Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Win the issues. Don’t hope the issues will win.

By

The 2008 election bred a political complacency in the Democratic political class. It meant that we “won” the debate because, to his credit, Obama ran on the issues on which he plans to govern.

But the issue debate is never permanently won. It is never put to rest. It must be repeatedly won.

Neglecting to do that is how we end up playing catch up in a special election. Vague appeals to issues and values, desperate reliance on robocalls and GOTV cannot win elections if one has lost on the issues.

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  1. Has it occurred to you that perhaps people have heard “all this” and decided that the health care fiasco is disgusting. We are not a banana republic; maybe people are smarter than you give them credit for.  

    • From where I sit, the worst parts are abandoning single payer from the start, then not even putting up a fight for the public option.  The Nebraska craziness is  (IMHO) a result of compromising to the point where you can’t even get your own party to go along.

      <

      p>I’m not advocating it, but Bush was able to get more through with fewer votes by  ignoring and demonizing the opposition, then selling the hell out of everything he did.  Obama keeps reaching out and getting bitten.  He should learn…

    • Let them continue on their road of them “knowing everything” and the people are too stupid to be able to think for themselves. You could show them a poll of MA voters saying exactly why they voted for Scott Brown and they would still spin this into something because they can’t handle the truth.

      <

      p>Dems are coming out now saying they want to work with Republicans. The President just went public saying don’t JAM this down the GOP’s throat.

      <

      p>My advice, let them continue to pontificate amongst themselves and let their circular arguments bring them right back to Jan 19th in November.

    • Prior to the election, lots of diarists on this site offered excellent policy reasons as to why Scott Brown would be a worse choice than Martha Coakley. For the purposes of this diary, it didn’t make sense to me to repeat all that. This is another example, I think, of We Won’t Always Play With You.

      • beliefs do not by any stretch appeal to the majority of voters. Your link to “We Won’t Always Play With You” is sad in the sense that none of us has changed anyone else’s thinking. And how, pray tell, is a discussion of a girl’s horse relevant as to why Scott Brown would be a worse choice than Martha Coakley? Along with the rants about “Teddy’s Seat,” that particular post was absurd.  The reality is that your side lost; this is not politically correct little league baseball where everyone can consider themselves winners.

        • Losing the moral high ground must seem like a small price.  

          <

          p>Reason and honor are overrated, n’est-ce-pas?

          • defending the horse post, are you?  Or that somehow this senate seat was a Kennedy legacy?  

            • It was about Scott Brown playing poor.  But you knew that.  

              <

              p>Life is going to be so much easier for you now that you don’t care about honor.  I’m almost jealous.  

              • the poor are democrats. No, the BMG Horse Post was an attempt to belittle Brown for the fact that his daughter had a yuppie hobby, and supposedly a very expensive one at that-so he couldn’t possible be like the rest of us. Sort of like John Kerry in reverse, trying to be like Everyman when he said, “Where can I get me some ammo for this shotgun?”

      • Prior to the election, lots of diarists on this site offered excellent policy reasons as to why Scott Brown would be a worse choice than Martha Coakley.

        <

        p>What a disappointing defense.

        <

        p>Most on here are liberals. We agree with the policy positions. That’s not enough. We need to go out and convince 50% + 1 of the total voters to agree with us on the issues and cast a ballot for our candidate. Clearly, we failed.

        <

        p>I don’t buy the argument that the people have “heard all this” and don’t agree. It can’t be left at that.

        <

        p>Sometimes (this time) we need to get them to reaaaaalllllly agree with us to overcome a candidate they don’t like as much.

        <

        p>If people don’t like the Democratic Health Care proposals floating around Washington, that’s OUR fault. If they feel like they haven’t gotten enough information about it, that’s OUR fault. The burden is on each and every political entity to convince a majority of people that they are right.

        <

        p>There is no other option.

        <

        p>Democrats have not done enough to convince people. It’s that simple. We’re losing too many unenrolleds and even Democrats because we haven’t given them enough convincing information.

        <

        p>Save some money on the GOTV calls next time. People knew when the election was and whether they were going to vote for Martha. 8 extra calls were not going to do it for 100k people.

        <

        p>The campaign was clearly caught flat-footed with a candidate that didn’t have the ability to ignite voters on short notice and without a pre-existing base of support for the most important issues. I blame Martha first, she’s the candidate. Then her campaign, the state party, the city and town committees, the DNC and the DSCC.

        • I think your comment says what my diary says. However, you miss what I’m arguing about. Here are a few other explanations for the election loss:

          • Coakley was a bad candidate.
          • Democrats weren’t fired up enough and didn’t campaign enough for her.
          • Scott Brown was an extremely good demagogue.

          What you and I are asserting is different from the above explanations.

          <

          p>What EdgarTheArmenian wants to argue about, I think, is whether the policy positions are correct.

          <

          p>Important certainly, but elsewhere. Not germane here. So this wasn’t a defense so much as gavel.

        • If people don’t like the Democratic Health Care proposals floating around Washington, that’s OUR fault.

          <

          p>It is not MY fault that the Senate Democrats passed horse shit maneur that 70% of America hates, when they had a 20 seat majority. That’s pretty much Obama and the Senate Democrats’ faults.

          <

          p>2/3rds of this country loved health care with a public option. Rather than twisting a handful of arms (literally), the White House preferred to piss off an additional 1/3rd of America. Now, the only people who like the bill are the people who are so desperate to pass anything, no matter how odious, that they don’t mind being shit on in the process. Sorry, Ezra (and Charley), I’m just not into scat.

          • I was reflecting some more on this.

            <

            p>It seems to me that there are two choices politically:

            • You stick to principles. You campaign hard to get the a public option into the bill. It’s clear that you’re principled. You get voters support.
            • You realize you aren’t going to get the bill you want. You make tactical compromises. You clearly explain to the public why the net good is worth the compromises. You’re principled but flexible. You get voters support.

            Instead, what the Obama Administration did could be described as

            • You realize you aren’t going to get the bill you want. You make compromises. You hope that the public remembers the principles that make this important. They don’t. You lose your governing majority.

  4. A candidate can say anything to get elected, and — with enough television advertising — find enough people willing to believe it;
  5. A candidate can run as an “independent thinker” (see above) after voting with his party 96% of the time, conveniently avoiding the stigma of his party’s all-time-low approval ratings, all the while cashing the checks coming in from the RNCC et al;
  6. Accurately representing an opponent’s party affiliation, voting record, and stated positions on the issues, is negative campaigning, and lying about those is not;
  7. White, male, hetero, teabag anger is a legitimate grass-roots groundswell, and liberal, black, gay, or female anger is tossed off as a joke;
  8. A significant number of voters are willing to vote for change, then vote to flush change down the toilet 14 months later;
  9. Major news outlets  — even when not overtly campaigning on behalf of a candidate like Fox did — can create a self-fulfilling prophesy, turning a not-close race into a close race into a come-from-behind victory with (at best) lazy, shoddy, or (at worst) biased political reporting;
  10. Conservatives are allowed to run the country whether in the majority or the minority.

    11. <

    p>Explaining (which, in this case, I presume means telling the truth; conservatives are always “explaining” things that they assume we liberals are too dense to understand) works great in a system that hasn’t been corrupted beyond repair.

    <

    p>It’s amazing to me that long after we’ve stopped blaming rape victims, Democrats still blame themselves for disasters like these.  That can only happen because people are in denial that the system is broken, and it can’t be fixed until we face that fact.

    • It’s amazing to me that long after we’ve stopped blaming rape victims, Democrats still blame themselves for disasters like these

      <

      p>Democrats own most–if not all–of this disaster.  Not four months ago after the primary she held a nearly 40 point lead.   Coakley decided at that point she was entitled to that senate seat.  And she had plenty of help facilitating her in that fantasy.  

      <

      p>Nearly all of the bullets you list were also in effect when Obama won this state with 56% of the vote.   Hell, most of that stuff has been going on, to lesser and greater degrees, now for years.  And Democrats have been winning in Massachusetts right along.  

      <

      p>Let’s be honest here:  Martha Coakley blew it and she had a fair amount of support in her self-immolation from Democratic party “campaign managers” and “strategists.”  

      <

      p>Democrats at the leadership level and Martha Coakley herself, complete with her disdain for the unwashed masses,  are to blame here and no one else.  

      • Yes, she & her campaign staff made big bad errors.

        <

        p>It is false to accuse her of “disdain for the unwashed masses.”  She didn’t take up the cause of protecting the unearned bonuses of Wall Street’s Titans like Scott Brown did.  She worked hard for ordinary people as AG, and didn’t let corporations run roughshod over the law.

        <

        p>It just doesn’t add up that she hates people.  Her comment about not wanting to shake hands in the cold at Fenway was most likely just saying the pain of the cold outweighed the gain of a few votes… she probably could have gotten more votes going to a heated church service or an indoor union meeting.  (And should have done that on Dec 19th!)

        <

        p>In every election Republicans & the media spin offhand comments into WAY more than they actually mean–it’s a trap for Democrats to think that they should have done the things the Republicans did on the way to the Republican’s victory.

        • Did you read her quote in the Globe about shaking hands?  In the cold?  Outside Fenway Park?  Are you really suggesting that’s what she really meant?  If you are, then you may be the only one because, I’ll tell ya, all my coworkers read it like I (and Jon Stewart) did. And are you really saying that people-to-people contact doesn’t win races?  That’s patently absurd and you should know better.  Getting out there, knocking on doors, and asking people–to their faces–for their votes wins elections when you’re running for an office for the first time.  And standing outside of Fenway Park would have given her access to the very voters she didn’t get.  

          <

          p>There’s a difference between caring for people as an abstract idea and pursuing policies that benefit them.  It’s quite another, however, to mingle, make appearances, demonstrate in an interpersonal way, you know “where they live,” that you care about them, and that you desire their votes.  Good grief.  Are we really having this conversation?  

      • …to clarify, let’s not exclusively blame the party and the candidate without paying some attention to the elephant in the room.  And if people are saying that Coakley would have won if everything had been the same except that she had campaigned harder, or shook more hands, or gone on the attack sooner, I don’t necessarily buy that.

        <

        p>What everyone is saying we/she should have done and what was done is not significantly different except in degree:  Democrats expect the weight of their ideas and values to carry the day every time; if that’s the mistake, then explaining the ideas and issues until people’s eyes roll up into their heads is a variation of the same mistake, since it’s apparent that to win, you need the support (whether you’re Obama, G.W. Bush, Brown, Bill Clinton, or Deval Patrick) of a lot of people who don’t even know what the hell they’re voting for.

        <

        p>The last thing a candidate with a 40-point lead wants to do is bring any attention to her opponent by even mentioning his name.  That is a basic and well-tested strategy used by campaigns of all stripes, as is the idea that resources should be conserved unless they’re needed, not to mention how difficult it is to recruit volunteers and raise money when it looks like a slam dunk.  If you tried to run a full-press grass-roots campaign every time, eventually everyone burns out and you can’t get anyone interested anymore.

        <

        p>For Democrats to either say “we don’t need to campaign to win” or “we should have campaigned harder/sooner, etc.” displays the same arrogance, in that both assert that Democrats have control over what happens.  Sometimes there are forces that take over and overwhelm any other dynamics.  I think that once it started to snowball, this one may have played out the same way even if the Coakley campaign had done everything right.

        <

        p>If the Boston Globe decides to invent a competitive race from whole cloth, they have the power to do that.  Her nothing-to-lose opponent is going to take whatever she does — whether it’s run a low-key campaign, push hard, go on the attack, or whatever — and turn it into a negative; the story gets picked up not as propaganda but as analysis, and away we go.

        <

        p>You know as well as I do that Scott “That’s Senator To You” Brown has more “disdain for the unwashed masses” than Martha Coakley does — people who’ve met her think she’s great, and people who’ve met him have found out he’s an asshole.  The fact that even people in her own party are parroting the “Cold Martha” meme illustrates how powerless the truth is when the Eric Fehrnstroms, Karl Roves, and Lee Atwaters of the world get their groove on.

        <

        p>My main point is that until someone shows some interest in fixing the problem, which is that good ideas, experience, character, and qualifications don’t matter anymore, hair-splitting discussions about tactical subtleties are irrelevant.

        • Ayla is worshipped by lots of young people in Mass — This gives him both added young voters and parents who will be swayed to turn out to vote the way they kids want them to vote.    Gail Huff with years as a well liked news anchor and connections in all levels of Boston media.     Everything bad about Coakley was magnified in the media.   The only thing about this election that surprised me was that it was as close as it was.    

      • Hindsight is of course easy.

        <

        p>I wanted to give Coakley a fair chance for my primary support but she hid for most of that campaign. How she won the primary so easily still escapes me. I can understand the strategy of not wanting to appear with your opponent when you’re the frontrunner, but what about appearing at all?

        <

        p>If you’re going to hide from the voters, why run for office?

        <

        p>I’ve been told that Coakley is a very capable, caring person; it’s too bad her campaign failed to communicate this.

  11. My biggest complaint about the Obama administration is the tendency to sacrifice principle in the name of compromise. Sure you need votes to win, but the machinations Obama has gone through to get e.g. healthcare reform through have hurt both him and the resulting product.

    <

    p>As I was writing this, a friend sent me a link from the Guardian.  Dan Kennedy says it better:

    <

    p>

    Obama’s attempts to find compromise solutions did not stop Republicans from labelling him as a radical – or their nutty tea-party allies from calling him a “socialist” and worse. And, in retrospect, that was going to happen no matter what he did. His real problem has been that, to his supporters, he looked as though he’d been sucked into the very system he was elected to reform. Thus an Obama ally like Martha Coakley, a loyal Democratic apparatchik who’d long been criticised for her reluctance to take on political corruption in Massachusetts, became the perfect foil. (Coakley is best known for prosecuting Louise Woodward, a British nanny accused of killing a baby in her care.)

    For Obama, the lesson of Coakley’s defeat is that he needs to start fighting for principle the way he did during his campaign. Had he demanded and won a stimulus package big enough to restart the jobs engine, and if he’d insisted on a stronger healthcare bill and pushed for quick passage, he’d be in far better shape politically right now.

    There are signs that he and other Democrats understand their dilemma. The House of Representatives may pass the Senate version of the healthcare bill intact, thus bringing the months-long process to a merciful close. Maybe then they can start explaining to the public what’s in it for them – something they have failed at pathetically for many months.

    • Here:

      Mr. Obama was right to press for health care reform. But he spent too much time talking to reluctant Democrats and Republicans who never had the slightest intention of supporting him. He sat on the sidelines while the Republicans bombarded Americans with false but effective talk of death panels and a government takeover of their doctors’ offices. And he did not make the case strongly enough that the health care system and the economy are deeply interconnected or explain why Americans should care about this huge issue in the midst of a recession: If they lose their jobs, they lose their health insurance.

      Mr. Obama has not said or done the right thing often enough when it comes to job creation and housing. He appointed an economics team that was entwined with the people and policies that nearly destroyed the economy. He made compromises that resulted in a stimulus bill that wasn’t big enough or properly targeted. Even now, despite a new, rather awkward populist tone, serious relief for homeowners is lacking and financial regulatory reform is in danger of being hijacked by banking lobbyists and partisan politics.

  12. as well as our unbelievably primitive GOTV techniques.    I dont agree that it is about the issues.    I think it is rarely about the issues.   In fact, in big elections it seems to me that the better presentation and the foggier one is on specifics of issues the more likely the candidate to win.  

    <

    p>That said our media wanted Scott Brown to win and therefore he won.  

    • Politicians get away with vagueness because it fits within a useful narrative. The narrative we should have had is that the country’s in a bad way, the Democratic agenda will improve matters, elect a Democrat to advance it, and prevent Republicans from blocking it.

      <

      p>Instead, both Brown and Coakley campaigned on health care reform. Both of them. It’s a national failure that that did not cause Brown to be crushed.

      • Campaigning is a sales and marketing job. Along with being able to win an issues debate, a campaign also needs to be able to make people “get over” other things that prevent them from voting for a candidate. I heard an analogy on the radio the other day (I don’t remember where so I can’t credit it properly) that I am going to expand on.

        <

        p>Suppose you are a Detroit automaker – I’ll pick Ford because that’s the one the other person cited – and you’ve really cleaned up your act and are now making good, quality cars that people would be happy to own. If someone looking for a car took a purely logical approach and weighed all of the parameters (features, cost, reliability, etc.), they might pick a Ford as their best option. But if family, friends, neighbors, and the media have been pounding in the message for years that Detroit doesn’t make good cars, that buyer might not even get to that step.

        <

        p>The same is true in a campaign. If there is something at the front about a candidate that turns off a voter (and I saw plenty of that regarding all four candidates in the primary), they will never get around to weighing the issues, or that weighing process will be distorted by the preconceptions.

        • I used to hear a lot of people say “All I know is …”

          <

          p>That’ll stop them from buying Fords or voting Coakley.

  13. I fear that our passionate discussion distracts us from some fundamental truths:

    <

    p>

    • A majority of Americans (something on the order of 60%) still want a strong public option.
    • A majority of Americans want single-payer.
    • A majority of Americans think the government should stay out of decisions properly made between a man or woman and his or her doctor.
    • A majority of Americans are furious at big business, furious at big banks, furious at big financial institutions, and furious at big insurance companies.

    <

    p>I think we forgot that America supports our positions and voted for us because of that.

    <

    p>I think that when we started caving in a failed attempt to win over a resolutely intransigent GOP, we forgot to say WHY we were caving and WHO we were caving to.

    <

    p>It is true that the current mess on the table that we call “Health Care Reform” has only about a 33% approval rating.

    <

    p>What is NOT true is that this is the “DEMOCRATIC health care bill” or, even more hilariously, “Obamacare”. It is neither.

    <

    p>President Obama made a masterful and effective change of course in his press conference this afternoon. I sincerely hope we follow his lead.

    <

    p>Here is what I think we should be saying:

    <

    p>”Democrats remain committed to a collaborative approach to solving the many problems that face us. We celebrate diverse points of view, we welcome creative and pragmatic suggestions from whatever source, and accept that constructive conflict is always a part of such diversity. We have zero tolerance for those who are not collaborative, for those who seek only to say ‘NO’.”

    • I think we forgot that America supports our positions and voted for us because of that.

      And the thing that stands out is that the Congress and Obama did not stand up and support those positions. If a majority of your constituents voted for you because they thought you were going to make a set of changes, and if you are part of a similarly-elected majority, yet you do not make any of those changes, look out. People are going to react in ways you won’t like.

      <

      p>I hope Senator Kerry and all of the MA representatives will stand up and be visible in arguing strongly for progressive positions. I don’t mean issuing position statements on their blogs or press releases – I mean actually arguing and pushing the positions, confronting the Blue Dogs and the Republicans, making some real noise that the media can’t just ignore the way they have done.  

      • that such capitulation is a pragmatic necessity … if the agents that force that capitulation are clearly named and labeled for what they are.

        <

        p>If it is the GOP that forces these failures, then say so. If it is corporate political sponsors who force it, then say so. We were able to do it effectively when the rightwing stuck their collective foot up their butts in the Schiavo debacle, we should have done the same for the Stupid amendment (and Mike Capuano did, to his credit).

        <

        p>I think enough American voters are mature enough to deal with the reality of just how badly a generation of failed rightwing economics have screwed things up, if our political leaders make clear who’s side they’re on and who the bad guys are. We have to start calling them bad guys.

        <

        p>The first great failing of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and even the White House staff has been their unwillingness to shut the door to rightwing obstructionism.

        <

        p>The second great failing of the same leadership team has been their unwillingness (and I think genuine discomfort) to fire up the passions of the Hispanic and African-American constituencies that strongly support our agenda and that more than balance the passion demonstrated by the various rightwing loonies. Those two demographic segments, taken together, are already a majority and are growing. I think Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the mainstream media are, for whatever reasons, extraordinarily reluctant to face that reality and its political consequences. Jeremiah Wright is not a looney-tune extremist (at least in comparison to his counterparts on the right).

        <

        p>These are serious issues and intense passions. We do risk violence in the streets — the problem is the incredible concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny number of white men. We cannot solve the problems of our economy and culture without, one way or another, getting some of that wealth and power back into the hands of the rest of us. There is precious little historical evidence that such a change has ever been done peacefully.

        <

        p>If there is to be force and violence, I would rather it be the violence of federal authorities at Little Rock forcing an end to racist segregation laws than the violence of German authorities looking the other way on Kristallnacht.

        <

        p>There is a time to compromise, and a time to hold firm.

        <

        p>It’s time to take names and kick butt.

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