I agree with his assessment. In fact, I was saying this two years ago. It's really simple: as political actors, we're more worried about the fragility of our own political fortunes than we are about confronting the other side to reduces theirs.
The thing about Obama and other Democrats is that we can hold them accountable directly, more so than we can do with Republicans, who answer to Republican Primary voters, and who tend to be elected from districts that are, unsurprisingly, more full of right-wing voters willing to reward them for what we would punish.
We don't have to organize to strike at them, don't have to convince non-Democrats, even Republicans, to vote against somebody. We don't have to get out of our comfort zone. In the meantime, even if we don't get any policy out of it, we can reassure ourselves that we're true believers, not compromisers who might be getting played by the big boys in Washington, who might see the person they worked hard to support go a different way than we'd like. We don't have to tolerate disappointment, or accept less than the best.
In other words, we can behave like a minority. Emotionally, I think, that's still where a lot of us are at, and to be perfectly honest with you, that's the mentality I think the Republicans want us to have.
Cynical, so we descend into apathy rather than fight the right wing hijacking of the system.
Fickle, so the Democrats never develop a firm ideological base that will resist the GOP's advances, seek for different compromises.
Inconstant, so the Republicans never have to face ongoing, unceasing political pressure from the left.
Divided, so the Republicans don't have to fear for their fortunes, even if we have a majority to push against them.
And most important, more apt to blame both sides, often Democrats first, for how bad things are, so Republicans don't take the full withering heat of scorn, so the critical mass of anti-GOP sentiment doesn't get firmly fixed on them.
I will concede to my critics that many in Washington, including Obama sometimes, make it harder to sell our agenda as easily as we would prefer. They make compromises we dislike, they still talk the Republican talk, and they all too often fall for the Republican's bamboozlements.
But let's step back for a second: Republicans have stubbornly opposed Obama from day one. No matter how good a negotiator he's been, no matter how tough he's been at different junctures, the Republicans have always resisted him. They resist him in numbers. They resist him in unison. During the 2008-2010 Congress, They maintained a consistent 40 vote filibuster against most bills coming out of the house. This wasn't simply an accident. The weight of the negative reaction against those who crossed party lines early on to vote for the Stimulus should tell you something. Hell, it made Arlen Specter a Democrat. That, if you remember, is how we got to 60, that supposedly magic number that would allow us to magically pass every bill.
They always throw that number at us, ask us why we couldn't pass things with a "filbuster proof" majority. They said we controlled everything, even as they forced sixty vote supermajorities on even minor things.
There's a certain level of naivete in the electorate that aids the Republicans in this. They're not so familiar with the filibuster, and its devastating effect on our ability to pass even majority backed legislation. They just hear that so many bills got killed in the Senate. They also don't realize that the system has such a huge amount of inertia when it comes to the laws of the land, that policies often don't die unless somebody can single them out and pass legislation to undo them.
There are two major points, I think, to Republican's obstructionism.
The first is to maintain the default of thirty years worth of Republican dominance in the policies of the American government.
The second is to drive us so batshit bonkers over the failure to change anything that we just give up in shame, anger, disgust, whatever negative emotion you would like. They figure if they can break our hearts, or better yet, force the Democrats to break our hearts with their hellish compromises, our resistance to their policies will fail.
And having broken the opposition, they will rule the day. They'll keep on writing the policies, they'll keep on forcing their politics on the rest of us.
And we'll complain from the minority, safe in our cynicism, our apathy, our contempt for the system as a whole from the disappointments that come with having power, that comes from having to make hard choices.
My mindset, from the point that I realized that this was the game, was that Democrats needed to understand that Republicans weren't fighting for political purity, but power instead. In fact, the purism in their party is kind of the fly in the ointment, the weakness in the Party's structure. What most Republican saw in the Tea Party was a way to get quickly back into the thick of things, quickly recover the majorities they had lost to us, without actually reforming the party.
They needed the Tea Party because they had, in their cynicism, gutted the morale and trust of their own voters, their own followers. They didn't have the inclination to rehabilitate themselves, or the patience to wait for the voters to forgive and forget. They had to say "This time, we promise we'll get everything!"
The Tea Party was ready-made electoral energy, a ready-made supply of ideas (hideously bad ones, but original, at least), and best of all, the people forming their base wouldn't listen to those liberals.
Only problem is, the Republicans were taken too seriously on this by the Tea Partiers, and now the Tea Party is consistently the faultline along which their deals break. Just look at the vote totals on the Debt Deal and the earlier government shutdown deal.
Progressives say, let's be just like the Tea Party Republicans! Let's be fiercely dedicated and force our side to do what we want!
I'd say let's stop for a second and step back. I think the Tea Party represents something of a recapitulation of what happened with our party as a result of the defeats and disasters of the late sixties, only this time with the Conservatives. They're a symptom, to me, of a party that's so oversold it's basic ideology, yet so underperformed on it, that members no longer trust their leaders to lead. They've got a wishlist a mile long, and even the strongest expansion of their policies in decades won't satisfy them.
I think the Tea Party represents the fracturing of the Republican party that will only get worse over time, as those who recognize that the great-fun-joyride of decades worth of policy pushes hasn't been enough to establish the promised utopia, that the Democrats haven't just laid down and died out, that the pure policy initiatives once promised haven't come to pass, that the results they were told would come of those policies haven't come to pass, either.
To us, they may have won big victories, but for them, those victories are like ashes in their mouths. They know that somehow they've been made into the bad guys again. They know that this isn't all they could have gotten. The ones deluded enough to believe the claptrap about the default not being a problem, and the sudden end of so much of the government's spending being one, too, are now sitting around wondering why their people gave into our scare tactics (as they see them, we just think of them as frightening truths), wondering how they got a deal that doesn't go after the entitlements they wanted to cut.
So, do we want to imitate these people?
The truth about policy, and this seems to have been the case throughout my life, is that it's always hell to get change, because people fight you. That's why you have to be persistent, have to be involved, have to have a certain emotional robustness, especially when the other side's become such ideologues and obstructionists.
But it's also why you have to focus on who the real bad guys are, who's active trying to get in your way. The truth is, taking the fight successfully to the Republicans will stiffen more spines, shift the weather-vane sentiments of the politicians much better than any punishment of our own party that still leaves Republicans dominant, Republicans winning, and Republicans setting policy.
Let's stop getting played for chumps. Let's take the fight, however difficult that may be, to those who we really must defeat to get what want.