If there's one thing I've learned is that the most powerful people aren't the folks who get everything they want. It's the folks who show up to make sure that they have a chance to get it.
It seems to me that we're confusing two issues: whether we're satisfied with the government we have, and whether we're willing to reelect folks in charge. There's no point to reacting to your disappointment by failing to show up in 2012. Elections are won on the concentration of supporters who show up.
It galls me that I might have to support less than stellar candidates. I wanted better out of everybody. But it occurs to me that when you start out from horrible, it is not all that unlikely that your first choices, your first improvements will still represent shitty deals.
A lot of us think of ourselves as Keynesians. Well Keynes made the point, as I recently learned, that rather than having it easier, the folks who think and act with the long term in mind often get a lot of flack. We are told that it is better to fail conventionally, than succeed unconventionally.
The problem with Obama is that he's trying to succeed unconventionally, succeed for the long term, not merely fight everything on a short term basis. He's not looking to make a show of getting everything you want now.
There was a time when the Republicans were fighting the status quo, when their policies were made fun of. But they won over the long term because they kept showing up, and we stopped showing up. We started sensing our decline, and became a party to it by deciding that everything was going to hell, getting too compromised for our tastes.
It is this kind of inadvertant complicity that I fight here at DKos. When we decide TTFN, or GBCW, we only succeed, really, at marginalizing ourselves further. If we want to get more power in Washington, we've got to commit to sticking around. We cannot build a majority lying on our backs. We cannot wait for better politicians, because the market will continue to operate, and while we're sitting on our asses, the other people in this country who are committed to furthering their politics will get their way over our passive objections.
We have to be there, to affect the primary vote. We have to be there to be a constituency that will get attention when it doesn't show up. We have to be there, making our voices heard, reasonably and persuasively to other Americans, if we want people to move in our direction. We cannot expect the Republicans to consistently alienate enough people, lose enough supporters, to be out of the running for the majority all the time.
We got in the bad habit, during and after the Bush Administration, of accepting that. What we haven't figured on is the net effect of having the concentration of pundits, apologists and ass-covering incompetents that the GOP has. They're not going to sit still and kindly throw the game, they're going to try and make the stupid seem smart, the collosal unplanned errors seem like genius policies, they're going to try and scapegoat us for all they got wrong. We should not be sitting around hoping for people to come to their senses. We should be out there, whether we feel like it or not, actively persuading America that the Republicans have lost their senses, and that this, oddly enough, should be a disqualification for getting elected or re-elected.
Let's stop hoping for better from our party. Let's force better from it. Let's force better from this country, light a fire under its ass, and expose the Republicans for the boat anchors they are, holding America back. Let's quit waiting for Republicans to sell Democratic majorities, and lets start doing the job of selling Liberalism and progressive politics as a movement ourselves.