I’ve got a busy week so I probably won’t be posting for a few days, but I want to leave you with one thought that’s probably obvious to Balloon Juice readers, but doesn’t seem to make the disarray stories: the Romney campaign is what you get when your incubator is Fox News.
Romney and his advisors are all used to a media environment of puffball questions and solemn nods over the stupidest of talking points. His opposition in the primaries was almost entirely people who were auditioning for a contract with Roger Ailes. When you marinate in an environment where reactionary rhetoric has no consequences, you’re going to think that the right thing to do when an Ambassador may have been killed is to make up lies in an effort to blame Obama hours before the bodies have even been identified. When you are used to a world of unquestioning icon veneration and hero worship, you expect that Clint Eastwood can do magic without a prepared speech. And if you live in a world driven by sloganeering, you can become convinced that a campaign can be run on completely non-specific “plans”, and you think that making up the details as you go along is a not only practical, but is actually a good idea.
If you need any more evidence that MSNBC or the Daily Kos or whatever other liberal demon Fox believes controls the Democratic Party isn’t really in charge, look no further than the Obama campaign. They aren’t acting like a bunch of hothouse flowers, wilting the first time the real world intrudes on their sunny, warm fantasy world. They’ve been living in a 5 year shitstorm, and that’s part of the reason why they don’t fuck up on a regular basis.
Hunter Gathers
This.
Obama learned to tune out the noise a long time ago. All Romney hears is the noise. Hence the 12 trillion strategy changes.
Culture of Truth
Adding, MSNBC is not the liberal safe house Fox is for the GOP. Yes, the evening skews progressive, but it’s a tougher, more real-world environment than Hannity, for example.
Joey Maloney
From Dogs Against Romney’s Facebook page, the fail parade keeps marching on…
kdaug
“Probably obvious”? Yurp.
Create your own reality, chant to your totems, whatev’s, don’t much care.
But about those melting icecaps…
ETA: To belabor said point – “No food? Sucks.”
Zifnab
:-p After the $4T turd of a “Compromise” got floated through Congress in the wake of the Bowles-Simpson commission, I’m not sure this is anything to be particularly proud of.
Yes, Obama isn’t the cloistered kool-aid slurping slogan jockey that most right wing pols have morphed into. No, distancing yourself from the policies espoused by DKos and MSNBC is not the sort of thing you want to take a lot of pride in.
The Obama admin walked into the door ready to cut deals in ’09, when the fiery liberal base was screaming warnings that, no, this absolutely was not going to work with the modern GOP. It took Obama two years – and a precious two years of Dem monopoly over government – to figure that out. Perhaps if the Dems had been willing to play hardball sooner, we wouldn’t be having these absurd austerity debates in ’12. :-p
FlipYrWhig
@Zifnab: Or maybe “the Dems” even when they had a monopoly included a lot of politicians who have no patience for “the fiery liberal base” and don’t want to “play hardball” by embracing liberal policy preferences, and who would be a thorn in the side of liberals no matter how liberal Obama was inclined to be.
Rathskeller
Excellent point. I would add the same is true of voters. What is persuasive & insightful to a wingnut who listens to Fox & Rush all the time sounds like sheerest lunacy to a lot of swing voters, e.g., Al Qaeda conspired with Obama to let Osama get killed. Just throwing that out there.
I loved in the 2008 election that the Obama campaign was never trying to win the day, and I love it now. Eyes on the prize.
taylormattd
Um, yes it is. The geniuses at Daily Kos were shrieking “kill the bill” when the Liebermans and McCaskills of the Senate made sure there would be no public option. The geniuses at Daily Kos are convinced Obama should have spent his time yelling on the TV just like Alan Grayson, because pullypulpit. The geniuses at Daily Kos are enraged every time Obama speaks politely toward a republican; they’d have him throwing his glass of water in their faces. They are fucking morons, and if the Obama campaign listened to and took half of their recommendations, Romney would be winning.
The Moar You Know
@Zifnab: You seem to have come down with a savage case of Firebagger’s Disease.
We’re all very sorry.
Zifnab
@FlipYrWhig: Nancy Pelosi cracked the whip on the Dem House and got tons of good legislation passed.
Harry Reid played nice with his buddies. He didn’t try and nerf the filibuster. He held back on the arm twisting. That, admittedly, may have been a feature of the Senate more than a flub of the Majority leader. But I can’t help feel the Dem Senate leadership simply lacks the brass balls that Pelosi’s team had.
Certainly, when Mitch McConnell wants a unified front, everyone from Scott Brown to Jim DeMint seem to know that its time to get in line. Hell, McConnell has done a better job – far and away – in leading his caucus than Boehner/Cantor. So I have a hard time giving the Senate Dems a pass.
japa21
@Zifnab: Of course, there would have been no decent legislation passed the first two years, just like none the past two years. Forget any stimulus, forget any health care reform, forget START, forget DADT repeal, and the list goes on.
Instead of the Republican Party being the obvious party of obstruction, it would have been the Dems and the GOP would now control the Senate as well.
Southern Beale
Gretchen Carlson punked by “former Obama supporter: … LOL.
jibeaux
In the Michael Lewis profile, Obama talks about how, whether it’s people who hate you or even people who love you and think you’re Black Jesus, that it is so much more about *them* than it is him. As president, he’s a cipher for almost anything people want him to be, so you just can’t take it seriously and you have to let it roll off you so you can get the job done. Mitt’s problem is that he basically takes the opposite approach to that dynamic — he works to become whatever it is his base tries to project onto him.
Rex Everything
Very true. Krugthulu put it differently during the Republican debates; I think he said the GOP echo chamber had become so loony that a candidate had to be either stupid, crazy, or fundamentally dishonest to pass muster. But it was basically the same point.
kdaug
@Rathskeller:
Mitt killed bin Laden.
Bare-handed.
HelloRochester
re what mistermix said: Real talk.
HelloRochester
re what mistermix said: Real talk.
Dennis SGMM
@Rex Everything:
Your conclusion was amply borne out by this year’s Republican presidential field.
schrodinger's cat
Poor Romney, Bubble Boy is out of the bubble now.
Roger Moore
It’s not just that the cushy Fox environment lets the Republicans get away with being sloppy and lazy. The Republican base is now so different from the electorate at large that the race for the nomination actively selects against good candidates for the general election. It’s like 2010 Senate races on a national scale.
Zifnab
@japa21: Republicans slow-rolled the health care fight because Obama and Reid insisted on getting some Republican votes. In the end, it passed with the singular blessing of Joe Liebermann, at the expense of the public option. And in exchange, Republicans were able to “suggest” conservative changes to the bill that they got but never had to vote for (see: Death panels).
That was flat out bad politics, all to achieve the optics of bipartisanship that never even materialized. Obama would have been better served simply hashing it out with the Dem Senate leadership and cutting deals within his own caucus. And if Republicans wanted to offer their votes in exchange for amendments, make them earn it rather than letting them sit in on committees where they had no intention of being productive.
There was no way the GOP could have been any more obstructionist than they were in ’09-’10.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
Well, you kinda did in your first comment when you said that Obama came into office making all kinds of compromises with Republicans. Unless Max Baucus, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Evan Bayh, and Claire McCaskill (among others) changed parties when I wasn’t looking, the problem wasn’t that Obama had to find compromises that Republicans were happy with throughout 2009.
FlipYrWhig
@Zifnab:
I think that turns into a psychodrama something much simpler, which is that Senate Democrats are a conservative bunch, many of whom have won elections by presenting themselves as brakes on their party’s liberal tendencies. Without them, there’s no getting to 60, and without them, there’s no ratcheting down the filibuster to make getting to 60 unnecessary. And, for that matter, an ass-kicking arm-twisting Senator wouldn’t be elected majority leader in the first place, because there are too many members of the party who don’t want their arms twisted.
Linda
Another underrated reason: the left’s capacity for self-doubt. It’s a weakness, because we often second guess ourselves and doubt our core values (at times), but a positive point is that when we are really wrong, we can self-correct. The right never self-corrects; it doubles down, even when wrong or crazy.
And they never take responsibility for being in a pile of crap: they always look for someone else to blame.That means when they get their clock cleaned, it will be “voter fraud,” or some other excuse. It will take a couple of cycles before they are beaten down into accepting reality.
Culture of Truth
“The Senate Dems” were not all progressives. So they probably don’t want the pass you are not offering.
DaddyJ
It does seem they are getting desperate.
Yeah, the 27 percent will carry us over the top! That’s the ticket!
Ash Can
@Zifnab: So this is Obama’s fault how?
Brachiator
There is something more at play here. Romney got kicked to the curb by Republicansin the last primary. Newt, Perry, Santorum and Ron Paul did their best to slap him around this time around. I doubt that Fox News and other conservative outlets loved him when he was governor of Massachusetts and more or less acting not a moderate.
I don’t know who all his advisors are, but I get the impression from some Rachel Maddow segments that many have been with him a long time. He has stuck to some campaign tactics (failure to disclose his tax returns while attacking supposed nondisclosures by his opponents) time and again.
And despite his father’s more expansive worldview, Romney clings to a narrow, insular perspective that may have been reinforced by his wealth and religion.
On top of all this, Romney’s deepest character flaw, his fundamental political cowardice, has led him to run to the Fox News crowd and to seek their embrace. McCain was distrusted by the wingnuts and kept some distance from them even as he chose Palin as his VP choice.
Romney is too afraid and unsure of himself to stand up to Fox News even though his wealth, background and past political experience could easily have let him defy them.
Of course, it may also be that he also believes some wingnut shit, especially the stuff about Real White Man Anglo Saxon exceptionalism.
Either way, the Fox News universe is the symptom, not the disease itself.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
Psst. Though he will occasionally vote with them, Joe Lieberman is not actually a Republican. And the other huge compromise that had to be made (on abortion) was thanks to a Democratic House member, not a Republican.
Sorry, but most of the compromises that were necessary to get PPACA passed were generated at the request of Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents, not Republicans.
Except for ’10-’11, of course. The lame duck session was pretty much the only time anything at all has been passed.
cervantes
Well, incubation within the epistemic closure zone may be part of the explanation for the Romney campaigns failure to shake the etch-a-sketch, but I actually think they tried and found they couldn’t do it. The Christian dominionists, racist ultra-nationalists and ignoratti who make up the Republican electorate can’t be counted on to hold their noses and vote for the Mormon former severely progressive governor of Massachusetts after all, so he has to keep sucking up to them to reassure them that he will indeed do their bidding. He’s painted into a corner.
jibeaux
@DaddyJ: He must not’ve seen what generally happens when highly engaged right wingers start talking to the less engaged. Urgent appointments are quickly remembered, etc.
Zifnab
@Ash Can: It was explicitly his stated goal to get an 80-vote Senate majority for this bill. He wanted nice fat margins to demonstrate that he was being bipartisan and bringing change to Washington. In the process of trying to get those votes, he opened himself up to the GOP slow-roll and sabotage of the bill.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
Also, too, if I were going to criticize Obama over PPACA and other legislation that got hung up in the Senate, I think he made two primary mistakes:
1) He overestimated how much support he would get from Senate Democrats because he had been one of them. He didn’t realize that US Senators are, by and large, freakin’ prima donnas who were pissed off that this kid from Chicago had leapfrogged over them and taken their rightful place as president, so they all wanted to leave their mark on the legislation. (And when I say “leave their mark,” I mean the way your cat or dog does it, by pissing on it.)
2) He was not prepared for the coordinated PR push-back by the Republicans throughout that whole summer. Democrats should have been able to go back to their districts armed with talking points and OFA should have been organizing counter-demonstrations, but it never happened and it gave a lot of momentum to the Tea Party hysteria.
WereBear
Yup, we are in the Third Act, where the destructive ethos of the villainy is turned on itself.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@FlipYrWhig:
__
One of the peculiarly American and small-c conservative aspects of our system of govt is that due to slow turnover certain institutions preserve the political climate of yore like prehistoric flies trapped in amber. SCOTUS is paramount in this regard, but given the high rate at which incumbents are re-elected the US Senate is not far behind them. What we are butting up against is that Democratic Party today is noticeably more liberal than the Democratic Party of the DLC/Bill Clinton days, back when a non-trivial number of conservative southern Dems were still around and occupied many leadership positions. This in turn was the way the party reacted to 12 straight years the GOP running strong in national elections under Reagan and GHB. The party today is more liberal than the Democratic party that was trying to find its way out of Reagan’s shadow, especially at the grass-roots level.
This internal division, between an older and more conservative Dem leadership, especially in the Senate, and a more liberal grassroots level party, was a division the GOP was bound to exploit unless they’d gone completely brain dead. Our job is to do the best we can while time works in our favor to heal this split in the Democratic coalition.
Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker
I was looking for a story, I thought it was Pierce but can’t find it, about Stuart Stevens putting together some nasty racist ad that got spiked by the campaign and SS was bewildered. He couldn’t understand that it might backfire, and IIRC one of the arguments the journo’s source was making was that SS isn’t racist, but he thinks anything goes in politics, and race-baiting works, so go with it. Personally, I think race-baiting is racist, which I guess is one of the reasons I’m not a Republican. But I do think, if I am remembering that article rightly, that SS and Willard are kindred spirits, that he’s the one telling Willard what WR wants to hear, and is reinforcing this low-road, talk-radio demagoguery that Willard thinks is the key to the WHite House.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I think another problem Romney is struggling with is that post-Citizens United the central coordining bodies in the GOP are no longer able to issue top-down marching orders and have any confidence that they will be followed because they’ve lost control of the money and the advertising. That’s what has prevented them from shaking the etch-a-sketch with a pivot back to the middle. This change has actually been coming for a long time, dating back to the rise of direct mail fundraising in the 1980s, but CU was the final tipping point which has destroyed the traditional top-down control which the GOP has used in the past so effectively, and they won’t get it back until they control the WH again. Without the WH nobody in the GOP has a big enough megaphone to tell the crazies where and when to get in line and wait their turn.
Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker
also, too, I saw a clip this morning of Bay Buchanan disputing these stories of disarray and back-stabbing. Bay was saying she is at the table, knows all the top advisors, sees them interacting with Willard, blah blah blah. I don’t know which is a bigger sign of a weak, out-of-touch campaign, that they sent Bay Buchanan out as a surrogate, or that Bay Buchanan, assuming she’s telling the truth, is part of Romney’s inner circle. She makes John Sununu seem like a relevant, relatable voice.
Mino
@Joey Maloney: Is it parody yet?
redshirt
The best example of this phenomena I can think of is the picking of Palin in 2008. The Repukes were positive that simply by nominating a woman – any woman – they’d be able to take advantage of the Puma’s and crush the Democrats. Not a chance, and I think they still can’t believe it didn’t happen – hence, ACORN! BLACK PANTHERS!
jgs
Exactly. I was struck by this when listening to the most recent On The Media. The topic was “Does NPR Have a Liberal Bias?” (sigh, if only). Anyway, they asked a couple of representative Republicans to keep a diary for a week of examples of bias they found on NPR. The best one guy could come up with was that Michelle Norris asked an interviewee, “can this country afford [a tax holiday] right now?”
Yes, really. Having the temerity to ask that obvious question was held out as proof of “liberal bias”. Unfortunately, there’s no transcript up yet. But don’t take my word for it, here is some random right-wing blog whinging about it:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2011/03/16/nprs-norris-wonders-if-us-can-afford-job-creating-tax-holiday
Seriously? THAT’S the best you can do?
Roger Moore
@Zifnab:
It wasn’t just to demonstrate bipartisanship. Any Republican who voted for PPACA would have a much harder time voting to repeal it later. If he had managed to peel away even a few Republicans- and bear in mind that there were a few Republican Senators who acted for a fair while as if they might be convinced to vote for it- repeal would be largely a dead issue today. That made it a very worthwhile goal, even if it didn’t pan out.
I think there was also some practical politics involved. As long as the bill was going to take 60 votes to pass and there were exactly 60 votes in the Democratic caucus, the bill was at the mercy of the least progressive member of the caucus. The plausible threat of getting a few Republican votes helped to keep the Blue Dogs in line. That threat eventually fell by the wayside, but it may have done more than you appreciate to keep the bill from being watered down even further.
lamh35
I Can’t See Your Face Right Now’: ‘Fox & Friends’ Pranked In Wild, Nonsensical Interview”
WereBear
@lamh35: I love this. That bubble blocks thought in so many ways.
Roger Moore
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
He who pays the piper calls the tune. When you outsource fund raising and advertising to the SuperPACs, you wind up outsourcing your policy decisions, too.
TooManyJens
@Southern Beale: I just came here to post that. Holy shit, Fox got exactly what they deserved on that one.
gene108
@Zifnab:
The Democrats didn’t have 60 Senators seated until AFTER the August 2009 recess, when the fact they didn’t get HCR done blew up in their face.
On January 20, 2009, Sen. Spectar was still a Republican, Sen. Franken was still counting votes against Coleman and Sen. Kennedy was persona non grata due to brain cancer and Sen. Byrd was just hanging on, as well, due to old age.
The right-wingers have a lie going around that, when President Obama was inaugurated he had 60 Senators and should’ve done whatever he wanted. The 60 Democratic Senators didn’t materialize until Sen. Spectar switched parties, Sen. Franken was sworn in and Sen. Kennedy’s replacement was sworn in.
I don’t have the dates off hand, but it wasn’t until the fall of 2009, if I remember correctly.
The ARRA, HCR, etc. all required one or two Republican votes to get past the filibusters Republicans threw up.
Steeplejack
@Zifnab:
The Senate is constitutionally (no pun intended) different from the House. In the Senate you have 100 rich prima donnas on a six-year term, each of whom thinks he should be the next president, whereas in the House, although it contains numerous prima donnas too, you have a lot of grifter clown wannabes who are painfully aware that they are potentially less than two years away from a severance notice. Hell, yes, they’ll toe the party line when push comes to shove. Senators, not so much.
ruemara
@Zifnab: There were never, ever, ever, enough votes for a public option. That was what the White House knew, that was why it was skeptical when Reid said he would hold a vote on the weak option. This had nothing do with any “slow-roll” or Lieberman. You’re simply wrong.
Peter
@Zifnab: You are aware that the minority party in the senate (and individual senators, for that matter) have much greater power to obstruct legislation than do their counterparts in the house, I assume?
Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker
@Steeplejack: adding, you can fault Reid for not backing filibuster reform, but it’s far from certain there would have been fifty votes for it even if they had. And going further through the looking-glass of counterfactual land, there’s no guarantee a better HCR bill would’ve gotten fifty votes. Reading Grunwald’s New New Deal, a lot of Democrats in the House, long time members, not newbies, were just gobsmacked at the sanctimonious intransigence of the Senate ETA: in this particular case, the discussion was about the stimulus, ARRA, but the big picture applies to health care, too. I was frustrated by it, but a lot less surprised than the congrescritters quoted in the book.
redshirt
Awesome. Another stupid Firebagger debate. MAGIC UNICORNS!
Chris
@Steeplejack:
I read the opening of “Master of the Senate” earlier this year and was impressed by the extent to which the Senate’s always been THE ultimate roadblock against getting anything done. Bastion of Gilded Age privilege gutting progressive legislation for decades until the New Deal, bastion of racial privilege gutting civil rights legislation all through the fifties, bastion of isolationism gutting FDR’s attempts to ready for war right up until Pearl Harbor…
And, interestingly, an institution completely dominated by Southern Democrats, not only because it overrepresented the South but because positions were assigned by seniority and with the South basically a one-party state, lots of those senators were running unopposed and had been there forever.
FlipYrWhig
@gene108:
Before this was a right-wingers’ meme it was a disaffected left-wingers’ meme.
At any rate, all the things that made the health care reform act worse than it otherwise would have been arose from the pernicious input of conservative Democrats in the House and Senate. I think it was a good idea in theory to chase after the votes of people like Charles Grassley, because if it worked it would succeed in undercutting drama queens like Lieberman and Ben Nelson — it just didn’t work out and took way too long.
But, honestly, as much as we like to say that Republican obstruction was inevitable… it only happened because of an unprecedented strategy of fighting full strength against everything the president wanted and daring anyone who didn’t like it to make it stop. Nobody had ever tried anything that obnoxious before. Mitch McConnell had to convince his guys to give it a shot because they had nothing to lose. It worked better than they had the right to expect. I don’t really fault Obama or Reid for not anticipating that development.
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker: Especially when a liberal stalwart like Russ Feingold opposed changes to the filibuster.
Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker
@FlipYrWhig: I did not know that. But i’m not surprised. In the deep dark woods of Wisconsin, old timers tell that if you say the words “sanctimonious intransigence” in a mirror three times at midnight, Russ Feingold appears.
FlipYrWhig
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Definitely. And IMHO that’s why Clintonian/DLC strategies keep coming up (like talking about deficit reduction and listening to the needs of businesses) — because they were the last new thing that worked. Sure, it was 20 years ago, but these things turn around verrrrrry sloooooowly. Eventually we’ll get Democratic senators who run in Obama-like ways, by appealing to young and minority voters and giving a sense of larger purpose beyond efficient management of the economy. But that won’t happen until young Team Obama hotshots become the seasoned veterans of campaign staffs. So, 20 years from now, alas. YMMV.
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker: He’s a stickler for the separation of powers, checks and balances, etc. I think that gets overlooked as an ingredient in the many disputes about the role of the executive: a liberal senator may have views that stem from his status as senator as much as from his status as liberal.
Steeplejack
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
And the Republicans seems to think that without the crazies they can’t get the White House. A deadly conundrum.
dogwood
@Steeplejack:
You are actually contradicting yourself here. While having to run for reelection every 2 years make the electoral dynamic of the House much different than the Senate, it is actually easier to flip a Senate seat than a House seat. Thus, it’s easier for House members to stick with the party line. Senators face a different electorate than House members, and consistently face better known and better financed challengers. Incumbency is a serious advantage for all members of Congress, but it is even more helpful for House members.
Josh G.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ @ 34: “One of the peculiarly American and small-c conservative aspects of our system of govt is that due to slow turnover certain institutions preserve the political climate of yore like prehistoric flies trapped in amber.”
Yes, I think this is one reason why elderly Senate Democrats are often afraid to do anything even vaguely left-wing. They still remember the 1970s, when many Americans really did believe that “liberalism” was out of control, and when too many influential people on the left really did seem to have disdain for middle America. For someone born in 1980 like I was, Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland and David Frum’s How We Got Here were real eye-openers. It’s amazing in retrospect just how good things were for liberalism back then, and how badly our predecessors misplayed their hand by going too far, too fast, and fatally alienating too many people. But now it’s the “conservatives” (actually radical reactionaries) who are making the exact same mistakes.
Chris @ 51: “I read the opening of “Master of the Senate” earlier this year and was impressed by the extent to which the Senate’s always been THE ultimate roadblock against getting anything done. Bastion of Gilded Age privilege gutting progressive legislation for decades until the New Deal, bastion of racial privilege gutting civil rights legislation all through the fifties, bastion of isolationism gutting FDR’s attempts to ready for war right up until Pearl Harbor…”
Absolutely. Hendrik Hertzberg’s book review of Robert Dahl’s How Democratic Is the American Constitution? has some excellent discussion on this front.
Frankensteinbeck
@FlipYrWhig:
And the entire argument about whether the ACA should be better ignores that passing it, period, is an accomplishment presidents have failed at for 100 years. People like Zifnab are bitching because Obama’s A+ grade wasn’t A++. Their wishful thinking is that throwing a tantrum and demanding everything right now would have been a more successful negotiation tactic. Playing nice got us historic legislation against unprecedented opposition. Spitting in your opponent’s face is strictly for campaign season, and even then notice how sounding congenially above it all is working for Obama.
Steeplejack
@dogwood:
So why don’t we see more examples of rogues and zany “independents” in the House?
The reëlection rate is higher in the House than in the Senate, but only slightly. And I would say it is an effect rather than a cause. That two-term back-bencher from Lard Lake, AL, gets reëlected because he toes the party line and gets the goodies dropped down from above (pork, constituent services, etc.). If he strays off the reservation, it is relatively easy to find someone to primary him (e.g., up-and-coming Lard Lake district attorney Clyde Biffel). Easier, I would think, than it would be to find a well-known and well-financed challenger of the proper gravitas to face an incumbent senator. And a rep still has three times as many opportunities to get taken down as a senator does.
Gretchen
One interesting thing about the Michael Lewis profile was that Obama designs his basketball games to be hard. If somebody doesn’t play hard against him, he’s not invited back. Most of the regulars are much younger and taller than he is. He even wants a hard challenge when he’s playing.
Romney has never faced a hard challenge in his life, and has always been surrounded by people who tell him he’s wonderful and dance to his tune.
I can’t wait for the debates. Nobody has ever been allowed to tell Romney he’s wrong and stick around. Not even the debate coach who greatly improved his performance in the primary debates.
hoodie
True, but perhaps not quite for the reasons presented. Romney’s incompetence seems more sui generis, associated with Romney himself and the Bain/Mormon hothouse that spawned him. Romney was a deeply flawed candidate to begin with, and his quirks have become more apparent now that he does not enjoy a favorable comparison with the likes of Gingrich, Perry, Santorum, and Bachmann. The guy has won exactly one race against a crappy Democratic candidate; Kennedy eviscerated him once he realized he had to do a bit more than just put his name on the ballot. Notwithstanding that, Romney seems to believe in the myth of Mitt, Master of the Universe, which is a big part of why he is losing and why he would be a shitty president, irrespective of ideology. I don’t think that has much to do with Fox.
FlipYrWhig
@Frankensteinbeck: I don’t think it’s a perfect piece of legislation, but I do think that there is no clear path towards getting a better one, short of electing A LOT MORE progressives to the Senate in the first place. The existence of conservative Democrats is what makes a Democratic majority among senators possible and simultaneously what makes a progressive majority among senate Democrats impossible. And IMHO we ought to be able to get populist Dems elected all over the map, but if we managed that feat we should also be prepared if they defect to the wrong side on race, gender, and sexuality, not to mention civil liberties.
FlipYrWhig
@hoodie: I still think that Perry was their best candidate. Not the brightest, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans before! I kept predicting that he’d come back and win the next one. But he never did. I guess I’m not good at thinking like a Republican voter.
Robert Sneddon
As an interested observer from a far-off land where things are done differently, can anyone tell me the average ages of US Representatives vs. Senators? I get the impression that the Senate is filled to the brim with AARP-qualified oldsters and many of them have been there for several uninterrupted decades whereas the HoR is where the youngsters whet their political teeth in the two-year knife-fighting electoral cycle.
Does anyone ever resign or give up their seat in the Senate to go contest a Congressional seat? I do note that it is not uncommon to go the other way, giving me the impression that a seasoned pol regards the Senate as having a higher status.
Frankensteinbeck
@FlipYrWhig:
It is not perfect. A public option would have been a damn sight better, but it was not going to happen in the Senate. However, while it’s not perfect, it’s very good, even great, and so hard to pass that president after president has tried and failed. In particular, I like the ACA because hidden in the document (if ‘making up the bulk of it but ignored in conversations about it’ is hidden) is a vast swathe of new regulations on the insurance and medical industries to control spiraling health care costs. Some of it simple, some of it far-reaching and flexible, some of it truly devious.
dogwood
@Steeplejack:
I think Doug J’s post is correct. Incumbent Republicans are now only concerned about losing their seat to an even crazier Republican in the primary, and it’s Republican primary voters who are addicted to Fox and talk radio. A big share of Republican voters don’t vote in the primary and don’t pay much attention to what these teatards actually represent. I have Republican friends and acquaintances who don’t watch Fox or listen to Rush. They are clueless about where the party is today. Since the only Republicans paying attention are the crazies, no one can afford to be a rogue independent, especially in the House.
Kathy in St. Louis
The main thing that I’ve actually been able to see about the Romney campaign from the start is just what Mistermix states above. For God’s sweet sake, this guy has been running for president for 6, count them, 6 long years. He has no identifiable plan for bettering the country. He has a track record of letting businesses sink or swim on their own, which can only translate to the same thing for the U.S. and it’s citizens, just on a larger scale.
It’s hard to imagine that he’s suddenly going to see the light, get definable programs out there, show us his tax returns, become a world-class diplomat, or anything else in the next 7 weeks. The Republicans need to go back to the drawing board or 50 years from now, people will be remembering them as we do the Whigs.
WereBear
I know exactly what you mean. These are the folks who just show up and vote Republican and don’t even know what the issues ARE. I tell them what the latest Republican stunt is about and they laugh it off as “fringe” behavior that they cannot believe is serious. Even if it is enshrined in law, now.
Turned off their brains a while back. Gotta use those cells for Honey Boo Boo or something.
mainmati
@Zifnab: I agree. One has to look no farther than LBJ to see the kind of arm-twisting until its broken way that LBJ ruled the Senate. For that matter, even George Mitchell was a much more effective Senate leader than Harry “the Boxer” Reid has been.
However, I don’t think The Turtle has been an effective Leader of the Goopers. After all, his only approach is “Hell no” with a group of Senators that are almost all far right extremists (excepting only the New England clique). It’s easy if all you are doing is saying “No”.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Robert Sneddon:
I imagine I might be able to dredge up some very obscure example out of US political history, but this is basically unheard of. A perch in the US Senate is much higher in status that a House congressional seat, and for the most part it is also higher in status than the governorship of even one of our larger states.
This is a big reason why the US Senate contains so many dinosaurs. There are only two offices in our system to go to that are higher in status, and that would be to be elected President, or to be appointed to the US Supreme Court. Anything else is a major step down. So the US Senate fills up with people who are good enough politicians to get elected to the Senate but not good enough or lucky enough to take the next step. For that reason the Peter Principle reigns supreme in the Senate. A lifetime berth in the US Senate (and it is not unusual for leading Senators to depart that body feet first) is the political equivalent of Thermodynamic Heat Death.
Steeplejack
@dogwood:
I don’t disagree with that. My original comment addressed the point of why Harry Reid couldn’t swing his big brass balls and bring the Democratic senators to heel.
catclub
@FlipYrWhig: Except franken was not seated until what, July?
and Specter did not jump parties until april.
Kennedy died August 2010, so now the window is only July 2009 until july 2010.
PLus, one of that 60 is Lieberman.
Yeah, right. A great team for steamrolling centrist crybabies.
catclub
@Kathy in St. Louis: “He has a track record of letting businesses sink or swim on their own”
He also has a track record of extracting cash and then tossing them an anchor.
I think it would be fun to look up managers of companies he bankrupted and ask their opinions of him. Not just factory workers. I bet they would hate him, too.
lacp
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Both John Quincy Adams and John Tyler went to Congress after having been President….although Tyler went to the Confederate Congress.
Heliopause
Now here’s an Obama-worshiping statement that I can completely get behind. Yes, the Obama political team are expert at keeping calm. In fact, when the Juicers go on a freakout about some big nothing-or-other (e.g. Cory Booker going off script) it’s notable how the Obama team, by contrast, stay level-headed.
rikyrah
tell the truth, why don’t you…
FlipYrWhig
@catclub: Or, to think of it a different way, what’s the best way to handle 20-25 Ben Nelsons? People like Mark Warner and Bob Casey, Jr. lay low for the most part, but it’s not like they’re eager to advance a bold progressive agenda. First you have to threaten or cajole people like that — and then it gets harder. You can twist some arms, but not all of them.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@FlipYrWhig:
__
Tell them there’s a meeting of a new Social Security entitlement cutting deficit reduction committee meeting, starting right this minute in the elevator of the Senate Office Building. Then, after they’ve finished pushing each other aside to crowd into the elevator, cut off the power so they can’t open the doors or call for help.
lol
@mainmati:
LBJ had more Democratic Senators and reasonable Republican Senators to play them against. Guess who has the power in that scenario? Probably the guy who can tell half a dozen Senators to go fuck themselves if they won’t play ball.
Obama had 56 Democratic Senators (including 2 highly ill ones), 2 independents and, on a very good day, 3 Republicans to work with when he took office. Who has the power in that scenario? Probably the Senator who knows that you can’t pass a god damn thing without him.
It’s amazing how many liberals have absolutely no idea about how negotiation works or the power dynamics at work.
Chris
@lol:
Really, both parties were loose confederations of local party organizations that all had their own individual quirks and interests… hence all the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats and the muddled, non-partisan (ideological but not partisan) nature of politics at that time.
There was no equivalent to today’s system where the alliance of big money and a group of ideological fanatics have torn down all the local GOP organizations, remade them in their own image and made them all march in lockstep.
AHH onna Droid
I love puffball mushrooms, mistermix. Nice to meet another fan.
Lojasmo
@Zifnab:
Huh. Yeah, Obama totes didn’t pass historic health care legislation into law, or allow openly gay people to serve in the military.
OBAMA SOLD US OUT!