I haven’t weighed in on the special election in Massachusetts. I hope Martha Coakley wins, but I don’t know if she will. I don’t have any advice to offer, and I’m not interested in running her down as a candidate because I don’t see how that will help. Frankly, I haven’t been paying enough attention to critique her performance as a candidate. But, if she loses, and people start pointing fingers, I don’t think Armando really hits the mark when he says “don’t blame internecine fighting.” More explicitly, Armando makes the point that it makes no sense to shout down the disaffected left, even if they are partly to blame. Let’s think about that.
He’s 100% right that the left does not need to hear a lecture from Rahm Emanuel, or any squishy Blue Dog/New Dem ‘centrists’ about how we’re all a bunch a cry babies who are hurting the party. But what about people on the left talking to other people on the left? How about an internal debate on whether our tactics are working or not? Because, I don’t think they’re working, and a lot of what I’ve seen in the progressive blogosphere this year has been more effective at demoralizing and dividing the troops than it has been in persuading anyone not on the left to do what we want or advise.
If Coakley loses and this starts some soul-searching debate or circular firing squad, I think the real conversation needs to be the left talking to itself.
I understand the need for a “big tent”. There is, however, a point at which that “big tent” becomes a Tower of Babel that is completely incoherent to the general public. I think the Dems may have walked off that cliff in the health care fiasco. It may be that the progressives have developed their own “beltway” mentality in their search for political power.
But Booman…the left is “talking to itself”.
Isn’t that the only thing that’s happening now?
No one else seems to be paying much attention.
Here’s a suggestion. (From about 5 years ago. Nothing much has changed. Not really. The names have changed is all. I’m not Jess Fine anymore, and Gannon/Guckert has gone the way of all flesh. Down.) :
Same shit, different toilet.
Just as it’s always been.
And the Daily Kos Kaissons go rolling along.
Left?
Bullshit.
Left behind.
AG
it’s like a leftist teabagging manifesto. Doesn’t make it wrong, but still…
Still what?
Precisely.
We swallow the leftiness line about the teabaggers.
And we swallow the hook along with the stinkers.
The teabaggers have the same dissatisfactions as do we. However, their PermaGov media encourage them to demonstrate and agitate because they have been hoodwinked into believing the PermaGov line, whereas our own (eequally corporate-owned) media encourage us to impotently watch our beloved MSNBC/Comedy Channel duo and have blog wars over who’s smarter.
This keeps us conveniently outta the way, doesn’t it.
Hmmmm….
AG
Maybe that’s the key. After all, the teabaggers managed to get the GOP to chase after them?
ya know, i never agreed with arthur a few years ago.
these days, i find he makes more sense than most.
Thank you.
That is the story of my life, reduced to a few words.
On every level.
I’m not boasting…it could be a complaint as easily as it could a boast, but we are what we are no matter how far or fast we try to run from it.
And trust me. I did try to run. But every time I turned a corner, there I was again.
As the great philosopher Lord Buckley said…you could look it up:
Eventually I stopped running.
And ran right out of the whale’s belly.
Wow!!!
Daylight at last!!!
Come join me.
Most of the rest of America is stuck where the sun don’t shine.
Bet on it.
AG
Why is the “Left” (such as it is) even being considered for any kind of blame?
Who watered down every single piece of needed, anticipated, popular legislation/bailout/cramdown/rescue put forward or considered???
Who refused to seriously deal with the banks?
Who refused to put cramdown or serious mortgage bailout with teeth into play?
Who refused to consider ANY kind of real reform to the health care system?
Who refused to pay attention, REAL attention to the actual driving force behind this “great recession” (i.e. unemployment, underemployment, and consumer despair)??
It was most certainly not the progressives or the “left”…
How about laying blame where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of the backstabbing moderates, Lieberman/Nelson/Stupak enablers, and the dysfunctional, fucked up, moronic, un-democratic structure of the Senate.
And until this wing of the “left” continues to run things…and they always will…we will be going around this mulberry bush forever.
I think I have been consistently arguing that both the ‘centrists’ and the Senate are to blame for the lack of progressive victories, and not some anti-progressive impulse from Obama.
But I’ve also been arguing that the Left in the blogosphere is going about things all wrong and will not get any improvement using the tactics most of them have been using.
No argument from me on that score booman. That’s why I put “Left” in quotes all the time…
Because it isn’t. It’s a pathetic shell of a bankrupt, semi-progressive, narcissistic reform movement.
If they are forcing the consrvadems to deal with these issues then the left are doing what needs to be done.
So sad that people like Rahm have got their knickers in a knot over it but they are the ones who contorted themselves into that position. If they don’t like it then they shouldn’t put themselves there.
The fact that they are forced to talk about IS an improvement. Whether or not they choose to deal with it rationally is up to them.
The frustration with Coakley comes out of a sense of astonishment by state Democrats about how many missed opportunities there have been in her “campaign.” I live in MA and Coakley has been effectively MIA since the primary. Dems in the state – watching the growing momentum behind Brown – were left wondering, where the hell is she?
So I don’t think we’re necessarily “running her down;” it’s more that we’re voicing frustrations we’ve had for some time about how cavalier she has been. You have to work for your votes – something the guy she’s replacing (Kennedy) understood very well. I just sit here amazed, literally amazed, at how her campaign could have let this happen. Now the entire national Dem establishment is forced into triage, squandering time and resources that wouldn’t have been necessary if Coakley and her campaign had shown the least bit of political savvy several months ago.
A democrat lacking in political savvy.
What.
A.
Surprise.
no offense intended.
But seriously…
These are the same fools who have continued to trust, reward, and caucus with Joe Fucking Lieberman… who trusted Olympia Snowe…
HAHAHAHAHAHA
What a joke.
If she’s that clueless, how come Dem voters and activists didn’t know that before she got nominated? That would have been the time for the “left” to do more than argue with itself, no?
But they did. Even the Kennedys stayed quiet through the primary – with the notable exception of Caroline Kennedy – very close to Uncle Ted – who supported Alan Khazei. The Boston Globe also endorsed Khazei.
But low voter turnout, a very short campaign runway, and a better known Coakley “brand” ended up winning the day. And now, well, you can see where we are now.
Soy yo. I think I’m the guy they’re talking about. I donated $2000 to Obama and at least $1000 to other dems between 2008 and last summer. I worked on Obama’s campaign. Now I wouldn’t donate a penny and will vote 3rd party.
The health care debacle broke my back. Even if the bill passes, I got absolutely ZERO relief from the crippling health insurance bills (800/month for a single healthy person) until 2014. When I get fund-raising calls I either scream into the phone until they hang up or if I’m feeling mischievous, I screw around with them for a while first. I’m a nihilist now. I care more about seeing Rahm Emanuel go down in flames than somehow triangulating some inconsequential lesser of evils compromise when I know there will be fine print to bail out the corporations in the end.
Do I qualify as a member of the disaffected left?
why, yes, yes you do.
I gave just as much money to Obama, etc. Yeah, I’m not happy with the compromises they had to make on the health care bill.
But will screaming at volunteers (a real dick-move, btw), and voting third party help anything? Nope. Too many of us did that in 2000 because Al Gore was too centrist. It got us 8 years of Bush. What a great victory for the left!
You think things are bad? Just wait until the GOP gets more power because of quitters like you. The Dems aren’t perfect but the GOP is freaking insane. If we got two more Dem senators in there, the public option or Medicare buy-in could pass. Take the longer view and think about what your actions would cause.
The “disaffected left” isn’t as big a problem as the “disaffected” middle who now sees both parties as nothing more than the two sides of a worthless coin.
that’s an enormous problem, and a far greater one than the left arguing with itself.
put it this way: my dad is, in general, on the same page as Booman. We get into the exact same kinds of arguments I get into with our gracious host.
or rather, we USED to. because now, my dad (who is approaching 70, hates Ralph nader for throwing the election to Bush, and voted for Obama) is considering not voting in 2010, because he “now sees both parties as nothing more than the two sides of a worthless coin.”
same with my mom. Same with a lot of people, from all walks of life, that i know.
i think the democrats have a lot more to worry about than the disaffected left: it’s the disaffected middle that brad refers to.
Well, either the disaffected left is wasting its time talking to itself, or it is helping to sell all those disaffected middlers on the theory that the Democrats are worthless. Neither seems like a smart course of action.
well, here’s the question: often it seems like everyone reads blogs, but i’m pretty sure the percentage is fairly small.
i don’t think the “disaffected left” is as pwoerful as you suggest hee. i think the disaffected middle is reaching that conclusion all by themselves.
Exactly. They don’t need blogs. They can put two and two together.
i often show people the department of labor news release list. It’s kind of remarkable and, of course, not covered by the press. So the 2 and 2 are what they get from the msm.
I think passing the health care bill, as imperfect as it is, will go a long way towards ridding people like that of their “both parties are the same” bullshit.
HCR has real benefits for people. I have pre-existing conditions and my insurance runs out in a few months. Without this bill I’m screwed. Looks like it’s the free clinic for me.
The Dems are hindered by a few Blue Dogs on their right, bu 95% of them are trying to do the right thing. Just talking about this makes me so mad at the damn filibuster, and the idiot senators who continue to support it.
I think the FDL/Americablog types have gone seriously overboard in their disgust/disappointment with Obama and the Dems.
Some are too emotional, too idealistic, whatever. I’ve had my moments too. I’ve said we should kill the health care bill if it doesn’t have a public option. But then I slept on it, realized that was insane. You kill this bill, we won’t see any more health reform for ten years.
Yes, Obama has to do more to repeal DADT, create jobs, tax the banks, etc. But how will he get anything done if he doesn’t have 60 Dems votes?
The only upside to Brown winning is that it gets the “remove the filibuster” argument pumped up before the 2010 results. If 41 GOPers slow Obama’s agenda to a crawl and block more nominees, then Dems Senators might finally start talking about eliminating the filibuster at the start of the 2011 session. But I’d rather have Coakley win than rely on some hypothetical.
I question whether or not you’ve got the time for those 60 votes. If we head back into a “double-dip” recession, you’ll never convince anyone that it’s “all Bush’s fault”–even if it is and in the public mind, Progressives will be thrown out with the bath water.
I also question whether or not Obama is the progressive politician you seem to believe he is. Stocking your economic team with a bunch of Goldmanites, making side deals with Big Pharma, “mandates” and rest of the list of nice promises doesn’t exactly foster confidence. Also, …Rahm who was out trolling K Street before the votes were even counted in 2006. Seems to me it’s nothing but “Hope” without the “Change.”
I didn’t say Obama is progressive. Though I will say that if Congress sent him a bill that created a single payer system, repealed DADT and DOMA, and included EFCA and a five dollar increase in the minimum wage, he would sign it.
Obama has angered me with many of his actions on civil liberties, his failure to see the GOP resistance for what it is and react accordingly (though he seems to be getting the message now), and his tendency to compromise with himself.
Don’t give me that Rahm crap. He’s not some Dick Cheney or Karl Rove type pulling strings. He’s a vote counter and lack idealism, sure, but he’s not the root of our problems.
I’ve seen what super-majority rules have done to my state of CA. Look at our budgeting mess. The GOP is doing the same thing in DC. The Dems have the power to end the filibuster and get shit passed, but so far they are too naive to do it. And yes, voters will punish the Dems even though none of this is their fault.
“You kill this bill, we won’t see any more health reform for ten years.”
10 years? Hell, it’s been 17 since Clinton tried, and you can go back at far as Teddy Roosevelt in this string of Fail.
Over this year, I lost faith in AmericaBlog, Firedoglake, Huffington Post. I felt they stopped presenting facts that did not fit narratives about Dems betraying the left. I felt they became echo chambers of redhot emotions depending on the most cynical interpretations of administration and non-blue dog Dems’ motives and actions.
But I wasn’t truly worried until dKos started down that path. I was discouraged when FDL started paying people to get daily diaries recc’ed up there, making FDL’s case to kill the bill. I had mixed feelings about the paid advocacy, but what I really minded were factual distortions and misrepresentations amounting to a call for cynicism and anger. The comment sections of nearly all dKos diaries devolved into shouting matches, imo to an unprecedented level (and that’s saying a lot). But I wasn’t really worried until Markos himself signed onto a letter with Hamsher and Aravosis, then came out in favor of killing the hcr bill. I can tune out FDL, AmericaBlog, and HuffPo. But it’s a real blow to me, and imo a real shame for the left, to see dKos double down. Instead of plain vanilla analysis that would help people understand the hcr bill’s provisions, e.g., we get one front-page post after another about the excise tax where none even mentions it’s a tax on insurance companies not policy-holders.
A case can be made for or against anything by downplaying or omitting certain facts while elevating worries, suspicions, unsourced accusations, charts that don’t really illuminate, etc. I hope alarm bells are going off, though, as people see even our most progressive Dems (like Bernie Sanders) getting sneered at and derided for supporting the biggest Dem bill in decades. I don’t see how being urged to assume the worst about their motives helps us at all.
You should read this, by Jim DiEugenio: http://www.ctka.net/2009/huffpo.html. Very similar sentiments.
There’s much more at the link, and some of the text above is linked in the original.
I disagree with that. You really think Kos and Jane Hamsher had the power to push out Caroline Kennedy? Or that Jane has the power to make Vic Snyder quit? I’m sure she wishes she had the power you say she does. If Caroline was so hot to get into the Senate, why did she hire people known for working for Holy Joe in ’06? And why was Bloomberg pushing her(Especially knowing what we know about his pushing Harold Ford, Jr.)?
I live in MA and I think this issue is actually a bit overblown. Based only on my own intuition, I think Coakley’s problems are perhaps mostly local, not national. Democratic voters were lulled into a false sence of complacency and indifference with the loss of Kennedy. On the one hand, no one could replace his progressive image, and on the other his legendary status in the state made his replacement by a democrat seem a foregone conclusion (the entire media treated it as such). I surmise many people are poorly informed in general and so base their votes on their personal knowledge of a candidate. This means that Coakley didn’t sufficiently make a case for herself, she simply used her own constituency to become the candidate.
Also, in my limited exposure to it local media here is by no means as liberal or progressive in general as some outside might think. It’s basically parochial, although there are obviously important liberal national institutions here, with large numbers of intellectual liberals, but their influence may be greater nationally than locally.
Coakley’s commercials are pretty lame too. She makes rote nods to each liberal canard. And her attack ads do the same for Brown. She needed to at least try to create an identity for herself, whether like Jim Webb or Rockefeller or Sanders or whatever. I don’t dispute that the national atmosphere affects the race one way or another, but Coakley hasn’t been competing. I suspect Obama knew long before the election that he was going to win, but his whole campaign faught hard till the end.
Let me understand this:
There are so many lefty Democrats in Massachusetts who pay attention to blogs that the pie fight about tactics could conceivably suppress enough Democratic votes in the base that a Republican wins.
And if that happens, we should have a discussion about lefty bloggers hurting the party.
Is that your argument?
The more this goes on, the more I think that the most popular lefty bloggers have an exaggerated opinion of their effect on the base and on the voters.
And this in the face of the massive mobilization of major blog sites to put volunteers into Massachusetts to help turn out the vote.
What clearly happened is that Martha Coakley’s campaign assumed that once the primary campaign was won, she could coast to victory in the general.
The fact is if she wins, it might be the blogger boots on the ground that made the difference. Not on the intertubes – on the ground.
I agree and disagree. Agree that the blogs don’t have as much power as they sometimes think. But disagree because blogs may not lead public opinion, but they often do reflect it. So I often find friends who don’t follow blogs espousing some of the same rhetoric. It filters out in other ways, and some people just all have the same instincts at once.
Yes, blogs reflect instead of lead public opinion. Which is why folks should listen up when bloggers say that there is going to be a loss of support if this happens or that does not.
BTW, Digby has an example of how the DSCC has screwed up the campaign with one of its ads that shows Brown superimposed over an images of the World Trade Center. To my mind if that got wide exposure, it would not be helpful to Coakley.
Let us hope that the boots on the ground can pull it out for Coakley.
People are fed up with the dysfunctional political system and with the dismal state of the nation. And they blame it on Obama. But it’s not Obama’s fault. On the contrary, the Obama administration is doing what it can in this lousy environment. A lot of people just don’t believe that, because they don’t understand the terrible obstacles Obama has to deal with. At the present time this government offers the only hope making progress out of the disaster of the 00’s. Some government that doesn’t exist and cannot now exist would do a lot better, of course.
I heartily agree. I have my bones to pick with the administration, but they’re nothing compared to the bones I have to pick with my fellow so-called progressives.
Wouldn’t you think that seeing what a battle it was just to get the first step toward healthcare reform that we (maybe) did would clue in the left about what country they live in? The cognitive dissonance between ranting that the system is corrupt and broken (which I absolutely agree with) and then bitching at Obama for not bringing a paradise to America makes me despair over ever building a real left, an effective left, in this country. Obama, and even to some degree the Congressional Dem majority, opens a doorway to real change for those ready to open it. But our side is manifestly not ready. And that’s somehow Obama’s fault. It’s painful to have to acknowledge that Big Stupid is not entirely confined to Wingnut World.
Don’t give a damn right now about the left or tactics or anything right now. All I know is I just got back to college from break, and I’m going to be phone banking until that damn election is over.
While I agree, I also think it’s pointless. Ego trumps unity most of the time, I’m sorry to say. That’s been my experience of a lifetime on the left.
The lifeline of effective political action. Missing.
Where the heck was the left during the primary? Complaining about Coakley AFTER the primary is utterly self-defeating. The fight was before, and I’m not sure it was even fought.
I may be reaching for a silver lining here, but with no “60 vote” majority in Senate that makes Lieberman tits on a bull.
I’m sorry. If the Democrats don’t represent me but represent banks and healthcare corporations, then I should support whom? Support lame Democratic candidates? Keep my mouth shut and vote?
I know Dems who wanted real healthcare reform and don’t like the monstrosity rolling out of Congress. Hell, I know people who would like to have a job, having watched huge multi-million dollar payouts to bankers with taxpayers’ money.
I know lots of people who wanted to end the wars who voted for Obama. Those wars’ve been chugging along like Cheney was still President. So if you were a leftie who wanted to end the wars, what party should you support?
In these desperate times the Democrats, who have sixty votes in the Senate and a big majority in the House, haven’t been able to equal what the Republicans could do with fifty votes.
What does that mean?
It’s amusing that as the DLCers are about to fail big-time, once again, that it’s time to blame… the leftists.
It means that people like you are still assholes. Go away, please.
Well, it depends on whether you care that the civil rights division of the DOJ is intervening on the side of a gay kid who was bullied and sued the school, or that they are prosecuting cops who beat prisoners, or that the DOL is protecting fringe benefits and wages of the lowest paid workers against ripoff owners – or if you just don’t give a shit and are a self-absorbed whiny “leftist”.
You’re missing one thing though. In the minds of the self-proclaimed “true progressives” who align themselves with teabaggers in attacking anything with Obama’s name on it, THERE SIMPLY IS NO LEFT ON LEFT fighting.
To the leftier-than-thou’s, ALL disagreement with them puts you smack dab in the youloverahmemmanuel camp (or worse).
Properly appreciating their mindset can be helpful.
It’s funny: I sort of agree with both sides. I don’t see the point in abandoning hope, withdrawing and pissing on the shoes of people to my immediate right. Something useful may get done, and something horrifying may be slowed down.
But on the other hand, it looks pretty clear to me that the Democratic Party as an institution and its present-day leadership do not have the instinct, the courage or the intelligence to get done what must be done in this country to prevent a fascist nightmare here.
What is hard for me is to locate is the point where perpetual amelioration and quarter measures have to give way to recognition that we are wasting precious time when we should be building something longer-term and more coherent.