A less florid version of yesterdays column!
Let’s start with 2010. There is about 14 months before the next election in 2010, historically the Party in the WH loses seats in the midterm. But unless Town Hall Hooliganism, Tea Parties and Birthers somehow sway the election, that doesn’t look like it will happen this time.
We can’t predict the future of course, but the Dems actually have a chance to gain a couple of seats in that troublesome Senate. if that happens, people like Lieberman, Landreiu and Ben Nelson will become, we hope, slightly more irrelevant. Right now, they and Repubs like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine hold an immense amount of power as the swing votes in the Senate.
Gaining even two more seats will change the landscape immensely, most likely taking ANY Repubs out of the realpolitik equation and bringing the situation we face now into even starker relief. The power stucture then will be, starkly: ConservaDems vs Dems.
That is bad, but it will accomplish, or at least help accomplish, the real victory. Breaking the ability of The Republicans to frame the debate(s). Or to put it more bluntly, decreasing the power of Republican delusion. And delusion, as is becoming apparent even to the dullards in the Village and the Merde Stream Media, is all they have.
Delusions on HCR, delusions on Foreign Policy, delusions on how an economy works, delusions of the proper place of those of differing race, creed, and orientation. Delusions of who America “belongs” to.
And if…IF, we can accomplish that AND expose the Culture of Corruption that IS the Republican Party to further justifiably discredit them, and by discreditting them, we can remove or severely diminish their influence not just on politics, but on how America THINKS.
Exposing the torture, the politicization of the Justice Department, the selling of political influence most blatantly illustrated by Jack Abramoff, and finally, their willingness to send Americans to die in Iraq based only on their lies….
SHOULD reduce the Republican Party to an irrelevant shell.
Then we will have only the ConservaDems as real political opposition, as a roadblock to meaningful change. And as much as we all despise them, one thing must be said: They are just not AS crazy and delusional as the Republicans.
They simply cannot get away with totally distorting reality, as the Republicans have been able to
Add in a big enough (but still not 100, dammit!) majority in the Senate….pressure can be brought to bear on the ConservaDems. Whetehr Fightin Harry Reid (gag, cough) WILL do so or not remains to be seen.
Then we can not only end the political standoff we are currently “enjoying” due to the shoddy and cowardly Dem leadership, but start to systematically dismantle the delusional Repub worldview that has infected our country and made it into a battleground of expertly crafted and presented outright lies vs INCREDIBLY poorly presented truths.
It is of course possible that some miracle will revive the Republicans.
It is of course possible that the Dems will blow it badly enough (again) to do that job for them.
But it really would take something akin to a miracle.
Once Health Care is done in a month or two…or three… it will once again be time to take up the call for aggressive investigations. By then much of the current energy of the Delusional Death Panel Republicans will have blown their wad. They will either be tired, or, lol, even MORE delusional. The 2010 campaigns will have swung into gear and the candidates will be slinging more ‘Hope’ful and ‘Change’-y rhetoric about. Rhetoric we can use to pin them down on Progressive positions and on cleaning up the Culture of Corruption.
We are right now, to put it bluntly, in limbo. An unnecesary limbo caused by Democratic caution. But if the voters don’t reject that unnecessary caution, and if the Dems can do even a halfway decent job of messaging….which would be a VAST improvement…we could actually begin to break the Republican delusions that have held the Great Middle in its thrall for generations.
That moves the Overton Window to the Left. It makes it not only possible, but almost certain, that Progressive solutions, ideas, policies , and FRAMING will gain credence, popularity and eventually be enacted by the Establishment dems.
Who will of course, after rejecting them and reviling them for decades, lol…then take credit for their effectiveness.
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that Americans actually DO think.
They do, but most people dont have time (energy, interest) to really peruse all the blogs etc… which is fine, understandable, but that’s exactly why the messaging and framing is so important.
I dont know, but that maybe most of the re-framing will come with 24 if Jack Bauer ever has an epiphany or something. Did he already?
Firstly, I don’t believe the dems or Obama have the spine to secure any meaningful health care reform that isn’t insurance industry approved. That, however, is not my reason for pessimism for 2010.
In 2010 we will still be in Iraq. Even if the status quo holds, we will still be sending troops to die there. The Iraqi insurgency still exists. Who knows where it will be in a year? Perhaps it will re-ignite after we turn over more control to the Iraqi army or after we stop paying the leaders of the Awakening movement. So far what success we have had there will be attributed to Petraeus and Bush, not Obama. That is troublesome.
In 2010 Obama will fully own the disaster that Afghanistan is surely to become. Petraeus will not be able to repeat a successful counter-insurgency campaign. The Taliban is too big and it has too much public and regional support. They aren’t fighting urban guerillas here. The United States army will have to sustain a campaign in territory for which it is ill suited, men will die. At the rate we are losing troops we will be nearing 2000 dead by the time the 2010 elections roll around…maybe more. Obama will not be successful in Afghanistan…and it WILL be his promise to escalate the war that the voters remember. They may well punish senate and congressional dems for this. Whats worse, moderates and conservative dems may remember Bush’s abysmal failure in Iraq as his last months in office when ground was gained with the surge.
Furthermore, the army of youthful supporters that worked so well for the dems in 08 will not be there in 2010. Where are they during the health care battle? The nutcases have more troops on the ground in this fight.
In 2010 dems will not have Obama’s coattails to ride. The “hope” bubble has burst. Barring some drastic economic turn around I don’t see the Democratic party regaining any of the election momentum that had in 08.
Lastly, there will be far less progressive enthusiasm this time around. For Christ’s sake people are pissed. Right now there is a diary on top of the rec list at DKos titled “Fuck Democrats”. Obama won’t move a hair on torture (there may be token gestures) or GLBT rights, why should he? His administration has shown nothing but disdain for the left since taking office. Rahm isn’t thinking about full throated progressives when doing his election math….after all….What are we gonna vote republican? I just have a feeling there will be lots of jaded progressives out there who just won’t have the stomach to put in the effort for half measures and lip service instead of concrete departure from Americas scary turn right.
Sorry to bring the room down, but that this is just what I see comming.
So score one for Obama.
We need to “tear this whole building down.” ‘Cause it needs it. Vote ’em all out and vote the best ones back in. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Sorry, but that and the fact that Obama is a sell out is going to screw us big time.
We simply HAVE to stick to our progressive guns when it comes to the party and say FUCK YOU if you’re not a progressive Democrat.
Screw this “give us 60 Dems first and we’ll get things going”. That was a corporate bullshit line that too many progressives caved on.
There’s no such thing as “purity trolls”. There is only our way or the Nazi way.
That phrase has such a nice ring to it. May it come to be.
IMHO, the biggest battle for the Democrats and for the Progressives is to enlighten those moderates/conservatives who are capable of being enlightened–to the fact that they are being manipulated by corporate puppetmeisters, through their bought and paid for GOP’er puppets.