Like Kryptonite To Stupid
Shorter Matt Stoller: Quit acting like babies. Waaaaaaaaaaaah. The world is ending because Sen. Obama doesn’t personally read every blog and conduct online polls asking the “netroots” what color underwear he should wear.
Do these guys know that a presidential election isn’t all about candidates catering to their personal idiosyncrasies? I don’t think so.
In case you were wondering that in the midst of all the drama on the Democratic side of the aisle it was possible for the Republican party to remain brain dead on the seminal issues of our time… wonder no more.
Sen. John McCain on Tuesday rejected calls by his Democratic opponents for universal health coverage, instead offering a market-based solution with an approach similar to a proposal put forth by President Bush last year.McCain’s belief in the power of the free market to meet the nation’s health-care needs sets up a stark choice for voters this fall in terms of the care they could receive, the role the government would play and the importance they place on the issue.
The Republicans largely really believe some of this bull about the free market. They really think in their heart of hearts that the solution for every issue is to sprinkle some of that magical “free market” fairy dust and all will be well. The problem is, that is not what Americans feel. Oh sure, we’re willing to give the market a go of things - and for some things it works great. But we effectively operate under a free market health care system right now and its woefully unpopular. That’s the reason why health care is a serious issue in 2008 in a way that it wasn’t in 2004, 2000, etc.
John McCain is so out of touch with normal Americans (his health care costs are covered by his military disability, his Senate health care plan and should anything fall through the cracks his wife’s generous inheritance can take up the slack) that he believes that what people want is more of the current mess.
Yet the American mood on large national issues like this is not a faith based free market system, but rather historically tends to favor a collective system where we all pay in and benefit.
So today the RNC pushed out a press release falseley claiming that the DNC had used Iraq footage from Fahrenheit 9/11. The funny thing is, that was the more sedate of the charges as the first round insinuated that Dems had received it from terrorists (from Michelle Malkin, naturally). RNC Chairman of the moment Mike Duncan:
As you are already aware, and as has been widely reported, the DNC’s ad is troubling for at least two reasons. First, its message is factually false; the DNC is deliberately misleading American voters. Second, it constitutes an illegal excessive in-kind contribution from the DNC to its presidential candidates. Now the Republican National Committee has learned that the ad features footage from Michael Moore’s 2004 conspiracy theory, “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
Of course, the footage isn’t from terrorists or (even worse in conservative minds) Michael Moore. The footage is from an AP report purchased from Getty Images.
The funny/sad thing is the RNC and the con bloggers are more upset over where the footage may or may have not have come from than they are about the people and the party who have put our soldiers in harm’s way in the first place.
Again, here is the ad they don’t want you to see, from the folks at the DNC.
Superdelegates with no need to interact with us unwashed masses support Clinton, while those who have to actually answer to voters have gone more for Obama. And more will likely come.
Among elected officials, Sen. Obama leads in endorsements from governors and senators. He is behind among House members by one, but both camps expect him to pull ahead unless he does badly in next Tuesday’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries. If he doesn’t stumble, enough elected Democrats are expected to back Sen. Obama after the last primaries June 3 to give him the delegate majority needed for nomination.
Many of them see Sen. Obama as more electable than Sen. Clinton. But even those who don’t have been impressed by his grass-roots organizing and fund raising and the legions of new voters he has attracted, particularly younger and African-American voters.
Clearly the preference is for them to just do it, but it will come in due time.
A few months ago I wrote about how I really really want the president of the United States to be someone who is the national leader of the country and not just a party chairman. I feel the need to point this out again in the middle of some of the typical blogosphere whining over Sen. Obama’s appearance Sunday on Fox News.
There are certain things I demand out of a Democratic candidate, but I don’t labor under the pretense that the person is going to check, check, check down the line for the progressive movement. Do I want them to sound like a Republican and echo conservative phrasing? No. But to act as if a deviation from the line will cause the universe to collapse on itself? Come on.
In the case of Sen. Obama I say again: I don’t want a cheerleader for the Democratic party. I want an adult to set this country back on the path of righteousness.
This comment from Matt Stoller’s comment thread does a good job of summing things up:
The job of a candidate for US President is to put together a winning coalition, not to pamper the tender egos or play into the macho fantasies of his/her supporters.
If you are this disappointed by Obama the candidate, you will weep bitterly as Obama the President tacks and weaves just like FDR did and as every politician has to. The question is balance and total direction. What you people have failed to understand is that the problem with Bill Clinton was not that he was expedient, but that his goals were limited to his own personal political success.
Most of us who support Obama are not under the illusion that he is a magical hero or that he is a progressive miracle worker. He’s a smart politician trying an potentially game changing tack that may reconstitute a pro-working-american coalition. So we don’t weep and gnash our teeth and demand constant reassurance or go into hysterics at every imagined slight.
Grow up, children.
I know I’m too cynical, but the sort of utopianism pushed in some corners of the progressive blogosphere are just kind of nutty.
She’s standing on a platform of Jello. Via MSNBC’s Verdict with Dan Abrams here is Sen. Clinton slamming MoveOn (and by extension everyone who’s ever had the desire to be a progressive/Democratic activist) and here is Sen. Clinton just a year ago saying what great work she thinks MoveOn has done. This of course is part of her ongoing argument versus caucusing because she does badly there, but it also shows us - like with her vote in favor of the Iraq War - how quickly she would have thrown the progressive base of the party under the bus had she been the nominee.
Luckily, we dodged the bullet.
At Shakesville, writing about Obama and abortion Kate Harding writes this intriguing bit
Progressives? Do not respect the anti-choice position.
Really? This is the road we’re going to go down now? I think being pro-choice is a necessity for a Democratic candidate. It’s a showstoper for me, and I couldn’t support a presidential candidate who wasn’t pro choice. I personally believe that a woman’s got a right to choose her own health care.
But I do respect the anti-choice position. I understand that if someone believes that a fetus is a human why they might feel so strongly about abortion. I don’t agree with them in the least and think their opinion is dumb, but I respect it.
Of course, at the same time, I respect those who are more pro-choice than I am. I happen to support parental notification for minors, but understand the reasoning of those who oppose it. I don’t agree with them, but I respect it too.
The conservative movement shows us what its like when idealogical movements abandon all pragmatism and consent to thought-based purges. As does the Democratic party of the ’70s and ’80s.
But then, I guess I’m not a progressive.
Hillary Clinton and her surrogates sure feel a strong need to echo right-wing attacks versus Sen. Obama. And that’s fine with me. At the end of the day this will teach us that no matter what the Clintons cannot be trusted anywhere near the leadership of the Democratic party in the future. At the same time it also shows us the problems we would have encountered should she have won the nomination. Reacting like a scared ninny to the prospect of Republicans saying bad things about you has been a recipe for Democratic failure for almost half of my life. The Clinton response turns out to be just to echo the right wing without doing anything constructive about it and hope the media gets bored, while the Dean/Obama posture is to return fire until their ships are in Davy Jones’ Locker.
The former strategy does its job in saving the Clinton’s hides while damaging the Democratic party, while the latter defends the candidate and changes the progressive/Democrat brand from one of weak-kneed fainting back to its historical strength of moral character.
So thanks, Sen. Clinton, this has all been helpful in clarifying some things and allowing the scales to fall from our eyes.
From a practical matter no matter what the hyperventilating conservatives and their increasingly similar pro-Clinton partisans wish to believe: Sen. Obama is winning, will win the nomination (assuming likely Clinton-initiated fraud will be nipped in the bud) and will likely win the general election. But we play. We play to win the game.
Clinton bloggers are just shocked as heck to find out that campaign events are stage managed affairs. This is either naive or stupid. Or both. But I guess you’ve gotta grasp at straws…
Next thing you know they’ll be shocked and appalled that those tv anchors aren’t just coming up with those thoughts off the top of their heads but are in fact reading.
God, please let this primary season end before people take complete leave of their senses.
UPDATE: A campaign stagecraft flashback.
On Friday, the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-New York, issued a statement to CNN in response to an article written by a college newspaper that included the accusation that the campaign suggested a student ask a certain question.
“On this occasion a member of our staff did discuss a possible question about Senator Clinton’s energy plan at a forum,” campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee said in the statement. “However, Senator Clinton did not know which questioners she was calling on during the event. This is not standard policy and will not be repeated again.”
Concern trolls unite! The New York Times has the Rosetta Stone of concern troll articles for you today, describing a few nervous nellies who wish to make it known in the press that they want Governor Dean to do… something. Most notable is Clinton-supporter Donald Fowler, whose son Donnie Fowler lost the chairmanship race to Gov. Dean.
A lot of these people wish for the days of Ron Brown and Terry McAuliffe, where the party chairmanship was essentially an outgrowth of the Clinton family. Which, as noted time and again, was a good arrangement for the Clintons but pretty much the suck for Democratic candidates, right up until John Kerry.
Howard Dean’s job is to keep the party running at a steady clip while making the Democrats a truly national party again. That’s what he’s doing.
Back in the dark ages we now refer to as the early 1990s, I was in high school. On Fridays my friends and I had a standing appointment to play basketball. It was nothing formal and certainly not at a high level of skill - my main contribution was being the big guy who stood in the paint and made funny voices so I sounded like Shaq. My friend Mark used to tote a bottle of Gatorade labeled “Michael’s (Jordan) Favorite!” That kind of thing. But we had this one guy who played with us occasionally who used to do the weirdest thing. We would be playing, joking around, flailing at each other and hurling the basketball in the air on the off-chance that it might go into the hoop sometime, and if this guy was on a team that was getting beaten he would… just walk off.
He wouldn’t say anything, he wouldn’t make a snide remark or chide his teammates, it was even worse. He just walked off, a sore ass loser.
I say this because President Clinton has once again dug into the feces and pulled out another pony for his wife to ride on.
While speaking by phone Thursday to his wife’s Texas supporters, former President Bill Clinton downplayed the importance of caucuses and argued that his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., would capture the Democratic presidential nomination by outperforming Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in primary states.
“Right now, among all the primary states, believe it or not, Hillary’s only 16 votes behind in pledged delegates,” said Bill Clinton, “and she’s gonna wind up with the lead in the popular vote in the primary states. She’s gonna wind up with the lead in the delegates [from primary states].”
“It’s the caucuses that have been killing us,” he added.
Got that? In addition to red states that go Obama not counting, southern states with large black populations worth nothing, blue states that have the nerve to go against the annointed one being excluded, now all the caucuses don’t count. None of them, so the criteria we must use from here on is primary states where Sen. Clinton won. Mister President, just put a crown on her and quit beating around the bush, because clearly Queen Elizabeth isn’t the only monarch as head of state of a major western power left!
Christ, what is wrong with these people?
You know who once didn’t have such a problem with caucuses? Hillary Clinton.
“So I ask you to caucus for me tomorrow. Put on your coats and call up a friend and help me change America,” she says. “If you stand with me for one night, I will stand up for you every day as your President.”
But that was back on the second of January before she began losing from coast to coast. Contrary to President Clinton’s twisted logic, all the delegates count - be they in primaries or caucuses, red states or blue states, black voters or none. That’s the contest the Democratic party set up, and while I know this is a shocker to the two of them: They don’t own the party.
Stay tuned for another edition of Cherry Pickin’! With The Clintons: If they can’t win steal the nomination, nobody can.
ALSO: Exclusive footage of the Clinton campaign as interpreted by a troupe of mid-20th century British comedians.
The more I read about the rich donors who told Nancy Pelosi to shut up, the more angry I get. I may not agree with her on quite a few issues, but Speaker Pelosi is second in line to the Presidency, the first woman to hold her position and a figure demanding of respect - especially from people who are supposed to be her fellow Democrats. These guys seriously think that because they went to a fancy fundraiser or maybe played a round of golf with the ex-president that they really are better than the rest of us. They have every right to add their voice to the chorus supporting Sen. Clinton, but they have no place, no standing, no right to order the Speaker around.
These people are symptomatic, quite frankly, of the negative that came along with all the good President Clinton did during his tenure. The moribund liberal wing of the party, defanged after the losses of Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis, gave way to the big check writers, the elite crowd whose cash did prop up the party for the short term and helped President Clinton gain his office. But for the Democratic party and the progressive movement they have been a waste. Just look at the congressional seats lost during Clinton’s tenure, look at how unprepared the party was to field a coast-to-coast slate of candidates under Terry McAuliffe’s leadership - a party chairmanship that was all about fundraising to the exclusion of getting majorities and a president elected.
But the Clintons and the moneybags crowd have not learned. That’s why they tried to throw their money around in Michigan and re-do the primary. That’s why the Clinton campaign is now faltering at fundraising, having maxed out these whales she doesn’t have the pool of Average Joe donors (like myself) that Sen. Obama will have in the general who have not come close to the $2,300 limit. That’s why, as their anointed candidate began to fail they just cut another of their fat checks to form a 527 committee whose work product is horrendous compared to the work of groups like MoveOn and the labor unions. Sure, wealthy donors help fund some of those efforts as well, but they are truly nothing without their regular Joe volunteers and members. And none of those groups is so in love with themselves that they believe that they can tell Speaker Pelosi what she can and cannot say.
We poor unwashed masses, lacking mansions and minks and chaueffers, elected Rep. Pelosi to the position of Speaker via our representatives in the House. We may not have tee times at the golf club, a yacht parked on the intra coastal, nor do we feed our pets prime rib — but we know that the Speaker is to be afforded a modicum of respect.
This is the stain that remains on the party even after the events of Crashing The Gate were documented by Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong. These are the hangers-on who look down their plastic surgery noses at Governor Dean’s 50-state strategy and his middle class demeanor even as the party begins to regain its role as a truly national party. These are the people who think nothing - nothing - of throwing a tantrum because us people, us regular Joes and Janes, had the gall to not vote and caucus for the candidate they bankrolled and sought to shove down our gullets the way they always do. Instead we chose to vote for a candidate whose donor base is almost 2 million strong. Just like a couple of weeks ago when they were demanding refunds of their donations to the party they thought they owned they are once again trying to tell us they bought the Democratic party the same way they bought a diamond necklace at Tiffany’s for their trophy wife.
Not any more. The Democratic party is once again becoming little-d democratic. A party where the rich guys have a say, but so do the regular guys. Speaker Pelosi speaks for us, from Park Avenue to Georgetown to Skid Row to Baltimore to The Lower 9th Ward and beyond.
And you respect her, or shut up.
Seriously, New York Democrats, what the hell is wrong with you guys that you can’t get a governor who isn’t a philanderer, drug user, or both?
The problem with James Carville calling Gov. Richardson “Judas” isn’t that it’s crass and stupid - I mean, we’ve seen that side of James Carville before - its that it gives up the Clinton camp’s trump card right away. If they call Richardson “Judas” for making a free choice, what are they going to call the other superdelegates they’re holding a big stick over when they too decide to join Sen. Obama and the majority of the party?
Wall Street and the right want to eat their cake and have it too. They want vital financial institutions to be left alone, given free reign to do as they wish - but when they screw up and cause a ripple effect throughout the economy they come running to the government for a no-strings-attached bailout.
Eh-eh.
You want the government to have a hand in the game, you have to play by the rules. You need oversight, regulation, a catchers mitt over the invisible hand. The crisis we’re facing now is a product of our government abandoning its watchdog role and becoming nothing more than a cheerleader on the sidelines. It’s time once again for our government to put on its referee’s uniform and get this game back under control.
We could get a Democrat to replace the amazingly corrupt Don Young. Jake Metcalfe could become the latest demonstration of the crazy idea that a political party ought to compete in all 50 states.
Then Dean wanted to know how many organizers the state party now had on the ground, and Teeters told him there was just one: Teeters himself. The D.N.C. created his job — along with a position for a communications director — last year as part of Dean’s signature program, known as the 50-state strategy. Under this program, the national party is paying for hundreds of new organizers and press aides for the state parties, many of which have been operating on the edge of insolvency. The idea is to hire mostly young, ambitious activists who will go out and build county and precinct organizations to rival Republican machines in every state in the country. “We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” Dean likes to say. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.”
In paying for two new staffers, Dean had, virtually overnight, doubled the size of Alaska’s beleaguered state party, which used to consist of only an executive director and a part-time fund-raiser. But now, as Dean considered the vastness of the state’s landscape, he decided that one organizer wasn’t enough. “In most states, we have three or four,” Dean said, thinking out loud. “Seems like you should really have more. We should be able to find that money in the budget.”
That night, after meeting with Dean at the sad little storefront office that houses the state party, Alaska’s party chairman, Jake Metcalfe, announced to 400 assembled Democrats at a fund-raiser that Dean had just promised to hire an additional organizer for the state. The ballroom erupted in grateful applause as Dean sat there beaming. The members of his staff, gently rolling their eyes, began calling back to Washington, warning the political staff that they would need to find the money for yet another salary in, of all places, Alaska.
I try so hard not to write about this racial stuff, but then Amy Sullivan writes this:
But I’ll be back in a few hours to talk about why the Democratic party outsourced religion to black churches, and how that’s hurt the party. It’s also left most Americans with a Disney-fied impression of African-American religious leaders as folks who sit around listening to gospel music all day, spout inspirational phrases to slap on calendars, and generally act like Denzel Washington in “The Preacher’s Wife.”
By “most Americans” she means of course “white Americans”.
You may remember Sullivan as the author of a piece decrying the tepid sports cuture of Washington without once mentioning the Washington Redskins. In that instance, as well, Sullivan substituted white upper class DC for the more mainstream, blacker rest of Washington (aka most people who live in DC). She also has a habit of saying Democrats don’t like religion.
UPDATE: It gets worse:
For decades, the Democratic Party has ghettoized religion, outsourcing it to African-Americans within the party.
As one of the commenters notes:
Yes, I well remember noted African-American and Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter. African-Americans Bill Clinton and Al Gore both also made a big show of their Baptist faith, while African-American John Kerry frequently mentioned his time as an altar boy.
For the love of God, someone tell Amy Sullivan to STFU.
UPDATE 2: A friend notes: “Ghettoized” religion. Ghetto.
The race between Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama remains frozen in amber, with even an unlikely unprecedented string of lopsided victories between now and the end of the primary season unable to change the dominant dynamic: Senator Obama is the frontrunner. Both senators have motivated the base, energizing the party with unprecedented primary and caucus turnout. But now it must come to an end and a transition made to general election mode. Sen. McCain is his party’s nominee and is currently consolidating the conservative base. While I feel he still has little chance of winning the general election, we are at a moment in which the Democratic party can march to a historic victory - a repudiation of conservatism. The more the show of the primary season goes on, the less likely a major victory this fall (although even if the dang thing goes to the convention I still think the Dems will win).
The superdelegates have so far been content to sit on the sidelines and wait out the process, yet time is now of the essence. They need to vote their consciences now, reminded by Speaker Pelosi that they should take heed the will of the Democratic party’s voices in 44 states.
Barack Obama most importantly leads in delegates, leads in amount of states won. Sen. Clinton has run a strong campaign, but Sen. Obama’s has been stronger and that is why neither candidate can get to the nomination based solely on their primary/caucus performance. The superdelegates need to act. There are eight months until the general election. Eight months of voter mobilization, eight months of educating the voters about our nominee and the Republican nominee. Eight months of fundraising and coordination between the nominee and the national party to be done.
The Democratic party has a chance to not only elect a Democrat but to deal a severe blow to conservatism. The way to get there is for the superdelegates to act.
Vote now. Follow the people. Choose a nominee. Win the election.
