I think I saw this coming when the President spoke after the election and said, "I didn't reach out hard enough" in terms of reaching across the aisle to compromise. In the long lead-up to this tax debacle, I've given the President I worked hard for and donated to a lot of benefits when I was growing increasingly doubtful. In every move he's made, Obama hasn't been playing 2d checkers, or 11d chess or even Go.
He's been playing Operation.
Operation, if you recall from your childhood, is the silly kids game that uses a mild form of electro-shock therapy on you and your friends when you attempt mock surgery on the hapless Operation guy. Using a pair of electrified tweezers, you have to steady your hands and sneak them into the tiny, tiny holes where the microscopic-sized plastic bones reside, grasp them, and pull them out. Should you touch the metal sides of the openings, you're rewarded with a teeth-shaking buzz and the guy's nose lights up like John Boehner's after a bender. The trick to it is keeping your tweezers in the center of the hole.
I hear commentators on both CNN and MSNBC speculating that Obama wants to be seen as the last sane man in Washington DC. In every attempt at legislation, look what he's done--he's attempted to strike a position in a compromise, in the center.
Off the blogs, it appears that striking a compromise position resonates with people in most cases. Too much crazy sets our teeth on edge (Sarah Palin).
The problem is the game board. We've got Kentucky-Fried Crazy electrifying the rails on the right. They're more than capable of delivering the shock, the buzz, and the lit-up noses to whomever doesn't toe their line. Where we've fallen down is that we've not provided enough of a charge from the left.
Obama wants to be a centrist, and we've given him a pass by being center-fied ourselves. Look, the media is going to paint us the Angry Left anyway...let's live up to the title a little. With a strong leftward pull, we open up the middle.
But where to put the pressure?
I'm looking at the tax debate right now and see we've actually prodded awake quite a few of the sleepy, business-as-usual Dems in Congress. Where before it didn't matter quite so much who was the bad-Dem-of-the-week, there are many of them who saw exactly what that delivered them--they got booted for playing politics as usual. "Once you get here, everybody does it" doesn't work anymore.
There's where we need to focus. We're not the Right. The Right finds a charismatic leader and charges the leader to herd the peons along to where the top-cats want the party to be. Dissent is squashed with a boot from above.
We're the Left. We can't work like the Right. We have to lead from the bottom and force the top to follow. If they don't, they get left with their bare asses hanging in the wind.
This isn't so much about primaries--that's political game-playing, and it has just as much of a chance to backfire as it does to work. This is about making ourselves heard on policies, and on issues. Not through the media--around the media, because they're players in this game, too (who also, coincidentally, need to be led. Use money as bait, but that's a different diary). We need to apply direct pressure where the blood and money are hemorrhaging the worst--on Congress.
Let me get personal here. I live in southwestern Ohio. I live in the reddest county in the state. John Boehner's backyard and the home of Mean Jean Schmidt. I share liberal stuff on facebook with local friends and acquaintances and I can no longer count the number of people who have come up to me at gatherings, and only after looking both ways and dropping their voices to a whisper, inform me that they like my facebook posts and are so relieved that there's another Democrat floating around.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had conversations with entrenched Republican-identifying friends or acquaintances and heard them speaking of their values and realizing that their values--their ideas--are actually progressive (yet when suggesting this, I'm met with baffled, "did you just start speaking Esperanto?" looks).
Progressive ideas, progressive values, progressive people around here are living so far in the closet, we can see Narnia. Some days I feel like I can honestly say that I have an inkling of how it feels to be gay, because there are handfuls of people right in my town that flinch, twitch, and take it for granted that progressive leanings are to be hidden, publicly denied, and causes for shunning.
This is ridiculous. The fact that all these neighbors of mine here in red Ohio are telling me they're closeted Dems or at least progressive-leaning makes me ask, "How many of us are there, really?" And that's led me to believe we aren't loud enough.
We put our voice behind Obama. We didn't get what we wanted. We put our voice behind opposition to this craptastic tax deal and all of a sudden there are press conferences, and--and attention. There's pressure - real pressure - from the LEFT
We do need more and better Democrats. But those more and better are us. We don't need to clap louder, we need to yell louder. We don't need a different set of DC daddies to show us the way--we need to be the grown-ups and tell the two-year-old terrorists in DC that if they pitch a fit in the middle of the store, we will walk away and leave them by themselves.
Obama wants to be a centrist, then let's give him a hard yank left so he realizes where the center really is. If he wants to compromise, then he can compromise with us, too.