When we talked about hope the last time in the election, we talked about the hope that we could do things. We talked about gaining for ourselves the means to change the policies that were steadily destroying our country's economy, it's international position and prestige, our military, and our rule of law.
Now we're faced with the possibility that the Republicans might prevent us from doing all these things. We're faced with an administration that compromises out of a pragmatic and political impulse.Is this the time for us to despair? No, quite the contrary. If we despair and lose hope, then we drain away our ability to confront them, to at least stalemate the fight, if not win it.
We need to stop thinking about how bad things are now for us. Instead, we need to consider how bad things can get if we fail, and how good things can be if we succeed. We need to look past the present moment towards the future.
Is it we or the Republicans who got ourselves so focused on the here and now of our policy, of our intentions? Actually, the question is irrelevant. Either way, it's a problem, and we need to make our next moves not to react to current conditions, but in anticipation of what it will take to get what we want out of the system.
It may come to pass that in this election and the next, that our greatest challenge is not challenging Republican supremacy on the ideological front, but our own failings on the pragmatic front, and the immediate dark gloom that this casts on us. People might go with the Republicans out of some anti-establishment fervor, which they are stoking with the Tea Party Movement.
We face a deficit not of numbers, not of real power, but of the willingness to use that power. I can't think of a quicker way to kill a superior force on the political battlefield, than to gut its morale. The Republicans have done that, by engaging in a campaign of obstruction historic in its proportions. No other Senate minority has been such an anchor on its majority counterpart, and now there is absolutely nothing we can do in the Senate, beside the abolition of the filibuster as it now stands, to avoid it: we are going to get obstructed.
Our only chance, really, is to look beyond the present moment. Stop despairing, stop beating ourselves up. We are blaming on our own weakness what we should be blaming on the Republican's callous disregard for duty, and our own tendency to underestimate ourselves. We must step up to the plate, and we must guide Americans to understand the situation going on with the filibuster. Let us go door to door to tell Americans about the crime, the con job being perpetrated on them by the Republican Party, a fraud of epic proportions designed to put those responsible for our state of crisis back in charge of the country
Do we want this to happen? If it's our fate, so be it, but what business, knowing what we know, do we have simply letting it happen? We have to stop reacting immediately to what's going on now, and take the long view, and act according to that.
Never fricking mind whether the other Democrats out there are doing this. I know some of you will try excusing your despair on the basis of so many others sharing it, about it being useless to deal with those in Washington.
The reality is, though, that if we just balk at it because it's hard, because so many difficulties stand in our way, we will roll right back into that bad groove we've been running around for years now. Today should be the day we stop taking no for an answer in Washington, that we stop letting the Republicans flood the field with bad information and with slander against us. The time has come to stand firm, and we can't do that by constantly reminding ourselves how weak and ineffectual we are.
We need to show up on election day and get people to show up on election day. We need to win the fight to set the tone and guide the result, not declare it over and let the Republicans win by default.