“Bloodbath” Is Just About Right
by tristero
This is exactly what happens when top Democrats, including the president, are obsessed with appeasing Republicans – who can’t be appeased – and take liberal support for granted. As Krugman says:
, [With Republicans in charge of the House, i]t will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.
If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.
I don’t believe that’s hyperpole. Republicans have, according to Jane Mayer’s essential New Yorker article on the Koch brothers, convinced 55% of all Americans that Obama is a socialist. They’ve been working on that meme, hammering at it day after day, since the 2008 campaign, if not long before. Saving America from socialism is a holy cause for the extreme right. They will do whatever it takes to thwart and destroy him.
And remember, Krugman’s talking only about a House takeover. With, possibly, the Senate in the hands of the far right, well… it will get very, very ugly indeed.
UPDATE: What Digby says. While I’m not in a frenzy, nor am I drooling and quivering (I save drooling and quivering for sightings of this), I am very, very worried about what this country will look like a year hence, because I see not a single hint that any major Democrat will heed Digby’s or Krugman’s (or little old me’s) advice.
