Instinctive Hypocrisy

by digby

Dr Krugman puts to rest some of the misconceptions about deficits. Meanwhile, in Obama’s snooze inducing Q&A with Democratic Senators, Evan Bayh helpfully reanimates the monster just to make sure that the President doesn’t get carried away with any plans to actually improve the economy for regular people and keeps his eyes on the prize: wealthy investors.

The Guardian helpfully blogged the Q&A and makes the excellent point that the Democrats might have thought through this event a little bit and at least come up with good questions. Obviously, they just winged it and it wasn’t very edifying:

11.00am: Harry Reid says time for one or two questions. Next up is Patrick Leahy – and he too has a question about how those Republicans are being so awful and blocking stuff (judicial nominees in this case).

Why are the Senate Democrats so intent on portraying themselves as powerless? What do they think they’ll gain from this?

Obama notes that the Democrats in the minority pulled many of the same stunts, although he thinks they were more discriminating.

I’m all for Republican bashing, but this approach of whining about obstructionism has rapidly diminishing returns. If the Republicans are perceived as dominating and strong even from the minority, there’s a good chance people will think it makes sense to put them in charge. Americans like winners and the Democrats are making themselves look like losers.

I think that what may have happened is that the Democrats think they can adopt the same tone of victimization as the Republicans and reap the same rewards. But the right has a highly developed, centuries-in-the-making chip on their shoulders that makes them able to seen as both strong and victimized at the same time. They whine and complain with an accompanying smirk to let people know that they are only adopting the tone in order to make the other side look bad, not because they truly believe the other side has beaten them. The Democrats are just complaining.

I worry a little bit about these complicated strategies to “trap” the Republicans and make them look bad by forcing them to reveal their true selves. It’s one thing to straightforwardly attack the other side on ideological grounds and educate the public. That would be the beginning of a very long campaign that goes way beyond next November and I can’t think of anything that would be more useful. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as if the party has gotten the memo on that if this morning’s meeting is any indication. But these clever ideas about “forcing” the Republicans to govern etc, are a little bit too clever for our Democratic party. It’s not that Republicans are smarter, it’s just that they have been at this stuff for a long time and they have an instinct for this sort of politics.

I also think that Democrats really don’t like to govern because it makes them feel exposed. They have prostituted themselves to business and adopted neo-liberal principles, but they have to pretend that they are representing working people and the poor. They haven’t developed the skills the Republicans have for that kind of inconsistency and they just seem confused and weak.

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