Tag: 2010

Noises Off

Kevin Drum reacts to the 1.5-hour systematic refutation of GOP talking points by one Barack Obama today during the GOP caucus meeting (which you can see and read for yourself; Obama is particularly ferocious on healthcare and the preposterous rhetoric surrounding same. Also economic proposals. Worth your time.):

Right now Republicans have a built-in advantage when it comes to attack politics and they’d be fools to give it up. A format like this, which puts the president front and center, allows him to directly call out distortions and lies, and rewards conversation rather than machine-gun style talking points, is something Republicans should justifiably be very afraid of. Unless they’re suicidal — or somehow figure out a way to take better advantage of the format — they’ll never allow this to happen again. Without the noise machine, they’re lost.

I think this overlooks the fact that Obama can simply host the meeting anyway. TV cameras will be there. If the GOP refuses to show up, or won’t let him in the door, it makes for a powerful object lesson. Either they’re a) afraid to face him -or- b) have no valid response and know it. If they let him in but close it to cameras, that’s equally powerful in its own way. Any of these outcomes can then become the message for the next several days. You could even have count-up calendars: 64 days since the GOP last agreed to meet with the President. Will they turn up on Thursday? It’s the sort of simple, powerful concept that the American people will instantly and viscerally understand. And it will piss them off.

The Democrats need to focus all efforts at messaging. Most of the country is utterly unaware of just how pervasive GOP obstruction is, and will never find out on FOXnews. So you have to make it sufficiently unavoidable. Everyone must see it first hand, or hear about it at the water cooler, or see the particularly defenestrating YouTube clip, or what-have-you. Every day. Every week. Now until the mid-terms.

Still in Charge

Print out and laminate, [annotated and extended for you convenience]:

  1. [The Democrats in Congress] need to remember that they’re still in charge. Democrats have the White House and large majorities in both houses of Congress. They get to set the agenda.
  2. Democrats have to understand is that they already passed health care; they own the legislation. [As such, they will be campaigning on this issue whether it is signed by Obama or not. No matter what happens between now and the mid-terms. Better to have distinct policy issues to point to, as opposed to a miserable failure to act that they have to paper over.]
  3. If Democrats get the urge to reach out to their colleagues across the aisle, they need to remind themselves that Republicans have no incentive – or desire – to do anything other than obstruct any and all legislation the Democrats might seek to pass. [Furthermore, they need to tee up some popular, populist-leaning policies that they know the GOP will obstruct. And then crucify them.]
  4. Republicans will cry “big government!” at any proposal that doesn’t involve tax cuts for the purchase of monocles and yachting accessories, but Democrats should ignore them. [Furthermore, Democrats should repeatedly excoriate the GOP for their views. When asked to apologize, raise the temperature of the rhetoric. When asked to apologize for that, raise it again.]
  5. If [Democrats] want to avoid catastrophe, they’ll have to go against all their instincts and show the American people that they have some spine. The last thing they want to be saying to the public is, “Re-elect us, even though we are obviously incapable of getting anything done.”

Read the whole thing.

Bad for the Democrat

Alexander Ryking notes something that was seemingly lost amongst the shuffle as the Liberal Media rushed to declare the Democrat dead once and for all:

Bill Owens won NY-23 — beating a right-wing extremist and becoming the first non-right-wing candidate to win the district since 1871. Great job, Michael Steele; you couldn’t even hold a district that has voted for YOUR party for 138 years.

It would seem to me the titanic face-off between the far right and moderate wings of modern conservatism (in the form of the GOP and the Conservative Party vs. the Democrat), with the direct and heavy involvement of Palin and other “rising stars” of the conservative mediasphere that shall go unnamed, that actually has national implications in terms of its outcome (in that Owens now goes to Congress (as opposed to assuming a purely statewide job)), and that ultimately resulted in a historic upending of the normal voting order stretching back more than a century would be the key outcome of what is, even still, a backwater, off-off-year election of little national import. Instead, we get breathless reports on two races for governor with unpopular incumbents, one of whom actively distanced himself from Obama, and, in both cases exit polling definitively showed that this was in no way a referendum on the Democratic Party or Obama in particular:

majorities of voters in both states (56 percent in Virginia and 60 percent in New Jersey) said President Obama was not a factor in their vote today

But, by all means liberal media, don’t let the facts of one genuinely interesting story get in the way of the preferred storyline, whatever its particulars may be. And then wonder at your continued marginalization and failure at connecting with the larger public. For some reason (that is clearly unknowable): people just don’t trust the MSM any more.

GOPLand in Bad Decline

An excellent Boston Globe op-ed describes the current, historically bad state of the Grand Old Party, held hostage as it is by the most extreme elements of its fringe membership. I’ve even put it in graph form:

Pretty easy to gather that, compared to everybody else, Democrat and “Independent” alike, self-described Republicans hold very different views on the issues of the day. And it’s not as though, were these folks asked about immigration or abortion, they’d suddenly step back into some region of the non-lunatic spectrum. GOP identifiers largely believe (to the tune of 58%) that the President of the United States is a secret Muslim born in Kenya, after all. And that he’s furthermore planning to usher in a Socialist Empire of some sort. People are certainly entitled to their insane views; the problem is, as the article notes:

In America, we don’t really have splinter parties. When one of our parties goes crazy, it doesn’t slide to the margins.

Yep. It’s not as though this is some tiny, ad-hoc group’s take on some arcane local zoning issue we’re talking about here. This is a national party competing for the Presidency. We either need more choices, or need the GOP to sort itself out, and fast.

But, far from dusting itself off and letting some cooler heads prevail, the modern GOP just pushes the crazy meter even further along. Here’s the man that delivered the response to Obama’s joint-session address on the subject of the President’s citizenship:

STARK: What do you personally believe, I mean – do you think there’s a question [surrounding Obama’s citizenship] here?

BOUSTANY: I think there are questions, we’ll have to see.

Alright, they must have chosen Boustany because of some sort of unique ability or achievement in the healthcare and its administration in LA. Or not:

…ranked Louisiana dead last in 2008 among the 50 states for the overall health of its people, hugely because of its high percentages of people without health insurance, preventable hospitalization, infant mortality, cancer deaths, cardiovascular deaths, and overall premature deaths. The Trust for America’s Health had similar findings in its 2008 rankings. The infant mortality rate in Louisiana, according to the United Health Foundation report, is more than triple that of Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

And yet, apparently, this is the best the GOP had sitting on the bench, waiting to make an important speech to an audience who’d just watched Obama make his case.

Worth noting the ending of the afore-linked op-ed:

Maybe Democrats should be happy that Republicans have been reduced to a lunatic fringe. But the lunatics still have their seat at the table, and someday they may be sitting at its head again. What then?

The Year We Make Contact


Interesting results from the folks over to Gallup. Turns out that, despite major (and continuing) assistance from the MSM, ‘Merica is seeing right through this shit.

Seemingly forgetting the downright ruly 2-million person mob at their doorstep on Inauguration Day, seemingly forgetting that, in many cases, Obama carried their own districts by large, double-digit figures, seemingly forgetting that, you know, the economy is in freefall and that most everyone in America places blame squarely at the doorstep of the GOP; most of all, seemingly forgetting 2010.