I wish I could say it was this issue in and of itself that has caused me to lose such sleep, but no. Watching the current events and what appears to be a steady collapse of community among us here at Kos as we bicker and fight over who is to blame and who is really a right wing sleeper agent and why Obama doesn't fix everything today like he told us he was and all of this other insanity going on in our back and forth, I think it's just finally time to say enough.
There's a point in time where we need to agree to disagree. The fact that the left wing can even be divided in and of itself just speaks to the nature of things in this age. The more laughable part of it is how we go about mocking the tea party for splitting and dividing the GOP while we go on about doing the exact same thing. How can we possibly hope to even match or defeat the GOP on messaging when we can't even agree on the font that message should be in (Which, by the way, should always be 12 point Times New Roman).
So, settle in a bit while I get some things off my chest here with what little brain activity I can manage before passing out.
Part 1: Agreeing on a problem
Okay. So I think we can all agree there is something wrong with the state of politics as they are and Republicans are central to that "wrong"...and I think that's about as far as we can agree. The divide comes in at who is to blame for the state of the power balance.
Obama takes blame for apparently not being a super progressive leader able to cure racial, economic, and gender hardship in a single bound.
On the other end of the spectrum, blame is being vested solely at the feet of the Republicans in congress for being the unreasonable folks that they've always been.
-The middle ground-
Both sides can take blame in this matter for different reasons. Republicans can continue to do all of this work against the country and still come out smelling like roses because there's no actual system in place on our side to point out their mess other than the blogs. The news won't ask the questions that need to be asked, and our politicians, including the President, are fairly incompetent in framing the issue as it should be. Reid made some good efforts in attempting to frame the budget fight as the Republicans attempting to derail the country over abortion, but seeing as he had no one really backing him up against the chorus of Republican voices talking about the deficit, that fight was easily lost.
-Where blame is undue-
In all, Obama is only doing his job on this matter as well as any other president in this situation can. He can't afford to let government shut down as he understands the risks. Aside from a giant loss in revenue for the country, the halt of government services to a good majority of the population, including the armed forces and unemployed, and the hundreds of thousands federal workers who would be out of work (including my old man) until funding is restored, a shutdown would have made his job of attempting to fix this mess much more difficult.
It also would not have scored him any long term political points against the republicans. Considering how short a news cycle can be, no one will remember this budget fight come summer of next year when the presidential race is in full swing thanks to the major media outlets having the collective memory capacity of a gnat.
Should he have been giving up major concessions for budget cuts so early? No. Absolutely not. Could he have done a much better job of framing the argument? Most certainly. However, it is unreasonable to demand that the president to put people's jobs and livelyhoods at risk just to prove a political point.
Part 2: Synergy (The evilest word in the english language)
Taking another look at the issue, it becomes a problem of just where exactly do we want our elected officials to fall on the political spectrum. As Democrats, we express ourselves as the party of big tent government, believing the free flow of different ideas make us better at governing. It brings us into direct opposition of the Republican party, who express a "It's Our Way or the Highway" mentality.
The problem with the former is that, with the larger of spectrum, you have to take the good ideas with the bad, and will encounter ideas you just don't want anywhere near your cognitive dissonance. With the latter, the only ideas are the one that will ensure profit and self-reward, regardless of their effect as a whole. There is no good idea or bad idea, just THE IDEA, or sometimes a lack thereof.
Because of our different modus operandi, the Republicans is far better at messaging because they're all saying the same thing. We democrats, on the other hand, don't really know what message to go with, often leading to the few individuals saying only what will make themselves look good to constituents or on tv regardless of how the rest of the party feels.
The lack of message synergy (ugh) not only creates issues in getting voters behind us, but also helps to further divide us within our own party. While we're too busy with the circular firing squad, the Republicans are developing a new message on why "Republicans Good, Democrats Bad" and repeating it in tandem.
Fixing a broken record player
Okay, so this is a problem not so easily repaired. We don't exactly have a major news outlet capable of repeating our message for us on a daily basis to our target audience, and while Media Matters does their best to train anti-Fox News pundits they are just too few and far between in order to help the messaging.
New media is no longer our own weapon as well as it was in '08, as the right has started to take to the blogs and the facepages and the mybooks to try and counteract us. I don't think there is any correct way to properly fix this mess unless our politicians take the forefront.
Getting more Anthony Weiners in front of the camera as a means of getting factual messaging across is a start, and doing more to embolden Reid and other Democratic members of Congress to keep fighting with the message helps as well. What doesn't help is threats of "Do as we say or we'll remove you". We need to show that the will be willing to back them up if the chips are down, but threatening them is only going to scare them into doing what they think will gain reelection, which is often the trap of trying to match Republican messaging.
Part 3: That's a nice Congressional office you have there. Be a shame if anything happened to it
This, I think, is probably one of our bigger missteps. Back in 08, we developed an amazing thing about holding our politicians accountable. We developed a left-wing attack machine capable of exposing politicians to the people as a show of "We won't continue to accept the same Washington antics!"
Except now the problem is that we don't exactly know how to turn the machine off and it's starting to smoke and let off sparks.
Operating under the "Do as we say or we'll fire you" method hasn't worked. And in fact, it didn't work so well that it actually did the exact opposite of what we intended when, during an attempt to run a progressive candidate against a conservative democrat, the democratic seat was lost in the main election to a republican. Now, that's not to say replacing a candidate who isn't doing their job through a primary is a bad thing. It can be necessary sometimes. But we've no longer been taking into consideration just what exactly got that official elected in the first place, and it has bitten us in the ass.
Simply threatening a democrat who isn't acting just liberal enough isn't going to fly in most of the country, and in fact only gives the right far more salvo to use against us as a party and the candidate, who will be driven further towards the center.
-Unification-
It really goes back to the whole idea of the modern Democratic party: We are Big Tent. We accept there are ideas and positions that we don't necessarily agree with 100% or even 50% of the time among our own party, because we are the true representation of the country. From this, we need to show this sort of unity to prove to the rest of the nation that, it is because we take ideas from so many different slices of life that we are far better at governing. We also need to use this to show that we will not accept the corruption and trappings of corporate greed to taint our ranks, and that we truly are a party of the people.
Even when it comes to "Conservative Democrats", so long as their shows of conservatism are what their constituents truly believe. At that same time, Progressive Democrats should NOT be the only type of Democrats. There needs to be room in our party for all comers, not just those willing to tow the party line "or else".
In summation, I'm not really sure I had a point to this rant. It's certainly major things that I see our party struggles with as a whole, a lot of it I'm seeing it in large, loud bursts along Kos itself, but I imagine that if we as a party can actively fix a number of these problems in some meaningful way, no matter how small or large the change, we might have a chance of actually enacting serious change in Washington as some guy said some years ago.
TL;DR: We need to stop fighting among ourselves, develop a central messaging system, reunify as a solid blue party, and fix this country.