...especially if others may join in. That's my basic rule of running a debate. All too many Democrats around here are wasting their time criticizing an administration for the economic policies that Republicans have done their best to make impossible, reducing the Administration's support, at the same wasting the opportunity to keep people focused on opposing the Republicans who are the main, persistent cause of the obstruction.
Now, the objection I'll likely get from folks in the audience here, is that if Obama was doing better, doing what he was supposed to do...
Folks, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: Bush didn't win 2004 because he was doing what he was supposed to do. Bush won because they scared, pushed, and organized every last person they could in support of keeping the President in his job. The niceties of his actual performance were immaterial to the results, once people voted. Republicans didn't respond to his actual worthiness to keep in charge, they made a conscious choice to win that election, to go out and persuade people, to maintain Republican power.
I mean, so many people point to what the Republicans were able to do, under Bush, and I have to tell them that it took years to force the party into such lockstep discipline, years during which the conservatives increased their dominance. Now, do you think Republicans got everything they wanted, got all their little hearts desired when Reagan took office?
No. Not by a longshot. Within a year of their greatest tax cuts evah, they had the greatest tax increases evah, right on top of it. Reagan fought big government, and big government won. The Senate would lapse back into Democratic Hands until 1994, and the House never left our possession in that time.
Reagan was more effective serving as a symbol, his speeches and statements touchstones for the new politics. Unfortunately, many here turn their nose up at symbolism, turn their nose up at pushing a candidate just to serve their political interests. No, they have to be inspired. They have to be enthusiastic. It has to be all natural, like some sort of political granola bar.
Meanwhile, the Republicans don't worry about such niceties as what people actually think. They play dirty. Now doing that all the time is a mistake, but there are times when being too wrapped up in depending on substance is a mistake.
I can understand the mistake. As a fairly concrete thinking aspie, I much more prefer to tout things on their substance, winning on what we've done, rather than just sliding along using fallacious approaches and simply bashing the other side. I want to win on the merits.
But one advantage of being an Aspie is that your observations of what work can be kind of unsparing, and here is the unsparing truth: Republicans are not prepared to elect their leaders because of those leaders merits, they are prepared to elect them, often enough, because electing them means a Democrat or Liberal or Progressive won't be there instead. They are prepared to vote against us, against our people, and push other people to do the same. They are prepared to organize against us.
Their greatest weakness at this point is the very real possibility that their Tea Party will organize against its own, destroying more popular Republican, and replacing viable candidates, from top to bottom, with candidates who can't win the general election.
We're copying that mistake, only we have much more experience at it, to be perfectly frank. We're experts at organizing against ourselves, on focusing excessive amounts of negative attention on our own, organizing to kill our own morale, and convincing people not to vote for Democrats. We're experts at making equivocations between hardline right wingers and the Democrats forced to compromise with them.
It's a minority party's mindset, and the question is which party will adopt it most efficiently in the next election, drop-kicking and shit-kicking it's returns into the political wilderness.
A vote against a Republican is as good as a vote for a Democrat. Because of what the Republicans have done, with their monstrous, irresponsible levels of obstructionism, there will be very little positive reason to vote for Democrats. That's the point, to be blunt. The Republicans really have nothing positive to offer the country, beyond the bullshit faux patriotism, and promise of magic unicorn-generated prosperity. If you really laid out their agenda, that would be it. So what have they done?
They have kept hundreds of bills, hundreds of potential achievements from coming about, and watered down the others in a way that has enraged the liberal left here, and drawn fire on the President from the left, reducing his popularity substantially by making him look like a unversally disliked figure.
If your idea is to try and force some achievements through, good luck. Maybe a little political theatre is nice, but that's all we're going to get. Meanwhile, the Republican's strategic position in the House, which some geniuses here said wouldn't be a real problem, will allow them to force worse and more unpopular deals on everybody.
Deals aimed right and you, and Obama's supporters. They could not raise themselves up, so they are tearing us down. And they seem willing to tear the country down with them.
Understand that. Stop bullshitting yourself that if we were to try and win on the merits alone, it would work out as in some kid's movie. The truth is, the Republicans are all set to make this the Human Centipede of elections: dark, twisted, and nasty.
This isn't going to be a hope and inspiration election. This is going to be a fight for your political survival. If you somehow think sitting this one out will send a message, you're right: The left isn't interested in governing in this country. That's the message. The left isn't interested in fighting for you. That's the message.
It makes no difference, America, everybody's the same, everybody's just as shitty. That's your message.
Without alternatives, without the sense that there's a choice, you won't get anywhere. You just won't. People want to get out from under the stifling, hateful pall of decay that's settled over this country. They want something better.
Now there are two ways to deal with this.
One way worked when the other side was rocked back on its heels, self-defeated, tired: Hope, change, etc.
But then there came the Republican Backlash and the Tea Party, as they soured and strangled things for the Democrats. No longer are they shell-shocked into silence, into apathy. They're struggling for power, and not sparing any rhetoric for such niceties as truth or practicality.
We're going to have to approach things a different way. If we can't unite people behind hope and change, we can at least united folks against a common enemy: the people who are taking away hope, preventing change.
The Republicans.
But if we're continuing to focus on kicking our own asses as a movement, that's going to quickly degenerate into a circular firing squad. We won't have the presence of mind to focus blame and focus responsibility on the Republicans. We'll be playing into the "mutual dysfunction" meme in the media, by implicating Obama and the Democrats in what really should be seen as the fault of the Republicans.
Republicans won't be shy about who they blame, but they won't have one advantage we do: a litany of proposals, bills, appointees, judges, and other things they have gone out of their way to interfere with, and a limited, but impressive record of legislation that shows that if we were unleashed, we could do some good for the nation. They also won't have the advantage of being substantially free from fault with the Downgrade. The Tea Party Downgrade must go down in history as the Tea Party Downgrade.
Let's not futz around trying to reform our party and counterattack the Republicans at the same time. Let's not be so dumb as to divide our attention. We've got a Republican Presidential candidate to defeat, and a Democratic Presidential candidate to elect, and we should make it clear that whatever Obama's flaws, a tree stump with mushrooms sprouting from the top would be a better choice than the Republican.
That will have the virtue of being true. We have a much better candidate than a tree stump, and... Well, if Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann are nominated on the other side, it will have the virtue of being true on many levels.
This next election will simply be about knocking heads, and getting the American people to enjoy knocking a Republican's head over all this should be our focus. And really, with all the bullshit the Tea Partiers have said and done, do you really think it will be that hard, if you put your mind to it?