I am sitting in South Carolina waiting on a call from Senator Max Baucus. What I am getting are calls from frustrated volunteers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. They called twice on Saturday and twice last week. They want money.
I have been one of those volunteers for Organizing for America, the Charleston County Democratic Party and several campaigns. I understand that these volunteers have a difficult, unpleasant job raising money on the phone.
No part of the Democratic Party, no part of our Federal Government, has more responsiblity for what has gone wrong in the last year than the Democrats in the United States Senate. They were given, at huge effort, the sixty votes they swore they needed. They were provided with a postive President ready to lead. They were backed by a huge majority in the US Congress and a massive grass roots effort.
We spent months making phone calls, going door to door and circulating sign up sheets. We held rallies, film nights, discussions, training sessions and events. We make phone calls to congress, wrote letters and edited You Tube videos. Nearly all of us did it for free. Those on the payroll did their jobs for very little. We sent the Democratic Party a Billion dollars.
And the Senate did very little with the historic opportunity of a generation. We got a health care bill which was better than nothing, which the process of producing they allowed to consume vast amount of energy and capital. They waited to see what the least they could do would be.
It is nice to be a US Senator. You get to hang around six years between elections. You can hide behind weird procedures which blur the responsibility for failure. The best part is, when you cave in to the big checkbooks, someone else always pays.
The House has passed over 200 important pieces of legislation. It's possible that far more of them will lose their reelection campaigns.
The President has seen the movement of a generation blunted. What may have been the last desperate surge of civic energy for progressive change left in the population has been allowed to dry up in the sand.
The Senate isn't in a hurry. We are. Speed and productivity are what we worked for.
Our position in South Carolina is a bitter and conflicted one. We failed to get a competent candidate on the ballot to challenge Senator Jim DeMint. Alvin Greene is a humiliating failure for every Democrat in South Carolina, including the few pretending we have a candidate. It's easy for a few people to confuse the sort of people we try to help with the sort of people we should try to elect. I can't explain Alvin Greene. He is a product of either incompetence or corruption, the only two things South Carolina can produce in abundance.
It was no consolation to clear the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had given up South Carolina for dead before any of us started work. Maybe they were right.
South Carolina has a teabagger candidate for Governor endorsed by Sarah Palin and a cabal of Republican candidates hell bent on further cutting education funding. They have mountains of money. We'll do the best we can in November.
We do, however, have hundreds of dedicated progressive activists which I would stand dollar for dollar and pound for pound against any state in the union. They spent over a year preparing for this election cycle.
We did all of this, and endured the mixed results of our efforts in hope that somewhere, there were Democrats who would support the President and act on the overwhelming problems taking over this country before the economy and the Planet reach the point of irretrievable collapse.
One thing is certain, very few of them were in the US Senate.
I and my beaten up friends in SC don't have all the answers, but under tough conditions we show up to do the work Democrats should do. The Senate didn't.