I know, I’m the pest who keeps complaining that, for all their heroic posturing, our progressive leaders have been pathetic in refusing to brandish any kind of retaliatory stick while begging the Democratic Party to not turn the healthcare bill into nothing more than the bloody stump of reform.  And urging those outraged at those pathetic leaders to start figuring out how to hit the Democratic Party where it hurts.

Then along comes Jane Hamsher.  For the record, I had criticized her in my intro to the Full Court Press as one of those progressive leaders who had caved in and was supporting the bill even without the “robust” public option she had once demanded.  But then she turned around and came out 4-square for killing the Senate bill.  And then, a few days ago, she joined with notorious scoundrel Grover Norquist  to demand an investigation of Rahm Emmanuel for malfeasance regarding his relationship with Freddie Mac.

Well, I gotta say the lady’s got guts.

Her move follows one or both of two tracks.  It could be seen as an innocent exercise in good  government.  Or it could be a counterpunch to the way Rahm and the White House have viciously sidelined progressives around, well, everything.  Both are valid.

But working with Norquist! the Dems cry while clutching at their smelling salts.  Okay, let’s look at the Democrats’ record.  The Stupak amendment passed mostly with Republican votes.  And then when the House Democrats passed its Stupak-laden bill, they made Stupak their own.  They passed a Republican measure.

So the Obamacrats cry “teabagger!”  Jane Hamsher is getting her money from Jack Abramoff!  Next thing you know, she’ll be leading teabagger rallies.  The charges are nonsense, but the underlying politic is worth some thought.

Make no mistake, the teabagger movement is a fascist-led, corporate-funded reactionary movement.  But its success is in part a monument to progressive failure.  While progressives had dreams of Obama-plums dancing in their heads, they ignored their working class base, which was outraged that Wall Street was getting bailed out while they were losing their homes.  They distrust the Fed.  They fear a distant government that might do things like, oh, mandating people to buy insurance they can’t afford.  The teabaggers were able to merge this righteous anger with backward racist and sexist currents in the American people.  Because progressives were asleep at the wheel!

1979 San Francisco.  We were working on a hard-fought rent-control ballot initiative.  Hard-fought between the coalition of tenant organizations and the Democratic Party stalwarts on one side (seemingly) against the landlords and downtown developers who ran City Hall under Mayor Dianne Feinstein.

Even more hard-fought was the struggle between the tenant organizations which had created the campaign in the first place and ran the campaign’s district committees (I chaired District 6, the Mission), against the Democratic Party’s consultants (the little wigs) and Democratic clubs and official leftists, over whether the campaign would be a consultant-based media affair, or grassroots tenant-based.  The underlying question was whether the district committees would last beyond election day.

The money went to the consultants and for TV ads, while the district committees were starved.  The measure had been gutted even before the campaign began, in order to appease a few prestigious Democratic clubs that in the end actually opposed the initiative.  In the home stretch, it became clear that Prop R was going down.

Now a whiny voice pipes up from the back of the room.  “Hey, old guy, is this gonna be another of your boring stories about how you had to walk 20 miles through the snow to get to an SDS meeting?”

“Shaddup, kid, there’s a point here somewhere!”

As I was  saying, in the final weeks, the campaign bosses went into a pseudo-frenzy.  Once more to the barricades, voter registration, lit drops.  The campaign came down to getting a slate card under every door in the city.  No volunteer was to be left standing as the polls closed.

A few words on how I got here, old, tired and sick, but truckin’ on.  About my focus on tactics, not just tactics in-themselves, but how they are developed.

I was a 60’s kid, brought up white lower-middle-class, believing in the American dream, freedom of speech, civil rights, truth and beauty.  In 1964, I supported both Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King.  How’s that?  Got to college, and along with millions of others, found out that the American dream was a lie.  War in Vietnam was an obscenity.  Michigan State University had nothing to do with either truth or beauty.  Got active.

Sitting in to support three groovy professors who had been fired at the behest of the Mothers Against Degeneracy.  The Akers Hall Kiss-in (hundreds of people kissing in the lounge because they were told they couldn’t.  The war.  Always the war.  Marched, did wild in the streets.  Saw it crushed.  Friends with broken bones, in jail.  Dead.  The George McGovern campaign in 1972 picked up the pieces and sold them cheap.  I was shattered, broken.  Emotionally and political numb.

How did I get through it?

This is the piece that briefly got posted on OpenLeft Saturday night, was yanked under orders from Chris Bowers on Sunday, and was the target of a bizarre counter-attack by Bowers on Sunday night.  I outline this in my comment https://www.docudharma.com/show… on BuhdyDharma’s Blogging and the Left thread.

It is merely a simple tactic, and a work in progres.

The Case

The health care reform debacle is beginning to stink to high heaven, whether or not some rotted carcass labeled “reform” ever gets passed.

Obama now proudly walks in the footsteps of Lyndon Johnson and George Bush as he ships 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Hopes of seriously regulating Wall Street have been dashed to bits by the Goldman Sachs economic team Obama has put in charge of the henhouse, while Wall Street pockets the bailout money that we gave them and plans its next round of Ponzi schemes.

Working families only face more unemployment, and foreclosures, while employers exploit the hard times to crack down on the still employed, and the social safety net provided by state and local governments is ripped asunder.

At this moment, Obama’s Fed nominee is touting creating jobs by gutting Social Security.

And hope is dying.