bring your friends, family
members, co-workers and everyone you know as we call on Members of
Congress to finish reform once and for all! Because we’re emphasizing
the fact that “California Needs Coverage,” bring an umbrella with you
(rain or shine) to help us make this point perfectly clear to
everybody watching.

Reader curmudgeon went and reported this back:

I went to the demonstration.

I got there at 10:58. No one was there.

3 minutes later one of the organizers showed up

3 minutes after that two more organizers showed up with two children–under 7 yrs. At 11:15 there were 7 people total, plus the two children.

I felt like all that was missing was the wreath

Now the villagers all interpret that to mean that everyone hates health care reform. But the truth is that its supporters just feel hopeless. This is not a good time to make your supporters feel hopeless. In fact “hope” is one of this president’s major selling points if I recall correctly.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that they raised expectations and already took a triumphant victory lap declaring that they had passed the grandest, most historic social legislation since the New Deal, but it didn’t help. Perhaps they have learned the lesson from this that most of us learned in kindergarten: don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

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