Divided We Stand

[Political Waves]

Well, what a fine mess, as Ollie would tell Stan. In the last months, as the Blue Dogs engaged in ... and apparently succeeded in ... pulling the teeth of the Public Option that would endanger their corporate friends, the grass roots Lefty's began a unified assault to get them back into a Liberal position. Meanwhile, the remaining Republican base has scrapped all but the most radical of its leadership, taking its orders from Beck and Palin and even Newt Gingrich, who has now fallen out of favor for being too reasonable. The gap between the parties has widened immeasurably -- and what more classic example of the Saturn/Pluto square than the future facing off against the past in disturbing ways?
 
We're closing in on an All Or Nothing At All extremism; although the Left has to go a pretty far piece to close the gap on the delusional/conservative energy that has inched up ... and all according to plan, implemented over decades and administrations ... since St. Ronnie chuckled and preened and waved to his adoring fans. Now ... and despite appearances ... few but the most radical and paranoid can approve the current Pub hatespeak, with even various of the Evangelical groups turning away from their Dominionist brethren, GOP numbers have dwindled to only the most faithful. There are plenty of Conservatives out there, to be sure, but many no longer wish to identify themselves with the Republican Party. Current polls show that less than 20% will own the GOP brand.
 
Those who pine for the days of civility and sane discourse ain't got no satisfaction at the moment; and I wonder how long it will be before we get anything close. Limbaugh has said, for instance, of Dierdre Scozzafava -- moderate Pub who was running against both a Dem and a Wingnut candidate Palin approved in NY state -- that she is "guilty of widespread bestiality; she has screwed every RINO in the country" ... this when Ms. Scozzafava, accused of being too mainstream, withdrew her candidacy and endorsed her Democratic competition! I applaud the Wingnut rejection but it likely put a stake in her political heart, short-term. The Right has it that any wins in today's election will prove that they're on the upswing ... what it will prove instead is that people really do want change and they want government to provide it; so nothing new under the sun except that nothing is moving quickly enough for us in this amazing Shift and the anger abroad in the land is really fear and insecurity for the future.
 
Bonus includes progress reports on Obama, mindful of his election anniversary -- although he didn't take power until January; two months in the void doesn't count, in my book, for a years assessment. I find this all very interesting, as the Left is fuss-fussing about his timidity while the Right is calling him Stalin -- which is one more litmus on how divided we are in terms of what we think government should be. That IS the nut, my dears; simply put. And it appears to me that, in measuring Obama's success, historians will likely have the detachment but the Average Joe/Jane probably won't see that big a picture -- they judge the man and his administration on what they thought he was going to be rather than what he suggested he wanted to do.

It's that Neptunian signature in his chart that makes him enigmatic; and our desperate need for a hero that assigned him the attributes of one, which is childish in its implications and misunderstands the environment he elected to take on. The Republicans would like the South to rise again, the Democrats would like Utopia and Obama ... a man whose unique DNA and upbringing creates him as a prototype left-leaning moderate with his mother's altruism and his grandparent's pragmatism ... is showing up with a smile, every day, to slog ahead and redirect a divided country toward safe ... and delayed ... passing into a new century. In this nation, seems to me, that alone should justify his Peace prize. It took 30 and more years of deliberate stagecraft to create a psychosocial environment in which our freedom and good sense was given over into the hands of the ruthless with nary a whimper; to expect anyone to turn that around in less than one year is as delusional as Michele Bachman's website.

Me, I'm as impatient as everyone else with those hoped-for changes that Obama seems to be avoiding, and I'd sure love to see Rahm tossed off the pier; but in the larger view, it's the grown up's who get how the cycles spin and the pieces come together and I want to be one of them because we can't stand divided and hope to restore the nation; only a new, carefully instituted governmental infrastructure that promotes success and commonwealth will turn the heads of those whose disenchantment defines them, and enlist their cooperative spirit for the long haul.

Last read, while there IS no 'War on Terror' there is certainly a struggle against terrorism -- Obama's inclination is to draw down and fight smarter, but the Pentagon is a inflexible as the stick up Cheney's ass. Rolling Stone has the read.

 

Note: lots of reads today, to take you to the end of the week. I have an unusual ... and temporary ... window of decent weather to get the homestead ready for Winter and I must take advantage of it.

Jude


The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York
FRANK RICH, NYT
October 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/opinion/01rich.html

BARACK OBAMA'S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week's election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors' races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 - a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican "comeback." But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York's 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement - whether the participants are dressing up in full "tea party" drag or not.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement's undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the "actual responsibilities" of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party's nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn't sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right's Jacobins, that's cause to send her to the guillotine.

Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a "true" conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway - as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele - he too was slimed. Mocking Newt's presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as "global warming czar." She's quite the wit.The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin's clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman's Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn't even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he "showed no grasp" of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance - blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.Last week it turned out that Hoffman's prime attribute to the radical right - as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative - was bogus. In fact he's on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York's 23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.

The right's embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It's still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it's even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That's bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor's race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats' prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we're seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era's equivalent to today's tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society's "ruthless prosecution" of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to "melt Snowe" (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

These conservatives' whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the "race card." What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn't understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.

This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol' Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in "Gone With the Wind" when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. "America was once their country," he wrote. "They sense they are losing it. And they are right."

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a "microcosm of America." (New York's 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country's 21st-century profile.

That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that's still rural. It's also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama's ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson's university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama's Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting "Hope."

Chris Christie, McDonnell's counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating "Change" in which Obama's face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you'd think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It's become a Beltway truism that the White House's (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network's numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck's histrionics for the first time, the president's numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in "Star Wars."

There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It's Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down. ++
 

New York Republican quits House race, endorses Democrat
Steve Thomma, McClatchy
November 02, 2009
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/v-print/story/78135.html

 
WASHINGTON — Under fire from prominent members of her own party who said she wasn't conservative enough, the Republican candidate for an open U.S. House seat in New York abruptly withdrew from the race just days before the election, and in another surprise move over the weekend, endorsed her Democratic rival.
 
State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava said she was trailing in polls, unable to raise money and unlikely to win. She told supporters that while her name would still be on the ballot Tuesday, she released all of them from their pledges and said they could vote for anyone.
 
The sudden withdrawal came as polls showed her falling to third place behind Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. The election in New York's upstate 23rd Congressional District will fill a seat vacated when moderate Republican John McHugh was named Secretary of the Army by President Barack Obama.
 
"In recent days, polls have indicated that my chances of winning this election are not as strong as we would like them to be," she said.
 
"It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so."
 
Scozzafava, who Sunday endorsed Owens, said she'd always been a "proud Republican" and hoped her withdrawal would help the party.
 
A moderate with close ties to organized labor, Scozzafava was selected as the party nominee by country chairmen who thought her the strongest candidate to carry the district that had elected the moderate McHugh and which swung to Obama in 2008.
 
While some party leaders such as Newt Gingrich called that the smartest way to win enough seats in coming years to win back control of Congress, others instead called it a cop-out.
 
Scozzafava was vilified as a liberal RINO -- Republican in Name Only -- as big name Republicans such as Sarah Palin, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Reagan Atty. Gen. Ed Meese urged voters to reject her and instead support Hoffman.
 
Hoffman, a Republican who launched his third party challenge after losing the nomination to Scozzafava, saw his support climb while hers dropped.
 
A new poll by the Siena Research Institute showed Owens with the support of 36 percent of likely voters, Hoffman with 35 percent and Scozzafava with 20 percent. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
 
The Republican establishment immediately embraced Hoffman as their de facto candidate.
 
"Effective immediately, the RNC will endorse and support the conservative candidate in the race, Doug Hoffman," said Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. "Doug's campaign will receive the financial backing of the RNC, and get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat Bill Owens on Tuesday."
 
Owens will get help as well, as Vice President Joe Biden heads to the district Monday to rally supporters. ++
 

Are Moderates No Longer Welcome In The Republican Party?
VALERIE BAUMAN, HuffPo
11/ 1/09
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/are-moderates-no-longer-w_n_342076.

 
ALBANY, N.Y. — In a Republican Party struggling to find its identity, the surprise withdrawal of the chosen GOP candidate for a New York congressional race – forced by a rising conservative upstart – renews a lingering national debate: Are moderates welcome in today's Grand Old Party?

The question became even more relevant Sunday when the ex-candidate, state Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava, threw her support behind the Democrat in the race rather than the Conservative Party candidate favored by fellow Republicans.

The GOP leadership insisted on Sunday political TV talk shows the party is strong and inclusive while Democrats described a Republican party out of touch with the people.

"We accept moderates in our party, and we want moderates in our party. We cover a wide range of Americans," said Republican House Leader John Boehner in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union."

But in New York's rural 23rd Congressional District, the message was clear early: Scozzafava was too moderate; some even used the dreaded "L" word – liberal. Her endorsement of Democrat Bill Owens over Conservative Doug Hoffman only reinforced that perception – even her former campaign spokesman, Matt Burns, said it was a mistake and urged Republicans to back Hoffman.

During the campaign she failed to connect with voters, party officials or, perhaps most important, campaign donors, largely because of her support for abortion rights, same-sex marriage and union rights. That opened the door for Hoffman, who took every opportunity to remind people that Scozzafava was not the kind of Republican they wanted representing their interests in a Democratic-led Congress.

Even before Scozzafava's fall, Republicans looking to broaden the base by attracting more centrist candidates worried that the harsh tone in the 23rd spelled trouble for the future, particularly the 2010 midterm elections.

"If we don't get some adult supervision, basically the party could explode and split itself up," said former Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, chief executive of the Republican Main Street Partnership, just days before Scozzafava withdrew.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had the same concern, and that's why he endorsed Scozzafava early in the race. As other Republicans threw their support behind Hoffman's momentum, Gingrich argued that the party needed to be more inclusive of moderates if it had a hope of retaking the majority.

He told The Associated Press he was disappointed, and "deeply upset" that Scozzafava endorsed Owens.

"How could she have accepted all that support?" he said, adding later: "I'm very, very let down because she told everybody she was a Republican, and she said she was a loyal Republican."

Gingrich now backs Hoffman.

Scozzafava's support of Owens is angering Republicans back home as well. State Republican chairman Ed Cox said her endorsement is a "betrayal" of the people in the district and the party.

A recent Siena College poll showed her finishing a distant third behind Owens and Hoffman. And in this upstate New York district, Republicans never finish third. In its different configurations over the years, a Republican has represented this part of New York since 1852.

Scozzafava did not return calls Sunday. Her husband, local labor leader Ron McDougall, said he's supporting Owens because of his union positions. He said his wife had been treated "harshly."

During the weekend, New York Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer and the White House reached out to Scozzafava urging her to back Owens.

Big-name Republicans including Sarah Palin, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson weighed in early in the race, giving their support to Hoffman. Money poured into his campaign from all over the country. In the process, Scozzafava was left behind in fundraising.

Democrats are seizing on the race as evidence that Republicans won't be able to retake the majority with a far right agenda.

On CBS' "Face The Nation," White House senior adviser David Axelrod addressed whether he believes conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh truly represents the direction the GOP is going.

"That's for the Republican Party to decide," Axelrod said. "I think we've seen an interesting development over this weekend in a special election in upstate New York in a congressional district. The Republican candidate withdrew because of the strong third-party movement behind a very right wing conservative.

And certainly Mr. Limbaugh and others were behind that. And I think it sends a clear message to moderates within that party that there's no room at the inn for them. That's why you see Republican identification in polls at a historic low."

And Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said Republican leadership is "becoming more and more extreme and more and more marginalized."

John Brabender, a veteran Republican consultant, said it's dangerous to lump people together by label and suggest there's no room for moderates.

"I think it's about how moderate, and how likely are they to be voting with Republicans," he said. "I think it would be too grand of a statement to say moderates have a target on their back."

Brabender said the outcome of Tuesday's race will be key as Democrats and Republicans fight for what will be perceived as message-sending wins in this and other off-year races. Democrats will try to scoop up any disenfranchised moderate Republicans, while Republicans will argue that this is the year the political pendulum swings back to the right.

"There's a renewed belief that the Republican Party has a number of principles and people are going to look at the candidates running and look at the consistency of their principles rather than if they have an 'R' after their name," Brabender said.

A Republican loss in the 23rdwould leave the party with just two seats in the 29-member state congressional delegation. ++
 

Joe Trippi: Rove's Misread of Tuesday's Elections
HuffPo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-ostroy/one-year-after-election-d_b_341593.html


Today's "Bellweather" Elections Aren't Bellweathers & Don't Say Much About National Politics
David Sirota, OpenLeft
11/3/09
http://www.openleft.com/diary/15776/why-tuesdays-big-elections-dont-say-much-about-national-politics

Conservatives take aim at leaders, Crist, other races
Jim VandeHei and Alex Isenstadt, Politico
November 2, 2009 
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=B287C056-18FE-70B2-A88C6D5F0E6061E5

The conservative coup in upstate New York did much more than lay bare the power of conservative activists: It exposed how little control GOP officials hold over this surging and formidable political movement.
 
In the wake of conservatives’ role in forcing liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava out of Tuesday’s special election in New York’s 23rd District, GOP officials are trying to make it seem as if they are helping to stoke the passion — and can harness it to upend President Barack Obama and Democrats. They didn’t — and they can’t.
 
Many of the activists who helped knock out Scozzafava told POLITICO that the passion is building despite — and sometimes to spite — Republican leaders in Washington.
 
“I don’t give a crap about party,” said Jennifer Bernstone, a tea party organizer for Central New York 912, which helped to lead the anti-Scozzafava charge. “Grass-roots activists don’t care about party.”
 
Says Everett Wilkinson, a tea party organizer in Florida: “We are not going to allow our [movement] to be stolen by the GOP or by any political party.”
 
This energy on the right seems to exist outside the control of the conventional political structure, and GOP politicians and operatives are as likely to be victims of this anger as beneficiaries.
 
GOP leaders are about to learn the lesson again, several conservatives warned. Grass-roots activists are ready to turn their fire on Republicans in a host of races across the country, said Adam Brandon, a spokesman for FreedomWorks, an organization that helped gin up the tea party protests and town hall flare-ups.
 
“If you look at other bellwether races, we’re still going to be on opposing sides,” said Brandon, who pointed to the Florida Senate race, where a conservative former state House speaker is taking on GOP-establishment-backed Gov. Charlie Crist as the next major conservative electoral stand.
 
“There are going to be other conflicts,” said Brandon. “We have a lot of work to do. The [Doug] Hoffman campaign was the beginning. It was not the climax.”
 
Tom Davis, former head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said this rage against the GOP machine might feel good for disgruntled conservatives, but it could also land Republicans deep in the minority for years to come.
 
“It becomes a challenge for Republicans to harness this energy in an appropriate fashion,” he said. “Part of the responsibility of the minority is to harness the energy against the majority.”
 
Still, he warned, load on too many conservatives, and they will “sink the boat.”
 
To be blunt, many conservative activists couldn’t care less what Davis and top party officials think about them and their brand of politics.
 
They feel they were had by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who urged them to stomach earmarks for the good of the party; by George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, who urged them to stomach a massive expansion of education and Medicare for the good of the party; and by the rest of the Washington gang that collaborated in the largest expansion of government in their lifetime for the good of the party.
 
Erick Erickson, founder and editor of the conservative RedState blog, said grass-roots activists are done listening.
 
“Republicans are going to have to come our way,” he said, before going on to trash NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele for backing Scozzafava.
 
Their “level of disingenuousness ... is disgusting,” Erickson said.
 
His influential blog is now calling for Sessions to get the boot from the NRCC as a penalty for mishandling the race.
 
Erickson’s bombast may seem overboard, but it captures the depths of anger over the handling of this special election. It’s not just that Scozzafava wasn’t conservative — she was very liberal on abortion, unions and gay marriage and even left the impression she might join the Democrats once elected.
 
Indeed, on Sunday, the day after pulling out of the race, she endorsed Democrat Bill Owens.
 
“There is already a party for people who think like that,” conservative columnist George Will said on ABC’s “This Week.”
 
“It’s called the Democratic Party.”
 
Right now, the power, the energy, the momentum — and the results — are on the side of the conservative activists.
 
The newest incarnation of confrontational conservatism — driven more by animosity toward government and Obama than by the social passions of the 1990s — has plenty of energy and bodies to turn out big crowds at tea party events, hijack congressional town hall meetings as it did in August and defeat a GOP-establishment-backed House candidate.
 
It also has leaders with louder microphones than those of House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky: former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her Facebook page, Rush Limbaugh and his radio show and Glenn Beck with his popular 5 p.m. slot on Fox News.
 
Those commentator-entrepreneurs are far better known and are considerably more influential with the conservative grass roots than the GOP’s Washington leaders — congressional Republicans such as Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey and even Steele have both been forced to call Limbaugh to apologize after making critical statements about him to the media — yet they carry unmistakable downside risk. Not only are they unpopular with many moderate voters, but they also have histories of saying wildly impolitic things.
 
Make no mistake: There is a huge divide between the public rants of this activist wing and the private angst of party leaders in D.C.
 
Numerous GOP officials have told POLITICO they worry that the party has been hijacked by a noisy and powerful minority that will keep the GOP in a noisy and not-so-powerful minority for a long time.
 
It will be impossible for GOP leaders to make this case anytime soon. The trick, instead, will be to find common ground on running conservative candidates who appeal to activists but can also run campaigns not entirely predicated on the hardest edges of their conservatism.
 
The Virginia governor’s race, which will also be decided Tuesday, could be the prototype for this kind of compromise. Until then, Charlie Crist should get ready for a rumble. ++
 

The Netroots Take the Gloves Off
They pushed the public option back onto the table. Now, liberal activists are stepping up the pressure on Obama-and hitting wavering moderates with corruption charges.
Art Levine, The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-31/the-netroots-take-the-gloves-off/full/

The liberal activists and bloggers who helped keep the public option alive-pressuring Democratic leaders after it was declared virtually dead a month ago-are now stepping up their attacks against any senator in the Democratic caucus who might join a Republican filibuster. For good measure, many of them are also sharply criticizing President Obama for failing to pressure legislators for strong reforms. Their criticism of Obama has been echoed in milder terms by such outspoken reformers as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). Weiner said bluntly on MSNBC, "If the President calls [members], it's tough to say no. We've been kind of left to do this on our own, and we need the full-throated support of the president at a time like this when we're having a big national debate." As a result of Obama's absent leadership, the watered-down House version of the public option unveiled Thursday wasn't fully competitive or affordable, he noted.

Now corruption allegations against potential supporters of a filibuster have ramped up the war within the Democratic Party. Jane Hamsher told the Daily Beast that one of her emerging themes is: "Is Barack Obama tough enough to stand up to corruption in his own party?"

Some cable TV talk shows are filled with liberal critics. MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show showcased more intra-party attacks by featuring influential bloggers Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake (twice) and Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, who lobbed incendiary allegations of health-industry corruption involving Senators Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman - and their wives.

Before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced his support for a public option with an opt-out for states on Oct. 26, he and wavering Democrats were subjected to withering TV attack ads; polling sponsored by the 100,000-member Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) last week that disclosed a majority of Nevada voters regarded Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as "weak,", and phone-banking sponsored by the Firedoglake PAC threatening Reid, up for reelection, with a primary challenger.

Now the targets have been expanded to those in the Democratic caucus who may join a filibuster. "This is out-and-out corruption," Hamsher, a movie producer (Natural Born Killers) turned progressive blogger, told The Daily Beast. She charged that lucrative donations to the Bayh and Lieberman campaigns by health industries and the health-related corporate positions of their wives amounted to "legalized bribery."

Whether it's due to such public pressure or merely a change of heart, Bayh, for one, has already "clarified"-or altered-on Oct. 29 the stance he took just the day before, when he leaned toward supporting a filibuster. Then he told CBS's Bob Schieffer he may block a bill from moving forward for a vote if he didn't consider it "fiscally responsible." But a day later his office released a statement, "Senator Bayh will support moving forward to a health care debate on the Senate floor, where he will work hard to address his concerns." He later added that it would be "extremely unlikely" that he'd filibuster against the bill.

Adam Green, the 33-year-old co-founder of the PCCC, boasted in an e-mail sent to supporters: "Hours after a new poll showing Sen. Bayh's constituents want him to oppose a health-care filibuster.Bayh's office announced significant movement."

Now corruption allegations against potential supporters of a filibuster have ramped up the war within the Democratic Party. Hamsher disclosed to the Daily Beast that one of her emerging themes is: "Is Barack Obama tough enough to stand up to corruption in his own party?"

Both Bayh and Lieberman have denied doing the bidding of health care industries, as well as any conflicts of interest because of their wives' positions drawing lucrative paydays from corporate health interests. Susan Bayh has earned a reported $2 million dollars over the last six years as a member of the board of leading insurer WellPoint. Hadassah Lieberman formerly worked for two PR and lobbying firms, Hill & Knowlton and APCO, handling pharmaceutical and health care clients, as columnist Joe Conason of Salon reported, but was never a registered lobbyist. Lieberman's spokesman declined to answer written and phoned inquiries from the Daily Beast.

But Bayh's press secretary released a statement to The Daily Beast: "Neither Mrs. Bayh nor any employee or lobbyist for WellPoint can lobby Senator Bayh or any member of his staff. Our strict ethics policy goes above and beyond what is required under Senate ethics rules." The spokesperson added, "He has voted against the insurance industry numerous times."

While left-wing pressure is moving the debate, one of the leading reform organizations advocating health-care reform expresses wariness of the tactics. "Rachel Maddow and Jane Hamsher are talking to the Democratic base, but [these corruption charges] don't resonate with swing voters," says Alan Charney, the program director of USAction, the lead grass-roots organization in the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition, with its 1,000 local and national groups. "The bottom line is not to score rhetorical points, but real points by moving members of Congress to do the right thing," he observes, favoring a strategy he calls "positive pressure."

"How's that working out for them?" says Hamsher scornfully. "Alan Charney's full of shit." She accuses HCAN of pulling its punches against Democratic legislators, and only just attacking Republicans, to further a partisan agenda. "Their advertising has had no effect on health care reform," she insists, although, in fact, HCAN helped generate nearly three million signatures for a public option and hundreds of thousands of calls. Moreover, she blames the coalition for months of passivity, failing to attack the insurance industry. She claims that didn't change until the group got the go-ahead for such attacks from the DNC and the White House after Obama's team gave up in September on appeasing that "stakeholder." In truth, the coalition started attacking insurance companies as far back as last December, as their press releases show, but they didn't escalate with an effective, high-profile, multi-media campaign until September. (Charney has told the Daily Beast that the late-launched attacks against insurers by HCAN were simply a strategic mistake.)

Feeling that they are gaining ground after pushing Reid to back the public option, Hamsher and other critics are now using hard-hitting charges against Democrats and Lieberman as part of their broader efforts to pressure the Democratic leadership and the President to rein in potential filibustering members with LBJ-style threats where it hurts. That's a notion that's currently seen by most conventional Hill observers as far-fetched. Lieberman's Connecticut colleague, Sen. Chris Dodd, a public option supporter, dismissed on Oct. 28 the idea of stripping Lieberman of his chairmanship as "ridiculous." He was promptly derided by a pack of blogs.

On Oct. 29, though, Hamsher, among others, was cheered by the powerful chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Tom Harkin (D-IA), who issued a veiled warning to Lieberman in a conference call with reporters. "He wants to caucus with us and, of course, he enjoys his chairmanship of the [Homeland Security] committee because of the indulgence of the Democratic Caucus. So, I'm sure all of those things will cross his mind before the final vote," Harkin said.

Polling remains a primary weapon in the drive to keep Senate Democrats loyal to health reform. In a new poll co-sponsored by PCCC and released Friday, Oct. 30, the group found that it would be "career suicide" for embattled Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln to join Republicans in filibustering a public option bill. In fact, 49% of Democrats and 35% of Independents say they'd be less likely to vote for her if she did.

At least two major membership organizations so far, Howard Dean's Democracy for America (DFA) with one million members and the five-million-member MoveOn.Org Political Action have launched initiatives against pro-filibuster Democrats. The DFA campaign urges members to ask Democrats to strip any filibuster proponents of their chairmanships. The group is on track to have 150,000 signatures on its petition by next week.

"I would like to see the President fight much harder, but this [health reform] is an issue progressives can fight for and Congress can make  happen," says Charles Chamberlain, DFA's political director. "We can do the arm-twisting." ++
 
 
bonus
 

One Year After Obama's Victory: We Are in the Opening Months of a New Progressive Era
Robert Creamer, HuffPo
November 3, 2009

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/one-year-after-obamas-vic_b_343465.html


The Striking Obama Record
Jacob Heilbrunn, Author, "They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons" - HuffPo
November 3, 2009 08:30 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-heilbrunn/the-striking-obama-record_b_343413.html

One year after the election, President Obama has not: ended world hunger, brought about perpetual peace, banished unemployment, abolished crime, or even managed to prevent snowstorms and floods from occurring.

What he has merely done, however, is to: prevent a new Great Depression from occurring by rescuing the banking system and Wall Street, partly by backing a stimulus plan that his conservative opponents denounced as the beginning of socialism; ensure that Congress will pass a comprehensive health-care will be passed that his conservative opponents are depicting as full-blown socialism; preside over the beginning of the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq; push for a global warming bill; and, along the way, be everything that George W. Bush was not.

No, no, no, cry Obama's biggest detractors -- on the left. Not good enough. Bad Obama. We want more. Obama is too passive. He doesn't understand Washington. He's getting rolled. And so forth.

Don't believe a world of it.

This is no time for buyer's remorse when it comes to Obama. Compare Obama to John F. Kennedy and his record starts to look pretty good. For one thing, he's avoided disaster. He hasn't launched into a Bay of Pigs. Nor has he been taken to the cleaners by any foreign leaders. Instead, Obama is carefully thinking over the consequences of America's involvement in Afghanistan. Obama, like Kennedy, is a young president, which means that he's learning on the job.

Sure, Obama may be idealistic and underestimate partisanship in Congress. But it was a shrewd maneuver on his part to let the conservatives blow off steam in August. Now Obama has the momentum and is on the verge of getting a health-care bill. Anyway, is idealism such a bad quality in a president? It's carried Obama all the way to the presidency and may well allow him to chalk up some real accomplishments in foreign policy.

One thing is clear: anyone looking for Obama to become a new version of George W. Bush, blasting away at the opposition is going to be disappointed. After Obama has been in office for four years, however, I bet his actual record will not provide much grounds for disappointment. One year later, Obama doesn't deserve brickbats, but plaudits. Bravo, Mr. President! ++


Democrats' Quiet Changes Pile Up
JONATHAN WEISMAN, Wall Street Journal
NOVEMBER 2, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125712507804421903.html

WASHINGTON -- While President Barack Obama still faces stiff headwinds on a range of major legislation on his agenda, he has been signing into law a slew of smaller initiatives that had gathered dust on the Democratic wish list for years.
 
Many of the bills had been blocked by Republicans who considered the measures unnecessary expansions of government or too costly. But facing Democratic majorities in Congress, conservatives are picking their battles and in many cases letting the legislation roll through.
 
Last week, Mr. Obama signed defense-policy legislation that included an unrelated measure widening federal hate-crimes laws to cover sexual orientation and gender identification -- 12 years after it was first introduced. The same legislation also tightened the rules of admissible evidence for military commissions, an issue that consumed Congress in debate in 2007 but received almost no attention this go-round.
 
Other new measures signed into law since the administration took office, all of which kicked up controversy in past congresses, make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, set aside land in the West from development, give the government the power to regulate tobacco and raise tobacco taxes to expand health insurance for children. Congress and the White House, in the new defense-policy bill, also killed weapons programs that have survived earlier attempts at termination, among them, the F-22 fighter jet, the VH-71 presidential helicopter and the Army's Future Combat System.
 
Rob Nabors, the White House's deputy budget director, called the series of new laws "a very, very quiet but important victory."
 
To conservatives, they are Democratic payback to liberal interests. "The left knows what it wants," says former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "It's been trying to get it for some time, and this is its moment."
 
Some promises that Mr. Obama made during his campaign, such as repealing much of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, Patriot Act, allowing openly gay service members into the military or making major changes to the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act have gone nowhere.
 
But other issues that once consumed Congress are now sailing into law, often without much public notice. Senior White House political adviser David Axelrod said his opponents in Congress are absorbed with defeating Mr. Obama's health-care overhaul, what he calls "the shiny object that they've chased." As a result, he contends, other measures have been left to pass into law.
 
Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.), a conservative leader in the House, concedes that, in some cases, Republicans are being outflanked. "The administration is pushing so many things so rapidly it's difficult to concentrate on all of them," he said.
 
In his first year in office, President George W. Bush had more modest success with a conservative wish list. His 2001 tax cut ended the tax penalty on marriage, a longstanding Republican desire, and it slowly phased out the estate tax. But Mr. Bush didn't champion many other conservative wishes, which had been pushed by the Republican-dominated Congress during the years Bill Clinton was in the White House. Proposals from some in the party to eliminate certain government agencies in Washington and roll back work-place and environmental regulations stayed on the shelf.
 
In contrast, the Obama White House has reached into the Democratic archives, as some of the measures illustrate:
 
The hate-crimes bill became law 11 years after the slayings of the men it is named after: Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man left for dead on a split-rail fence in Wyoming, and James Byrd, a black man dragged to death behind a pickup truck in Texas.
 
The legislation gives the Justice Department the power to investigate and prosecute an expanded definition of hate crimes and to pre-empt local police when Washington decides too little is being done about a crime. The legislation has long been controversial. In fact, it took 14 votes in Congress to pass it. Opponents believe the measure is an unwarranted expansion of federal power. They also say it creates a new category of violent crime that isn't necessary because the acts it addresses would be crimes regardless of motivation. Mr. Price, the congressman, called it an "unconstitutional thought-crimes law."
 
The new public-lands law signed this spring was also once hotly debated. Among other things, the new law declares 1.2 million acres of Wyoming range land off-limits to oil and natural-gas development. Some who opposed the measure see an essential problem: The U.S. Geological Survey, they note, has estimated the area holds large natural-gas and oil deposits, which could help the U.S. toward energy independence.
 
Regarding the new tobacco law, the Food and Drug Administration and allies in Congress have been seeking regulatory authority over tobacco since the early 1990s. Republicans have argued for just as long that a federal regulatory agency established to police medicine and food had no business regulating a legal product that is neither. Indeed, they argued, because the FDA couldn't create a tobacco product that is safe, regulatory authority could in the end make tobacco illegal.
 
The legislation expanding children's health insurance has been equally controversial. Mr. Bush vetoed the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program twice in 2007. While there were supporters of the measure in both parties, who were concerned that too many children were without health insurance, opponents said the price tag was too big and would ultimately outstrip the revenue from tobacco taxes designed to pay for it.
 
Republicans also say that as eligibility for government health insurance moves up the income scale, parents could drop private coverage to enroll their children in a government plan. The new law makes families with incomes up to 300% of the federal poverty level -- or $63,600 for a family of four -- eligible. The previous cutoff was 200%, or $42,400 for that same family. ++


Hope Springs Eternal
Assessing a young presidency. Barack Obama campaigned as a populist firebrand but governs like a cerebral consensus builder. The founding fathers wouldn't have it any other way.
Anna Quindlen, NEWSWEEK 
Oct 24, 2009, from the magazine issue dated Nov 2, 2009
http://www.newsweek.com/id/219371

From time to time the American people participate in a mass delusion about how their government works. Such a delusion took place exactly a year ago, when a 47-year-old African-American who had once been accorded little chance of prevailing was elected president of the United States.
 
History will judge Barack Obama over the long haul. But we've learned something in the short term that is simple, obvious, and has less to do with him than with the Founding Fathers. This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.

Checks and balances: that's how we learn about it in social-studies class, and in theory it is meant to guard against a despotic executive, a wild-eyed legislature, an overweening judiciary. And it's also meant to safeguard the rights of the individual; as James Madison, president and father of the Constitution, once said, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." But what our system has meant during the poisonous partisan civil war that has paralyzed Washington in recent years is that very little of the big stuff gets done. It simply can't.

This president promised to tackle the big stuff, swiftly, decisively, and in a fashion about which he was unequivocal, and voters took him at his word a year ago. For those who yearned for a progressive agenda that would change the playing field for the disenfranchised, he promised to do good. So far he has mainly done government, which overlaps with good too little in the Venn diagram of American public policy.

Universal health care is the area in which the gap between what's needed and what's likely is most glaring, and the limitations of the president's power most apparent. It is dispiriting to watch the cheerleaders of American exceptionalism pound their chests and insist that our citizens do not need the kind of system that virtually every other developed nation finds workable. (By the way, if you're confused about the public option, just ask yourself this question: would you like to be eligible for Medicare at 40 rather than 65?) As elected officials posture and temporize, families are bankrupted by health-care costs and forgo treatment they can't afford. Statistical measures of the national health, from life expectancy to infant mortality, continue to be substandard. And because we have that system of checks and balances, in which movement usually happens slowly and sporadically, a great need for sweeping reform may be met with a jury-rigged bill neither sufficiently deep nor broad, which perhaps someday will give way to a better one, and then eventually a truly good one.

All that is a far cry from the health-care agenda President Obama articulated during the campaign. But campaigns are bad crucibles in which to forge the future. They speak to great aspirations; government amounts to the dripping of water on stone. The president promised in January to close Guantánamo, the detention center, created in the wake of the terrorism attacks, that has become a symbol of disregard for due process. A laudable goal, easier said than done: with more than 200 detainees and a congressional ban on bringing any of them to the United States, the administration has been reduced to trying to persuade foreign governments to do what we're not willing to do ourselves. There's been no rush to help, although props to Bermuda, which took four Uighurs, members of an oppressed Muslim minority in China.

Another of the president's promises was to end the risible military policy called "don't ask, don't tell," a policy that has resulted in the loss to the armed forces of thousands of distinguished service members merely because they happen to be gay. When he addressed the Human Rights Campaign on the eve of the gay-equality march, President Obama noted that "progress may be taking longer than you'd like." That's because, some officials say, a change in the policy must suit the comfort level of military personnel. But if the Truman administration had waited for the acquiescence of the average enlisted man, it would never have integrated the armed forces. This is one where the president does not have to convince the posturing right wing of Congress, the one that invented the spurious notion of death panels in the health-care debate. Transformation is within his grasp, in a pen, a signature, an executive order.

Why has that not happened? One reason may be the president's essential character, which is at odds with the persona that developed during the campaign. Perhaps because of his race and his age, much of the electorate, especially those of us who are liberals, succumbed to stereotype and assumed that he was by way of being a firebrand. A year in, and we know that we deceived ourselves. He is methodical, thoughtful, cerebral, a believer in consensus and process. In an incremental system, Barack Obama is an incremental man. It is one reason he is taking his time ending the two wars in which we remain mired, Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding. On the one hand, on the other. This makes attacks on him as a radical or a socialist preposterous, not to mention ridiculously retro. (Can "Trotskyite" be far behind?) It has also dispirited progressives, whose heraldic emblem might well be the broad stroke. The president is a person of nuance. But on both ends of the political number line, nuance is seen as wishy-washy. There's no nuance in partisan attacks, soundbites, slogans, which is why Barack Obama didn't run with the lines "Some change you might like if you're willing to settle" or "Yes, we can, but it will take a while."

That's really how our government works, by inches. In our long history it seems that the decision to wage war is the most sweeping act of the executive and legislative branches, although the British would likely argue that Franklin Roosevelt even brought an incremental approach to that in the run-up to World War II. In modern times, most true transformation has come through the judiciary: Brown, Roe, Miranda. Perhaps that is because consensus on the court is manageable, with only five of nine required, or because justices have life tenure, and need not spend their days looking to the next election, the focus group, the polls.

Although we view the past through a lens of misty historical romanticism, there's no question that the calculus of elected office at the moment is startlingly cynical. Henry Paulson, the last Treasury secretary in the last Bush administration, told Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair that he was most shocked by the perfidy of official Washington, in which members of Congress would tell him privately that they supported policies that they would oppose, even vigorously trash, in public. "I didn't understand the system," Paulson concluded, the system in which men and women have their consciences excised in the course of government service. The small steps an incremental system guarantees become even smaller in the face of pitched partisan rancor, until eventually nothing moves at all.

Americans point to events ranging from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Voting Rights Act to show that America knows how to think—and act—big. But a stroll through actual history, as opposed to the cherry-tree-chopping sort, provides a different narrative. Many abolitionists decried Lincoln's executive order, which freed few slaves and failed to make the buying and selling of humans illegal, while conservatives thought it was radical and unwise. In other words, it was a smallish, moderate, middle-ground measure. And while it has become gospel that Franklin Roosevelt utterly transformed the public weal through the New Deal, he was so frustrated by the opposition of conservative members of his own party that he proposed to Wendell Willkie that the liberal Democrats and the liberal Republicans join together to create a liberal party.

Even the astonishing domestic successes of the Johnson administration in 1965 were built on previous gains; the Voting Rights Act was begotten not only of the civil-rights marches, but also of Brown v. Board of Education. (And of hard-core politicking, of course. You have to wonder whether Lyndon Johnson would have gotten away with handing out public-works projects like cheap cigars if today's blogosphere had been around to record it in real time.)

But there is one legacy of that year, a year that also saw the passage of Medicare and immigration-reform legislation, that may be instructive today. It's best summed up by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She served as an aide in the Johnson White House, and her voice still carries the vibrato of excitement when she recalls that time.

"LBJ promised the members of Congress that they could someday say they'd made history," she says. "This Congress has never known the joy of that accomplishment. They haven't ever been part of an institution that moves collectively to change history for the benefit of the American people." She also notes that the presidents who have made real change have always done so in the same way: "Each of them had the country pushing the Congress to act, the people and the press both. The pressure has to come from outside." So if the American people want the president to be more like the Barack Obama they elected, maybe they should start acting more like the voters who elected him, who forcibly and undeniably moved the political establishment to where it didn't want to go. After all, in our system, even great, audacious change is never as audacious as it seems: calls for a national health-care system can be traced all the way back to Roosevelt—Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912. When Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, broke with her party to vote a health-care bill out of committee, she said, "When history calls, history calls." And it's not asking for baby steps. ++

 
The Generals' Revolt
As Obama rethinks America's failed strategy in Afghanistan, he faces two insurgencies: the Taliban and the Pentagon
ROBERT DREYFUSS, Rolling Stone
Oct 28, 2009
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30493567/the_generals_revolt

 

 

"I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
~ Barack Obama

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.