This is off a CNN site:
PCCC co-founder Adam Green theorized that if Obama doesn't fulfill the requests of his supporters during debt negotiations, he may be more poised to run as an independent in 2012 instead of in the Democratic primary.
When I read things like this, I tend to lower my head and say things like "You stupid motherfuckers." But that's not helpful to you in terms of understanding my mindset. So, let me be honest with you in another way, and tell you what leads me to be so frustrated with some on the left.
There's a sequence of events you will have to go through to successfully get the President you want. First you have to select somebody who will actually have a chance of getting the nomination. Second, they have to win against one of the most tireless and inventive political campaigners of modern time. Third, having defeated Obama they have to bring all the supporters, probably Obama himself into play to win what will surely be a brutal 2012 match up against a Republican Candidate who will smell blood in the water.
All that having happened, the new President will have to deal with a House and Senate of unknown composition, in unknown hands.
Lose the Presidency, and what can we expect of the President who takes office?
Well, look at the Bush Presidency. Can we assume that a Republican President will not make more cuts in spending, will not attempt to "reform" Social Security or Medicare? Can we assume that they will take the close election that will likely result, much less any victory broader than that, as a sign to tread carefully? Can we assume that anything will be safe if the Republicans gain additional majorities?
The answer to all these questions is no.
I've been at Watchblog for over seven and a half years, and have had to fight off all kinds of shit from actual Republicans. Not simply trolls, but real live Republicans. Trust me when I say that they will take any weakness on the part of our party now as reason to be emboldened about their agenda. Any lost election on a Democrat's part will be seen as reason to believe that the country is center-right, and moving that way every day. And they'll sell this to a generation of voters primed already to respond.
And really, what are the lessons that Democrats have drawn over time, as the party's sustained its losses? Anybody who thinks that Democrats will compromise less if we threaten to stay home on election day simply does not understand which way the concentration of viable voters swings when we leave the stage. More to the point, they seem, in my mine, to have forgotten just about thirty years worth of Democratic responses to Republican victories. Tell me, which way has Obama swung in the wake of the 2010 election? Right, or left? Have the Republicans learned their lesson and moderated their policy? No! They've decided that this is going to be the new 1994, and that they're going to sit there for a while. Instead of dreading a repetition of the example of 1995, they went right ahead and insisted on it, and added this collossally stupid Debt Ceiling confrontation on top of it.
You think these are the people who are going to let you have your progressive fantasy?
I'm not interested in progressive fantasy. I'm interested in the bloody-nose and skinned-knuckle realities of how we turn the tide against the Republicans, and turn the page on the history of their ascension.
We need to a constant force. By God, yes, tell them that Social Security and Medicare are off the table. But don't make stupid threats where you don't have alternative, and they do. Democrats have independents, moderates, and even the occasional Republican to appeal to, if all all else fails. Only if they know that their political survival is at stake, will they not look elsewhere.
Or, if they don't have anybody to give them anywhere else to look.
Look, I don't make these criticisms because I have some almighty gift for seeing the future. What I have is a memory of what Democrats have tried since the days of Michael Dukakis. And one thing, for sure, that we have tried, is sitting things out.
What seems to work in Republican's favor, through many elections, is that they won't sit elections out. And when they do? They lose. Funny how that works.
We need to be there all of the time, to be the voices that dominate the conversation, not the ones that fade into the background when rebuffed.
We seem to be playing this all too fair, with regard to the Republicans. We seem to be accepting that they're winning, the way they did not accept after 2008. If there's one reason why the Republicans are back in power, it's that they immediately counterattacked. They didn't wait for credibility or perfection, or any of those nice things to return before they started to put up a fight.
Unfortunately, where we are imitating the Republicans, we seem to be mimicking their stupidest tendency, which is their absolute ideological paranoia.
Remember that Watchblog site I told you about? one of the valuable things about my time there is that I encounter Republican die-hards firsthand, day in and day out. So I have some grasp here of what these people are thinking about their own party. It's not pretty. They hate the moderates and the liberals in their parties almost as much as they hate us. These are the people they depend upon to keep their party together, the people who would just as soon be rid of the moderate part of their party. They seem less than concerns aut how to appeal to the center, perhaps because they believe that they have their finger on the pulse of that center, and that if they're only given a chance, they can convince us all that they are right.
Seems like the zealots of all parties are similar in these respects.
The reality, I've found, for any policy, is that nothing gets through pure through our kind of government. Most strong policy develops in iterations. Whether those iterations are small or big, they usually don't develop all at once. This is good and bad. Bad, since in desperate times, we need the help quicker, but good in that we don't have to win everything in one fell swoop, once we've gotten our foot in the door.
Ah, but of course, the same goes for our rivals on the right! Given enough chances they can, and have pushed policy far from where it started, only a few decades ago. In the course of my lifetime, I've seen policies that were once absolutely unfeasible become unquestionable, and vice versa.
So, we've got a choice: play a long game with lots of innings, quarters, victories and setbacks, or keep on trying to gamble, short term, on achieving absolute miracles all at once. My sense is, that we should dedicate ourselves and summon up the will power to make whatever changes at whatever opportunity we can get, to become like a fast-moving river that will get into any weakness it discovers and scour out a hole in whatever is in its way.
We should not invest our passion in Barack Obama, or any man or woman. We shouldn't even invest it in the party itself. We should invest it in our cause, and in gathering the means to serve that cause, however great or small those means might be. That cause should transcend candidates, transcend election seasons, simply go beyond any limitation that failing might place on it. Rather than count on Obama, or the Democrats in Congress to carry us, we employ them opportunistically as a means to our ends. We should dispassionately weigh what our alternatives are. No bullshit about bogeymen, or President Palin. We should simply consider what we should should expect to see from a Republican these days in the White House. If we consider that with any degree of sane recollection of the Bush years, then that should be motivation enough to defeat whatever Republicans come our way.
No more waiting for the pain of the policies of the Republicans to motivate people. If the last ten years weren't motivation enough to do something to change things, then somebody should put a mirror near your mouth and nose to see if it fogs up, because I remember the last ten years fine, and I don't need another ten years to tell me that what we need is for the Republicans to experience a defeat so humiliating and divisive within their party that they trade roles with us for the next thirty or forty years.
If you want the sucky compromises to stop, the Republican Party must be broken. That should be our focus and first priority. Stop waiting for Obama or the party to get perfect enough to support. Start showing America that the time of the Republican's domination is over. If the GOP is a collapsed heap of debris, then there won't be much left to defer to, or compromise with, right?
The Republicans are doing much of the work themselves. We need to be the wall that the President can't back his way through. We need to push him, put him in a position where he can honestly tell the Republicans, I don't have a choice, I can't support this. Never mind what you fear he might do. You'll never get anywhere just reacting to your fears, tell him exactly what you want him to do, and what you don't want him to do.
We've got greater strength, wisdom, and intelligence than this. We shouldn't be so reactionary. We should think, consider the angles, and have a strategy about how we turn things to our advantage.