In honor of Oliver Willis, I ll use a football analogy here. Do you remember back in Super Bowl XVIII, when the Oakland Los Angeles Raiders had Mr Willis favorite team, the Washington Redskins, pinned deep near their own end zone at the …

DC area blogger Oliver Willis has looked at the Democrats performance, and has become depressed.

Why Republicans Will Maintain Or Increase Their Control This Fall
by Oliver Willis | June 16th, 2006 | 2:12 pm
Only one party is interested in t…

* The Republicans increased their seats in 2004 because of Tom DeLay’s shenanigans in Texas.

* The Republicans increased their seats in 2002 because they were able to shift the national focus to war with Iraq, which sadly the public supported. Parties in the White House almost always lose seats in off-year elections; 2002 and 1998 were aberrations because they shifted focus away from the White House performance and to other issues (the public opposed impeachment in 1998, which worked to Congressional Democrat’s favor).

This is an off-year election. The default assumption needs to be that the party in the White House will lose Congressional seats, because it is almost always true. The Texas redistricting prevents the Republicans from losing control of the House, and more Democrats being up for reelection in the Senate gives the Republicans control there, but they won’t actually gain seats.

Contra Dugger, being against Bush, who is wildly unpopular, is a no-brainer position for Democrats. Even Joe Lieberman’s lame bear cub commercial positions Holy Joe as anti-Bush.

The Democrats gain seats but not control. The press will write that it is a victory for Republicans, which it would be if the Democrats gained only single-digit House seats.

The Democrats are stupid for these reasons: they believe coming out in favor of redeployment will make the right and the media call them cowards, but the right and the media are going to do that anyway. The Dems keep wanting to come to a cumbaya position on things, with everyone agreeing when the path to success is not consensus but leadership.

A significant majority of the Dem caucus would support the CAP/Murtha redeployment plan, and it would finally be a unified position for the Democratic party to rally around as an alternative to the GOP “stay in Iraq and get killed” program. Would individual Dems disagree with it? Yes. But individual Dems also disagree with the party platform but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a platform.

“Ya gotta have a plan.”

When one considers that Bush’s “plan” is to never admit to having a plan (eg; no set timetable for pullout), all of this noise may just be for naught.

I heard Joe Biden on Imus this week. His “approach” to managing the war is starkly different from the Bush approach.

John Kerry wants us out at the end of the Year. Murtha the same, more or less.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t thinking a timetable is a good idea.

Oh…Democrats have “plans,” Oliver…the problem is that there is no unified front, other than to argume vehemently that the war is wrong (which it is), or not going well, and that Bush led us into this war based on premises that didn’t exactly turn out to be true. (I think it was Matthews or Russert who pointed out that nearly everything this administration has said about the war, has turned out to be false.)

I wish I were a historian. I’d likely be able to offer an informed view on why the opposition party isn’t speaking with a unified voice, or whether it would even be wise to have a unified voice.

I wish I were a psychologist. I’d then be able to conjure up an explanation that involved some level of “risk avoidance,” or “defense mechanism,” to account for the lack of response from the left.

I wish I were a philosopher. I might then be able to detach myself emotionally from the issue, and argue that war is not the solution to any problem, and that one must always look to resolve our differences peacefully.

For the moment, I’m none of the above. What I do know, however, is that I’m simply tired of having to “defend” the only viable option to the GOP, from OW’s relentless tales of woe, gloom and doom.

JK

Lets see how it will sort out.

Democrats meet:

“All opposed to Bush say “aye”.

“Thats 100% ayes. Now we need to figure out some positions on stuff. Candidate X. Whats your psotion on Iraq?”

“I hate Bush.”

“Excellent, X. ”

Dugger

Two of the most powerful Democrats here (Philly), Congressman Bob Brady, and John Dougherty (head of IBEW 98, the most politically powerful union in Philly) are in a pissing match with each other that caused Dougherty to resign from his position with the city Democratic Committee.

If these two aren’t on the same page by Labor Day, it’s gonna spell trouble. Rendell is gonna win regardless, as are Brady and Fattah, but if Dougherty decides to take his ball and go home and doesn’t put out his usual massive GOTV and massive election day street presence, it could hurt Casey for Senate and Allyson Schwartz for congress.

I don’t know what can be done, since they’d laugh Dean out of the room if he tried to do anything, but Rendell or someone else better have them get their shit together.

by tristero (Hullabaloo)

Issue #1 is Bush. Issue #2 is everything else. Until Bush no longer has a Republican majority in the House and the Senate to rubber stamp nearly everything he wants, your opinions and ideas mean squat. No. Less than squat.

Make reining in Bush *the* issue. Republicans in Congress will do whatever Bush wants, but the country is fed up with what Bush wants. They’ve seen how much damage he causes. Only Democratic majorities in Congress can prevent him from wreaking even worse havoc on the country. Bush is the issue. And hoo boy! has Bush made your job incredibly easy:

Remember: Bush really is incompetent. And the American public sees it now.

Remember: Bush really has governed above the law. And the the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush has bogged this nation down in an insane war. And the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush does not have a genuine plan to deal with Iraq, nor is he capable of creating and implementing one. People are dying because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And the American public understands that now.

Remember: Bush’s supreme callousness and negligence led to the hiring of the incompetents in charge of FEMA during Katrina. And the American public knows it.

Remember: This is one helluva unpopular president. The American public has very good reasons for disliking him and his policies so intensely. They are all but begging you to stand up and refuse to go along with his incompetent, extremist, and unlawful behavior.

Focus on Bush. Everything else is detail.