Month: February 2012

Blue America Chat: Ken Aden from Arkansas

by digby

One of the greatest difficulties for progressives these days is imagining how we can possibly win elections when the 1% has uncapped a fire hose full of money into our politics. It’s a daunting prospect, to be sure. Their gusher of cash is so overwhelming that it’s hard to see how average people can possibly compete. But that’s why Blue America is so enthusiastic about progressive candidates around the country who are coming up with craetive strategies and tactics to meet the challenge. Turns out that big money ads may be able to tear someone down but it still can’t buy you love the way a one on one conversation can.

One of the most inventive progressive grassroots strategists in the country is Ken Aden of Arkansas’ 3rd district. Ken is one of those rare politicians with both the common touch and a long term vision who has sat down and thought through how to wage his campaign on the ground, one on one. With a combination of high-tech micro-targeting savvy and a sophisticated field operation using dedicated volunteers to walk the district and meet every possible voter, this strategy shows how progressives can overcome the odds.

As you can see from the video above, Ken is a man with grassroots organizing experience, empathy and intelligence. And he knows his constituents as neighbors and friends.

Ken says:

Because a legitimate campaign effort has never been mounted by a Democrat running for Congress, voters have never had the opportunity to be introduced to a Democratic candidate who believes what they believe. Incumbent Steve Womack is a Tea Party Republican who believes Social Security and Medicare must be cut and changed. However, the residents of the district don’t feel the same way. In Benton County alone, more than $600 million in Social Security payments, Medicare funding, and Medicare prescription drug coverage was utilized by residents. Districtwide, that figure tops $1 billion dollars in combine Medicare and Social Security Payments. The people who depend upon these programs don’t want to see them cut, but they’ve never had a Democratic congressional campaign knock on their door and make them aware that there is an option other than a Republican.

Check out the reaction he gets on that subject:

“If you even think of cutting Medicare, if you even think of cutting Social Security, you’re a criminal.” Words progressive Democrats should live by.

Ken’s making some waves, that’s for sure. You may have read in the national news that his campaign manager came home a few weeks ago to find that someone had murdered his family cat and scrawled the word “liberal” on it. Aden is a former combat soldier and doesn’t scare easily and neither does his campaign. In fact, it propelled them to double their efforts to get out and talk to the people and let them know who it is that’s on their side when it comes to protecting their livelihoods, their economic security and their futures. (Hint: it isn’t cowards who would kill a defenseless animal.)

Blue America endorsed Ken with great enthusiasm and we are spreading the good word about his grassroots strategic vision to progressive challengers across the country. We believe that this kind of creativity and energy can pay off. But he needs all the help we can give him to keep the campaign funded. He won’t be able to match a corrupt Republican incumbent, not even close. But he has a good chance to win if he can put this plan into practice and defeat him with sharp grassroots tactics and hard work. Please donate here if you can.

And please join us at 11am PST/1pm CST for a Blue America live chat with Ken at Crooks and Liars, where he’ll be taking questions on the issues and his strategic vision for waging grassroots campaigns in the age of Citizens’ United. You’ll come away feeling a lot more confident that the right candidate with the right plan can beat the right wing.

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Paul Ryan wants all the female icky to STFU

by digby

Right:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan insisted Tuesday that while the media and the Democratic Party were trying to sidetrack Republicans with social issues, the GOP is dedicated to tackling economic issues.

“It’s not troubling for me” that there is conversation about social issues, the Wisconsin Republican said on CBS’s “This Morning.” “I think that’s more about the media, and maybe the Democrats who are trying to move it in that direction.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have a sidetrack into social issues,” Ryan asserted.The Wisconsin Republican said that Republican presidential candidates were mostly talking about economic issues.

I guess these guys were all testifying about the capital gains tax:

More than a thousand anti-choice and restrictive reproductive bills have been pushed by Republicans around the nation just since 2010. They can pretend all they want that the Tea Party takeover was strictly economic, but it won’t make it true. Reap what you sow, Paul Ryan.

On the other hand, many Republicans aren’t as concerned as Ryan (who fears his star will wane, I’m guessing, as social issues are revealed once again as the primary concern of GOP base voters.) Nancy Scola observes:

[S]ome Republicans are seeing an upside in the raging debate: It’s a chance, they argue, to prove to Americans that Barack Obama truly does want to weasel his way into every aspect of American life. And they’re counting on voters to recognize that fact come fall.

“It’s not really about whether contraception would be included in insurance coverage,” says Tim LeFever, talking about the approach to including birth control in the plans of religious employers that the Obama administration is selling as a compromise with the Catholic Church. LeFever runs the Capitol Resource Institute, a Focus-on-the-Family-type group, and is a California real estate lawyer. Access to contraception is settled law, he points out, some 50 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. “It’s that with our country’s tradition of religious liberty, Obama would step in like he did. Very few people consider the compromise anything more than a wink and a nod. Most of us say, ‘Of course we’re still paying for it. You’re still going to war against our conscience.’ ”

And that, argue Republicans, is what this debate is all about. It’s not birth control. “The argument has been made that 98 percent of Catholic women have used contraception,” says LeFever. “But then the counterargument is that 98 percent of Catholic women have found a way to get contraception.”

I guess we’re going to see if that’s right. Frankly, I’m mostly afraid that men will start to agitate for a Grand Bargain common ground solution in order to end a debate about something they don’t want to talk about. (I suspect Ryan represents a fair number from both parties.)In my view it’s important to fight this out and see where we stand as a nation.

Interestingly, Scola quotes a Republican pollster and strategist who breaks down that battle in some very familiar ways — not based on gender, but rather our other tribal fault lines:

What sort of political legs does the “war on women” slogan have, I asked Goeas. He let out a hearty laugh. “It fits into the category of ‘nice try.’”

Goeas puts some numbers behind that take. “Many of the women that react that way” – as in, who come away from the present debate over contraception with the idea that Republicans are eager to whittle down their right to conceive and bear children as they see fit – “aren’t Republican voters to begin with.” According to a new poll of 1,000 likely voters to be released next week, says Goeas, Republicans and Democrats do equally well on the question of which party best shares their values, tied at 46 percent. There’s only a tiny gender gap. Men lean 48 to 45 percent Republican, while women lean towards Democrats at a rate of 47 to 43 percent.

“If you’re looking at whether in fact Republicans are losing women, you can’t just look at young women, or young single women, or African-American women, or Hispanic women – you have to look at the demographics where Republicans have been strong – white women, for example, or senior women.” Slippage among those groups would be cause to worry, says Goeas. “And I’m seeing no sign of that.”

David’s piece below discusses the “demographics are destiny” theme that Democrats have been leaning on for quite a while now. There’s more to be said on that another time, but let’s just say that until we achieve our demographically certain majority for all time, the socially conservative white Republican majority can do a lot of damage. I wouldn’t wait for the numbers to magically change.

Update: You have to love this. The Alabama crusader who put the state rape requirement in his bill has backed off his specific language:

SB12 will no longer require “a woman seeking an abortion to first undergo an ultrasound in which a doctor or technician inserted an ultrasound transducer, or wand, inside her,” State Sen. Clay Scofield (R) explained in a statement Monday, allowing the woman to determine which “method of ultrasound that she would be more comfortable with.”

Big of him, isn’t it?

Seriously, these people have been trying to pass laws about inserting “wands” inside women for no reason. I honestly think we’re going to look back on this and realize that it was a historical moment. I just don’t know what the history will show happened next.

Also, too, the bill is still an insulting, infantalizing piece of shit.

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This is What Terrifies Conservatives

by David Atkins

That the conservative base and establishment have gone off an ideological cliff isn’t in question. The only question at hand is why, whether anyone but a few media moguls is really in control of it, and whether it’s a trend indicating strength and strategic brilliance, the rise of a new potential totalitarianism, or the last flaring embers of a dying demographic and cultural identity. Perhaps it’s more than one of the above.

For his part, Jonathan Chait in the New York Magazine leans toward door #3 in fairly convincing fashion:

Today, cosmopolitan liberals may still feel like an embattled sect—they certainly describe their political fights in those terms—but time has transformed their rump minority into a collective majority. As conservative strategists will tell you, there are now more of “them” than “us.” What’s more, the disparity will continue to grow indefinitely. Obama actually lost the over-45-year-old vote in 2008, gaining his entire victory margin from younger voters—more racially diverse, better educated, less religious, and more socially and economically liberal.

Portents of this future were surely rendered all the more vivid by the startling reality that the man presiding over the new majority just happened to be, himself, young, urban, hip, and black. When jubilant supporters of Obama gathered in Grant Park on Election Night in 2008, Republicans saw a glimpse of their own political mortality. And a galvanizing picture of just what their new rulers would look like.

In the cold calculus of game theory, the expected response to this state of affairs would be to accommodate yourself to the growing strength of the opposing coalition—to persuade pockets of voters on the Democratic margins they might be better served by Republicans. Yet the psychology of decline does not always operate in a straightforward, rational way. A strategy of managing slow decay is unpleasant, and history is replete with instances of leaders who persuaded themselves of the opposite of the obvious conclusion. Rather than adjust themselves to their slowly weakening position, they chose instead to stage a decisive confrontation. If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner. This was the thought process of the antebellum southern states, sizing up the growing population and industrial might of the North. It was the thinking of the leaders of Austria-Hungary, watching their empire deteriorate and deciding they needed a decisive war with Serbia to save themselves.

At varying levels of conscious and subconscious thought, this is also the reasoning that has driven Republicans in the Obama era. Surveying the landscape, they have concluded that they must strike quickly and decisively at the opposition before all hope is lost.

Arthur Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a high-profile presence on the Republican intellectual scene, wrote a 2010 book titled The Battle, urging conservatives to treat the struggle for economic libertarianism as a “culture war” between capitalism and socialism, in which compromise was impossible. Time was running short, Brooks pleaded in apocalyptic tones. The “real core” of what he called Obama’s socialistic supporters was voters under 30. “It is the future of our country,” he wrote. “And this group has exhibited a frightening openness to statism in the age of Obama.”

Chait goes on to hypothesize that the 2012 election is rapidly being seen as the point of no return for conservatism as we know it, and that the refusal of Republicans to compromise with Democrats even on a Grand Bargain mostly favorable to them represents a last-ditch attempt to regain control of all branches of government. The idea from there would be to take just two years to so dismantle everything progressives have spent decades trying to build, that it would take a new generation their entire political careers just to repair the damage.

I’m not sure I wholly buy the argument; I doubt the lurch rightward has quite as much strategy or immediate desperation as all that. But there is something truly to be said for Republicans’ increasingly apocalyptic sense of the times, and for a progressively paranoid worldview that sees the entire world crumbling beneath their feet.

Of course, liberal commentators will point out that the top 1% appear to be doing quite fine in the Obama era, and that not much has happened to really change the status quo. What does it matter, they might argue, if the delusional rubes on the right see Obama as the harbinger of their destruction? What matters is that the plutocrats don’t, they will say. Some (who clearly don’t spend enough time consuming conservative media or hanging out with conservative acquaintances) have even suggested that Republicans are throwing this election because they’re happy with the current Presidency, all things considered.

But that would be a mistake that overlooks one pivotal fact: devastating realignments don’t usually happen overnight, but rather slowly. FDR’s presidency was more the exception than the rule. True, progressives had many reasons to hope that Obama’s election would mean an FDR-style reversal, coming as it did on the heels of a major economic downturn clearly caused by conservative economic policies. The President’s own tendency toward an obsession with grand political compromises certainly hasn’t helped. On the other hand, President Obama has a far more conservative legislature with a much more sluggishly corrupt system to deal with than did FDR.

In terms of electoral realignments, the election of Barack Obama may rather most closely resemble the election of Richard Nixon. That’s not a bad thing, either.

Richard Nixon was the beginning of the conservative realignment. Barry Goldwater lost, and lost badly. But he ignited the movement conservative coalition. The Goldwater conservatives upended the establishment and elected Richard Nixon. The parallels between Goldwater and Howard Dean, and Nixon and Obama are striking in this regard.

But as with Obama and the left, Nixon disappointed his movement conservatives. He wasn’t the man they had hoped he would be. He founded the EPA, opened trade relations with China, almost passed a more progressive health law than the ACA, and much more besides. He was a total paranoid crook tactically and personally speaking, but from a public policy standpoint he was actually fairly liberal even for his time (to say nothing of today.) But that doesn’t mean that he and his Southern Strategy weren’t the harbinger of an enduring, half-century long coalition that remains politically vibrant, even dominant, to this day.

The same can be said for Barack Obama. No, he hasn’t been as progressive as many liberals of the Howard Dean persuasion, myself included, would have liked. But his very existence–and more importantly, of the electoral coalition that sent him to the Oval Office as well as the younger, hipper, more urban, more multiracial, more cosmopolitan political ethic he represents–are here to stay. And not just to stay, but to be the prophet of the dominant political era to come.

Perhaps Barack Obama will not realize the desires and natural policy outcomes that derive from such a coalition. Indeed, he almost certainly will not and can not, any more than Nixon could have implemented the fully formed Reagan agenda back in 1971. But he has done much. And the next president elected by this coalition will do more, and the next one after that will do even more than the one that came before, until in 25 years, even a Republican president will be significantly more liberal than any Democrat in 2008. Conservatives understand this, even if only at a deep-seated level in the darkest fathoms of their collective angst.

This election, then, is about much more than Barack Obama. For conservatives, It’s about putting back in the genie’s bottle the coalition that the election of 2008 began to unleash. It’s about reverting America back to a time when the Nixon coalition was still comfortably in charge–whether it elected Republicans like Reagan or Democrats like Clinton.

That’s what terrifies them, and that’s a major part of what is driving this parabolic path of extremism on which the conservative movement finds itself. Their time is up, and they know it. But denial is a very powerful motivator that leads to irrationally stubborn belligerence. Which means that no matter what Democrats do, and no matter how hard politicians like Barack Obama himself may try, and even no matter how much progress the 99% may or may not make against the plutocrats, the civility of our politics is going to get much, much more strained over the next few years.

The old Nixon coalition is not going ride quietly off into the sunset, not by a long shot.

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Authoritarian victimhood

by digby

Wow, here’s a strange collision of protest culture:

A teenage girl was detained Monday outside the Capitol after police separated Occupy protesters from a group opposing black-on-white violence in South Africa.

The girl with Occupy Oakland was taken to Juvenile Hall after she became combative and assaulted an officer who asked her to pick up litter, California Highway Patrol Officer Sean Kennedy said. He did not have her age or city of residence.

“It’s a free country and we’re here to protect everyone’s rights,” Kennedy said.

There were no other arrests, despite shouting and sign-waving by competing protesters who were separated by about two-dozen officers on foot and horseback.

Activists with the Occupy group cursed at peace officers and about 40 mostly white men who were at the Capitol to draw attention to what they say is white genocide.

Organizers for the South Africa Project said similar demonstrations were planned in other states and elsewhere in California.

“There is white genocide going on in South Africa. It’s a government-backed genocide,” said Kyle Krieger, a spokesman for the South Africa Project.

His comments were echoed by other men, some with shaved heads and prominent tattoos.

Occupy protesters, some wearing hoods or masks, said they came from the San Francisco Bay area to counter what they called a racist group affiliated with former Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Some in the Occupy crowd also had shaved heads or mohawk haircuts and equally prominent tattoos, but a different message.

The update in the Sacramento Bee is so obviously biased toward the police officers that I am taking it with a grain of salt. But it does seem to the case that a bunch of White Supremacists were screamed at by Occupy protesters, somebody threw something, the cops went after the Occupy folks and chaos ensued. The white supremacists and the police are claiming to be the victims.

Yes, the white supremacists have a right to protest. But then so does Occupy. And the government has an obligation to protect the rights of both groups. I’m fairly sure there’s something profound to be gleaned from all this but I’m damned if I know exactly what it is.

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Slasher Rerun: Deficit Zombie’s from hell

by digby

Apparently Steny Hoyer is determined to slash the safety net before there’s even the slightest chance that a few sane Democrats might be elected next fall:

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) is looking to shake legislative politics out of unconsciousness as early as this spring, and force a vote on a bipartisan legislative proposal – which would include higher taxes and cuts to federal programs — to reduce deficits by trillions of dollars over the coming years.

The push is intended to disrupt the consensus among most political leaders that Congress will punt budget consolidation efforts until after November — when the election returns are in, and the January 1, 2013 expiry of the Bush tax cuts and deep across-the-board spending cuts make real action inevitable.

In a speech hosted Monday morning by Third Way, Hoyer revealed that he and other lawmakers are looking for the right moment to introduce a bill that would achieve the sorts of deficit reduction goals that have eluded Congress and the White House thus far.

“Members of both parties, and on both sides of the Capitol, are working to ensure that the next time we find ourselves at an impasse — which could be sooner, rather than later — we will be ready, with a legislative package in hand to address our debt and deficit in a comprehensive, long-term way,” Hoyer said.

Hoyer declined to discuss the specifics of this bill, but suggested it would deal with spending and tax policies of all kinds. He and his colleagues face one key problem: there’s a lot of white space on the legislative calendar this year, and that means they’ll have a hard time leveraging unwilling members into action.

I’m beginning to think we should elect the most crazed Tea Partiers we can find and encourage them to hold fast and never pass any bill that President Obama might sign. With Democrats like Hoyer around, it’s probably our only hope.

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Where the sexists live

by digby

I always wondered what the women who hear crap like this on Rush Limbaugh think when they hear it. I’m sure many of them are so beaten down that they think it’s normal and there are always a fair number of Phyllis Schlafly’s out there. But how could any self-respecting female not be repulsed by crap like this?

As it turns out, he’s just talking to the guys they way these guys talk when the beyotches aren’t around:

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Setting it up for the next phase

by digby

Following up on my earlier post, here’s a great new piece by Perlstein in Rolling Stone. This is just so right on:

Here’s the problem: Even if Obamaism works on its own terms – that is, if Sullivan is right that Obama’s presidency is precisely on course – it can’t stop Republicans from wrecking the country. Instead, it may end up abetting them.

To understand why, let’s look at Ronald Reagan. Barack Obama has famously cited him as a role model for how transformative a president can be. Well, what did he transform, and how did he do it? Here’s how: He planted an ideological flag. From the start, he relentlessly identified America’s malaise with a villain, one that had a name, or two names – liberalism, the Democratic Party – and a face – that of James Earl Carter. Reagan’s argument was, on its face, absurd. For all Carter’s stumbles as president, the economic crisis he inherited had been incubated under two Republican presidents, Nixon and Ford (see this historical masterpiece for an account of Nixon’s role in wrecking the economy), and via a war in Vietnam that Reagan had supported and celebrated. What’s more, to arrest the economy’s slide, Jimmy Carter did something rather heroic and self-sacrificing, well summarized here: He appointed Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve chairman with a mandate to squeeze the money supply, which induced the recession that helped defeat Carter – as Carter knew it might – but which also slayed the inflation dragon and, by 1983-84, long after Carter had lost to Reagan, saved the economy.

In office, Reagan, on the level of policy, endorsed Carter’s economics by reappointing Volcker. But on the level of politics, in one of the greatest acts of broad-gauged mendacity in presidential history, he blamed Carter for the economic failure, tied that failure to liberal ideology and its supposed embrace of “big government” (Carter in fact took on big government), and gave conservatism credit for every success. Deregulation and supply-side tax-cuts brought us “morning in America,” he said. That was bullshit, but it won him a reelection landslide against Walter Mondale, Carter’s VP, whom he labeled “Vice President Malaise.”

What’s the lesson? It’s not that you have to lie – Republicans had to do that to win, but Democrats don’t. No, Democrats, in 2009, could simply have told the truth, and called it hell. The truth was this: For the first few years of this new century, America had ventured upon a natural experiment not attempted since the 1920s – governing the country with conservatives in control of all three branches of government. The result, of course, was – smoking ruins. Everybody knew it. A majority of Americans was receptive to “liberal solutions,” and even conservatives knew it – which was why, after Obama delivered his February 24, 2009 speech defending the stimulus that, as I noted last week, got a 92 percent approval rating, and Bobby Jindal responded to it by excoriating the $140 million in stimulus spending “for something called ‘volcano’ monitoring,” David Brooks said his “stale, government-is-the-problem, you can’t trust the government” rhetoric was “a disaster for the Republican Party.”

Barack Obama knew it too. He just wouldn’t say it. He refused to criticize right-wing ideology. Or to make a full-throated case that Democrats offered an ideological alternative.

Instead, his favorite campaign line on the Republican record was a story about competence: The Republicans “drove the country into the ditch,” and “now they want the keys back.” But Republicans aren’t bad drivers; they drive exactly where they want to go, pedal to the metal. Sure, they sometimes compromise on tactics – certainly Reagan did. But he, and they, never waver on strategic aims. They plant their flag in an uncompromising position, and wait for the world to come around – which, quite often, it eventually does. This is because in a media environment based on the ideology of “balance,” in which anything one of the parties insists upon must be given equal weight to whatever the other party says back, the party that plants its ideological flag further from the center makes the center move. And that is how America changes. You set the stage for future changes by shifting the rhetoric of the present.

And it’s the lack of doing that, and not just on Obama’s part but virtually all national Democrats, that has brought us to the point at which the country no longer has any sense of what liberalism stands for. Sure they all like the individual policies, but they don’t understand that they are liberal, based upon a coherent set of values and philosophical worldview. In fact, they often believe they are conservative because the Republicans pretty much tell them that anything they like, by definition, cannot be liberal.

I’ve been railing about this for years. Yes, the president has little real power when it comes to domestic issues and yes, he is hamstrung by his feckless congressional caucus and yes, the bully pulpit is bullshit, etc, etc. But I simply do not agree that it isn’t the president (and the party leadership’s) job to use their rhetoric and national forum to articulate a political vision and set the stage for future progress. It’s not enough to be personally inspiring. In order to make advances and secure the ones you have, you have to appeal to people on the level of cultural, political, and ideological identity. The left and center left in America today is a mishmash of inchoate political confusion and discrete issue advocacy. We don’t even agree on what to call ourselves.

What we are seeing happen right now as a result of this failure to stake an ideological flag is the mainstreaming of Paul Ryan’s dystopian Randism and a foreign policy (in both policy and political terms)in which the only daylight between the parties is so slight that the greatest danger ahead is that the right wing will feel compelled to ever more dangerous adventurism simply in order to make a statement.(Unless they adopt Paulist isolationism, which I greatly doubt, they have nowhere to go but all the way down the rabbit hole.)

Read Perlstein’s whole piece. It’s a gem. And worth thinking about if you want to understand why some liberals are so disillusioned and depressed about the missed opportunity of the Obama mandate coupled with an economic crisis. The prospect of having to reinvent the wheel again next time is just exhausting. It gets harder and harder to do that the further both parties continuously move toward neo-liberal policies and authoritarianism.

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“Things happen quickly sometimes”

by digby

For those who agree with Ron Paul and friends that the US should withdraw from the world entirely (no foreign aid for you!) and the federal government should be pretty much dissolved in favor of allowing the 50 states to run their own affairs, here’s a little preview of the sort of thing we might expect if they get their way:

On Friday, the Wyoming House of Representatives advanced a bill to set up a task force to prepare for the total economic and political collapse of the United States. Per the bill, the panel would investigate things like food storage options and metals-based currencies, to be implemented in the event of a major catastrophe.

Then it goes three steps further. An amendment by GOP state rep. Kermit Brown*, calls on the task force to examine “Conditions under which the state of Wyoming should implement a draft, raise a standing army, marine corps, navy and air force and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.” As Miller explained to the Casper Star-Tribune, “Things happen quickly sometimes.”

As far as I know, Wyoming is not on any ocean so it’s hard to see what use it would have for a navy, but perhaps they are contemplating invading some of the coastal states and taking over their territory. They are, after all, populated by their worst enemies — liberals, gays and racial minorities. “Things happen quickly sometimes.”

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Non-aggression tack

by digby

EJ Dionne thinks that Democrats should be wary of getting too cocky because the Obama lead is fragile and the Republicans might just decide to be sane before the election:

[T]he GOP’s self-correction in Virginia is also a warning for Democrats. Republicans, now aware that they are on a losing track, may begin to engineer a series of course changes. The fact that House Republicans reached agreement with the president to continue the payroll tax holiday is the clearest sign that the party realizes how a far more assertive Obama is dangerous to them in a way that the conciliatory Obama of last year’s debt-ceiling battle was not.

That’s interesting in two respects. The first is that he thinks “the Republicans” have the capability of changing course, which would mean they are not ideologues and zealots, they have just been being strategically stupid. It’s certainly possible, but I’ve had the feeling numerous times over the past couple of years that the leadership would have very much liked to take yes for an answer, but couldn’t get the votes. So, I think it’s debatable whether or not that’s a reasonable proposition.

What he says about Obama being dangerous when he’s being assertive is more intriguing. I’m one of those who think that the electorate is already polarized so there’s nothing to be gained by trying to split the difference or appeal across party lines. But EJ Dionne is the one who recently took the president to task for being “assertive” about the contraception requirement. Maybe it was a sophisticated feint of some sort, but it certainly sounded as if he truly felt the President should have been “conciliatory”.

Dionne is normally one of the good guys and just seems to have a blind spot when it comes to this Catholic issue, so I’m not going to hold it against him. But generally speaking, the Democratic Villagers have insisted that Obama should be conciliatory and bipartisan, which ended up moving the goalposts substantially to the right over the past four years. I suspect that was fine with them in terms of Obama, but now they are looking at a GOP that’s certifiably nuts, having been encouraged to pull so hard from the right that they’ve fallen over the cliff.

I’m still not entirely sure why it took the administration so long to recognize that the Republicans were going to be a totally obstructionist opposition (or realize that they could benefit from being in opposition to them.) But I can’t for the life of me understand why the Very Serious Political People didn’t see it. One can only assume they just didn’t want to. Indeed, if you look at David’s post below about the nauseating piece in today’s New York Times hitting Obama for failing to fully enact the GOP agenda, you can see that the pundit class and mainstream journalism remains a funadamental part of our problem.

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New York Times Hits Obama for Hyperpartisanship, Inadequate Kowtowing to Deficit Commission. No, Seriously.

by David Atkins

The Times just came out with its first article in a series called A Measure of Change, supposedly dedicated to assessing President Obama’s record. The first article is a masterpiece of of the Church of High Broderism, a four page hit piece on the president painting the Bowles-Simpson commissioners as heroes, calling the deficit “perhaps the nation’s biggest problem,” and Paul Ryan as a good-faith player who fell victim to the President’s hyperpartisan approach.

The entire piece is written in tragic undertones, as if all the benevolent efforts to ignore unemployment while cutting spending to decrease the deficit were stymied by unfortunate circumstances and nasty partisanship that sadly undercut the most holy work in American politics.

Any random paragraph sampling is enough to make an honest and sane person howl. Consider this:

But the downsides for Mr. Obama have become clear. His partisan turn undercuts a central promise of his 2008 campaign, to rise above the rancor. And by neither embracing Bowles-Simpson nor explaining his objections and quickly offering an alternative, Mr. Obama arguably failed to show leadership on perhaps the country’s biggest problem. This month, in a New York Times/CBS News poll, 59 percent of Americans disapproved of his handling of the deficit.

Or this:

After a golf game in June, Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner began secret talks.

In a few weeks, they seemed within a handshake of a potentially historic deal. Mr. Obama offered more than ever before, including changes in the Social Security cost-of-living formula and slowly raising Medicare’s eligibility age to 67, an idea that went beyond Bowles-Simpson. Mr. Boehner would support $800 billion in 10-year revenues.

But in a drama that transfixed the world amid threats of an American default, the talks collapsed, revived and finally died.

The Times knows what dirty hippie bloggers haven’t figured out: the threat of default wasn’t a hostage-taking con game set up by Republicans, but rather a true possibility created by hyperpartisan intransigence against reaching a nice Grand Bargain. They don’t need evidence for that assertion, of course; it just feels right, and allows the authors to stand above the nasty partisan fray, demanding austerity of all the greedy little people.

And then, of course, there’s poor little victim Paul Ryan:

“My naïveté was thinking, O.K., we’ll put our budget out there first and then he’ll loosen up and start coming to us and we’ll really start talking,” Mr. Ryan recalled. “And what we got was the back of his hand.”

Mr. Ryan bolted from the hall after the speech. Mr. Sperling ran after him to explain that the Obama team had not known he would attend and had not set him up to witness the attack. “You just poisoned the well,” Mr. Ryan snapped.

Mr. Obama, now hopeful, aides said, that he had set the stage for compromise, met the next day with Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson. Both had been in the audience. “What did you think?” he asked, according to Mr. Simpson. “I thought it was harsh,” Mr. Bowles said.

“I didn’t think I was,” Mr. Obama replied.

“I thought it was like inviting a guy to his own hanging,” Mr. Simpson said.

But the authors still hold out desperate hope that welfare queen Medicare recipients will get what’s coming to them in Obama’s second term:

Since then, in speeches around the country, Mr. Obama has emphasized job-creation spending and tax cuts more than deficit reduction. Gone from his still-pending legislation are some of the concessions he offered Mr. Boehner — presumably in reserve for the elusive grand bargain.

At their recent lunch, Mr. Obama assured Mr. Bowles he would not give up. Mr. Bowles said the president talked of seeing “a real opportunity” for compromise after the election, when Republicans will be eager to avoid the expiration of Bush tax cuts and automatic cuts in military spending — suggesting another chance for a deal inspired by Bowles-Simpson.

“To see his commitment,” Mr. Bowles said, “gave me real hope.”

All mockery aside, the article does have one use value beyond serving as an ipecac substitute. It’s a potent reminder that the President, together with Plouffe and Axelrod as political advisers, desperately wanted the Grand Bargain against the better judgment of Democrats with a head on their shoulders:

From the start, some Obama advisers were wary of a commission. But while the administration was consumed in its first year with initiatives that critics would denounce as big-government liberalism — the stimulus package to help revive the economy and the health care law — the president had mused to aides about a bipartisan panel to address the mounting debt. He had inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit for 2009, roughly the size of the 2012 shortfall, and benefits for an aging population soon would increase deficits to unsustainable levels.

In the summer of 2009, he charged economic advisers with researching the history of presidential commissions. Their findings were discouraging: in decades of such panels, only one, the 1983 Greenspan commission to save a bankrupt Social Security system, had produced results.

By 2010, signs of economic recovery alternated with reports of continued high unemployment and home foreclosures. Inside the White House, an intensifying debate over a commission reflected the tension between those seeking continued stimulus, including Lawrence H. Summers, then the senior economic adviser, and those emphasizing deficit reduction, chiefly the former budget director, Peter R. Orszag.

Mr. Orszag argued that forming a panel could buy the administration support for more stimulus measures and time to write a deficit plan. His allies included political advisers David Axelrod and David Plouffe, who saw a commission’s appeal to independent voters.

Mr. Summers had backing from Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who shared others’ concerns that a commission might box the president in with proposals he could not support or pass. Also opposed were legislative aides, who channeled the objections of Congressional Democratic leaders to a panel they could not control.

But the president, by all accounts, still favored the idea, arguing it was the only way to get Republicans to accept tax increases and Democrats to support savings in entitlement programs. Ultimately, the White House was backed into creating a panel: it was the price moderate Democrats exacted to raise the debt limit that winter so the nation could keep borrowing to pay its bills.

Alarmingly, it would seem that Larry Summers and Tim Geithner were among the few voices of reason arguing against this foolishness, but were overwhelmed by the President himself, flanked by Orszag, Axelrod and Plouffe.

That’s terrifying and depressing.

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