I want you to look at what Democrats got done in their few short years as an effective majority, and then look at the Republicans, and what they're doing right now. Understand this: the Republican's current legislative efforts are a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, for the most part.
For all their scary, intimidating threats to tear down the liberal edifice of big government, they're not planning this too terribly well. They're not building up to a confrontation, they're quickly picking dozens of fights, few of which they can actually win.
Once again, Republicans overpromised, and now they will underdeliver. Is that a cause to celebrate, to lay back? Not at all. It's an opportunity to push them back, to put them on the defensive, to lay the groundwork for our victory in 2012.
For all its frustrations, Obama's style of politics got our feet in the door on many counts. A great deal of the Republicans attacks are built on rolling back what we just rolled in.
The time has come to ask people why the Republicans, charged to create jobs, are primarily interested in an agenda that will literally cost millions of jobs across the country, why relitigating the last two years is so much more important than dealing with our current problems.
They'll say it's all that uncertainty, that job-killing socialism, that job-killing regulation.
But ask: how many jobs, ultimately, did Republicans getting what they want on all those counts actually create? Fewer than any other President's since WWII, even if you leave out the losses of the Recession.
This isn't about our jobs, what they're doing. No, this is about their friend's profits, and the continued, exclusive focus of the Republicans on what can be done for the rich and powerful.
Even if the Democrats weren't perfect on that count, they were not so bloody imperfect as the Republicans. There was a happier time, we can say, a more contentious, but more clear thinking time when we Democrats were in control, when the economy and the proper governance of the system were the main priorities.
There was a time, we can say, when the folks in charge were the ones who would fight for people, not for the powerful, and when the thought of losing so many jobs wasn't met with a "so be it."
Sure those times were harsh, we could say, and the din of argument was to where you could hardly think, but at least people were making progress. It's alright, we could say, to have second thoughts, to second guess a major new change in policy. But we ought to look at the policies the Republicans are enacting now, and realize that they were in error before, and they are still in error now, and we need to get back on the course of correcting those errors, now a bit sadder and wiser for this detour we took as a nation.
That should be our story. It's forgiving, it's got moral power, and it has the virtue of being true.
The time has come to push for a return to progress, to push for a return to recovery, to push for an end to the continued attempts of the Republican party to reengineer our society at the expense of the masses.