The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    MrSmith1's picture

    Time to E.A.T. P.E.A.S.

    By MrSmith1 on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 12:26pm |

    I think it's time to start the Progressive counter-movement to the Tea-party.  

    I offer a name for the new movement: E.A.T. P.E.A.S. which stands for Eliminate All Tea-party Politicians and Policies, Escaping Awful Scenarios.  

    If that's too long a title, we could just go with E.A.T.Ps - Eliminating All Tea-party Politicians and Policies.  

    To my mind, this is what will make the 2012 election worth participating in; pushing back hard against the idiots who held the country hostage and gave the Repubs a majority in the House.  Making a concerted effort to destroy or marginalize the Tea-party can only be a good thing for Democrats, right?

    Who's with me?

     

    Comments

    Sounds good to me.

    WE COULD BE PEABAGGERS!


    by Richard Day on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 12:43pm

    HA! I was thinking more of Pea-pickers, as in picking off tea-partiers.


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 1:21pm

    We need to fight a first battle inside the Democratic Party, before moving on to the Republicans.


    by Dan Kervick on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 12:52pm

    Or we could use the tea-party scenario, and fight against the tea-party independently first (y'know, the whole grassroots thing) and let the Democratic party absorb our members and adopt our policies in the same way the Repubs co-opted the tea-party.


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 1:19pm

    Didn't tea partiers run primary campaigns against more moderate Republicans?


    by Dan Kervick on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 2:35pm

    This is, of course, precisely backwards.


    by brewmn on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 2:27pm

    Of course.  Because your way is working oh so well.


    by Dan Kervick on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 2:33pm

    There seems to be two very separate goals. On the one hand, there is the internal battle where the left would pull the Party further left in the similar manner that the Tea Party pulled the GOP further right.  Then there is the battle to defeat the Republicans, specifically the far right/tea party candidates.  In places like where I am at, there is almost no chance a far left candidate would unseat Pence. Whereas a Blue Dog might have a chance.  In this scenario then, we defeat the Tea Party candidate, but the Party's politician demographics is pulled to the right in order to achieve that victory.


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 2:43pm

    Do whatever you want in your state.  But I'm going to be thinking about how to elevate progressive policy alternatives on the New Hampshire primary season radar screen, and how to force Barack Obama to confront and debate these alternatives, accept responsibility for his failures and re-chart his course.


    by Dan Kervick on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 2:48pm

    By the way, Obama sounds a little bit chastened and embarrassed by his performance.

    He might want to think about using the low-media month of August, with Congress out of town, to fire some people and re-tool.  His current crop of top advisers is a joke.   He needs to hire some people with a clue.


    by Dan Kervick on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 2:54pm

    Sounds like a good plan.  I was merely pointing out this blog was about working to get rid of the Tea Partiers and what you seemed to be advocating was that the Party needs to do the purifying thang through the primary strategy in order to move the Party more to the left.  Two distinct, but not necessarily contradictory nor complimentary, goals.  In places like New Hampshire it may be possible to push the local party further to the left, whereas in places like rural Indiana it is more likely looking to just unseat the Republican as the best possible achievement.  If both are successful, it would shift the dynamics inside the beltway further to the left, along with the possible influence on the down tickets (for instance, 2010 saw Indiana's state government go completely Republican). 


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 3:28pm

    It was just reported by the Commerce Department today that  consumer spending dropped 0.2 percent in June, and that this is the first decline since September 2009.  We may be headed for another recession.  Even if not, the economy is obviously foundering.

    I would suggest that those of you who care about re-electing Barack Obama in 2012, and increasing the proportion of Democrats in Congress, focus your attention on turning around the economic fundamentals, and get your heads out of the culture war.  If this economy stays stuck in the mud, it will be an easy matter for any Republican candidate next year to run against the "Obama economy".   And not only will Obama be defeated, he will drag down multitudes of Democratic candidates with him.  That's something I'm pretty pissed about.

    Obama has just spent most of 2011 helping conservatives lead the country on a wild goose chase in search of the flesh-eating deficit zombies.  Nothing in the deal that resulted will help to grow the economy or create jobs.  In fact, the deal is likely to depress the economy further.  It's going to throw more people out of work, and throw more of the already-unemployed out on the street.  Nice job.

    It shouldn't surprise you at all that Republicans are perfectly willing to stick a monkey wrench into the economy if it serves their electoral purposes.  And we have seen that when Republicans actually control the White House, as for example during the Reagan administration and Bush II administration, they have dropped all their pretenses about shrinking the deficit and dropped their phony debt hysteria, and run up big deficits to expand the economy.  And they got re-elected both times.

    Obama and his hapless followers, on the other hand, seem perversely determined to stifle the very economy on which Obama's re-election depends.  For some reason, Obama decided last year to declare the recession over, ignore unemployment and stagnation, and climb on the austerity bus with Pete Peterson, David Cameron, the Concord Coalition, Bowles, Simpson and the other undertakers of prosperity and growth.  It was a tragically terrible move.

    Where is your sense of urgency?

    Why aren't you at least calling for the heads of Obama's economic team?   How much failure and stagnation do you need to see before it gets through to you that he and his team have chosen a very wrong path?


    by Dan Kervick on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 4:01pm

    Dan, I would love to be able to turn around the economic fundamentals.  I think you're right, there's a real problem there, considering Republicans have been running against the 'Obama economy' since somewhere around January 21, 2009.  But is it possible for Progressives to affect a change in economic policy at this point? What leverage do we have? We've already threatened to play a more passive role in the 2012 Obama campaign.  What else is there to use as an incentive to force the administration to re-think their policies.  Other than screaming at them that their policies aren't working. Honestly, I just do not know what we can do about that.  I admit it's a lot harder to do than trying to unseat tea-partiers and overturn their policies.  Okay, so I went for the easier job.   But tell me how we do the other one and I'll happily support it too. 


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 11:14pm

    Other than screaming at them that their policies aren't working.

    I think screaming at them would make a very good start.

    Look, even Obama believes that voter pressure works.  If he didn't, he wouldn't have insisted so much last week on getting people to call Congress to support his "grand bargain."


    by Dan Kervick on Wed, 08/03/2011 - 6:39am

    Good luck with that.  Seeing all of the ones elected along with the ones running in 2012 is a bit depressing.  At this point one wonders if it is a victory if we just keep them from expanding their numbers in the House and Senate (not to mention Governorships). 

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tea_Party_politicians

    Just looking at the list of those in the Tea Party Caucus alone and where they are generally from makes one a little less than hopeful of getting a serious progressive challenge.  For instance, probably the only chance of getting Pence out of my district is if he runs for Governor.  The question is whether one would, as a Progressive, be willing to support a Blue Dog Democrat in order to take on a Tea Party Republican. 

     

     

     


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 1:27pm

    The list is daunting, but on the other hand, completely unreasonable, ridiculous attacks making baseless claims and creating dramatic scenarios out of whole cloth worked for the teaparty in 2010, why not for EATPPs in 2012?  Time to give the teaparty a dose of their own medicine.


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 1:41pm

    Good post, Mr. Smith. It just seems that Republicans are one step ahead in the messaging area, and they toe the line. Democrats seem more scattered in messaging and do not have clinchers.

    The tea partiers have been out all day saying "this is the first time in history a debt ceiling raise was matched with spending cuts in the same amount.". I haven't heard a succinct response from Democrats.


    by Oxy Mora on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 10:14pm

    A succinct response might be: "We didn't give away the entire store!"


    by MrSmith1 on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 10:55pm

    "We didn't give away the entire store!"

    YET;

    GIVE OBAMA MORE TIME

    Obama' failure to adequately FIGHT to help the homeowners, sealed his fate for me. He has lost the enthusiasm of his base, he has tapped out any credit, I'd give him.

    Find the cuts, that hurt Republican donors.

    "If you prick them: do they not bleed"?

    The rich having been bailed out and now they are hanging on to their money; they know how to deliver the decisive blow, to destroy labor.

    The people should have been bailed out, Not the bankers.

    First they took your homes and now you can fight for the crumbs on the street.

    Obamacare; why should he? Whose going to pay for it? Who paid for it?  

    Can we see those green shoots, from 6 foot under?


    by Resistance on Wed, 08/03/2011 - 6:18am

    I can't disagree with anything you wrote, which, I think is what has got so many of us in such a deep emotional chasm.  In the final days of the budget deal, I kept checking with Dagblog to see if there was anyone that could help me make sense of all this. Some new insight or perspective.  I can't recall any other issue on which the readers here didn't wade in enthusiastically with multiple takes and suggestions and a diversity of viewpoints.  For the last couple of days there were no new blogs on the topic. Maybe we're all too disheartened.  I know we have a couple of great threads discussing the budget deal, but it was a bit odd, seeing no flurry of blogs just before and just after the deal.   

    I'm not an easy person to have lose their optimism.  I'm hard-wired for optimism and very resilient. I don't, as a rule, stay depressed very long.  My sense of humor invariably kicks in and that quickly gets my footing back.  And yet, this deal has brought me to a deep sadness about my hopes for America's future and the futility of supporting Obama in the 2012 campaign.  This idea was an attempt to fire my own self up a bit, and by so doing, perhaps fire someone else up too.  It may be a pointless exercise, but I don't know what else to do.  


    by MrSmith1 on Wed, 08/03/2011 - 7:28am

    I have noticed what seems to me a sort of shellshocked response all over the liberal blogosphere to what just happened.  There are a lot of people who don't like to be critical of the administration.  But they've finally banged their head up against something that they just can't defend in any way.  So they aren't saying anything.  I expected a debate, and instead it's just crickets.


    by Dan Kervick on Wed, 08/03/2011 - 7:58am

    Exactly.


    by MrSmith1 on Wed, 08/03/2011 - 9:32am

    Sure enough, crickets.

    It reminds me of a line from an old play--God is dead; you're on your own.

    Whatever we do next, we probably need to do ourselves. I don't think it matters a bit whether we do it from within or without the Democratic party, or both. But we have to find ways to take simple messages about what it means to be an American and a Democrat and get them out there in a way that doesn't start with "Well, those other guys are MOSTLY right, but......."

     


    by erica20 on Thu, 08/04/2011 - 1:15am

    "Well, those other guys are MOSTLY right, but ..."   LOL!   Yup. Couldn't agree more. That has to be one of the most maddening phrases a Progressive can hear from a Democratic politician.  Unfortunately, we hear it far too often lately. 


    by MrSmith1 on Thu, 08/04/2011 - 1:23am