I am voting for Scott Brown. Warren maybe smarter even better but we have Kerry, Whitehouse etc
if we are going to work with Republicans we need a few that we are on the same page with, that are moderate.
Please share widely!
Reality-based commentary on politics.
let’s vote for Warren, but work to get Scott Brown protected under the Endangered Species Act. 😉
no cigar. He is a Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell Republican. No thanks.
…if I could find one – Scott Brown fails that test in a big way. The last Republican I voted for was Lowell Weicker, when I lived in CT. He lost to Lieberman, and I’ve always been happy with my vote.
You think it’s been hard working with the Republicans for the last four years? Wait until you see what it’s like with Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader.
even Bill Weld, though it’s a stretch for me.
But this is all about protecting a Dem Majority in the Senate my friend, and besides Scott Brown is no moderate having cast too many contradictory votes that show his stripes as a rigid conservative hiding under a moderate snakeskin.
that had people like Jacob Javits and Everett Dirksen in it. Scott Brown is nothing like that. He’s got a free pass from the GOP Senate leadership to cast a few small votes against his party so he can campaign in Massachusetts on being a moderate. He isn’t one. But everyone is right, even a Javits or Lincoln Chafee would be dangerous in an election when control of the Senate is on the line.
Screw ’em.
I don’t want to ‘work with them,’ I want them run out of town.
for alcohol abuse, you don’t let the person continue to run the liquor store while he or she is recovering. The republicans need to hit rock bottom just like the Whigs did before the Civil War or they will never recover or evolve into anything reasonable (or human). Just like Kirk said about the Klingon Home Word, “Let Them Die!!”
I’ve read all week.
We can’t work with these Republicans. Obama tried.
And trying to rebuild the GOP with Scott Brown is like trying to reduplicate a Great Pyramid with Silly Putty.
I rejected this argument in the 90s when Weld ran against Kerry. It isn’t so clear to me that Kerry’s votes for Tom Daschle and Harry Reid were really worth it.
Essentially, the argument here is that we should vote for Harry Reid. But he zzzzzzzzzzz. Sorry dozed off there thinking about Harry Reid.
…keeping the issue of Mitt’s tax returns squarely in the public eye. Say what you will about his style as majority leader, he’s played some great politics with that issue, bringing it up again on the senate floor this past Tuesday in the wake of the 47% comments by Romney.
Say Brown were to majorly buck his party in the Senate. What would happen?
He would doubtless be hit by a primary challenge to his right. The independents who drive things in Massachusetts have little ability to support him from the center, because unenrolled voters don’t get to vote in the primary without leaping through hoops.
Democrats would rather vote for a guy who seems to be awfully close to an illegal gambling ring than vote for a Republican, because they “vote the party, not the man.” Evidently getting Harry Reid back in the driver’s seat will really make a big difference in our country’s future. So they would let him burn rather than help him anyway.
So, protracted bucking of his party, as demanded here, would be all risk-no reward for Brown, and would simply redound to the benefit of Team Democrat.
Then, said Democrats will piously complain how polarization is purely caused by meanie Republicans who stole our ball and won’t give it back, waa.
Sure seems to me like the extinction of moderate Republicans has as much to do with the gleeful willingness of Team D to watch them go. For the good of the nation, you see.
The recent demise of moderate Republicans was the gleeful success of the TeaParty and the my-way-or-the-highway GOP leadership. Brown is certainly not one of these ‘moderates’ – his few bi-partisan votes were intentionally and mathematically unimportant.
lies with Republicans — and maybe moderate voters. Why’s it our responsibility to protect the Lugars, Spectors, and Voiniviches of the world from primary challenges?
You play in this awful party system. I just explained how the system is practically designed to produce polarization.
That is why I would advocate measures at almost every level to break the power of the political parties. Open primaries, all the time, always, and voters can vote in both primaries if they so choose. Schwartzenegger plan for redistricting. It would be better for committee assignments to be done by lottery than by fiat of “party leaders.” No punishments of an apostate by choosing who does and doesn’t get financial support: if you are running as a Democrat, you get pro rata share of party funds, period. Etc.
The labels “Democrat” and “Republican” should be loose and amorphous labels chosen by candidates for general self-descriptive purposes only– kind of like “Red Sox fan.” We don’t live in a parliamentary democracy, and we were foolish to allow this accretion of rules that would be more appropriate if we were.
… how do you figure it’s taken over 200 years to get to where we are. The system hasn’t changed.
As far as parties are concerned, I believe they are a natural consequence of a one person one vote system when mixed with our particular federal structure. That is to say, if we had Britain’s structure, you’d see emergence of niche parties with actual power and if Britain had our federal structure, you’d quickly see bifrication of the vast vast majority of the electorate into two parties.
Other voting systems might ameliorate this as well.
That doesn’t make it a good thing.
I think it more likely that the shared experience of the Depression and the war gave an artificial sense of unity that lasted for a good 25 years, then faded, and is now gone.
I’m fine with two parties. What irks me is the power wielded by the parties over its members. I don’t want to abolish the parties, I just want to greatly weaken them by making them fluid and unable to exact retribution for departures from the party line.
At present, the two tails of the bell curve are empowered at the expense of the top of the curve.
In the sixties, the Democratic and Republican parties each had two or more factions. It was possible to pull together majorities that picked and chose from each party.
Currently, the Republicans have decided to move completely in lockstep and excommunicate those who don’t. While there have been a few primary challenges “from the left” among Democrats, few have succeeded. Joe Lieberman is still a Senator.
Reasons for that (1) liberals constitute at most 50% of Democrats & polling sometimes shows a smaller percentage, (2) the Democratic base, unlike the Republican base, loves compromise, (3) the Democratic Party’s members in Congress cover almost the entire range of political opinion, from Tory to Labor, from Green Party to Christian Democrat, in any European country, so there’s much less unity among them.
It is the Republicans practicing parliamentary politics, refusing compromise and coalition building at every term and sharply whipping their party to vote in lockstep whether its for Bush era bad big government and unfunded wars or Obama era obstructionism. Nakedly partisan and all they serve to do is to get back in power so they can redistribute my hard earned tax dollars to corporate welfare queens that backed them.
I agree with a lot of what you say, I do think the jungle primaries have been rather foolish in California since competitive redistricting still leaves districts where there is a big D or R majority, and we have inanities like the Sherman-Berman race where identical Democrats who used to be friends have wasted the last two years hammering each other and wasting millions of campaign cash instead of doing their jobs. With the two rounds of primaries and a general election these guys will have run against each other three times.
That said Abel Maldonado is a centrist Republican running as a moderate against a left of center Dem, the kind of races we used to see a lot of in the Northeast and Midwest, so competitive redistricting can work. Redistricting by Dem and Rep dominated state leges definitely helped wipe out the Gypsy Moths and Blue Dogs, but there are still more Blue Dogs than Gypsy Moths because our party has a bigger tent.
You have to concede that the Tea Party did Shays and Simmons in, did Castle in, and arguably will do Tisei in since he has to endorse Ryancare and Boehner and can’t run as too independent of his party. Democrats had nothing to do with those loses. If Tisei ran on clean elections, campaign finance, Simpson Bowles, and strongly voting against his leadership on gay rights issues than I could respect him. Instead he is bragging about all the pork Boehner can get him and supports Ryancare-thats not bold independent leadership in my book. What should have happened with Tierney is a primary challenge, but I could survive a single term of Tisei if it brought a better Dem in, but I had higher hopes for him that he has dashed with his campaign.
I assume you meant undeclared voters, but in any case, when I voted in the recent primary, I was asked which ballot I wanted. That was the hoops. I’m curious, and since I don’t remember your writing about it – what is your position on requiring ID to vote?
Also, I really don’t know what you’re saying here:
But now having voted, you are no longer unenrolled. You are a [whatever you voted in]. That means that if you want to choose again next time, you must go back to town hall and re-unenroll. That is a hoop.
This hasn’t been true in Massachusetts for some time now. See The Secretary of the Commonwealth (emphasis mine):
CMD’s description of how things used to work here is accurate, but it’s been changed. Now, if you show up at a primary election unenrolled, you leave unenrolled, regardless of which ballot you took.
Paul Krugman, 8/15/2012
Listen to the vitriol above about Republicans. We need change in this country but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Maybe if we (GOP) won everything we could make some changes to get things going but that would be a longshot (but possible).
If we have a split decision (GOP wins Senate or POTUS) then we still have gridlock, we lose both then we still have gridlock. The your team sucks attitude only makes it worse but I guess that is what we’ll have for now and going forward.
by Republican Senators? Many more than under Bush.
I was referring to both our teams having that attitude. I may feel strongly about my positions but I am not in favor of gridlock regardless of who is causing it. Judicial nominations should be voted on up/down which I have always supported.
that sucks, but I think the Democrats are serious about filibuster reform this time. If their timing had been better, they would have let the GOP use the nuclear option instead of the listening to the Gridlock 14 (love those bipartisans). There would have been some political advantage to losing the filibuster during GOP rule.
This time around, the Democrats, I believe, are serious about returning the filibuster to a 30 hour speech with other limits.
I agree that if you’re going to filibuster then make them work for it!
I’d also had all the nominations for the State Department, ambassadorships and several regulatory agencies as well. Its really a stretch but the Republicans are actually against non-partisan technocratic government if their man isn’t making the appointments. Thats just sad. I do remember David and others praising Lindsey Graham for his Sotomayor vote and I hope, that the support of voting for a justices qualifications instead of their ideology continues. My only issue with you johnd is that if these are your views and those, presumably, of a lot of Republicans than why don’t you pressure your members to vote the right way?
The debate within Democratic circles concerns how partisan the Democratic Party ought to be. With your like/dislike view of the world this is difficult to understand because strongly disliking someone looks like a character flaw.
The healthcare discussions proved it was impossible to work even with Olympia Snowe, the most liberal of the Republican Senators. If Republican fealty to ideology and obstruction is going to win out over policy and compromise at every turn, that gives the adults in the room some difficult questions. Being nice (think Obama first quarter 2009) did not work. Persuasion neither. On the debt ceiling, consequences barely worked. What works?
Obama was maddeningly convinced that being nice and appealing to the good of the country would work when he ran for office and throughout most of his term.
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One might add that the Republican base drifts off into La-la-land.
By recent polling a majority believes that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. A majority don’t believe Obama was born in the US. The belief that he is a Muslim infects a significant percentage. Likewise lots of Republicans when polled think global warming is a hoax — or if present, not man made and not worth any effort to reverse. This isn’t vitriol. These are just the sad facts. It is an ongoing puzzle to figure out what to do about it.
A family friend of my dads is a big Tea Party activist in New Mexico and just doesn’t like citing facts in his arguments. He honestly believes Reagan balanced the budget, in spite of my citations and in spite of Reagan’s own budget director Dean Stockton quitting over the deficit and supply siders. He also refuses to admit that the bulk of the current deficit was under Bush and somehow blames Obama for Afghanistan going south and the casualties we’ve had there. They truly are not in a reality based community, some on this forum are in left wing baseland, but there are far less there than in the right wing baseland.
It used to be that the two sides agreed on the ends of government and just debated the means, usually resorting to empirical arguments. Those days are gone, the right doesn’t even know what end it wants with government, either to end government or to use government to advance social conservatism-these tensions somehow coexist in the GOP. You’d be hard pressed to find reflexive ideology on the Democratic side, show me a bad ineffective government program and you’d be hard pressed to find a liberal defending it since we want good government and smart government. But if we can’t even agree on the facts or what the challenges we are facing actually are (is global warming real? is Russia a threat?) its going to be a long hard climb to get to a place of compromise.
In talking about stimulus in the last couple of months, johnd expressed an approach that would have been mainstream moderate Republican back when such creatures existed. The problem is that the GOP is not beholden to reasonable men, like johnd on certain days of the week. It is increasingly beholden to people like your father’s friend. Even folks like Robert Eno, who seemed much more reasonable in 2007, have drifted off into some sort of strange ideological state.
They honesty hate Obama as much as they hate(d) Clinton, whom they now ironically cite as a “good” Democrat (I guess when he wasn’t busy killing Vince Foster he ended up being a good president?). Growing into political awareness under the last President, especially in Cambridge I encountered a lot of Bush hatred, some of it unfounded, but much of it grounded in hatred of an empirically disastrous war. You just don’t see that on their side. Looking at the polls about Obama being a Muslim or just taking to dads buddy Joe about the Libya terrorist attack-it’s worse than Rashamon it’s like we are in parallel universes.
tsk, tsk… Please point out any time I’m “unreasonable” in the future (on those other days of the week), I’d be curious how you define “unreasonable” going forward.
apparently there is a tax on wit. who knew?
why Romney’s tax rate is so low.
(rimshot)
…with this paragraph from CMD:
“He would doubtless be hit by a primary challenge to his right. The independents who drive things in Massachusetts have little ability to support him from the center, because unenrolled voters don’t get to vote in the primary without leaping through hoops.”
First, he would be less likely here than in most states to attract a credible challenge from the right. Second, independents can very easily request either ballot in a primary, and no, you do not have to deliberately switch back to independent as selecting a ballot does not change your registration.
who recently attempted to get on the ballot as both a republican and a democrat.
All this republican strategy is nothing more than parlor tricks.
Since Brown is by his own admission not a moderate Republican. A moderate Republican is the type of governor or state senator that wants universal coverage but uses the private sector to achieve it. Brown does not fit that mold. A moderate Republican values balancing the budget over most priorities and would be willing, like George HW Bush, to raise revenue and cut defense spending to achieve it. Brown does not fit that mold. A moderate Republican would make votes in favor of organized labor, like Arlen Specter or William Weld, but Brown does not fit that mold. A moderate Republican supports environmental regulation, but Brown does not fit that mold. A moderate Republican supports gun control and stands up to the NRA, like Governor Weld, but Brown again does not fit that mold.
William Weld was one of the best Governors in my lifetime and my family did support him against Kerry and we re-elected him over Mark Roosevelt, and I do not regret either of those votes from my parents and would proudly make them today myself. Weld was that rare politician able to get a cross section of people to vote for him and was unafraid to challenge his party orthodoxy on gay rights, abortion rights, the environment or race relations. I knew William Weld, he was a Governor of mine, Scott Brown is no William Weld.
Band of extremists to control the Senate makes one not a moderate. It is correct that Scott Brown is not, say, a global warming denier, but it is also correct that Scott Brown will vote in favor of leadership who will put a climate change denier as head of the Senate Science Committee. He will support that. How does that not matter?
If Scott Brown is such a moderate, why is he willing to vote for all the radicals in his party to control the United States Senate? This is the question Lincoln Chafee couldn’t answer – a true moderate, he admitted later that his defeat was probably good for the country in that it helped keep Republican extremists from controlling the Senate. And this is a question Scott Brown can’t answer to the satisfaction of many Weld voters.
They call themselves Democrats these days, but they’re fiscally to the right of Nixon and Reagan.
We need real Democrats, FDR Democrats in Congress. Which is why working Americans should vote for Warren.
that we aren’t getting what we paid for with our taxes – we aren’t getting good government. Their solution is to say we are better off without government, therefore, cut taxes and starve the beast. For them, its one big farmer’s market; if the tomatoes are rotten, don’t buy them and pretty soon they will disappear from the marketplace and you won’t miss them. But this free-market analogy to government hasn’t worked out so well for them. People want, need and expect certain things that government provides and the market does not. So, of late, they have turned up the vitriol and fomented the current extreme right and have employed a very clever, and creepy, strategy. Thomas Frank (Harper’s, The Baffler) lays it out pretty well: when the republicans are in power, they do all they can to break government, usually by starving a program or an agency or jamming up congress. When they are out of power, they point at guv’ment and say “see, it doesn’t work, it’s broken, get rid of it.”
The democrats you speak of have lost faith in good government, and, by acquiescence, aid and abet republican behavior.
In a recent profile of Warren in the New Yorker, Warren poses the current struggle by asking: “What is good government?” Prior to this recent wave of right wing rage – started during Reagan – democrats and, to a lesser degree, republicans knew what was good government: it was a variation of FDR policies; a mix of private capital and the common wealth to forge a greater good through market forces and democratic governance. Kerry was mocked in ’04 for assuming people still embraced the idea that “help (in the form of government) was on the way.” His fine speech at this year’s DNC and Warren’s question show they clearly understand just how far into the weeds we have wandered away from democracy. If anyone can “restore” what we all once knew to be good government, it’s Elizabeth Warren.
Why we should donate to pro-labor pro fair trade Senator Brown in Ohio! But I think if Warren,Brown, Baldwin win we will have some more old school labor Democrats in charge.
Sherrod Brown is in a very tight race. Donations would really help out his campaign. He is an extraordinarily good Senator.
That our elected officials don’t really represent us, but only the interests of their 51%+ supporters.
Therefore it’s important to demonize and hate the candidate that your person is running against.
It’s also helpful to hate and ridicule people who support the opposing candidate. Lump all of them together in a broad generalization about their craziest fringe demogrpahic.
Don’t forget to continue this after the opposing politician is elected.
That way when the other person wins you can complain about lack of bi-partisanship.
At least that’s what I learned here at BMG.