The Great Massachusetts Senate Ass Kicking, And How A Real Left Could Have Changed The Game…And Still Can
Dimocrats for the Leisure Class, F*ck The Dimocrats, Find Your Inner Left Populist, Health Care Deform, The Obama Nation -- Chump Change?? January 20th, 2010
So now, it is official….Scott Brown — Teabagger, Playgirl poster guy — is now warming Ted Kennedy’s old US Senate seat for the next 2 years.
Goodbye, Democrat supermajority and filibuster protection. Goodbye, any chance of reasonable health care reform, since now Lieberman and Nelson can now play Kingpin and extract even more onerous concessions to Big Insura and the antiabortion lobbys (and still not avoid the inevitable GOP stall tactics.
Already, the usual suspects are playing the blame game.
The Dem establishment is blaming their candidate, Margaret Coakley, for running a weak campaign.
The usual media Village Idiots are blaming the Democrats for overreaching themselves with a “big government” agenda (to use NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell’s phrase) at the expense of those prestine “swing voters” and “moderate Independents”.
The usual Democratic Leadership Council mouthpieces (see Evan Bayh and Lanny Davis) blame the supposed dependency of the Dems on “the Left” (or to use the current popular phrase, “the left of the Left”) for dragging the party down and alienating said “independents” and “moderates” for the favor of those “dirty effin hippie” bloggers who put ideological purity above practical pragmatism.
And of course, those same liberal bloggers are all over President Obama for allowing the vaunted mandate of reform to slip through his hands and enable the Teabaggers and Blue Dogs to seize the moment and revive themselves.
But, what if this debacle was not really a surprise, but the inevitable and even predicable result of a party continuing to take its “base” for granted and not addressing their key fundamental concerns, even going as far as ignoring their basic needs?
What if the results were made inevitable by the many double crosses and private deals that the Obama administration and the Democratic “leadership” were foistering in the smoke-filled back rooms whale saying the exact opposite in public about “transparency” and openness??
What if this was all about the ruse of Prez O talking up “change” while in reality retaining much of the worst of Dubya’s past policies, from FISA immunity to the Af-Pak wars to corporate bailouts paid for with taxpayer money, to the on-again/off-again crawfishing on DADT/DOMA??
And what about the bait and switch of “health care reform” where all the talk about “public option” and universal health care affordability got mutated and morphed into Baucus-Romney-MassCare with a Stupak kick in the ovaries for women’s reproductive choice and a few extra bribes for Ben Nelson and Nebraska??
Perhaps that had a lot to do with why most of the Dem base in Massachusetts stayed home and the Independents bolted, allowing Buff Brown the Teabagger Pinup to emerge victorious and grab a supposedly in-the-bag “liberal” seat???
Naaaah…must be Coakley’s fault for running a bad campaign.
In any case, the repercussions for the 2010 midterms and the 2012 Presidential elections could be enormous, especially if it spells that the rumored death of the GOP proves to be as premature as all the death calls of 1992, of 1977, or of 2008. Boy, they sure look like they are the more disciplined party, even with the wingnuts in charge..and it’s the Dems who look like a fragmented, ideologically listless party with no identity.
But, that’s what happens when you attack your base and run for the “corporate center”, and thusly allow principled right-wingers to play the “populist” card.
Unfortunately, my guess is that the Dems are so dominated by Village Idiot Conventional Wisdom and the old DLC/Fixed Noise logic that their basic instinct response will be to retrench to the (Center-)Right, attempt to find at least one Republican to compromise with to make the “bipartisan” facade look real, and dump on “the Left” and those “DFH’s” in the “netroots” for dragging them down….and hope that the craziness of the Teabagger/Birther Hard Right and the specter of a Beck-Palin Presidency is enough to keep liberals in the fold.
Problem is, though, that blaming Dubya and using Sister Sarah and the Teabaggers as a convienent foil just isn’t going to work anymore if you blow your supermajority. Ultimately, you have to actually govern on your own merits…and given what little the Dems have produced with their majority, it’s only fair that they reap the whirwind of their lack of initiative.
If Dems can’t even hold on to Ted Kennedy’s seat, for crying out loud, then there isn’t much hope for swing states, now isn’t there??
It’s past time for the Democrats to decide what kind of party they want to be. The first option is for them to rework themselves as a genuine progressive populist party and oust the BlueDogs and ConservaDems and the DLC shysters (and that means that Rahm Emanuel needs to get his walking papers, too), and for Obama to move HARD to the Left and start kicking.GOP/Teabagger asses like Ronald Reagan used to kick liberals in the teeth. Rediscovering progressive social values like respecting reproductive and sexual choice and not selling out GLBT’s wouldn’t hurt, either.
The other alternative would be to follow the DLC/Bayh template and abandon the liberals altogether and remake the Dems in their own corporate, BlueDog image, with Harold Ford, Jr. (the African-American Redneck version that ran for Senate in Tennessee a while back, not the latest model trying to carpetbag his way into Hillary Clinton’s old NY Senate seat this year) being the prototype…perhaps even with a special wrap-around to the thinly-veiled Wallace racist instincts of the “working class White” voters whom were the “Reagan Democrat” swingers of old.
Although I do hope for the former, I’m guessing that given the current power dynamics and media dominance, we will see more of the latter…and Obama will be a one-term President before the next wave of Republican reaction takes over.
And the Dems can’t blame Ralph Nader for this one, though…they destroyed themselves all by themselves.
Maybe it’s time that we had a real party of the Left that actually gave a damn about fighting for principles of equality and justice and social solidarity..and wasn’t afraid to name names and kick ass??? I’m open for suggestions, people.
Tags: Dimocrats for the Leisure Class, Massachusetts Senate Debacle
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