This is what I find on Greg Sargent's The Plum Line, today. Folks, it's time for a wake-up call. We've been overconfident for too long, believing that somehow people would react against the Blue-Dogs, and choose us in this election. That doesn't seem to be what is happening.
I mean, folks, how do you separate Obama from the Progressive left? How do you dodge the bullets when they're aiming at the socialists and the big government people, and are blaming them for people's lot in life? How do we expect people to get depressing, mind-numbing, soul-hollowing news about how the progressive left has failed from both sides, and not turn against us?
You don't. We've joined the Republicans in gutting faith in ourselves and our Congress, and we haven't kept ourselves from being collateral damage in the process. Folks, we've only been defeating ourselves. It's time to stop this self-destructive behavior.
We may see ourselves as different parts of the same party, but nobody else does. The Liberal, and now the Progressive brand are closely tied into mainstream Democratic Party values, and those have been under assault from the right ever since we took power. They haven't cared to make that distinction. We're all far left to them, and Obama's the leader. They'll note the criticism of our party only to say that Obama's gone too far to the left for most of his part, or some bullshit like that.
They don't see people who disapprove of Obama because he's not far enough left. They just see disapprovals, and they make up their own story to fit their agenda of pushing the country further right. That's what the bullshit Rasmussen approval index is about.
Whether we wanted to or not, we helped make Obama politically radioactive, and the radiation has been mainly hitting the folks who are closest to him in the public's mind in politics: Liberals and Progressives.
It doesn't matter that this narrative may seem like complete bullshit to you: much of the public believes it. Abandoning the President, chastising Congress hasn't purified the party, it's set up the conditions for our Congressional Caucus to go further to the right.
And Depressing Liberal Turnout? Look, by not countering that, by not taking our politics a level or two above simple reaction to surface politics, we've enabled something that should theoretically be a warning to recalcitrant Democrats from our perspective, become a major liability for getting liberals and progressives re-elected.
In essence, we picked the wrong time to hold our people accountable, letting our quest for that accountability get conflated with a movement from the Right to take out the Democrat's majority.
That's the problem.
Who do I blame? Everyone, and no-one. We all rested on our laurels. We all thought the Teabaggers weren't a serious threat because they were so silly and stupid. We never registered what was behind them, nor noted how well they and their handlers were playing on simple, basic, emotional resentment. We were counting on people to be rational. But even smart people don't operate by utter rationality. People don't necessarily know enough about the situation, burdened by the issues of their daily lives, to do the kind of research some of us do.
We've neglected those people, neglected to realize that we were selling policy to more than one part of the political spectrum, and that all our complaints about Obama, all our disapproval of him, was being used to back a narrative of ideological excess on his part.
Those are our mistakes.
What are the solutions?
Before we go any further, lets just acknowledge one thing: we may lose this election, lose a House of Congress at least. I don't believe this has to happen, that this is inevitable, but we must acknowledge that it can happen, and act and plan both to prevent it, and if it comes to pass, to undo it.
The first thing is, while we should hold Obama accountable, we must hold him accountable in the context of a recalcitrant Republican minority that blocks everything they can in the Senate. We've allowed too much of the perception to coalesce that the failure to get things done was our fault, and that translates to the failure of the liberals and the progressives. most people don't know enough to blame it on the Blue Dogs and Conservative Senate Democrats. We assumed a level of familiarity with Washington people don't actually have.
We've failed to pin responsibility for Republican obstructionism on Republican obstructors. We let the margin of Democrats get the focus of our anger, and as a result, we let the perception developed that legislation wasn't passing because Democrats were too weak to pass it.
And of course, Democrats don't mean conservative Democrats in many people's minds, it gets conflated with us, the Progressives, the Liberals. You know, the people who ironically want things done.
From this point on, when a Senate vote fails on account of a Republican minority, the failure should be first blamed on Republicans. If Democrats enter into it, we should speak of Conservative Democrats siding with Republicans, and only do so after we have first laid the blame at their feet. The word "Filibuster", "Abuse of the Senate Procedures", "Procedural Technicalities" should figure large. Republicans should take the blame, and be made to look like folks cheating the system.
Okay. But that Damn Senate and Damn House don't always cooperate!
If so? Fuck them. We don't have to make it about a referendum on them. They can be portrayed as incidental. The main question is a choice: When you're deep in the shit, do you ask somebody to pile on more?
This is about the agency and ability to choose of the voters, not just who happens to get into office this time around. We can change a party over time to get things done better. But what we don't need, in this time of crisis, is to put people in charge who will make things worse.
This is not merely about scaring people into voting for Democrats. We might do to scare a few people. The Republicans are scaring the shit out of people, and they're not doing too shabby, in case you've noticed. There is no problem in scaring people, in forecasting doom and gloom, when very likely the result will actually be that bad.
We've dismissed that as being beneath us, saying, "that's a losing strategy" Saying it won't inspire people, or whatnot.
Who the hell cares? Let's not be prissy about this. There is a real choice here, and we have to force people to make that choice, and recognize what the consequence for choosing the other side is. We got to get them to recognize what the Republicans have been trying to funnel people towards that whole time with their talk of liberals being socialists, and Obama's policies being far left: that the whole purpose is to make them vote to crap on their own interests, to keep the folks who keep them poor, keep them working hard for less, keep them unemployed and destitute in power, and even grab more for them.
Folks are angry, and we've been idiots enough to let that anger get focused on us, in the name of holding our politicians accountable. We've forgotten that there are other politicians to hold accountable, folks who didn't take the hint of the last two elections, and still think this is a Center Left Country. If we fail to vote in the next elections, fail to get people angry at the Republicans... Well then, the Republicans will get away with EVERYTHING they did. The Blue Dogs will get away with everything they did. The traitors in the Senate will get away with everything they did.
And what will be the sum total of all our efforts? Back to square fucking one. That does not make any fucking sense to me as an acceptable outcome. That sounds to me like the Republicans preying on voter's weakness, their anger in order to compound the damage they've already inflicted.
The real threat to liberal power in this country is not liberals themselves. If the Conservatives had laid down and accepted their lot, we might be losing a few outlier districts, but we wouldn't be in this situation. No, the real threat to our agenda, to our ability to get things done are the Republicans, their noise machine, and their control of certain seats.
If we fail to turn this election around, if we lose this election, the amount of time we should spend going "boo-hoo" should be absolutely none. We front-loaded all our second guessing, who we were going to blame for the losses. Having done that bullshit to ourselves, we have no reason to waste time farting around with that crap afterwards.
No, what we do from that point forward is get relentless and stay relentless. We make sure every foul-up, every nasty scandal, every cross word of theirs blows up big. We disrupt their townhalls the way they disrupted ours. We hold big demonstrations, and we make that Tea Party Bullshit look like the manufactured non-event that it was. If the mainstream media won't cover it, we push this stuff in this face until they have no choice.
We don't quit until it's Republicans running for cover, Republicans denying themselves, Republicans who can't show their faces. We replace liberals lost with liberals, and we primary and weed out the conservatives in the party who have no reason to be there, and replace them with true Democrats.
In the meantime, we make sure that the Redistricting that gets done is done fairly, and we make big damn stinks if they don't. We sue them when they try to cut out minority voters, when they gerrymander and corrupt the process. We don't quit. We don't let a loss turn into a defeat. We make sure that the history books record any win on the Republican party, if it happens, as a fluke, an artifact of public anger and frustration.
We don't sit around and mope.
But you know what? Hope for the best, plan for the worse? I don't want us to simply sit around and wait for the election to be lost. We better get out there and get energized now, because even after this election, if we keep the Senate and House, we still have a lot of pushback to do.
Everybody who reads this can be better and do better than we've been the last two years. I may have had cross words for some of you, but I want most of what you folks want, too. I just want us to strive for it, to fight those outside our party who threaten it's advancement, to make sure no Democrat has the excuse that it's not politically palatable to be a liberal or a progressive.
I want people to once again proudly call themselves liberals, and I don't want to see Republicans do to the word Progressive what they've done to Liberal. I don't want this election to be a defeat for this party, even if it's a loss. At its very worse, I want this election to be the lowest point we see in this generation for the Democratic party. I want to see a positive slope from here on out for ourselves.
I'm sick of taking Republican crap. If they're spinning their little Tea Party as some kind of damn revolution, it's time for the Democrats to become counterrevolutionaries, political Guerillas in the fight for America's political souls.
And don't wait for your politicians to do this for you, or to lead you to this. We got too comfortable with that these last two years. No, lead yourselves, and let the politicians catch up if they can. If they can't catch up, leave them behind and get better people.