Month: November 2010

The Hangover

by digby

God I hate morning afters. But they are inevitable (if you’re lucky) As far as I can tell in reading the various postmortems there are two overriding lessons.

The first is that it’s the economy (stupid). At nearly 10% unemployment, a foreclosure scandal of epic proportions, Wall Street run amock and a gusher of plutocrat money flowing into the political system, it’s almost impossible to believe that the Democrats didn’t lose the Senate as well as the House. It was not an ideological election — Blue Dogs and progressives alike lost their seats, in regions all over the country. It was a primal scream of a vote, against those who promised to make things better and failed to do it.

There are fundamental disagreements about how to fix this, but I expect that “consensus” is about to be found around the idea of austerity. Nonetheless, the Republicans will say the president is a socialist foreigner who is working in league with terrorists to destroy the country, so 2012 may be even more disappointing. If you’re a praying person, pray that the invisible hand is hard at work making everything all better very quickly.

As to the other lesson, some of us predicted when the first black president came into office and was accused of proposing death panels for seniors, that the Republicans were firming up their best new demographic. Here’s one from March of 2009.

The elderly are easy prey for all kinds of scare stories and scams from unscrupulous people. And nobody is more unscrupulous than a right winger desperate to obstruct a program or politician they know will be popular and empowering of liberals. Here’s one example from a few years ago, and as far as I know they are still active today. The groups they fronted for certainly are.

I know it’s seems surprising to many that the right is able to mobilize senior citizens against health care reform, but it doesn’t surprise me at all. They’ve been laying the groundwork for this, from dozens of different directions, for decades. The “right to life” people’s ongoing efforts to put euthanasia on the table is just well tilled little piece they are using for this particular moment.

The fundamental architecture of the conservative movement is built on a simple premise: liberals want to take all your money and then kill you or they want to kill you and then take all your money. It’s not really any more complicated than that.

The right understood they’d lost the youth vote, the ethnic and racial minority vote and usually the female vote. The only demographic vote they had going for them was the elderly. And they’ve done a masterful job of making seniors feel like they’re doing something for their grand kids by denying them health care and ensuring that there will be no safety net for them when they get old. You have to give them credit for that.

And you have to blame the Democrats for failing to see that was a huge part of the Republican strategy going into the mid-terms in which the voting demographic always skews older.

So, here we are. People keep asking me what this means for the progressive movement and I reply — nothing. Progressives are in this for the long haul. And anyone with any experience knows that the country is polarized between the right and the left, with a bunch of people in between who don’t know what to think. All we can do is keep trying out different ways to persuade them that their best bet is to go with the progressive philosophy and require our elected politicians to figure out how to turn that philosophy into governance. It’s a long term battle that has periods of intense confrontation and calm conciliation, but it never really ends.

As you go about your business today, feeling like hell, keep in mind that it was just two years ago that many of the same pundits and gasbags were assuring us all that the conservative movement was dead. We are doing a lot of lurching about right now because the country is under stress and our political system is dividing strongly along partisan lines. Get used to it. I suspect we’re going to be in for turbulent politics like this for some time. And if we play our cards right, and the Democrats don’t completely implode, it’s probable that at the end of the day we (or those who come behind us) will look back and see that human rights, economic justice and peace came out the winners more often than not.

I thought that Hillary Clinton had it right when she said at the Democratic Convention in 2008:

My mother was born before women could vote, my daughter got to vote for her mother for President. This is the story of America, of women and men who defy the odds and never give up. So how do we give this country back to them? By following the example of a brave New Yorker, a woman who risked her lives to bring slaves to freedom along the underground railroad. On that path to freedom, Harriet Tubman had one piece of advice: ‘If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If they’re shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop, keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.’ And even in the darkest moments. That is what Americans have done. We have found the faith to keep going.

Keep the faith. And anyway, what choice do we have?

Update: Oh, and when they try to blame the bloggers or the liberals, just throw this in their face:

Only 47% of the members of the Democratic “Blue Dog Coalition” won re-election. 95% of the members of the “Progressive Caucus” won re-election. We’re divided, but not that way.

And just in case the media hasn’t noticed, the Democrats still control one house of congress and the presidency.

.

The Future

by digby

Here’s a little taste of what we can expect from the new Teabag Congress:

Reflexive Hippie Bashing For A Thousand

by digby

The MSM are going to make a big deal out of Jack Conway’s Aqua Buddha ad and Alan Grayson being generally rude and aggressive as reason for their losing their races, but they will be reflexively hippie punching and wrong on the facts. (In fact, they are already doing it.)

Regarding Grayson,well we have a little controlled experiment. His neighboring first term Democratic congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas, in a very similar district, took the opposite approach to Grayson. She ran as hard to the right as she could get away with, never had a controversial thought much less uttered one, was rewarded with big money and support from the DCCC — and she lost too. This race was bigger than both of them. Florida is turning hard right.

At least Grayson went down fighting for something instead of being a sell-out to the lowest common denominator. I’ll always be grateful for what he said and did these past two years. The country should thank him too — the Fed audit wouldn’t have happened and I’m not sure they wouldn’t have been able to keep the foreclosure fraud cover-up going a lot longer than they did without his intervention. We will miss him.

As far as the notorious Aqua Buddha goes, Conway was strong armed by the DSCC into running that ad because — as usual — they believed that all politicians have to run to the right no matter what the circumstances and they thought Paul was soft with social conservatives. If the ad backfired, you can thank the “professional” hacks not the dirty hippies, for insisting that it was a good idea for Conway to pretend to be something that he isn’t. It never works.

The good news, such as it is, is that the wingnuts expectations have been so elevated that anything short of a monster blowout across the board is going to be a disappointment. And so far it doesn’t look like they’ll get that. Of course the fact that Obama is still in the White House when a large number of them seem to think they were voting against him today is bound to be confusing and upsetting anyway. But then, that’s their natural state.

Onward to the Patron Silver and waiting to see if Harry and pot pull it out here in the west. You can’t win them all, but you can win some.

.

DeMint Tea Party

by digby

As I write this, the results are still up in the air, but this piece by Adele Stan is something to contemplate as we watch the returns come in:

The Republicans may not win the Senate, but the Tea Party could take it hostage, thanks to millions of unaccountable dollars, post-Citizens United.Of the eight seats that Democrats are given more than a 60-percent chance of losing by Nate Silver of Five Thirty-Eight, four will go to Tea Party-branded candidates if Silver’s predictions hold up. But the story doesn’t end there. In another four open seats currently held by establishment Republicans, Tea Party candidates running on the Republican line are likely to win. Taken together — the seats added to the GOP margin by Tea Party candidates, and the Tea Party candidates likely to be seated in open races that don’t affect the current ratio of Dems to Repubs — these candidates, if they win, represent a shift in power away from McConnell and toward Sen. Jim DeMint, who bankrolled many of these Tea Party candidacies through his Senate Conservatives Fund PAC, and endorsed them all.

It’s theoretically possible that the presence of this radical faction will drive a few of the sane Republicans to work across the aisle, but I doubt it. That’s a dynamic that only works in the Democratic Party. The tea party has the backing of the whole noise machine and they will be driving the crazy bus into 2012. They won’t even allow any members to disagree publicly with Rush Limbaugh. I doubt very seriously that any Republicans who plan to have a career past the next election will cross them.

They are going to be very interesting to watch. And by the way, they will also be joined by quite a few of the so-called grown-ups. That’s where the action is.

.

Shhh. Don’t Tell Anyone, But The Majority People Aren’t Entirely Stupid

by digby

This is surprising. The exit polls say:

Voters think the economy’s a wreck…but who’s to blame? Thirty-five percent of voters in early exit polls pin the blame on Wall Street. The next name on the list: former President Bush – 29 percent point their fingers in his direction. President Obama follows, at 24 percent.

This would be why DLCers like Harold Ford are all over the TV telling us that must immediately mend fences with Wall Street. After all, I’m sure it will result in bringing in lots of money for the DLC. Whether it works out for Democrats in general is less likely. But then, that’s not really the point is it?

.

Fergawdsake

by digby

TPM reports:

Local Fox affiliate finds New Black Panther Party dude outside polling place in Philly. Turns out he’s a certified poll watcher doing nothing illegal — other than “wearing a pin that indicated his party affiliation, along with a black hat, sunglasses and leather coat,” as Fox put it.

Gee, I had the same thing on when I when I voted. I guess I’m lucky I wasn’t mistaken for Patty Hearst and wrestled to the ground by Tea Partiers.

Oy. It’s going to be a long night.

.

What’s In Store

by digby

I and others have been writing for some time that the Catfood Commission doesn’t expect to get enough votes either on the commission or in the congress to pass anything, but rather was convened to create a new baseline for “bipartisan” negotiation. Here we have it in the mainstream press:

[P]eople in both parties say they have been surprised that the 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform reached an early consensus to put all three major budget parts on the table: taxes, annual spending for domestic and military programs, and the entitlement benefit programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Still, given Republicans’ opposition to tax increases and Democrats’ to changes in benefits, expectations are low that any plan can get the 14-vote supermajority required to send it to Congress for a vote in December. Advocates’ best hope seems to be that the co-chairmen — Erskine B. Bowles, president of the University of North Carolina system and a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader from Wyoming — can negotiate a package that attracts a sizable minority of the 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans and provides a framework for future bipartisan action.

When you put that together with this, you’ve got a little insight into what’s likely to happen in the next congress:

President Obama plans to talk about the results of Tuesday’s elections at a news conference Wednesday afternoon in the East Room of the White House, his staff announced.

Aides said they expected Mr. Obama to call for an end to the division that characterized the campaign and for a renewed focus on bipartisanship to solve the nation’s economic and other problems.

The White House is bracing for a bad night, anticipating an outcome that has virtually every political specialist predicting that the Democrats will lose the House but possibly hang on to the Senate. The White House wants to use the news conference the next day to help Mr. Obama reframe his presidency and signal that he heard what the voters were trying to tell him.

But keep in mind, that was likely to happen regardless of whether the Democrats suffer a big loss today. There was nearly zero chance that the administration would not take a turn right going into the presidential cycle. It’s what conventional Democratic wisdom requires. Of course, conventional Democratic wisdom also requires that you nail down your base in the first two years, so perhaps this whole thesis is inoperative. But I doubt it. I think they misjudged the fact that their base is suffering from the bad economy too — and overestimated the lasting personal affection for the president from the campaign. (This is a fast moving culture and as Heidi Klum says “one day youah IN and the next youah OUT!)

Now they have to walk a tightrope trying to keep the base on board while they make their starboard turn and hope to God the economy doesn’t tank again under the austerity measures they seem to think are big political winners. (And also hope that the teabaggers dominate the GOP primary in 2006 and nominate the Palin/Paladino ticket.)

2011 and 2012 were always going to be a hard two years for liberals. I think the big surprise was that the last two were as hard as they were. It has opened the door to all kinds of unpleasant possibilities going forward that might have been avoided with a different strategy.

However it must be emphasized that even the worst case scenarios show the Democrats controlling the the Senate and the executive branch with the Republicans holding a slim majority in the House. If it happens, it’s hardly the earthquake the gasbags are breathlessly telling us it is.

Update: Oy vey — and then there’s this:

.

Krugman Asks A Dumb Question

by digby

What do they want?

If there’s one piece of conventional pundit wisdom that annoys me most, it’s the constant refrain that Obama was wrong to pursue health care, that he should have focused on the economy instead. For the question people saying this never answer is, what would that focus have consisted of? Yes, Democrats would be in better shape if the economy were in better shape. Duh. So when you say Obama should have focused more, what policies are you talking about? A bigger stimulus? As far as I can tell, almost no pundits are saying that. So what other concrete policies do they have in mind? I have never gotten an answer.

I’m surprised at the good professor. Of course they have offered concrete policies: cut taxes and roll back regulations. Oh, and balance the budget. If we would just do that the invisible hand will magically restore our economy and we will all be rich, I tell you, rich! (Except for the lazy good-for-nothing you know whats, who deserve to starve cuz they’re not hard workers like us.)

Oh, and the other concrete policy is to do everything in their power to ensure that Obama is a one term president.

What’s the problem?

.

Lunatics and Liars

by digby

As most of you probably know already, ABC made the mistake of hiring an unstable hoaxter for its election night coverage and it’s cause a bit of a kerfuffle. They can’t can him because the entire right wing will immediately vomit green pea soup and start speaking in tongues at the mere hint of the MSM destroying yet another fine patriot for the “crime” of being a conservative. (Indeed, the media should recognize that the rules have now changed — conservatives are unfireable.)

But here’s what ABC gets for hiring from the lockdown unit of the GOP asylum, (from Media Matters):

Breitbart is in complete meltdown mode and his sites are posting a series of increasingly incoherent rants against ABC News. You really ought to read them though, as they perfectly distill the paranoid mind of today’s right-wing movement and its almost complete addiction to victimization. (Breitbart’s been blacklisted! Or something….) Plus, you’ll learn all sorts of interesting facts, like how it’s Media Matters’ fault that ABC seemed to walk back its TV invite to Breitbart. And George Soros’ fault, and the fault of Obama, Center for American Progress, the FCC, Keith Olbermann, Charles Schumer, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, NPR, and George Stephanopoulos.

And he’s still going to do the appearance, as far as I know. All ABC did was try to distance themselves from his ranting lunacy by saying he would be online rather than on TV. It’s not as if they shut out all the screaming, incoherent, wingnut wackjobs. They even kept his mendacious factotum, Dana Loesch on their in-studio guest list as an “analyst” with Cokie Roberts and Donna Brazile. But that’s not good enough for Breitbart, who is milking his semi-martyrdom for all its worth.

I know I won’t be watching ABC and certainly Breitbart’s audience won’t be — they watch Fox exclusively. So all that’s going to happen is that a bunch of casual viewers will tune in and they’ll see a babbling liar on the TV show and a few Facebook users over 65 will wander into the trainwreck that is Breitbart online. I sure hope his “edgy” commentary was worth all the trouble.

.

Vote!

by digby

In case you’ve moved or have never done it before, “Find your fucking polling place” here.

.