I expected the blow back after the party's failures from the usual propagandists, but at this point, we are now in "faith based" territory in which people who are losing are claiming to be "pragmatic."
This is not about being called a progressive or a pragmatist. Or whatever else you care to call yourself. This diary is about losing strategies.
If you don't realize it yet, you are losing. You have been losing. You will continue to lose.
If you were winning, I would care. But, the leadership is losing.
The leadership is losing because of bad policies that are harming the American middle class (that the leadership continues to sign off on), and no one cares to hear fear mongering in the midst of the economic terror that they already face. The stats are telling:
""Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?
Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.
Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.
The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s."
LINK
The American people are to busy suffering to listen to whining. The leadership is losing electorally:
"Massachusetts voters who backed Barack Obama in the presidential election a year ago and either switched support to Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown or simply stayed home, said in a poll conducted after the election Tuesday night that if Democrats enact tougher policies on Wall Street, they'll be more likely to come back to the party in the next election.
A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that "Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street." A full 95 percent said the economy was important or very important when it came to deciding their vote.
In a somewhat paradoxical finding, a plurality of voters who switched to the Republican -- 37 percent -- said that Democrats were not being "hard enough" in challenging Republican policies."
LINK
The leadership is losing because politicians in the DC bubble are concenred about their electoral futures, and unlike the leadership, they see the handwriting on the wall for November 2010:
"In a private meeting in the Capitol just now, a dozen or more House liberals bluntly told Nancy Pelosi that there was no chance that they would vote to pass the Senate bill in its current form — making it all but certain that House Dems won’t opt for this approach, a top House liberal tells me.
“We cannot support the Senate bill — period,” is the message that liberals delivered to the Speaker, Dem Rep Raul Grijalva told me in an interview just now.
Some had hoped Pelosi would push liberals to get in line behind this approach, in hopes of expediting reform, but that didn’t appear to happen in this meeting. Pelosi mostly listened, Grijalva said, adding: “We didn’t get any declarative statement from her.”
LINK
After Tuesday, it became clear that there is not enough people even in liberal MA who buys what the leadership is selling anymore. Nor, was Tuesday really the first sign- look at both the polling regarding the Virginia and New Jersey election (in both cases the base was depressed) and then there is 1994, which happened after NAFTA pissed off the electorate. Everyone knows the calculus has changed. Pragmatists don't ignore reality.
Politics is like being the best gun fighter in the Old West. You are not measured by the last fight. You measured by the one in front of you. The leadership won in 2008. The leadership did crap since 2008 to win the next battle. It is now 2010. They are losing now. The clock on the elections of November 2010 is ticking.