This entry was posted on 1/30/2010 6:33 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
Republicans have been drooling over their last few ballot-box victories
in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusets, stars twinkling in their
eyes as visions of 1994 dance in their heads and they see a big
landslide takeover of congress in the offing for them once again.
But the concrete steps their party is taking to make this dream come
true actually have more in common with the DEMOCRATIC congress of 1994
than with the Republicans.
As was the case with the Dems back then, the GOP leadership is old-fashioned and out of touch with mainstream Americans, their party has calcified into a more extreme version of itself to where it now demands party purity among those it supports for campaigns, and it grumbles and separates itself from a young, charismatic, more moderate and popular president in the White House.
A key component to the way in which Rahm Emmanuel and the DCCC built up
the Dem takeover in 2006 in the first place, and a BIG reason Barack
Obama won the White House in 2008--was an appeal to disgruntled
Republicans, moderate voters on both sides, and, basically, the vast
majority of Americans who sit in the middle on most issues and swing
slightly to the left or right on some things.
Maybe you're a fiscal conservative and pro-life but big on the
environment and think Gays should serve in the military if they want.
Maybe you own a gun and are a card-carrying member of the NRA but you
lost your health care when you got laid off and you've wanted
comprehensive reform ever since. Or maybe you're a union rep but not
sure global warming is all that.
Few people are ideologues all the way down the line.
Few people on either side of the aisle could pass a friggin' PURITY TEST, but apparently, they'll get funds withheld from them by the RNC for political campaigns if they fail to pass such ideological purity.
The Big Tent theory of political partying that was embraced by the
Democratic Party in recent years means that, yes, it is harder to
manage a party under those circumstances, as Ben Nelson and Max Baucus
and Jim Webb and others have proven time and again, BUT, when push
comes to shove, they DID VOTE for the big things their president asked
for.
Let's examine President Obama's REAL record this first year, not the one the media keeps whining about.
*According to a little-known and virtually unpublicized (it came out around the time of the Haiti earthquake) study by the Congressional Quarterly:
"In his first year in office, President Obama did better even than
legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on
issues where he took a position, a Congressional Quarterly study finds.
"The new CQ
study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began
scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades
ago. And that was in a year where Obama tackled how to deal with
Afghanistan, Iraq, an expanding terrorist threat, the economic crisis
and battles over health care."His success rating, the study goes on to say, was 96.7%.
Think about that for a minute and contrast it with all the news
stories, op-eds, and blogposts about what a failure this president's
first year has been.
A success rate made possible by the votes he had available to him by
a Democratic majority, I might add, even so-called "centrist"
Democrats, that liberal Dems seem to think need to be tarred,
feathered, and run out of town on a rail.
(Or at least, given a purity test???)
*Here's another great piece, this one from Daily Kos.
It's a list--just a list--of NINETY accomplishments--President Obama has had in his first year in office.
Read them through. It will knock your socks off.
*Also, in a quick graph, the Washington Post put up a list of 25 campaign promises Obama had made, and of these, 21 of them had either been completed or were in progress IN THE FIRST YEAR. This is a phenomenal record.
Again, made possible because the DNC decided, after a dozen years in
the wilderness, to reach out to the center, to moderates and
disgruntled Republicans to run for congress and the senate, and they
nominated in 2008 a candidate who, while a progressive at heart, was a pragmatist at his core, and he knew how to get things done.
Give him time, ladies and gentlemen, because he has only just begun to fight.
Yes, right now the GOP is licking its chops, certain that the
"populist rage" it thinks it has captured is going to carry it into a
majority and then the White House--maybe on Scott Brown's handsome
naked shoulders!!!--but an essay by Charles M. Blow in the NY Times nails why it is really not a serious political movement when you try to harness the energy of a bunch of pissed-off paranoids.
The nightmare that the first "Tea Party Convention" has turned into, of hucksterism, profiteering, and inner-tea-party feuding--not to mention the fact that they can't give away
tickets to see their keynote speaker, Sarah Palin, who has demanded
more than $100,000 for a speaking fee--is just a glimpse of how
ephemeral FOX-ed up, trumped-up rage can be as a serious political
movement.
Not that the GOP has learned anything from that.
They voted down a measure to create a commission on deficit reduction,
even though at least seven who voted against it had earlier actually
CRAFTED the legislation, and, among other things they voted
against--they actually voted against Pay As You Go legislation
that requires congress to pass only deficit-neutral legislation that is
paid-for upfront, which is the way congress had balanced the budget and
left a surplus under President Clinton, a Democrat, before President
Bush, a Republican, took office and the Republicans took over congress
and squandered the surplus.
I'm not arguing the merits for or against each individual piece of
legislation mentioned in the previous paragraph, but what I'm saying is
that, as in the State of the Union speech, when even after the
president spoke of tax cuts for small businesses, and the entire
Republican block sat like stone statues rather than muster up a
smattering of applause for their OWN policy--they risk looking like the
obstructionist dumb-asses they are.
And he knows it, as he so brilliantly showed when he spoke--on live TV--before the Republican Caucus last night.
In fact, so rope-a-dope perfect was Obama's performance at the Caucus that, as Sam Stein pointed out in a great blogpost for Huffington, FOX news cut the whole thing off 20 minutes early.
The GOP has, in fact succeeded in boxing itself into a pretty small
corner since it first took over congress in the 90's and "The Hammer"
and Newt Gingrich proceeded to run off some of the best Republican
congresspeople and senators they'd ever had because they were moderates
and had a record of working across the aisle with Democrats on landmark
legislation.
Since that time, especially after their own re-districting fiasco
that narrowed a candidate's area into even more partisan zones than ever, their party has bottlenecked its focus so badly that this "Tea Party" thing is their only hope of a pretense of "populism."
It's not real, though, not on a large scale.
It could be, though, if we think, over on our side of the aisle,
that the only way to combat them is to follow their lead and, as our
own Progressive Caucus recently stated, demand party purity of our own.
I've heard people insist that Obama act more like Bush, ignoring the
vast majority of Independent and disgruntled Republican voters who
helped to put him in office and only adhere to his "base" of
progressive party purists, by "ramming through" his agenda while "he's
got the chance."
I've heard people complain that the Democrats don't act more like
Republicans, marching in lock-step like Stepford legislators, repeating
cult-like mantras of party loyalty.
(Recently, even Sarah Palin was soundly criticized on Glenn Beck's
program...why? Because she had backed Sen. John McCain in a difficult
primary against the Tea Party opponent. McCain, it seems, wasn't
"pure" enough for Beck's listeners. The fact that Palin wouldn't even
EXIST, politically speaking, WITHOUT McCain was lost on him and his
viewers, and any semblance of decent human loyalty was completely
tossed in the name of party purity. THIS is what we want?)
But our own president has said that the reason he keeps reaching out
across the aisle is because he wants the things that are passed in his
term to LAST for GENERATIONS--not just until the next Republican
administration comes in and, with the stroke of a pen, overturns
everything he has done--which is pretty much what he has been doing to
the bullshit Bush put in place himself when he was busy "ramming
through" legislation.
And his patience, and willingness to listen and to reach out--while frustrating to his base, maybe--is working. According to polls
taken following the State of the Union address, he is beginning to win
over the Independents who had been frightened away by GOP scare tactics
this summer.
The Independents are the key.
So what can we do, as supporters and as either Democrats or
Independents who do not want a GOP/Tea Party takeover in 2010 to rival
1994? Not to mention a President Palin in 2012?
I suggest we follow Steven Benen's
advice. Admittedly, it was aimed more toward the Dems in congress and
the Dems in the partisan media than toward you and me but those of us
who do blog or volunteer or even just speak up at the dinner table or
stand chatting by the shopping cart at the grocery store, let's scream
bloody murder:
Just pretend that the Democrats have pulled every stunt pulled by
the Republicans in the past year, such as voting against funding for
the troops, in order to obstruct the president, or trying to woo a
segment of the party who would actually send out a fund-raising letter
that depicts the president dressed as a pimp--and imagine the howls of outrage that would dominate the FOX airwaves and everyplace else Republicans gather.
Benen thinks that the reason the Republicans continue to dominate
the message and the messaging is because they do the loudest screaming.
We don't have a screamer for a president, thank goodness, and I'm
not advocating same, but I'm saying that the Republicans have allowed
the screamers to take over their message, to their detriment.
At the very least, we need to be ready with the fact-checking and
the righteous outrage whenever these stunts are pulled, to remind
voters that what the GOP stands for, right now, isn't even very
Republican.
And it won't be, until they let go of the party purity tests and
reach out across the aisle, first of all, to a popular president, and
then, to the rest of the country.
But, as I have told him, I do love his style.
