Liberal Dems: Where’s our spine?
Congressional Democrats are abandoning ObamaCare like passengers on a sinking Titanic. Liberal writers are deeply ashamed. Kevin Drum writes:
I and my readers are mostly the sober, pragmatic sorts. Willing to compromise. Sensitive to political realities. Etc. And even we’re disgusted. I can’t remember ever being as embarrassed to be a Democrat as I am today.
I actually give Kevin credit for being sober and pragmatic, so his comments should carry some weight. Naturally, those who are less sober and pragmatic feel similarly.
Kevin also notes this tweet from Matt Yglesias, to the effect that “Congressional Dems on cable this AM looked like the French retreating from Russia.” I consider it unfair to compare the Democrats to the French, but I guess Matt has that privilege.
On his blog, Matt writes,
Explaining the October Revolution, Trotsky said “power was lying in the streets—we picked it up.”…Ever since November of 2008, power has been lying not in the street but in the halls of Congress. And it seems to me that many members of Congress have been simply unwilling to accept that fact. They want to evade responsibility…
The power is there. Anthony Weiner and Barney Frank and Evan Bayh are all autonomous human beings. If they choose not to pass health care, then they have the right to do so. But it’s up to them and they just need to decide.
It’s pretty normal for liberal pundits to denounce Evan Bayh’s timidity. But what’s going on if even Barney Frank is to weak for the Democratic left? Why have perceptions of the possible diverged so greatly between liberal writers and liberal pols?
Even before Brown’s victory, TNR’s Jon Chait warned Democrats not to panic:
The difference between the parties is that Republicans ignore the establishment’s advice. After Obama’s election, conventional wisdom insisted that the GOP would have to move to the center. Instead the party moved further right. And whatever the policy merits, it has worked politically. If Republicans had cooperated more with Obama, it would have given him bipartisan accomplishments and made him even more popular.The GOP’s ability to ignore establishment nostrums in the face of defeat is its great electoral strength. Democrats, by contrast, have a congenital tendency to panic.
We can argue about whether the GOP moved to the right in 2009 or Barack Obama moved to the left. But it’s true that the Republicans didn’t panic.
I’m not sure I can really explain the difference. My best hypothesis is that the GOP has a conservative base, whereas the Democrats are a coalition of liberals and moderates. When moderates abandon the Democrats, the party has much greater cause to worry.
I think that’s a fairly non-partisan analysis. Would you Democrats out there agree?
Cross-posted at Conventional Folly
63 Responses to “Liberal Dems: Where’s our spine?”
Wow, thanks for taking less than 24 hours to prove my point.
Did you fail to see or did you simply choose to ignore as not fitting your pre-concieved conclusions my reply to centristsam on my choice of words?
Make the necessary observations first (like reading the whole thread), then draw conclusions, then comment. It may help you not seem so reactionary.
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Dear Schadenfreude, Thanks for your reply and I am going to email Tyrone also. In the meantime, please (I know this is Luddite solution, but it will work for now) consider typing in the entire URL like, you know, sillywilly.com and people can paste it into the browser, even though it's not yet a live link.
Please keep trying to use your linking function to see if it has 'snapped back' also.
Stay tuned.
Dr. E
Sure they do. The Democrats, the press as a whole, and it seems perhaps you as well just ignore them.
http://www.gop.gov/solutions
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/05/nation/…
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/20/republ…
Dr. E -
Well, using just plain URL without the HTML to neaten them up did work. Still strange, though, as I am very well versed in HTML, and know I am not formatting it incorrectly.
But thanks so much for the tip!
Point taken about reading the whole thread, but in this case it would not have made a difference to my reaction, because my reaction had nothing to do with your choice of words being uncivil. That was completely irrelevant to why it was so funny to see someone describing David as “far left.”
David is a talented writer and a worthy intellectual opponent; I enjoy his posts a lot. But he is not “the far left wing of the Democratic Party.” I will let David further characterize his position on the political spectrum, because I don't like to speak for other people, but this much I feel fairly certain David would agree with.
Of course, you would not know this because you're new here.
kathy -
Wow. That is all I can say. Wow.
The fact that had you read the whole thread and seen that I acknowledged I should not have pointed my initial comment towards the poster but rather the post, which really was the intent as the rest of the post showed, you STILL would said what you did?
You think the Rocky Horror Show was weird, you have just entered the KK alternate debating universe (music from the Twilight Zone). Be prepared to suspend reality (at least on the thread).
You find my life story weird?
What have you got against resurrected bi-sexual alien transvestites who conduct re-animation experiments on humans and take joy in the misfortunes of others?
You sir are a: Sexist. Speciest. Anti-necrophiliac. Homophobe.
For shame.
For shame.”
It's worse, I am a Rep.
Yes, Schadenfreude, because as I told you, the accuracy of your characterization was my point, not its incivility. I would probably have worded it differently, in order to make it clear that I was referring to the accuracy of your comment and not the incivility, but I would still have been amused, to put it mildly, that you thought the author of that post was at the “far left of the Democratic Party,” because in fact the author of the post is about as far from the far left of the Democratic Party as anyone could possibly be.
Pointing your initial comment toward the post would have made no difference when the person who wrote it is a conservative Republican. How could the post have been an example of far left Democratic Party thinking when the person who wrote the post is a conservative Republican?
I've run out of ways to explain this, so this will be my last post on this subject.
You could have just said you're from LA, you didn't need to get specific.
you crack me up Prof.