Litmus-test liberals demand their candidates must always fight for the whole loaf and pillory their opponents’ candidates for compromising when necessary to move the country forward by negotiating to get the half a loaf that is the best progress humanly possible for the greater national interest.
They epitomize a philosophy that makes the perfect the enemy of the good and I must confess I have reached a point in the winter of my life that trying to reason with them exacerbates the pain — tantamount to masturbating the brain. After massaging their momentary pleasure they have nothing to show for their wasted effort.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Please share widely!
Even though I’m undecided in the Democratic primary, I cannot disagree with one word of fredrichlaricchia’s post. From the Spanish Civil War straight through to the protests at Bernie Sanders rallies, the left too often seems inherently fratricidal. Why protest one of the candidates on the right when you can pretend that you can reach a perfect agenda by targeting progressive candidates?
This reminds me of Sen. Kennedy when he would share his biggest legislative regret.
From the Boston Globe:
Ted Kennedy, whom Nixon assumed would be his rival in the next election, made universal health care his signature issue. Kennedy proposed a single-payer, tax-based system. Nixon strongly opposed that on the grounds that it was un-American and would put all health care “under the heavy hand of the federal government.”
Instead, Nixon proposed a plan that required employers to buy private health insurance for their employees and gave subsidies to those who could not afford insurance. Nixon argued that this market-based approach would build on the strengths of the private system.
“Government has a great role to play, he said, “but we must always make sure that our doctors will be working for their patients and not for the federal government.”
No one breathed a word at the time about Nixon’s plan being unconstitutional. Instead, it faced opposition from Democrats who insisted on “single-payer.”
Over time, Kennedy realized his own plan couldn’t succeed. Opposition from the insurance companies was too great. So Kennedy dispatched his staffers to meet secretly with Nixon’s people to broker a compromise. Kennedy came close to backing Nixon’s plan, but turned away at the last minute, under pressure from the unions. Then Watergate hit and took Nixon down. Kennedy said later that walking away from that deal was one of the biggest mistakes of his life.
Fred is right. The perfect can’t be the enemy of the good or else in the end the people who suffer the most are the people we are advocating for.
And a true one. True today as it was then.
I think the Sanders challenge can accomplish three goals.
1) Make social democracy as mainstream on the left as libertarianism has become on the right
2) Keep Hillary honest and engaged in the primary
3) Make the platform more progressive and engage new voters
I think he has already succeeded beyond the initial expectations of his campaign. Remember when George tried to red bait him on This Week and Bernie didn’t flinch, hitting him right back with what’s wrong with social democratic economic policies?
So he has shifted the conversation, and I think it has forced Hillary to confront issues earlier than she expected and from a more left wing angle than she or her advisers had planned. Bernie has avoided the silly season bullshit of Benghazi and email gate to focus on the actual issues based disagreements he has with her, without making it personal at all-in fact-calling such personal arguments emblematic of media sexism as he did yesterday on Face the Nation.
Their debates will be civil and constructive for the party, and I look forward to them. I just hope their supporters can follow the good example of their candidates.
let’s have a civil, issue-based debate among ourselves then unite behind our nominee and win the general.
I have the highest respect for your integrity and that of your candidate, Senator Sanders, who is a gentleman and a class act all around.
Moving forward, let’s remember the words of our founder, Thomas Jefferson, : “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”
Fred Rich LaRiccia
a difference between liberals and radicals. If you read anything from the radical left, you’ll find we’re sometimes lumped with the rest of political spectrum. Some of the far left don’t see us as watered down versions of them; they see a complete break between us and them.
The radical left pushes mainstream liberalism further along. Whether it’s civil rights, marriage equality, or feminism. What’s interesting about the Sanders campaign is that he is more Old Left than New Left, and his struggles with more radical activists are starting to demonstrate that. He is more Norman Thomas than Norman Mailer.
more 21st century with a decentralized movement and very heavy on the theory.
In the case of #BlackLivesMatter, I think it was healthy because it had the right outcome, which is Bernie addressing their cause. And they were right, I don’t see how their cause would otherwise be addressed. It was also good to push good, liberal whites beyond our comfort zone.
It was hard, but I tried to hold off on opining about their taking over his stage because I didn’t know what they were after. Better people than I didn’t hold off.
I agree 100% with Charlie about the Seattle folks, especially since nobody from Seattle BLM knew who they were and one of them is a fundamentalist Christian who used to be a Palin supporter, and it just smells of astro turfind. The platform change, the hiring of BLM activist as his main press secretary, and his improving rhetoric on these issues happened before the Seattle interruption.
That said, the Netroots Nation event was an actual BLM group, and his response was rather tone deaf and rightly critiqued. I think he has rapidly moved on this issue.
It would be nice, as Pierce points out, for Ferguson and the GOP to be held to the same scrutiny.
From Kos
Can anyone believe this distorted view? Going for the candidate that best embodies what each voter believes helps themselves and their fellow Americans is good citizenship.
What is being expressed in this post is what I call Democratic Angst. This is an ailment where one knows a candidate reflects their views strongly, but is considered unelectable(media driven) or is too radical for the American voter to get behind. So they pick someone at this distance from the election who is a compromise.
I contend that Democrats who fall into this line of thinking actually are the ones who have decided they are the ones who know best. They give up their governing beliefs to back “acceptable” candidates because they have name recognition, and have “acceptable” credentials(again media driven). These candidates they back usually put their finger in the air, constantly testing the political winds, before they put forward ideas that are compromised by group think and back room strategizing.
So into the arena steps Senator Bernie Sanders. A civil rights activist, successful progressive mayor, and a legislator who has had more amendments passed into laws than any candidate running. Do we hear anything about this unless you dig for it?
So what does he do? He runs a non traditional campaign going straight to the people asking for their help so he can help them. He has spoke or had rallies in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi with the same result. People in the thousands want to hear what he has to say. No other candidate running has done this. He had an online rally that reached 3500 venues with 100,000 potential volunteers listening in.
Using this approach his campaign coffers are only second to Hillary Clinton’s.
All the rest of the candidates that seem to have garnered lots of money, have it stashed in a variety of PACs, the exclusive domain of an embarrassing few loaded donors. We don’t even know exactly who they are.
The use a label of socialist to describe Bernie, bringing back “Cold War” fears. Time and again he says he is a Social Democrat in mode of Nordic Socialism. This is a marriage of heavy taxpayer supported social programs with a robust competitive fairly regulated economy. That philosophy of governing has produced the lowest poverty rates, lowest corruption by government or private business, and has the most content population measured by WHO standards.
Bernie(kinda like the ring of that rather than Jeb or Hillaary) also gets labeled as extreme, when almost everything he stands for is backed by the majority of United States citizens, a more reliable “Citizens United”. As Elizabeth Warren has said, the system is rigged towards those with more than enough while the working stiffs get hammered. Bernie is the flag-bearer to change that scenario. He also admits he cannot do it on his own. That’s why he, more than any other candidate, has taken his causes to the general electorate and those unregistered voters who felt they had nothing to vote for. If you add together the unregistered and the registered non voters they accede those who actually voted.
I’m done.
…a term I use here generically, not addressed at you personally, suggest that someone isn’t progressive or worthy of being called a Democrat for not being quite as far left as your candidate, that strikes me as holier than thou. I don’t think Sanders himself has done that, but some of his supporters have (maybe more on DK than BMG). I got a similar vibe from some Berwick supporters last year. I’ve referred to it as the tea party wing of the Democratic party and don’t intend it as a compliment.
An organized vanguard willing to move the party left and hold folks like Schumer accountable when they stray. We need to have more primaries, we need to challenge more incumbents, and we need to focus on controlling city halls, statehouses, and working our way up to a 50 state strategy. I think Dean and DFA, and Progressive Mass locally, and other efforts have attempted that, but we always get co-opted at election time by fear mongering calls to vote based more on how terrible the GOP is rather than how awesome our side is. That was basically the Coakley pitch, I worry sometimes that will be the Clinton pitch as it was in the 90s.
Hillary is already engaging in this, her spats with Jeb on twitter, at the Urban League, and over women’s health are the hallmarks of the Democratic Party’s wedge issues slice and dice strategy. Winning with 52% is good for Hillary, and good for the rest of us in so far as we block a Walker, Rubio, Jeb, or Kasich from the White House. But FDR build an enduring majority by winning over large swaths of America that had gotten used to being Republican, mainly by running a class warfare campaign. It helps that in a democracy the working class many outnumber the wealthy few since we all supposedly have votes of equal weight.
Yet for too long we have been the Coffee Party-the nice folks who are civil and want to incrementally and moderately govern while ‘those extremists over there’ are going to destroy the country. And it ends up letting the conversation get dictated by those with the loudest mouths and foulest ideologies on the right. We need a Roosevelt willing to say to the corporate class ‘I welcome your hatred’ rather than taking their $300k a pop speaking fees.
Tom Frank diagnosed this over a decade ago, America is turning into Kansas, where there is a moderate party and a extremist party. So while I would’ve voted for Orman over Roberts, and the moderate Republican turned Democrat against Brownback, I see no reason why Massachusetts or the rest of America has to settle for those choices. No room for real populist liberalism in that equation. We are still supposedly the most liberal state on paper, and an increasingly liberal country, it is time the Democratic party caught up with it’s base.
DFA, MoveON, and PCCC come to mind, all worthy endeavors as you mention. The tea party has adopted tactics that are cringeworthy and spread hate that I do not want our side imitating, and did lose the GOP elections they should have won. (As a side issue I hate that they co-opted our state’s history in such an inaccurate way.) I sympathize with most of what you say, but I don’t call it tea party.
I mean not the bile or extremist rhetoric, but the tactics of being boldly assertive of their ideology and holding their own leaders accountable. We could do a whole lot more of that, starting locally at the statehouse level.
As a question of substance, we remain reality based and empirical, they are not. As a question of style, we remain upbeat and inclusive while they are not. As a question of strategy and tactics-that is where I want us to begin emulating them.
MoveOn, but it’s a role they don’t seem to be filling very well. My guess is that they’ve decided be run plebiscite rather than by the politically shrewd.
MoveOne fulfilled that role best in the period 2002 – 2006.
The Senator was on Charlie Rose today, and was explaining her support for Hillary Clinton. Supposedly the public is not aware of her record, and the Senator from Missouri claims that she is different than her public persona. She went on to agree with all of Senator Sanders position, but somehow found they were too extreme. Now which is it? Does Bernie promote progressive policy in sync with the public or is he a raving communist? i wasn’t sure I should write the last statement until she further explained herself. She said Bernie was for worker ownership of corporations. Now I know he was for unions, but this revelation was news to me. Somewhere along the line she has swallowed entrenched Democratic uneasiness of a candidate who lays out clearly what his priorities are and lets the chips fall where they may.
She was on Charlie Rose’s program to discuss a book she wrote. However as part of that he told of how she cringed when her political mother energetically fought for changes she believed in. Sen McCaskell then went on to say she came to respect her mother’s courage. This Senator is the poster child for Democratic Angst.
McGovern for President, J. Jackson for Democratic nominee, Mel King for mayor, R. Reich for Governor, Berwick for Governor, etc. We’ve all had enough experience being on the losing side of an election. It’s nice that Vermont has such a wonderfully exceptional electorate. Neither Ohio nor Florida does.
In the modern world in which we unfortunately find ourselves, losing the White House to a Republican would be a disaster on so many levels that it is wildly irrational not to care deeply about how to ensure a Democratic victory.
Do we really think Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, voting rights, and Greenland’s ice sheet will survive having Republicans control all three branches of government?
The downsides are considerably worse than losing to Charlie Baker.
This is a primary, not a general.
How many times do we who support Bernie Sanders during the primary season have to say that will support and work for Ms. Clinton after she wins the nomination?
Just beating the GOP is not sufficient any more. We beat the GOP in 2008. We beat the GOP in 2012. That’s good, Barack Obama was a better president than John McCain or Mitt Romney would have been. It was necessary and not sufficient.
After all the self-congratulatory hoopla about electing the first black President, we got an administration that actually governed to the right of Richard Nixon. Barack Obama was essentially silent about deteriorating race relations during most of his administration (he delegated most of that to Eric Holder). He was so reluctant to be seen as an “angry black man” that he governed like a complacent white — and a complacent white Republican at that. Police militarization, police violence against blacks, and government surveillance of everybody exploded on Barack Obama’s watch. Elizabeth Warren has very successfully pointed out the many ways that big banks — CityGroup in particular — are even larger and control even more of government today than they did when they nearly destroyed the economy in 2008. So don’t preach to me about the importance of beating the bad guys. We did that twice and it accomplished very little.
We face issues that simply cannot be kicked down the road another four or eight years. The downsides of NOT actually DOING SOMETHING about racial inequality, police violence and militarization, increasing income and wealth concentration, and the collapse of our transportation infrastructure are also FAR WORSE than losing to Charlie Baker.
It doesn’t do any good to have Democrats control all three branches of government (like they did in 2008) if we don’t DO ANYTHING while we have that control. Surely we learned that here in Massachusetts during the Patrick administration.
To the right of Nixon is way, way superior to a Scott Walker, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and John Roberts government.
I think YOU’RE NOT THINKING CLEARLY about this AT ALL.
I’ve already said, multiple times, that “To the right of Nixon is way, way superior to a Scott Walker, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and John Roberts government.” I get that, and I agree with it.
It’s not enough, and I think you are missing that crucial point.
Mr. Nixon was NOT a progressive or a liberal. The America of 1952-1960 loved and twice elected a man (and Republican) who said this:
We must recapture THAT America. I stand by my comment.
doing harm.
I guess we shall agree to disagree.
when they controlled Congress. And they passed FDR’S New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society Civil Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, and Fair Housing when they controlled Congress.
I have to disagree with you, Tom, on this important point. I believe Hillary Clinton will have the coattails to win over independent, moderate,centrists giving Dems a fighting chance to win back Congress in a way I just don’t see Bernie having the chops to do.
I note that in advance of tomorrow’s Iowa State Fair former progressive Senator Tom Harkin, chief sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, endorsed Secretary Clinton today.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
My party held the presidency, the senate, and house. My party campaigned on a number of changes after the disastrous Bush administration and the Great Depression.
Here’s what my party did NOT do:
1. My party did NOT even investigate war crimes committed during the previous administration, even compelling evidence of those crimes was published and widely available. My representative, Barney Frank, had assured me during the 2006 mid-terms that “if you help us win the government in 2008, war crimes will be at the top of the list”. We won, and that’s NOT what happened.
2. My party did not take any steps AT ALL to lock and bar the revolving door between government and Wall Street (especially Citygroup) after the duet nearly destroyed us in 2008. In fact, my party motorized and greased it. The corporate culture and executives that threatened our entire financial system and plundered the wealth of millions of middle-class Americans left the Great Recession with MORE money and MORE power — and did so the DEMOCRATS watch.
3. My party did not close GITMO.
4. My party did not even propose, never mind advocate, single-payer government sponsored healthcare. It instead embraced warmed-over RomneyCare — a Republican plan — and immediately gutted even THAT before discussion even got started. I grant you that Obamacare is better than the chaos is replaced. It does not pass muster as a signature accomplishment that defines a successful presidency.
5. My President did NOT do anything at all to help the new “Consumer Protection Finance Bureau” that was Elizabeth Warren’s first effort to help the 99%. To the contrary, he worked with Republicans to scuttle it. It was only because of grassroots support and skillful political maneuvering that the agency now exists at all.
Most glaringly, the obscene increase and even acceleration in income and wealth concentration that is devastating our society was HELPED, not hurt, by our party when we had power. We appointed Wall-street INSIDERS who caused the collapse to “oversee” the recovery. Not surprisingly, the “too-big-too-fail” banks whose brazen negligence (at best) destroyed the equity of nearly ALL middle-class Americans emerged even bigger.
At every step of the way, facing an increasingly hyper-partisan GOP whose leader explicitly declared their goal to be the destruction of the Obama presidency, my party continued to pander to them in hopes of some “compromise”. When my party held the Senate and could have ended the pseudo-filibusters that the GOP was using to completely thwart my party’s agenda, it instead allowed them to continue for YEARS.
My view is that from 2008 to the present, my party stood for NOTHING, gained precious little, and betrayed the passion and commitment of lifelong Democrats like me. Instead, for nearly the entire Obama administration, the GOP has completely dominated the national agenda.
I did not say I thought Bernie Sanders would win. I never challenged the premise that Hillary Clinton “will have the coattails to win over independent, moderate,centrists”.
What I said and say is that without LOUD VOICES reminding Ms. Clinton that an ENORMOUS number of Americans want police violence against blacks stopped NOW, that an ENORMOUS number of Americans want taxes on the very wealthy steeply increased NOW, that income and wealth concentration is THE burning issue of this campaign, Ms. Clinton is all too likely to follow the go-along get-along path of her predecessor in the Oval Office and her own behavior when elected to the Senate.
In my view, if Hillary Clinton has the political chops to do what needs to be done in the next 4-8 years — and I believe she does — then she also has the political chops to leverage the momentum of Bernie Sanders and BLM into clearcut political advantage for herself.
She will NOT do that by blunders like “All lives matter”. She will NOT do that by tacking to the center, speaking sentimental pap about “villages” (even though I love that line), and promising to work to “improve” things on some far-off day.
She will instead do that by recognizing the economic suffering of the center of the income and wealth distribution TODAY.
As far as I’m concerned, endorsements from venerable retired officials are meaningless. What I care about it is what matters to Iowans and what does my party have to say about that.
I completely disagree with the second sentence, as someone who had health insurance on ACA for a year of un/half time employment, insurance frankly better than the coverage I now have through my job,
I can’t ever agree with that sentiment. It has saved real lives. 15 million uninsured now have insurance, and a friend who just moved back home from Canada actually said Mass Health was easier to use than the Canadian system for visa holders, and it has freed her to take a part time job to pursue her passion at Improv Boston. Your kids are in the food industry, I can’t imagine how beneficial it is there. And the Medicaid expansion was huge, kept my sister on health insurance and my niece as well, even as she is going off to college.
I think the rest list and the frustrations inherent there are honest, I’ve been back and forth about what could have happened different in ACAs passage. I think failing to mobilize the army of volunteers that won several caucuses, primaries, and an electoral majority for the President to counter act the Tea Party crowds really hurt us. I am not sure if crowds of people saying ‘Medicare for All’ would’ve convinced Bachus and others to ignore the ‘get government off my medicare’ crowd, but at least we could hold our heads high and say we tried. It wasn’t attempted. And we may have had a robust public option if it had been.
That said, I honestly believe the President when he says if he was starting from scratch he’d do a single payer system, but we had to build on the system we already had. Vermont had significant political support for it’s proposal, solid legislative majorities in it’s favor, and local for-profit providers willing to be nationalized and it still failed. If it failed there, I am not optimistic it will be successfully implemented from scratch anywhere else, though I would agree the next President should pass a public option.
GITMO isn’t really his fault in the sense that Congress didn’t do it’s job, again, OFA wasn’t deployed just as Deval’s canvassers were never deployed locally, to the detriment of both groundbreaking politicians and their policy agenda. At the end of the day, civil liberties and foreign policy are not a big grassroots priority for Americans, and it is up to us to change that from the bottom rather than hoping the man at the top does it for us.
We can’t remake banking from the top and needed their buy in to affect reforms, Occupy wasn’t around in 2008, if it was, we might’ve stopped or reformed TARP or forced more issues on that. I do know with Sen. Warren in the Senate rather than that defanged agency, Wall Street’s gamble backfired miserably and they are in worse shape now.
I could go through the rest of the list, the Iran and Cuba deals are historic, game changing presidential achievements. I think channeling your rage towards activism on Bernie and BLM’s behalf is a great way to channel that frustration in a positive direction. Nothing short of a mass movement can change our politics for the better, and those two at times, conflicting and at times parallel campaigns are going to do it even if Bernie doesn’t win, his agenda will be implemented by the next nominee. The BLM agenda HAS to be implemented by the next nominee.
Even David Simon thinks we are turning a corner on drug prohibition, sentencing reform, and turning back towards inner cities after two generations of malign neglect. Just as Rick Perlstein astutely called Reagan the Bridge, between Goldwater and governance, so is Obama the bridge between Clintonian centrism and the next wave of progressive leadership. He may not have made all the changes we believe in, but he laid down the path for the next generation to pick up the torch. I strongly believe that.
I agree, and I’d like to clarify my “signature accomplishment” phrase.
I had enormously high hopes when Barack Obama was inaugurated. My enthusiasm for ramped up during the primary season, and peaked during election week itself. I remember watching his first few press conferences through happy tears of joy at finally having a President who speaks complete sentences, handles gotcha questions with grace, civility, and toughness, and who clearly has a full complement of fully-functional brain cells. Because I am a privileged white male, his status as the first black president was not high on my list of reasons to celebrate.
Because my enthusiasm and expectations were so high, so too was and is my threshold for “signature accomplishment”. I do not mean to minimize the need for it or understate the difference it’s made. Instead, I mean that I have a higher bar than that.
Suppose a seafood restaurant with a primo waterfront location has a history of serving terrible sides, terrible mains, over-priced and watered down drinks, spoiled oysters and clams from the raw-bar, repeated healthcode violations for the kitchens and bathrooms, and a long history of patrons getting sick after eating there. Now suppose new management buys in, closes the restaurant for a few weeks for renovations, and then proudly rolls out the new-improved version with great fanfare, widespread ad buys, and a saturation mailing campaign.
I go to the new restaurant, and I get terrible sides, terrible mains, over-priced and watered down drinks, superbly fresh oysters and clams from the raw bar, and find the kitchens and bathrooms sparkling clean and fresh. I feel fine after eating there.
It’s true that my raw-bar items were great. It’s true that I ate there and didn’t get sick. If asked about my opinion of the restaurant, I’m going to shrug my shoulders. If that same new management starts promoting a second newly-renovated restaurant, and bragging about what a great job they did on their first, I’m not likely to get very excited.
I support Obamacare, I’m glad it’s in place. I think Obamacare is, primarily, a short-term subsidy and termination award to the health insurance industry. I grant that things are better for millions of Americans, I put that in the “unspoiled raw oysters and clams” category.
For me, it doesn’t rise to “signature accomplishment”. I think it will, frankly, be a footnote to historical accounts of either the collapse of the US health care system or its replacement with a government-sponsored single-payer system.
Obamacare reminds me, on the national level, of the minimum wage bill we just passed in Massachusetts. Necessary? Absolutely. Sufficient? Absolutely not. Each strikes me as a compromise that makes all the Vogons who participated very happy and that does very little for problem it purports to solve. I think Massachusetts Democrats attempted to use it in the last gubernatorial campaign, and the voters shrugged and voted for whomever they were going to pick anyway. I think Obamacare will play a very similar role in the 2016 federal election.
Because Obamacare is, in my view, unlikely to change very many votes, I don’t see it as a “signature accomplishment”.
I think the trends we are seeing are going to lead to both, and that is a good thing. I think we are seeing coverage go up and costs go down, and this will continue. I think this took our patchwork of a system and began to create a regulated national marketplace. I think as more and more people opt for the exchange over their employer plans, employer based insurance will blow up. As the cost of covering a family rises, I strongly suspect we will see patches like universal Medicaid for ALL children and non-working spouses get passed. And I think we will see greater standardization of care and cost containment. I think we are seeing new start ups emerge that offer ACO style coverage at cheaper cost without requiring a full health plan, this will blow up the health care cartels and begin to depress the exorbiant profits people make by being middle men.
We might see other patches like a public option PBM, a public option in general, and once that happens, you will see the shift from private to public healthcare take place. Those who are young and single and just need one time visits will use those new start up services, those that have kids will be on Medicaid, and a growing number of the middle class as well will opt in to it, and the rest will get cheaper and cheaper insurance through the exchanges. The employer based model is definitely dead thanks to Obamacare in the long run.
In the politics of the possible this will be seen as laying the foundation, just as Medicare itself was a generation before.
I agree with all you write here.
Accomplishing something that would change many votes might be setting the bar so high that Presidents with such accomplishments could fit comfortably on a motorcycle. That requires huge changes in the landscape of political coalitions, something that has only happened two or three times in the entire history of the republic.
The New Deal coalition broke 40 years ago, but nothing has yet really taken its place.
Accomplishing something like ACA in that environment, in which liberals could not even command a functioning governing makority, when previous attempts– even during the era of the New Deal coalition– failed, is a pretty big accomplishment in my view.
I think Bill Clinton had a least two signature accomplishments by my definition. I think LBJ’s “Great Society” was another. I think Jimmy Carter was largely ineffective as president (as much as I admire him). There haven’t been any other Democrats to choose from.
As far as I can tell, the “signature accomplishment” of our Republican presidents since Eisenhower has been the rampant and successful abuse of government power. In addition to Watergate, we’ve seen an illegal war in South America, the sale of weapons to our foremost terrorist enemy, and unprecedented human rights abuses. Add to that our most embarrassing military debacle since the turn of the 20th century and the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression (and caused directly by GOP policies), and we have a reasonably consistent picture of how the GOP governs.
I agree that Mr. Clinton did not replace the New Deal coalition. On the other hand, in my view he broke the back of the tired “welfare queen” canard that the GOP used so successfully for so many decades. He stared down the GOP in its first attempts to shutdown the government, and turned the GOP “momentum” against the GOP — a feat of political jujitsu that still impresses me.
I see nothing comparable in Mr. Obama’s two terms, although I agree that the Iran and Cuba deals each have the potential to become that.
I think that both actions I cite by Mr. Clinton did, in fact, turn voters in his favor. In comparison, I don’t see the ACA meeting that standard. On the other hand, I suggest that if Mr. Obama had pushed hard for at least a public option — if not for full-blown single-payer, we likely would have still had the ACA.
Had he pursued that path, I think he would have turned more votes than he did. In my view, his narrow win in 2012 was gained in spite of his record rather than because of it. I think his victory was a demonstration of the weakness of Mitt Romney and of the growing political power of minority voters in America. I think that, in turn, is why the GOP has redoubled its largely successful efforts to suppress minority participation since then.
While I’m glad that the ACA is in place, and I agree that it is at least a transition stage (if not a foundation) for further progress, I don’t agree that it was a significant political accomplishment (other than merely getting a worthy piece of legislation passed by an utterly dysfunctional legislature).
I think the motorcycle needs a sidecar, with at least two seats. I wish we’d forced its replacement by something larger.
I don’t disagree much with this.
Certainly, Clinton’s election and re-election– the first by a Democrat in the wake of the end of the New Deal Coalition (without a giant assist such as the previously-elected President from the other party resigning in disgrace) are impressive in their own right.
The paradox is that he defeated these tried and true GOP tactics by “triangulation”– a tactic that still infuriates the left, but left the GOP in the dust. He truly is a political talent. All of his failures, all of his wounds were self-inflicted. That’s why the email thing with HRC really seems ominous to me.
Barack Obama could have ordered GITMO closed had he done so before being explicitly prohibited by legislation — he chose not to. He could have vetoed that legislation — he chose not to.
I don’t agree about the way the banking collapse was handled. FDR made no bones about his contempt for the Wall Street crowd that caused the Great Depression, he brought in “new management”, and the voters loved him for it. I think Barack Obama could have done the same, and chose not to.
I agree about the Iran and Cuba deals. I think each WILL be a signature accomplishment, especially the latter. I need to add, parenthetically, that I hope Cuban rum today is better than today’s Cuban cigars. In my recent vacation in Europe, I sampled a reasonably rich variety of Cuban cigars across a variety of price points (there are no restrictions on Cuban cigars in Europe). I liked them much less than their counterparts from Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.
I think the resumption of normal relations with Cuba will end another chapter of the cold war, a chapter that has been left open for entirely too long. I look forward to a booming vacation and tourism trade and a sea-change in the economy of the entire region. I also note that the Cuban health care system has long been superior to ours (by all the accounts I’ve read).
Please note, again, that I am NOT saying that John McCain or Mitt Romney would have been a better President. I am saying that in my view, it is political suicide to cite Democratic control of government during the Obama administration as a feature to be advertised.
The plain truth is that the sides, mains, and drinks sucked on our watch as well as theirs.
I think we can definitely end this discussion in full agreement, the Cuban cigars I bought in the Philippines were over priced and lacking in flavor compared to some of my favorite Dominican brands. I do think there are brands out of my price range that live up to the hype, but not many. It’s sorta like Texans who told me Lone Star was special (tastes almost exactly like PBR) or my grampa bringing Coors back from West Coast business trips in the 60s and 70s.
The country itself still seems pristine and beautiful and I would love to go before it’s spoiled by an onslaught of Americans, we don’t even mind the strict requirements since we would want to integrate service into our visit, probably after she’s a full RN.
Cuban rum is still outstanding. Havana Club 7 is still cheap in Cuba and their 14 year old anejo is one of the best in the world, right up there with the Guatemalan 23 year old Zacapa. I gave up the stink sticks years ago but a freshly rolled Cuban cigar, bought at the factory, is a tasty smoke. Cuba still has trouble with the outer leaf but once they have access to our CT River Valley tobacco, grown almost exclusively for wrapping cigars, they will improve even more.
Except he choose to do exactly that. It was the fourth executive order he signed on Jan 22 2009, 2 days after having first taken the oath of office. The first executive order pertained to presidential records. The second executive order pertained to the ethics of the administration. The third executive order pertained to lawful interrogation.
The fourth executive order explicitly ordered the closing of Guantanamo.
It was, in fact, the Democrats, led by Joe Lieberman who performed some legislative heavy lifting to obviate the executive order of the President of the United States. Lieberman, in particular, but aided and abetted by others, de-funded, de-fanged and otherwise de-legitimized the presidents 4th executive order. The efforts they went through, for such little political gain and, in fact, so much political harm, beggars imagination and can, in my mind, only be attributable to rank bigotry. Surely another low point in the history of the union.
I believe that Barack Obama, circa 2008, chose Joe Bide as his VP and Rahm Emmanuel as his CoS precisely because he believed it would lead to legislative victories on hard issues. I don’t believe he thought the easy victories, one of which he thought (and I agreed at the time) was closing “Gitmo”, would have been so viciously opposed by his putative allies in the Senate. I think that, once Obama saw how small minded Lieberman et al truly were, he wholly re-evaluated his strategies.
I think you can probably blame Obama for a political miscalculation but I don’t. And I certainly don’t count that as a moral failing
but his executive Order #4 was sabotaged by that turncoat traitor Lieberman.
Great research, petr!
“Facts are stubborn things.” JOHN ADAMS
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I had forgotten the extent to which Mr. Obama was betrayed by his and our party. Surely he had an opportunity to veto the legislation that blocked his order.
Still, you are absolutely correct. Barack Obama attempted to close GITMO.
… I don’t know that there was a specific piece of legislation to block the order that could have been straight-up veto’d, but rather piecemeal amendments to larger appropriations and other bills that, over the course of the year that the EO required eroded the order and undermined the President. Of course, that year was also 2009 where stimulus, TARP and keeping together the fraying strands of a faltering economy were of paramount importance.
But, I really do think it caused Obama to re-think his entire approach to, at least, the Senate.
Unhappily, in the world we inhabit, Democrats win best by making soaring appeals to hope. The active ingredients of these appeals are all unattainable promises. Anything different, for example a sober analysis of the fate of our climate, a fully objective evaluation of racism, or a fiscally sound approach to infrastructure spending just turns off too many members of our inattentive electorate. Be not dismayed that the advertising overpromised. It had to. The best outcomes we can expect is that for which the most conservative of Democrats would vote — and even that is rarely attainable given the artificial gerrymandering of the House of Representatives and the historical gerrymandering of the Senate.
It seems to me that we need something just like MoveOn.
Only effective.
Solid post kbusch
Maura Healey, Deb Goldberg, Suzanne Bump, Bill Gavin, Marty Walsh, Lisa Wong, Elizabeth Warren, Seth Moulton, and Kim Driscoll. Even Gov Baker got less than half of a poor turnout.
So let’s capture what they did to gain the confidence of the people. Clinton’s stature is slowly eroding. This election should be done by the people, and there should be mechanisms to make it easier to vote, and then stand up with a bold, but acceptable vision.
…that she’s OK with Sanders, but her read is that he might not win a general. I think the reason she was having trouble articulating the differences is that there are not enough to count. I’m not at all sold on the idea that Sanders has had the effect of “moving” Clinton to the left because I don’t think she had as far to move as some say. This is my key complaint against the holier than thou crowd. They can’t tell the difference between being “a” progressive and being the “most” progressive and seem not to recognize a progressive when they see one.
Here are some ways I hope Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will move Hillary Clinton:
– I hope Hillary Clinton will outline concrete and specific steps she will take to use the full force and power of the federal government to end excessive police violence, especially against the minority community.
– I hope Hillary Clinton will be clear and specific about the ways that she will tax the wealthy and direct more of our nation’s enormous wealth to the rest of us.
– I hope Hillary Clinton will intentionally peel away economically punished voters whose only political voice until now has been the Tea Party
– I hope Hillary Clinton will embrace the example of FDR (one of her husband’s explicitly stated mentors and role models) and welcome the “hatred” of Wall Street and the big banks.
I don’t know or care whether that’s moving Ms. Clinton up, down, left, or right. The hyper-partisan acrimony between “left” and “right” is one of the more effective ways that the 0.1% (or 0.0.1%) have been distracting us while they destroy our society and plunder even the tidbits some of us are able to get now.
The “middle class”, as it has always been defined, is already dead. Half of American families are one paycheck away from poverty. Only a few lucky Americans have any discretionary income today, especially in comparison to middle America in the 1960s or even 1970s.
I don’t know who the “holier than thou crowd” is that you disparage, but I do know that this comment sounds pretty darned “holy” to me.
I can’t add much to that. I will say this is a primary, the polls currently show Sanders beating all of the Republicans. Hillary still hasn’t taken a stance on Keystone, TPP, or proposed a racial justice plank to her platform as Bernie Sanders has.
As Tom eloquently put it yesterday, no way are any of these Republicans ready for prime time, ready for governance. All of them are pro-life, some of the ‘moderates’ like Rand or Rubio actually oppose letting rape victims abort. All of them oppose Obamacare, all of them oppose common sense gun control, and all of them oppose the Iran deal which will lead to a future war we cannot afford to wage.
Hillary Clinton has the experience, the positions, and a growing vision to be a good President, and certainly a better President than any of the Republicans. I have long thought she could have the potential, as a stronger partisan fighter than Obama more stooped in the ways of Washington, to be another LBJ. I think the Sanders challenge, and possibly a Biden challenge, would make it more likely she rises to that challenge and becomes that President. We should welcome a competitive primary, an open debate, and an issues based campaign. It will stand in stark contrast to Trumpfest 2016.
That’s the point, and interesting you bring up Coakley, whom you would never support although you have indicated openness to Clinton should she be the nominee. I see Sanders/Berwick parallels in that both could justly claim to be the most progressive in their respective races, but not the only progressive.
Is there something unclear about what I’ve written about the candidacy of Hillary Clinton?
For example, on this thread (emphasis mine):
Or in this August 9 comment (emphasis mine):
That’s more than “indicated openness to Clinton should she be the nominee” and starkly different from my stance towards Ms. Coakley.
I get that you perhaps conflate Bernie Sanders and Don Berwick. I don’t. I don’t recall any news stories about crowds packing auditoriums for a chance to hear Don Berwick. I don’t recall ANY time during the gubernatorial primary season where Mr. Berwick polled with 60% to Ms. Coakley’s 40%.
I have not said that Mr. Sanders is the “only” progressive in this race.
You seem to be erecting strawmen, rather than actually reading — with comprehension — what some of us are writing.
I didn’t mean to indicate that you have said that Sanders was the only progressive in this race, but others have seemed imply it (and I don’t necessarily limit that BMG as I see it on DK as well). My attempted point was that in both races some diehard supporters of the respective most progressive candidates dismissed the progressive credentials of their primary rivals. I think you were clear; maybe I’m the one who wasn’t – sorry.
– I hope Hillary Clinton will push specific proposals to get big money out of politics.
However, I think the whole idea of another candidate “moving” her to the left or anywhere is ridiculous. What it is saying is that because candidate A said he believes in something (and in this case does and has specific proposals, but that’s almost irrelevant), candidate B will also say s/he believes in it regardless of if that is true. How is this a good thing? Are people that desperate to hear pandering and empty promises and lies? When has this idea of the race “moving” the winning candidate actually panned out after the election? (I’m open to a history lesson here).
I offer a different characterization of “movement” on the part of a candidate than you.
When the electorate energetically asserts widespread common ground on specific issues during a campaign, it is not pandering for a candidate to be responsive to that assertion. I don’t see Bernie Sanders “moving” Hillary Clinton in some “He-said-it-so-I-say-it” duplicity. Elizabeth Warren is, correctly, not even IN the race — and is moving ALL the candidates in the appropriate direction. I see Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren, along with BLM, tapping into and calling forth widespread common ground that already exists among the electorate and that every candidate from each major party has ignored until now.
You ask for history lessons — I think the embrace of same-sex marriage is a reasonable starting point.
Can anyone believe this distorted view? Going for the candidate that best embodies what each voter believes helps themselves and their fellow Americans is good citizenship.
What is being expressed in this post is what I call Democratic Angst. This is an ailment where one knows a candidate reflects their views strongly, but is considered unelectable(media driven) or is too radical for the American voter to get behind. So they pick someone at this distance from the election who is a compromise.
I contend that Democrats who fall into this line of thinking actually are the ones who have decided they are the ones who know best. They give up their governing beliefs to back “acceptable” candidates because they have name recognition, and have “acceptable” credentials(again media driven). These candidates they back usually put their finger in the air, constantly testing the political winds, before they put forward ideas that are compromised by group think and back room strategizing.
So into the arena steps Senator Bernie Sanders. A civil rights activist, successful progressive mayor, and a legislator who has had more amendments passed into laws than any candidate running. Do we hear anything about this unless you dig for it?
So what does he do? He runs a non traditional campaign going straight to the people asking for their help so he can help them. He has spoke or had rallies in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi with the same result. People in the thousands want to hear what he has to say. No other candidate running has done this. He had an online rally that reached 3500 venues with 100,000 potential volunteers listening in.
Using this approach his campaign coffers are only second to Hillary Clinton’s.
All the rest of the candidates that seem to have garnered lots of money, have it stashed in a variety of PACs, the exclusive domain of an embarrassing few loaded donors. We don’t even know exactly who they are.
The use a label of socialist to describe Bernie, bringing back “Cold War” fears. Time and again he says he is a Social Democrat in mode of Nordic Socialism. This is a marriage of heavy taxpayer supported social programs with a robust competitive fairly regulated economy. That philosophy of governing has produced the lowest poverty rates, lowest corruption by government or private business, and has the most content population measured by WHO standards.
Bernie(kinda like the ring of that rather than Jeb or Hillaary) also gets labeled as extreme, when almost everything he stands for is backed by the majority of United States citizens, a more reliable “Citizens United”. As Elizabeth Warren has said, the system is rigged towards those with more than enough while the working stiffs get hammered. Bernie is the flag-bearer to change that scenario. He also admits he cannot do it on his own. That’s why he, more than any other candidate, has taken his causes to the general electorate and those unregistered voters who felt they had nothing to vote for. If you add together the unregistered and the registered non voters they accede those who actually voted.
I’m done.
Thanks for this excellent comment, and for the opportunity to up-vote it twice. It was worth repeating.
The latest poll in NH has Bernie up by 7 points!
He did this not by ranting or pushing an ideology, but by saying what issues need to be addressed, and then sayingthis is what I think has to be done. And all were invited, voters, non voters, and any political stripe. So are the people of NH being holier than thou?
Electability is a black box sitting in the people’s brains not in reality. Do you doubt that Bernie would be more responsive to workers, those down on their luck, and civil rights than any of his opponents? He is at the heart of what it means to govern.
His constituency will come mostly from those who sit on the fence. Independents, non establishment party types, those who have not voted before, and maybe some moderate Republicans. Add that up and it comes to a larger voting population than has existed before in recent Presidential elections.
Anyone who professes to have an exact handle on “electability” is just whistling Dixie. Isn’t it refreshing there is a candidate who is not suppressing anyone’s vote by actually giving them something to vote for instead of voting against something.
Haven’t you noticed that Hillary’s un-favorability outdistances her favorability?
Since few of us here live in Vermont, we’ve had only rare occasions for the “black box” in our brains to be proven wrong. In my lifetime (now way above average in length, I might add), that black box has only possibly been wrong once and that would have been with Deval Patrick. However, it didn’t take long for Mr. Patrick’s gifts as a campaigner to become evident or his poll numbers to become overwhelming. So even the black box changed its little mechanical mind.
Whatever we political junkies and fervent primary voters may love about Sen. Sanders, there’s no strong evidence yet that his path to the White House is anything but improbable. A taste for dour, detailed, policy-heavy speeches could only be near universal in some place like BMG.
I’m sure ex-McGovern Administration officials would agree.