Liberals for Obama: What a Concept!

As has been said elsewhere, you vote for the best Democratic candidate during the primaries (however you define "best"), but then during the general election you vote for the best candidate there. If that means merely voting for "better than", then at that point, what are your options? Not voting? Bad idea. Voting for "worse than"? Worse idea.

This same idea extends to continuing the GOTV even if we're missing the "enthusiasm gap".

Personally I didn't wonder why we got the moderate Republican legislation.  When there are Ds like Nelson, Lincoln, and Bayh the worse thing for the Dems was people saw it as a "huge majority."  In reality there was about three parties represented in that "huge majority," a de facto coalition that functioned as most coalitions do,  If the Dems held all the Ds to the a liberal platform, folks like Bayh would have deserted the party.  The Repubs on the other hand have been able to keep a more narrow defined recruitment process through the primary (the Tea Party is kind of tweaking with it) so 40 some Repubs will find a hellofa lot more to agree about then 40 some Dems

And the problem with "the 70% of folks favored" (aside from the fact that prior to the BP fiasco even more folks wanted more offshore drilling which I guess means as progressive we needed to be for that, too) is that those questions don't get into the nuts and bolts, like paying for it with taxes. 

Politics is still local, and most of the politicians (putting aside whatever allegiance they had to the corporate interests) were not going to push for a plan that saw health care funded through increase taxes.  Now of course we could slash the military budget, etc etc and pay for it without seeing real tax increases, but that was not how it was going to play out.  So politicans in areas that were remotely purple, let alone kind of red (to over simplify things) were not going to implement a government run system. The president nixed it, in my opinion because he knew from the get go that Nelson et al. would join the Republican filibuster (since for folks like Nelso that would make him more electable to his constituency.

.Seriously, if there's a way to affect meaningful change within the Democratic party without showing them there are political consequences to pay for their failures, I'm all ears.

The way is for real progressive candidates to run for office and take them out in the primary and then to win the general election.  If progressive minded folks are as abundant as some say, and we're not basically a conservative-centerist nation, then there must be a few folks who have the desire to run and the charisma to pull it off.  I mean looking at the whackos that made it as part of the tea party says it ain't rocket science.  The reality I am afraid is that there aren't too many places that are going to send a progressive to D.C. 

But one of the paths to cutting through all the white noise and misinformation is for the Democrats and their perceived socialism to win.  Then what is the narrative (since they don't have Acorn to kick around no more) that would explain this.  Then maybe others might be more open to listen since it ain't those dang Volvo driving East Coast/West Coast liberal elites saying yes to progressiveism, but their neighbor.

People have been angry at the Democrats for a long time.  Damn--I'm angry at the Democrats--for the same reasons you cite. (though I'm questioning the cuts to SS and Medicare)

I'm not about to tell anybody how to vote.  Just stating the facts.  If the Dems lose the Republicans win.  If that's all right with you, then by all means, enjoy. . .

But it's not all right with me and I'll do everything I can to keep it from happening.

I have a pet peeve with people telling me their reason to vote should be my reason to vote.

I think this is what's been missing with a lot of the sniping on the left since 2008.  You basically have two groups, which I'll call the pragmatists and the idealists for no good reason.  The pragmatists urge that we have to be practical, better to get half a loaf than none at all, etc.

That's all well and good to the extent that it's actually true.  But the troubling fact is that this Democratic administration and this Congress aren't all that far apart from Republicans in far too many ways.

Foreign policy is basically the same, albeit with arguably better PR.  Domestic policy is more of a mixed bag, but the most glaring example is economic policy.  Here we had the greatest economic crises of the last 80 years.  Where was the over-arching vision for re-shaping America's economy for the next 50 years?  Why was (basically) nothing done to reform banking and finance?  To deal with the serious problem of mounting income inequality?  Stagnant or declining wages in the face of increased productivity?  America hasn't gotten less productive over the last 30 years, but it sure as hell has gotten less equal.

There's a mountain of good data to show that basically everyone, often even the wealthiest Americans, do better under Democratic rule.  If you actually take Democrats at their word as far as what they're supposed to stand for, this crisis was right in their wheelhouse.  And what did they do with it?

It's one thing to be pragmatic and to note real differences between Democrats and Republicans such that they actually exist and actually manifest differences in real lives.  But it's also the case that those differences are increasingly small in a number of very important areas, perhaps most of all being the general capture of our political system by wealthy interests.

Okay, so, if you would be so kind, stipulate what I've put down here so far - yes, real differences, but they aren't always as big as some would like to portray.  Because here comes the politics part.

If we allow that the above is true, and that there are certain people who would be inclined to vote for Democrats, but increasingly don't see that doing so is to their advantage, what good does it do to tell them that they're judging their payoffs incorrectly?  That's basically what the pragmatists are doing.

From a strategic standpoint, this makes no sense.  You have two groups, the P's and the I's, and there are two possible outcomes, either D or R.  Both P's and I's have to pick D's in sufficient number in order for them to win.  The P's believe that D is a better payoff than R.  The I's are indifferent.

Now, given this scenario, the dumbest possible thing you could do as a P is to just tell the I's that they don't understand the payoffs.  That's persuasive not at all.  If the P's cannot win without the I's, they need to persuade the I's that this is actually the case.  That's the job.  If the I's are actually indifferent to either D or R outcomes, then they will receive the same payoff either way and have no incentive to pick one over the other.

Sorry if that seems too abstract, but the point is that it's a demonstrably dumb strategy, if it even rises to that level.  And this is why even moderate voices on the left like JMM are starting to wonder what in the hell the Democrats are doing when the stars align and they have slam dunk policy and politics coinciding, but they just sit there like it's another week.

So people can write screeds about big scary Boehner and how Salon.com is going to send us back to the 1880s all they want, but it isn't good strategy or good politics.  Electing Democrats is fine as far as that goes, but those people ultimately have to do both policy and politics in a way that is persuasive, at the very least, to enough people to merit their continued support.  That's how this game is played.

Since I narrowly avoided a sports analogy a couple grafs ago, I'll end with this.  There's a saying that goes, "Scared money doesn't make any."  George W. Bush doubled-down on a 9 and an ace and hit it big.  When the Dems had a similar chance, they just stood there.

Are you really that incapable of grasping that you are rejecting a measure of progress in favor of massive backsliding because of your hissy-fit politics?

Geez ...

I hear an echo bouncing around here but I'll be damned if I can find where it's coming from...

Oh well, just another lonely tree falling in the quiet of the forest

Paddlin' on...

~OGD~