This time in the Hill:
Democrats in Congress are holding White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel accountable for his part in the collapse of healthcare reform.
The emerging consensus among critics in both chambers is that Emanuel’s lack of Senate experience slowed President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.
The share of the blame comes as cracks are beginning to show in Emanuel’s once-impregnable political armor. Last week he had to apologize after a report surfaced that he called liberal groups “retarded” in a private meeting.
No one, of course, is on the record. That doesn’t slow down Americblog:
Emanuel has presented himself as the all-powerful. He’s led Obama’s presidency into a tailspin (and Obama let him). While Emanuel hasn’t worked in the Senate, his Deputy Chief of Staff, Jim Messina, is a long-time former Senate staffer. How Emanuel and his crew destroyed the Obama brand so quickly will be the subject of debate for years to come.
Meanwhile, back at the Hill, this portion of the story that will get overlooked:
“I like Rahm; he’s always been a straight shooter with me,” said a Democratic centrist senator who was closely involved in the healthcare debate.
The lawmaker said Emanuel misjudged the Senate by focusing on only a few Republicans, citing Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins as too narrow a pool.
“In the Senate, you have to anchor in the middle and build out,” said the lawmaker.
“They just wanted to win,” the source said of Emanuel and other White House strategists. “Their plan was to keep all the Democrats together and work like hell to get Snowe and Collins. The Senate doesn’t work that way. You need a radius of 10 to 12 from the other side if you’re going to have a shot.”
Anyone want to take a wild guess how Americablog and others in the progressive blogosphere would have reacted if Obama and Rahm had passed a bill in the Senate that appealed to 12 Republicans? I can hear the screams. There would be ActBlue accounts by the dozens to primary Obama.
It just never stops. And if Rahm steps down, they’ll just find someone else to act as the bogeyman.
Corner Stone
Anyone care to speculate as to what a bill would look like that could actually garner 10 to 12 R votes in the Senate?
El Cid
@Corner Stone: Apparently you don’t know enough dimensions of chess to play.
John Cole
@Corner Stone: That is precisely my point. Can you imagine the freakout if they passed a bill that appealed to that many Republicans? Can you imagine how bad it would have to be? Besides, there are only two moderates in the Senate- Snowe and Collins. The others vote the same way. In order to get 12 Republican votes in the Senate, you would have to have a bill that would get 40.
Brien Jackson
Wasn’t it Rahmbama who told Reid he was messing up by going with the opt-out?
Comrade Jake
If you can’t fix the problem, fix the blame. That’s what all this is about.
Unfortunately it looks like the only thing left on HCR is the finger-pointing.
brat
Perhaps not. Rahm does not have a particularly good track record with LGBT groups. Not sure what his deal is, but he’s got a 20-year track record of hostility (at worst) and indifference (at best).
I will not shed one tear if he’s pushed out. Chronic contempt towards one of your core political constituencies is not the road to change.
dmsilev
@Corner Stone: Unless the bill included the instatement of Sarah Palin as VP, there’s nothing that could get 12 R votes. It’s nothing about the content of the legislation, it’s about defeating Obama.
-dms
jibeaux
If anyone thinks there’s a health care plan, in anyone’s wildest imagination, that could pass the Senate 72 to 28, then I have a Nigerian email to forward to you. You tell me, unnamed source, what specific provisions are in this magical bill.
EDIT: y’all are quicker than me.
Max
Maybe if Rahm had come to Aravosis’ Dupont Snowball Fight, he would like him.
FlipYrWhig
The pointlessly loud and faux-insider-ish criticism of Emanuel just reminds me of how in monarchies there was a taboo against criticizing the king directly, so if you wanted to complain about the regime you would raise a hue and cry about his dastardly and manipulative advisors.
J.W. Hamner
As mentioned up thread, you’d have a hard time convincing me that such a bill exists. Even if we took the McCain plan verbatim they’d all vote against it. The fact that there’s a “centrist Senator” who thinks otherwise is troubling.
aimai
Failure has a thousand fathers, success is an orphan?
Look, there’s going to be a post mortem of the Health Care Debacle. It will make more or less sense, and be more or less well informed, until long after we are all dead and every person involved, up to and including the White House Janitor, has weighed in with a kiss and tell memoir.
If Rahm and Obama had a plan for guiding the reform through an intransigent Senate it blew up in their faces. It didn’t blow up because of the left, or people outside the magic circle of decisionmakers. It blew up because of serious miscalculations about Baucus, Nelson, the original gang of seemingly amenable Republican Senators, the loss of momentum in August, and because there was no plan B. Perhaps there could have been a plan B, perhaps there couldn’t. Some people thought that plan B was reconciliation for part of the Bill. Some people thought plan B was Snowe or Collins. Anyone at the top level who had only a plan A, or only a plan A and B, and no plan C, is at fault as a strategist. Its really clear from watching the decline and fall of health care reform that something went wrong. People are going to be looking for a scapegoat–and people are going to be looking for a way to understand how this happened so that they don’t repeat this mistake in the future. That’s normal, and even necessary, even if some of the people doing it seem bitchy.
I don’t have any problem believing that Health Care Reform simply couldn’t ever have gotten through the Senate, or good health care reform couldn’t. Maybe that’s true. But at some point Obama, Rahm, and Reid thought it could. They thought they’d get it through using a plan they backed. And they couldn’t. That’s on them. It really is. They are big boys and I think they can take a little criticism. More to the point, they will undoubtedly ignore this criticism, as they ignored the rather large number of people advising them to change course earlier in the process when it might have made a difference.
aimai
NobodySpecial
Sounds like Max Baucus. Or maybe Ben Nelson.
Why are you moving the goalposts? Americablog and everyone else would be completely justified in going apeshit over a bill so bad as to garner support of almost half the Republican caucus, given their history of supporting health care overhaul. Or are they never supposed to go apeshit regardless of what bill is invoked?
FlipYrWhig
Also, why do people who don’t like the bill get all worked up about assigning blame for why it’s been having difficulty? Why isn’t the narrative that Emanuel is a secret firebagger sabotaging a bill he knows is the fabled Shit Sandwich?
slag
I’m torn. I do think Rahm kinda sucks. At least some of the stuff I’ve read about him doing kind of sucks. But then, this:
is also true.
And it’s up to Obama to decide whether Rahm stays or goes. And if Obama thinks Rahm’s doing a good job then (as I believe you’ve mentioned before) that is the a bigger problem for those who believe Rahm really truly sucks.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
If there is one thing that drives me absolutely nuts about humans, but Democrats in particular, it is the ability to blame the person who gave you 95% for failing and ignore the people who gave 0%, or less in the case of the Republicans.
scav
I’m beginning to like Rahm because his name alone apparently pisses some people off. It’s like a laser beam to some cats.
cat48
Congress can hold Rahm accountable all they want, but IT IS THEIR JOB to legislate. They need to blame themselves and get something done after the summit. These people are supposed to be adults. Their incessant whining enrages me.
mr. whipple
Yup. This whole thing now resembles a couple getting divorced. We got the trial seperation and the cooling off period, which is followed by moving on and a few dates with someone new(jobs bill). Now it’s time for the visit to the marriage counselor(Obama’s meetings with dems and goopers), which has nothing to do with saving the marriage but rather is a safe place to vent and air grievances of why it failed and cast blame.
Wish I could muster some hope-i-ness.
inkadu
As a fomer GOS reader, I have no love for Rahm Emmanuel, and nobody here has given me a reason to change that.
I think it’s just the shared contempt of the wildly emotional and uncooperative fringe of the Democratic party that gives some people here sympathy; but I don’t think Rahm’s contempt it confined to just the cranky pants left, but rather larger chunks. Policy wise, is he any different than a Reagan-era Republican?
OT: Diane Rehms (NPR) recently finished a show with Rick Perlstein (Nixonland), Grover “Drown the Government in the Bathtub” Norquist and two much less interesting personalities. Rick Perlstein kicked ass, drawing easy parallels between the Teaparty and early radical Nixon activists and really got into some spats with Grover. It was nice on several levels — both for the content, and for the rarity of hearing an informed, combative, and unapologetic liberal going toe-to-toe with a unreformed conservative. The second fascinating thing about the show was that when Grover called liberals “snotty,” and Perlstein called Grover a “Leninist,” Diane Rhems shut down the conversation and made it clear language like that was not acceptable on her show.
We need more media programs like that.
Brien Jackson
@aimai:
That doesn’t really make sense. On the one hand, it’s first and foremost on the Democratic Senators who have in some way or another been roadblocks to reform; whether making trouble for the bill a la Nelson and Lieberman, trashing the bill/process in public like Landrieu and Lincoln, or Senators we need tossing up procedural hurdles like Feingold. No matter how much criticism Obama and Reid deserve, as a first order matter any failure is on the Democrats who jumped ship in one way or another on their party’s biggest agenda priority.
From there, it sort of depends on how many different ways you think there were to accomplish the goal. If there was only one way to do it, then there wasn’t any strategic choice to be made, other than whether to try HCR or not. I tend to think there was only ever one way to do it, but YMMV.
John Cole
Do you even know what the statement “moving the goalposts” means?
Americablog is using the Hill story to claim that it is Rahm’s fault health care failed, and in the story anonymous pols state what he should have done was pass a bill that more Republicans would like and would have enraged the progressive wing (as well as me and damned near everyone here).
I’m not moving any goalposts, I’m just pointing out that no matter what, Americablog would be screaming bloody murder for Rahm’s head.
Joshua Norton
Sorry, but Rahm was a bad choice from the get-go. What it did was prove that all the “hopey-changey” slogans were just so much campaign rhetoric and beyond Obama’s abilities. The DLC insiders were back in charge instead of the Repug insiders.
Not what a lot of people signed on for.
Brien Jackson
@John Cole:
Well yeah, but that’s sort of another story altogether. There’s a certain axis of the netroots for which the Rahm-hate is totally personal.
K.
“Anyone care to speculate as to what a bill would look like that could actually garner 10 to 12 R votes in the Senate?”
That’s the thing, this is a bill that would hopefully garner 10 to 12 R votes and yet those Republicans predictably still won’t vote for it. Who is responsible for that?
Cole can act outraged at the critcism of those close to the Dear Leader (yes, it seems as if Cole is going down that road again) if he wants, but Rahm is a master of negotiating against himself.
chopper
@cat48:
exactly. ‘its rahm’s fault, he didn’t twist our arms enough.’ like these guys can’t do anything without a CoS telling them what to do? grow a spine, douchebags.
Elise
Jane already has the follow up over at FDL and they’re tweeting it all over the place. Peter Daou thinks it’s “interesting”.
It isn’t interesting. It’s bullshit. Of course, I’m not surprised to see so many so-called progressives buy anonymously sourced crap. I suspect half the time their “anonymous staffer on the Hill” is just their buddy Matt Stoller.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
What the fuck is wrong with people? Republicans can get near unanimous support for the craziest of ideas and the biggest of lies yet Democrats can’t hold together their party for even a year despite large majorities in both houses and a President who won by a large margin.
I’m getting close to the point where I just want to say fuck everyone, I’m going Galt.
beergoggles
@John Cole: Then shouldn’t u be glad it’s Rahm they’re blaming and not Obama directly? Otherwise ur gonna have to break out the Obot gloves for the hippie punching.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Joshua Norton: I was going to make some long comment, but after thinking about it for a bit, my response is: Really? That’s all you’ve got? Give me your home address so I can send you your plastic unicorn and you can go curl up with it under a warm blanket. If you act within the next 30 minutes, I’ll upgrade it to a stuffed unicorn for free.
General Winfield Stuck
@Brien Jackson: A diamond studded Tiara for Joe Lieberman, with a kicker to nuke Iran could have gotten the vindictive little bastards 60 th vote.
I bet/ but not much.
short of that – Obama screwed the HCR pooch.
aimai
I think I should add that I think that we make a big mistake in looking back at the negotiations as think that we can know, absolutely, who promised what to whom and who betrayed whom.
Someone upthread pointed out that we heard, dimly, through a scrim that Reid put in the public option over the objections of the White House. We did hear that. But if Reid got snookered by the usual people pulling out after promising that they would vote for something that happened several times in the process. There’s no proof that *not putting in the public option* at that point would have gotten us to the bill any faster, or more safely.
The fundamental issue in the HC negotiations is that the Republicans were playing to destroy, Lieberman was an unreliable vote, Baucus, Nelson, Bayh, Landrieu, and Lincoln were unreliable votes–almost everyone in the negotiations lied to the negotiators, negotiated in bad faith, and often deliberately held up negotiations in order to shift the dynamics of the playing field. I absolutely don’t blame Obama or Rahm or Reid for that. The better the bill–the worse the opposition. The more the bill did for the democrats politically, the worse the opposition.
In the end the Democratic majority Senate has been forced to go to the house and beg the house to pass a substandard, compromised bill with a promise to somehow fix some things later. That’s not the product of leftist intransigence–that’s the natural byproduct of the house having lost faith in the Democratic Senators as reliable and honorable players on the democratic team.
aimai
Punchy
Everyone in America has healthcare, you pissant whiny libtards. Just walk into any hospital (not in the inner city), ask for the ER (lie about health insurance), and enjoy the care you’re offered (give a false name to avoid the bills).
It’s easy and simple.
Comrade javafascist
The Rahm killed HCR is a senseless meme and holds holds his boss blameless (I thought we had put the accountability free era behind us) but the Deaniac in me hopes the anonymous long knives take their toll.
Anyway you look at it, the current WH strategy team is exceptionally bad at strategy whether it be negotiating for months with idiots like Grassley or having no plan B like…ever.
inkadu
@aimai: As much as I dislike Emmanuel, it seems a little silly to blame him for the failure of HCR. And if he is responsible, it is because of the style of politics Rahm plays, and it is for that style that Obama picked him, so ultimately, Obama’s at fault.
I can understand why bringing him on board was a politicial decision for Obama. Rahm is seen as a financial conservative, corporate-friendly type that could have greased the Republican members of the Democratic party, as well as potentially bringing along some Republicans.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in times of comity. Obama should drop Rahm merely because that wheedling strategy has proven stubbornly ineffective. It’s time to play hardball. The GOP has only gotten more conservative. We simply can not pick up any more votes in the Senate, so public sentiment doesn’t mean jack shit — they can’t elect any more Democratic Senators than they have already. The only game right now is to destroy the GOP in public and eliminate the filibuster.
jibeaux
@K.:
The Republicans, duh. Let’s be crystal clear about this: the Republicans are not, under any circumstances, going to vote for signature Democratic legislation. It was wildly, irretrievably optimistic to make overtures towards the Maine ladies on the grounds that they seem marginally less insane than the rest of them. They have their marching orders, and those fuckers line up when they’re called. Let me quote a little Ezra to you:
Now send me your email address and I’ll forward you that Nigerian offer.
Woodbuster
“And if Rahm steps down, they’ll just find someone else to act as the bogeyman.”
Exactly. It has reached the point where I am becoming Rahm’s biggest fan, simply because he pisses off idiots like Aravosis and Hamsher.
Guster
@John Cole: So your point is, ‘can you imagine how much progressives would’ve freaked if Obama passed a terribly damaging bill?’
And say what you will about Rahm, he doesn’t have half of Jane Hamsher’s political power. That’s why poking her with sticks makes sense, but poking him with sticks is just silly.
FlipYrWhig
@K.:
How is the answer to that not “Mitch McConnell”?
The question that may have an interesting answer is, “Who is responsible for 60 Democratic senators not voting for a very middle-of-the-road and wonkish/technocrat bill?” I still have a hard time believing that the answer to that is “Rahm Emanuel,” given that part of the reason people on the liberal blogs don’t like him is that _he is willing to cut deals with the center-right Dems_.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@beergoggles: Because, in the list of people whose fault it is that HCR is not passing, which goes something like:
Every Republican
Lieberman
Landrieu
Nelson
Lincoln
Stupak
…
…
Obama
You won’t find Rahm. The reason is that he’s part of Obama’s administration. And why do we keep screaming about Obama’s failure, and punishing the Democrats who supported it, when there are plenty of real people to be complaining about, and campaigning against.
Joshua Norton
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Up yours. I’m not some starry eyed Barry-bot. But I didn’t sign on for “Clinton Admin – The Sequel” with my vote either.
mr. whipple
After the election, it seemed to me the ultimate in craziness for the GOP to double down on the stupid and insane, but in retrospect as a political strategy it’s been pretty brilliant.
Just stand back, do nothing, and watch the Dems assemble the inevitable circular firing squad. Mission accomplished!
KCinDC
@scav, if you’re supporting things just because they piss other people off, you may be turning into a Republican.
Guster
@aimai: You are always the smartest person in the thread. It’s depressing.
K.
I don’t think the Republicans are primarily to blame for HCR not passing when the Democrats hold a historic majority. Anyone who does is a sad sucker fooling themselves. Even Democrats can be accountable.
beltane
@Elise: Peter Daou + Jane Hamsher + Matt Stoller=one heck of a giant asshole. I’m so sick of these prima donna “progressives”. We need an actual left in this country, not an egotistical bunch of upper-middle class poseurs.
mcd410x
Why do the progs always grab the best colors in the crayon box? Boy, they sure make me mad.
mr. whipple
Maybe so, but we still have that little problem with math.
If you don’t get these two shitheels, then you need the Lieberman shitheel and the Nelson shitheel, etc etc.
slag
@Brien Jackson:
This failure is on the Democrats who jumped ship and on those who made it possible for them to do so. Theoretically, there should be some party structure in place to enforce a certain amount of party cohesion. And since Obama is considered the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, it’s kind of his job to ensure that structure is well-fortified. We can argue back and forth about the feasibility of keeping Dems in line, but I don’t think there’s much debate that it’s at least partially the job of the party to make it happen.
That said, this issue gets to my own ambivalence about the importance of party cohesion relative to the importance of independent executive and legislative branches. I don’t like the President’s dual role as both leader of the executive branch and leader of the Democratic Party because I feel it blurs the lines too much. Especially with the Dems in the majority. Personally, I would be happy if we got rid of the President as Leader of the Party thinking altogether, but I don’t think it will ever happen.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
If there is one thing that drives me absolutely nuts about humans, but Democrats in particular, it is the ability to blame the person who gave you 95% for failing and ignore the people who gave 0%, or less in the case of the Republicans.
That is exactly it. Maybe it is because they think they have more control over their side than the opposition. Maybe they think if their side had listened to their super-magic plan, everything would be different. I don’t know. However, it comes down to attacking the people who are trying to do the right thing, instead of the people who are blocking it. It is stupid and destructive.
John Cole
I’m becoming the same way.
Winner. All you have to do is look at Nelson’s filibuster promise regarding Becker and you can see where the blame for this lies. The conservadems. Not the progressives, not Rahm.
Brien Jackson
@Joshua Norton:
I think it’s worth pointing out that Obama never really intended for Rahm to run point on HCR. The original plan had been to have Daschle playing that role, but that was fucked up when Daschle had to withdraw.
Svensker
@Guster:
WTF? Jane is more powerful than Rahm Emanuel?
Woodbuster
@Guster:
“And say what you will about Rahm, he doesn’t have half of Jane Hamsher’s political power.”
I can’t believe anybody would actually type this bullshit with a straight face. Somebody with a well read blog, who happens to have their PUMA knickers in an ego-endowed twist, has more political power than the COS to the President?
Either those are some good drugs you are on, or there are some good drugs you need to be taking.
EDIT: Okay, the Boss says it was sarcasm, so, mea culpa and all that. My detector needs batteries, I guess.
John Cole
No. I’m saying you don’t get to use an article using unnamed sources to blame Rahm for the failure of HCR and scream for his head when if Rahm had followed the advice of the unnamed sources in the article you would be having an even louder screaming fit.
This is not rocket science. They’ve carved out a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario, and the only thing that remains constant is the anti-Rahm hissy fit.
Joshua Norton
@Brien Jackson: That is very true. And an important part of the equation.
KCinDC
@Svensker, I think your sarcasmometer needs calibration.
FlipYrWhig
@Comrade javafascist:
I would almost guarantee that the Baucus-Grassley talks were the core of the whole strategy. You’ve got a center-right Democrat and an old-guard Republican from the state that made the whole Obama campaign. There shouldn’t be that big a distance between them in policy terms. Bridge that gap and you’ve got bona fide bipartisanship, and you probably also create a slipstream that pulls along one of the Maine Republicans too, along with all the nervous Democrat centrists who now have “bipartisan” cover. I think Grassley did more to prolong and misdirect the process than anyone.
John Cole
@Svensker: Sarcasm.
@Woodbuster: It was sarcasm.
Elise
@beltane: It’s all about power for these clowns. They want to take credit for passing health care reform, or for killing it and “saving” Democrats from the supposed mandate backlash.
My favorite part is when they call themselves “the base” even though they are the first to threaten to bolt when the going gets tough.
aimai
Brien Jackson,
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Was there only one way to get health care reform through the Senate? I think the answer is yes, no, and maybe. I think at the beginning there might have been many paths, and certainly Obama thought so. That’s why instead of drafting a single bill and presenting it to the Senate he choose (rightly, I think) to give the important Senators a piece of the action and use them to try to get some Republican votes. If they’d been able to do that we’d be cheering right now having seen the bill on his desk, and signed, already.
What was wrong about that choice became apparent early on, however, when it was clear that Baucus wasn’t the guy to manage it. he lost control of his (imaginary) Republican counterparties very early on. At that point I would have liked to believe there was another strategy other than shaving the bill down and down and down to get Snowe, Collins, or Lieberman and Nelson. Because they wound up shaving the bill down and down until they pissed off the house and lost the faith of the house.
I’ve always thought they needed more arm twisting–more linkages outside the bill. Lieberman has desires, like everyone else, I thougth bribery or bludgeoning would work but weren’t tried. Nelson should have been crammed in a barrell with two cats and thrown into the Tigris. And the entire time Obama and the Democrats as a whole should have been talking up the bill and its good parts.
I think there are tons of places where the entire reform process went off the rails. Of course its the fault of the Democrats in the Senate–I personally fault Kerry (and called his office to harangue him about it) for not sitting outside of Baucus’s secret negotiations and embarrassing Baucus and his Finance Committee into being responsible to getting the actual bill passed instead of just massaging each other’s egos. But the Senate is the Senate–if it couldn’t be managed then HCR was a dead duck from the beginning.
I guess what I think is that *everyone* involved, on the Democratic side, has to take the blame if HCR can’t be passed. Its not a question of making us feel better. Its a question of not allowing each individual part of the machine to shift blame to someone else. HCR was a democratic party initiative: they ran on it, they won on it, and the entire party failed us when they fail to get it through. In other words–I don’t want to see Rahm blamed *instead of Reid* or *instead of individual Senators*–I want to see the Democrats as a party grasp that they all failed to get on board with a serious program and plan and since they didn’t plan together they all failed together.
aimai
jibeaux
@mr. whipple:
Yep. And that’s why I would like to see a point by point summary of what a bill looks like that 72 Senators are going to vote for. Just to get to 60, you need some serious shitheels. Start making it shittier to try to get to 72, you lose the non-shitty votes.
mr. whipple
I was happy when they appointed Sebelius, thinking she would be less compromised than Daschle, but where the hell has she been?
General Winfield Stuck
@Guster:
Wut?
myiq2xu
What kind of wine goes with schadenfreude?
J.W. Hamner
The most surreal part of this is that they did keep together their 60 votes! So if Rahm is responsible for that, then he deserves props. The problem now is that we have 59 votes.
So I think John’s point is that for critics who think the bill is not progressive enough… citing this article as an example of how much Rahm’s sucks doesn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t think there is a magical bill that could attract 10-12 Republicans, but if it did exists it would be quite a bit less progressive than what we have now.
beltane
@Brien Jackson: I’m not a big Daschle fan, but I agree with you that he would have been far more effective than Emanuel in dealing with Senate conservadems. He would, however, been subjected to the same abuse from the netroots as Emanuel. Over the past few years I have come to the conclusion that anyone who is not their creature is an enemy.
If only Joe Trippi were COS, all would be well.
Brien Jackson
@slag:
I don’t really disagree with that, but the problem is that that depends on the whole caucus, not leadership, and certainly not the executive branch. The basic crux of it is that Republicans agreed to term limit their committee chairs, which forces them to periodically win the approval of the caucus to retain their seniority on other committees, and provides some leverage to leadership against them when their limit is coming. Democrats are simply not willing to do that, preferring to guard their individual perogative in the chamber. Which is to say; Democrats are acting much more rationally than Republicans.
beergoggles
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Probably because they’re already being complained about and campaigned against? I don’t think I’ve actually read a single liberal/progressive blog that doesn’t already complain about republicans and lieberman.
jibeaux
@myiq2xu:
Aw, hell, I gotta re-activate cleek’s pie filter?
inkadu
This is stupid.
We are trying to pass major legislation that breaks new ground on an industry that will soon be 20% of the economy, and we are trying to do it with 60 votes.
Sixty fucking votes. You just can not pass anything NEW in a big way with those votes. Everyone on the other side is going to disagree with it as a matter of principle; and your side will be split between people in support, people afraid terrified of new ideas, and people sympathetic to the other party.
We should stop fixing blame and recognize that we asked the party to do is close to fucking impossible the way the game is played.
From this point forward, though, we can hold the party responsible for not changing the rules of the game. That means enforcing party discipline, even if it means risking defection. Heck, at this point that would be a good idea. Ron Fucking Paul has a tea party challenger, and any former Democrat is not going to fare well in the Tea Party GOP.
Brien Jackson
@beltane:
I’m not really trying to make any larger point, just noting that you can’t really claim Rahm was always a bad choice without noting that the original plan was completely different than what was played out, because it was derailed by Daschle’s tax returns.
mcd410x
If you hated brussels sprouts, would you continue to eat them day after day after day?
Pretty sure it was a-ok to stop reading americablog after they turned on Obama BEFORE the inauguration.
And Al Gore is fat.
Also.
cat48
I blame the House if health care is dead. They could pass it today and will not do it. I don’t want to hear about side cars, etc. They have made a willful decision that they will not do what is necessary for millions of people to receive healthcare. Very angry today.
maye
Rahm was only ever supposed to deliver the House. Harry Reid was supposed to deliver the Senate. And here we are.
Comrade javafascist
@FlipYrWhig: Sadly it wasn’t just the core of their strategy, it was their only strategy. And that’s why I want Rahm gone. He’s bad at strategy. It’s not the hippie punching, it’s the being bad at your job. Having him as Chief of Staff would be like putting the former head of an Arabian Horse Association in charge of FEMA.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@beergoggles: I visit GOS a lot, and up until Obama’s visit to the Republican retreat, 3 out of every 4 diaries were about people fed up with the Democratic party and how they were not going to vote because the Democrats couldn’t get a bill through and how Obama had failed and how they all needed to lose to teach the Democrats a lesson (tried to sound like GOS during that time). It has finally calmed down to more rational levels, but a lot of people were definitely going after the wrong side.
inkadu
@beltane: Was Daschle the one initially proposed for HHS? As I recall, the lefties were ecstatic about that selection, because it indicated that Obama was serious about HCR and was putting a serious team together to get it passed.
@J.W. Hamner: 60 votes at the cost of a years worth of wasted legislative effort, taking a drubbing in public opinion, and a shit sandwich. It’s a high price to pay. And who knows what other concessions the ratfucking Senators would have extracted before their final vote.
scav
@KCinDC: I can enjoy him all the same because anyone else would piss people off and “not get things done” because I think this whole situation is beyond one person being the root cause of all problems. Jesus Haploid Christ spliced to Mahatma Bloody Buddha couldn’t get things passed in this Congress. So at some point, the only thing left is the entertainment value.
DJshay
I dropped Arovosis from my reading list a long time ago. Too much drama, all or nothing crap. I’m tempted to just form my own party that supports Obama. Anyone wanna join?
inkadu
Note to self: Cut down on the cussing.
mr. whipple
@cat48:
I think they also deserve a lot of the blame. I don’t understand the unions in this. Surely there is some good in the Senate plans, but to opt for nothing? I don’t get that.
I think I overestimated the ‘liberal-ness’ of Congress as a whole, including the House. The House bill, which now everyone thinks is the cat’s meow and is so much better than the Senate bill, was met with a collective yawn when it passed. The public option component of the House bill was very, very weak to begin with. Then you had the Stupak bullshit….
Brien Jackson
@Comrade javafascist:
And what, exactly, would an alternative strategy look like?
aimai
Inkadu
This.
If we lose health care reform this round we lose it. I personally think the house should pass the senate bill as is and we should just move on and try to tinker around the edges later, when the numbers may shift. But the fault lines for getting any kind of Democratic initiatives–hell, any kind of Democratic administrative positions–through are clear. The Republicans are playing for all the marbles. They are going to prevent Obama from even appointing minor people to standard admin jobs. If Obama and his team ever thought they were going to be allowed to act as an Administration in the most conventional ways imaginable they really need to think again.
I saw my first “Impeach Obama” bumper sticker the other day. I well remember the horror of the full on assault on Clinton, from day one. The Republicans never allowed him to be spoken of, or dealt with, as a legitimate president. They are doing the same thing to Obama. If the Democrats can’t grasp this and blow up the Senate and the Filibuster rules by any means necessary Obama won’t even be able to order a BLT in the White House dining room without being accused of trying to destroy the country and having the Republicans demand the right to order for him.
aimai
slag
Ha! Sure. Blame the one part of this organization that has delivered on its promises. People can bitch about the House bill all day long, but if the Senate had delivered a bill around the same time the House did, we’d have health care reform done by now. But then, there’s a reason the Senate failed to do so. And that reason isn’t the House.
Cain
@inkadu: <blockquote@aimai: As much as I dislike Emmanuel, it seems a little silly to blame him for the failure of HCR. And if he is responsible, it is because of the style of politics Rahm plays, and it is for that style that Obama picked him, so ultimately, Obama’s at fault.
This is just another wa y to blame Obama for the mess. It is the same message. Nobody seems to be holding Congress ccountable. It seems to me someone (source) wants to blame the President for this debacle. I don’t think so. I know exactly who to blame and who should be doubling down working harder.
That we are no longer a super majority is telling of bad leadership from the party in general. Massachusetts should not have fallen but someone stateside put in a bad candidate.
cain
mr. whipple
@DJshay:
Ditto. Dood went off the rails with his ‘I know secret rumors about Bill Clinton which I just might publish’ hysteria during the primaries.
And I don’t like Bill and Hill that much.
Erik Vanderhoff
While I generally loathe the term “thrown under the bus,” it’s pretty clear that the Democrats have decided that Rahm Emanuel will be their scapegoat for their failure on HCR.
beltane
@inkadu: Maybe some progressives were ecstatic, but I clearly remember a slew of GOS diaries (perhaps even some by nyceve, I’d have to check), that condemned him for his ties to the insurance lobby.
cat48
@DJshay: @mr. whipple:
Yes, count me in.
Elie
@aimai:
You make a lot of sense aimai…
I don’t know why I still hang onto hope that somehow in the next three years we can pass something on HCR — I don’t know how but I just cannot accept that its completely over or that this administration will completely give up on it.
As you say aimai, there is no certainty looking back through the retrospectoscope of which decision was fatal, only that key players were not acting with full honesty or integrity. How do you fix that in a process like this where you have to work this with the folks you have at the time? I don’t know and as you offer, its hard just to blame Rahm, Obama or Reid as solely responsible or that some change in the scope would have spelled success.
I am very sad about this in many different ways, but havent given up yet — at least not completely.
Rick Taylor
Off topic, but I just came across Steve Benen’s find of a conservative criticizing Obama for killing too many terrorists. These people are unreal.
DJshay
@Mr.whipple</a?
Yeah, I’m no fan of the Clinton’s either, but man, he just went off the rails with them.
General Winfield Stuck
@inkadu: This. also too.
The senate bill is out there and can be voted on and passed in just a few days by the House, up until the end of this Congress session. In the meantime, I would recommend senate dems, if they are not going to do the reconc. fix, should present a new bill that is stark, with the regulation changes that wingnuts have stated they support. Things like pre-existing conditions, rescission, job to job coverage etc..
Put the weasel motherfuckers on the spot and call out their lies and fealty to big Pharma, and that also goes for the blue dogs like Nelson et al. It would break the ideological fist the wingers are presently holding the senate hostage with, and if not enough of them vote yea, then hammer them with the truth. That they are reps to the plutocrats only, not the people. They will have no where else to hide.
Play hardball politics to educate the public on what really is going on.
cat48
@slag:
The House could pass the Senate bill today and send it to the Pres. desk today. It could be fixed in the Senate later. The House folks are the only ones who have the power to pass a bill right now today. That is why I blame them. They need nothing else to pass the Senate bill–I know they want more but they don’t need more. They should PTDB!
Brien Jackson
@aimai:
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think it’s highly likely that the House passing the Senate bill, a big signing ceremony, and a 3 week intermission would make it much easier for the Senate to pass changes to their bill at the margins. So I agree, the House should PTDB.
Stan
Another of your periodic laments about the shrill of the left. But you always come around. Takes days, weeks or months, but you come around. :)
Perhaps it’s a bit lazy to pin it all on Rahm; I have no opinion on this myself. But such epic failure cries out for an explanation; the mind requires that satisfaction. Thus scapegoats. But you know, it could be partly or largely his fault. Or maybe he just perfectly represents the technocratic, accommodating, slightly arrogant approach this administration has taken.
JD Rhoades
@DJshay:
Me too, after the fifteenth or sixteenth “there’s no difference between Obama and McCain” comment.
OC
It’s so much easier to blame one person but this has been a group effort. It truly has. Failure to acknowledge that will only hurt everyone in the long run. Good grief you’d think Rahm was the omnipotent master of the universe. I think Obama failed to use the bully pulpit with Congress and the American people. Congressional Democrats couldn’t get their collective shit together and pissed their pants when Scott Brown won. And don’t get me started on Republicans. I have never seen a more cynical bunch of pricks in my life. Ugh…I might have a drink at lunch.
Punchy
I’m confused. Rahm is at fault?
For what state does he vote for again?
Martin
I think you misunderstand that last component of the piece. That 10-12 radius isn’t who the bill needs to appeal to, necessarily. It’s how many you invite in to negotiations.
The problem with skirting close to the line is that you get set up for blackmail as Lieberman and Nelson did. If you invite in a pile of people, they’ll worry about forcing the issue if they think there’s a chance you might be able to replace them. The only think worse than Nelson not getting Medicaid funding for NE is having someone like Lindsay Graham come out of left field to break the filibuster in exchange for something considerably more palatable. With the strategy that was used, Nelson and Lieberman knew they could ask for anything they wanted – there was nobody else being courted. Of course, every time the WH tries to court anyone in the GOP the left calls Obama a sell-out or unrealistic on bipartisanhip because we’re fucking stupid.
Remember, the GOP that get on board don’t need to vote for the bill, they just need to break the filibuster. The political damage to them is minimal with voters back home. The more people the WH can put in the ring, the more competition and second-guessing there will be between them on whatever deal gets worked out – and the cheapest vote will win.
J. Michael Neal
@aimai:
It doesn’t matter whether Baucus was the right choice to manage this. The bill had to go through his committee. The fundamental problem, ignored by a number of posts in this thread, is that the US system was deliberately set up to have weak party discipline. It’s baked in. The Republicans have found a way to get around this and impose discipline, but that’s the exception, not the rule. It’s pretty much the only such exception in american history.
There was no choice but to negotiate with the harpies from Maine. A number of centrist Democratic Senators explicitly said that they wouldn’t vote for any bill if there weren’t negotiations with Republicans.
Obama couldn’t threaten anyone in the Senate, because he didn’t have anything the key players wanted. Just watch Nelson, Bayh, Lincoln, Landrieu, and others. They are comfortable with the idea of running against Obama for re-election. Hell, half of them prefer to run against Obama. If he threatened them, they’d just cut a campaign commercial saying how they are an independent voice that will represent their constituents in Congress.
As for just putting more bribes into the bill to win over support, I have two words for you: Cornhusker Kickback. I thought for a long time that this would be the best approach, but it turned out I was wrong. When it was tried, it blew up into a disaster.
I think that the administration made a serious mistake in not doing more to try to seize the public microphone, though it’s easy to overstate this mistake; they did their best last July and August to do so. That was exactly the point of the town halls he held.
In terms of legislative strategy, I don’t think they had any better options. Reconciliation was always such an empty threat that there was no point in making it. Too much of the needed parts of the bill wouldn’t survive the rulings, and there probably wouldn’t have been the votes anyway. That means that, with no real leverage, they needed to get the vote of every centrist Democrat. You know what? They got them, eventually.
kay
Is this that complicated?
Obama hit the Senate in his SOTU, and the Senate is hitting back.
In a sort of whiny, unaccountable, cowardly way.
It wasn’t the Senate that was the problem. It was Rahm Emanuels apparent inability to stroke the Senate.
Okey-doke. Got it, Senators.
This is a real brave stand they’re taking, attaching names and all. At least Obama had the balls to go after them publicly, and to their faces.
mr. whipple
I know it’s hard to give up hope, but for me this was issue #1. And while I’m not ready to give up yet, I’m not optimistic.
But the numbers aren’t going to get better, only worse.
And to see it from the perspective if a Congresscritter, just what is in it for them to want to pass this or try again? Seriously, I wouldn’t touch this thing with a 10-foot pole. You have half of your constituents thinking you are destroying America and believe any horseshit the gop tells them. On ‘your’ side, you have a certain faction that is happy with what they have, and a certain faction where nothing you do is good enough. The remaining few that still want it to pass have been led to believe it’s a POS anyway.
So, what’s in it for them, exactly?
inkadu
@beltane: I was reading the more mainstream blogs the ones that represent “the progressive left,” for me, like Steve Benen and Ezra Klein; so I probably got a different take on the “left.” I don’t really know why so much heat is generated by the spats with the Overtons. I guess its because during the Bush years we grew really close, and now that we have a Democratic president, differences in temperment and strategy become more obvious, and the people we thought were our friends in the fight are now stepping on our heels.
Martin
@OC: The problem is everybody blames the last vote rather than the first. Long before Nelson got on board or Scott Brown won the seat, 40 members of the GOP steadfastly voted against this thing, both in the chamber and in the media.
Blame them. Always blame them.
chuck
Why doesn’t this have the “Show me on the doll where Rahm touched you” tag?
Elisabeth
@cat48:
Amen.
beergoggles
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Considering GOS is a submission based site, one cannot hold the site accountable for the non-submissions of those non-critical of democrats. And that’s also one of the reasons why I don’t visit that site often (the bad writing being the main reason). I usually read the scienceblogs, some gay blogs and a few others like this one. So I don’t have the blinkered GOS focus that you do.
PS: And being gay, I still have the reflexive revulsion to Rahm from the Clinton years.
Pangloss
@aimai: “Coming up next on Fox News, is Obama’s Socialist BLT of Death the reason for the Dow falling below 10,000?{“
kay
“Once Obama decided to make healthcare the top priority, Emanuel approached it with his signature hard-charging style. That did not sit well in the Senate, according to Democratic senators and House members.”
This does not sit well with the Senate. What? Asking them to work every once in a while?
I swear to God. They lack only powdered wigs.
They deal only with former Senators, not lowly members of the House, who are “hard-charging”.
slag
@cat48: I totally understand the reasoning. But the reasoning is akin to the reasoning parents use when blaming the sister for not cleaning up the irresponsible brother’s mess. And while it’s all fine to focus on the ill-consequences of her not doing so, at some point, it just becomes enabling of the irresponsible brother.
demo woman
Bayh, and Lincoln are going to be looking for jobs come January. The mention of Rahm does bring out the best in people doesn’t it?
Woodbuster
Kinda O/T but kinda not – just picked up on this from Sully, and it does a great job of homing in on the real problem, in a very visually compelling way!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/schuhlelewis/4253810476/sizes/o/
scav
@kay: It does make them sound like aging debs now, doesn’t it?
kay
@scav:
Al Franken is the only one of them with any balls, who attaches his name. I think they have to throw him out. Somehow, a lowly commoner slipped past security.
Comrade Jake
@Martin:
So, they should’ve gone with a Gang of Twelve instead of the Gang of Six? Seriously? This seems nuts to me.
John Quixote
@kay:
This. A million times over. I have several US Senators at my workplace. I call them my superiors. The easiest way to piss the lazy-ass baby boomers I work for off is making them actually do thier jobs. That cuts into coffee time, cigarrette time, and gives them less time to flirt with the under 18 female cashiers. Because, as we all know, 17 year old girls are all about screwing fat, balding, middle aged 3-time divorcees with halitosis.
Elie
@General Winfield Stuck:
I totally agree with that strategy. Lets see though if the WH can get behind something like that…hope they can
MikeMc
Does the hatred for Rahm on progressive blogs stem from the fact that he always treated Howard Dean as kind of a joke?
Mary
You know who else wants Rahm gone? Netanyahu and the neocons and their various puppets.
scav
@kay: He is a bit of the ugly duckling at their ball. I admit to a lingering fondness for Sheldon Whitehouse but Franken is a much more fascinating addition to the backdrop of gilded fainting couches.
inkadu
@Cain: I think it’s fair to put a portion of the blame on Obama, but in a “fair cop” kind of way. He picked a strategy that didn’t work, and he may have stayed too aloof from the legislative process. I acknowledge that he has an extremely difficult job in front of him, and that other people are more responsible, but none are more accountable. One senator out of a hundred, elected only by the people of one out of fifty states? Or the Senate leader who is not elected by the people, but by the Senators? The President is at the top of the food chain, even if it’s not a good way to structure a government, and he has the loudest megaphone of any democrat.
Anyway, shorter answer: Blaming Obama is simplistic. Not expecting a change in strategy is suicidal.
kay
@John Quixote:
I could care less about Rahm, so I propose a fix. Fire him. Issue the Senate a challenge. If Obama fires Rahm, can they get the popular no-brainer sound-policy legislation that has passed the House through the Senate?
Let’s start with student loan reform. What’s the hold-up? The House passed it. Popular, makes sense, should be a piece of cake (unless they’re owned by lenders, that is).
Can they pass student loan reform in 90 days if we fire Rahm?
If not, why not?
Can they pass financial reform in 6 months?
Let’s solve their problem. And wait for the next excuse.
mr. whipple
That strategy got house and senate bills passed for the first time in history.
No small thing.
wrb
@cat48:
Exactly,
The house can pass a health care bill that does a huge amount of good today.
If they don’t it is their fault.
100%
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@aimai:
I guess what I think is that everyone involved, on the Democratic side, has to take the blame if HCR can’t be passed.
Except that it passed the House and Senate ENTIRELY because of the Democratic side, and with uniform opposition from the Republican side. So you want to blame the Democrats, rather than the Republicans? Seriously, do you work for them?
inkadu
@MikeMc: That might be it. But a more fair view is that Rahm Emanuel is a third-way New Democrat who pissed all over the left ala Bill Clinton to bring us the centrist Utopia we now inhabit. There are perfectly valid policy/strategy differences with Rahm to justify the acrimony.
Omnes Omnibus
@mr. whipple:
Doing something that benefits the American people, perhaps? Doing the job they were elected to do? Not being a complete self-absorbed asshole every once in a while?
slag
@inkadu: All true. And by the looks of things, it seems pretty clear that there is a change of strategy taking place. Whether it’s happening fast enough or drastically enough is a different question.
BenA
@inkadu:
That and I’m sick and tired of people like Rahm and Lieberman who think that they’re actually elected to represent Israel and not the people of their state and country.
I’m definitely not anti-jewish, not even anti-israel… but sometimes once in a while the interest of Israel and the USA MIGHT just MIGHT differ.
Dream On
Aravosis is a tired drama queen whose big news story scoop (discovering Jeff Gannon) have come from trawling porn sites for his personal use. The fact that he’s obsessed with a goddamn intern snowball fight tells you all you need to know. He’s just another Village prima donna, and I take him with a grain of salt.
wrb
@chuck:
priceless
Svensker
@kay:
WTF? I dislike Rahm intensely. But Dem Senators got their knickers in a twist and refused to work on a signature Dem piece of legislation?
The poor widdle peeps got der feewings huut? Awwww.
Gee, do these Dems have any spine or brains whatsoever? Maybe Mad Cow hit the Senate years ago unbeknownst to us all and ate away whatever gray matter they had left? Honest to God, what a bunch of spoiled, silly little prats.
mr. whipple
@Omnes Omnibus:
“Doing something that benefits the American people, perhaps?”
I agree with you, but like I said about half of the people think this is destroying America. Old people in their own party don’t even like it, thinking it’ll screw with their Medicare. Then you have their ‘own’ side. The unions are pissed, why I’m not sure. Then you have parts of the base that aren’t happy because it doesn’t go far enough. And you have the people who are happy with what they have and have no vested interest in change. Etc etc.
Let’s say the House voted for the Senate bill today. What would the response be? My guess: just as much, if not more anger. The people who would applaud and be energized by it would be maybe 10%.
t jasper parnell
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: This is exactly right. The bills passed are, of course, less than perfect; however, they are bills. The Republicans have halted the legislative process; it is there fault not Rahm’s not Obama’s.
OC
By no means am I solely blaming Obama or the Congressional Dems. But I don’t think they’re completely innocent. That’s all I’m saying. The entire process has been maddening.
What frustrates me is the Republican bullshit has left zero room for error. Plus you’ve got drama queens like Lieberman, Nelson, and Stupak running around creating even more roadblocks to getting HCR passed. You can’t rely on any Republican votes because they’re being dicks. Next thing you know an amendment or two will derail the bill because Dems may be willing to walk away. Like I said, zero room for error.
It would be another thing if the GOP had a serious counterproposal. Tax cuts, tort reform, and purchasing insurance across state lines? What’s next? Underpants gnomes? My brother in law told me I was naive because I didn’t see how that would lower health care costs. He couldn’t explain how either but I’m the naive one. Jeebus save us all.
Thanks for letting me vent.
onceler
Total strawman argument, and the “centrist” who you quote is no less of an idiot than Rahm Emanuel. Of course trying to win GOP votes on this bill was just pure ridiculous fantasy from the get-go. The Dems missed their chance to get much of anything done when they left the Senate rules in place at the beginning of this session. That’s where the action could have been, but lack of foresight and strategic thought left the rules in place, which the Repubs had been using to stymie all progress in the Senate since the Dems took over in ’06.
And if Rahm’s getting an increasingly bad rep it is well-deserved. He gets over-blamed by some, but he’s still symptomatic of a wrong-headed approach to just about every issue, and this wrong-headedness will keep biting the Dems in the ass. Over and over again. What issue, exactly, is this clown an ‘expert’ on? Wooing conservatives. That’s IT. That’s all he’s got. And he can’t even do that right. Doesn’t even come close. It’s time for him to go off into the sunset.
inkadu
@mr. whipple: Yeah, but could we have gotten a better bill passed faster if he has been involved? It’s one of those things that’s really hard to tell…
It also occurs to me that Senators might not really care what the President thinks. They are there for life, and presidents are there for 6 years of work, and one year of campaigning, and one year of lame duckitude. How many presidents have these senators seen come and go?
Nothing about this topic is inspiring.
Svensker
@MikeMc:
That did not help.
mcd410x
If you’re looking for your daily dose of outrage, I suggest this Washington Monthly piece on how the Texas (read: GOP) textbook committees are incorporating their world view into school books. Via TNC.
cheers
edmund dantes
The thing that doesn’t make any sense is why give him $500,000 dollars to run ads, and the guy turns around and bites you in the ass on a nomination to the labor board? Haven’t they learned anything yet?
If you need to bribe a guy with $500,000 for ads just to have him say he’s going to filibuster your labor nomination, I’d hate to see what he would do if you didn’t give him the $500,000.
The Dems need to start making some hard choices. Is it really worth holding onto that seat just so you can have a Dem (along with Repubs) torpedoing your work?
jeffreyw
Finally some pushback against Rahm Emanuel style politics.
John Quixote
@kay:
Nope. Ben “Pigfucker” Nelson, Blanche “Soon to be former Senator from Arkansas” Lincoln, Mary “Coward” Landrieu, and Evan “I’m pissed off that I’m not VP, and even more pissed off that Obama won Indiana without me on the ticket” Bayh are all under the assumption that blocking Obama’s legislative agenda will allow them to win re-election.
It has nothing to do with Rahm. It has everything to do with Obama. Think the GOP is pissed off that Obama won’t be thier n****r? These four are really pissed off that Obama won’t dance for them.
Johnny B
Tactically, Rahm maybe was overly optimistic about securing the votes of Snowe and Collins. But the failure to have a more progressive bill in the Senate is a function not of Rahm, but of the filibuster. Arguably, it’s a function of the mere existence of the Senate and the arcane rules it employs.
If progressives want to see their agenda become law, they must start arguing for the abolishment of the Senate. Can someone tell me what helpful role they play? Do we really need the wisdom of Senators Lieberman and Nelson before we can enact legislation?
I personally am delighted at the number of commentators (Krugman, Klein, Fallows) who are regularly discussing the complete disfunction of governance in this country. Of course, conservatives love it because they can be sure that only conservative policies will pass the Congress. But it will destroy what’s left of the Republic.
To me, it’s been obvious for quite awhile that we have structual problem, not a strategic problem. Our problem isn’t who is hired or elected and their politics. No, it’s the Senate and its rules.
Keep in mind, there has never been a procedural change in the governmental system designed by the Founders. The 14th Amendment expanded the Bill of Rights to the states, but it didn’t change the structure (President, Courts, Senate and Congress) of our system. We desperately need such a change. We need to eliminate the Senate. It serves no good purpose.
Sarcastro
The Senate doesn’t work
that way.FIXORED!
aimai
Sister
First–“passing health care in the house and the senate” is not passing health care. There is no bill sitting on the President’s desk waiting for signature–that would be a health care bill. Until that’s done, the Democrats as a party have not done their job.
Of course the Republicans are “to blame” in some cosmic sense for bitching up the entire process–but that’s what they do. They are the opposition party and they have evil ideas and intentions. There was no way they would ever sign on to any Democratic initiative that would lead to Democratic hegemony for the foreseeable future–hell, they wouldn’t sign on to something that just made people happy. That’s not their party platform.
Blaming or not blaming the Republicans is entirely beside the point. I mean, I wish the democrats would do more blaming and finger pointing at the Republicans because I think that’s an important part of the political process and its extremely necessary for the American voter, in the run up to the next election, to know who to blame.
But as a democratic activist its really clear to me that we gave Obama and the Democrats majorities in the House and Senate and they couldn’t get their programs through. If they need to come back to the people and tell us they need supermajorities and new laws that enable them to put Ben Nelson in the pokey that’s fine with me. But they have to come back to us and tell us that because otherwise voters have no one *to* blame except the Democrats in general as the incumbent party.
The point I’m trying to make here is that you have a very complex system: voters vote every two years, money is raised off selling voters (and corporations) a legislative project, and then the payoff is the legislative accomplishments (or, in Palin’s case, the starbursts). My party has a huge problem if they don’t get health care reform through. They promised it, and they haven’t delivered. In the next part of the passion play that is politics–the broad gestures, the mimed sorrow, and the real deaths–Obama and the Dems have to have a good story to enact for the voters. One part of the story has to be Republican intransigence and sheer destructive spite. But if you think the Democrats aren’t aware that many of their own–in the Senate, House, and White House screwed the pooch you are crazy. Some body, and its usually the most visible part of the pyramid (the top) is going to have to either take the fall or strike out and lay some blame. Thats not just good political strategy, that’s life. It will probably be some of the same people who will step forward and take the credit if the bill gets passed.
aimai
wrb
@mr. whipple:
I think not, but of course I could be reading it wrong.
I think that nothing will equal the fury and frustration that will result from failing to do anything.
And I think there will be considerable relief at doing something, showing that the country isn’t just ungovernable, even if that something isn’t quite what anyone hoped for.
kay
@John Quixote:
I feel like it’s the big, gaping hole in this argument.
Okay. They can’t pass health care reform because Rahm approached 6 Senators instead of 12, and that was such a fatal flaw, such an outrageous breach of protocol, that health care reform came to a grinding halt. I think it’s nonsense, but okay.
What else have they accomplished? They’re telling us there was this frustrating delay while Olympia Snowe screwed around pretending she was working. So, what were the rest of them doing for those six months?
They weren’t working on cap and trade, they weren’t working on financial reform, and they weren’t working on student loan reform.
They did, however, manage to confirm a SCOTUS pick. So, that’s one completed task, per year, and I suppose I should be grateful.
wrb
@Johnny B:
Just a rule chane eliminating the filibuster and unanimous consent would do the job and has the advantage of being achievable. Only requires a majority vote in the senate.
This is what progressive should be putting their energy behind and calling and writing about. It is the only thing that will save us and it ain’t gonna happen without the public demanding it.
If all those calls about the public option had been demanding this rule change instead we might have something.
And it has to happen soon or the dems are going to be voted simply for being ineffectual.
NR
@wrb: Leave aside the damage that a mandate with no public option will do to our health care system for the moment. There is ample evidence that the excise tax caused union voters in Massachusetts to either stay home or vote for Scott Brown. And now you want to replicate that clusterfuck on a national scale?
It would be political suicide for the Dems to pass the Senate bill as-is. That’s why it won’t happen.
inkadu
@BenA: You don’t have to apologize.
Though I just deleted a three-paragraph post because I don’t want to get into the shit-storm this topic instantly generates.
Svensker
@KCinDC:
D’oh. Just call me Cranky McCrabbycakes with a dead sense of humor at this point.
mr. whipple
I hope you’re right, but seeing as there’s been no real obtainable option other than having the House pass the Senate bill, and they haven’t done that yet…in fact, Pelosi says she doesn’t have the votes, I’m not optimistic. But I hope I’m wrong.
fraught
Aravosis’ idea that Obama is a brand and Rahm destroyed that brand is so village wanna-be, ChuckTodd-talk that ti literally cannot be taken seriously, any more than can all the continual Obama hatred in the comments at Americablog. I wish John hadn’t linked to it. Aravosis’ problems with the White House are seriously personal.
Martin
@Comrade Jake: No, the ‘gangs’ are mostly bullshit. They’re negotiating without having anything real to negotiate with.
The problem is that rather than only hauling Snowe into the WH for tea and earmarks, they should have been hauling in a bunch of GOPers and try cutting deals with all of them. The more people in play, the less leverage each person has.
John Quixote
@kay:
We should be very thankful that they even got that accomplished.
These so-called ‘centrists’ are nothing more than extortionists. Ugly, stupid and feeble extortionists.
They could give a shit about the country’s problems. They are set for life.
t jasper parnell
@aimai:
This claim
explains a lot. Democratic activists working in a broad-based, center-left coalition found a bunch of votes for Obama as they had earlier found the votes for center, left, and center-right Democratic candidates for the House and Senate. The idea that Obama and the Dems more broadly owe their majorities to left or progressive activists wholly misses the complex dynamic of the last couple of elections.
Ash Can
@NR:
Let’s see it, then.
danimal
@edmund dantes: Probably not.
A word of advice for those performing the HCR autopsy. The patient’s not dead yet. And the failed strategy actually did get a majority of the House and 60 votes in the Senate.
They can pass meaningful reform today. The House can do it. Really. The real question is: Will the unions really kill HCR over an excise tax on employers that kicks in several years from now?
Dr. Squid
@Svensker:
Why of course someone that doesn’t actually work has more power. That arrangement has worked wonders for the GOP.
Martin
@John Quixote: Can we please be clear about the distinction between filibuster and vote? We don’t need those votes. We just need them to get out of the way of the filibuster.
It’s a different hurdle to cross and the sloppiness about not clearly differentiating between the two makes the situation seem more difficult than it really is.
sy2d
OK
Rahm sucks cat’s piss.
Now there is a second source.
Obama needs to find a real hammer.
inkadu
@mr. whipple: Unions aren’t happy because of the tax on expensive health plans, since they negotiated wages for those good health plans. So you have a ten, twenty, or thirty year process where you enter negotiations with employers and choose the health plan over wages, and now the health plan disappears and you’re left with the lower wages. That’s something to be upset about. Though I think those union plans were going to be grandfathered in, now. or not. subcomittee proposal reconciliation subpart C in a public hearing… i can’t keep up.
Th Republic of Stupidity
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Take a number and wait your turn… NO cutting in line…
Lee Hartmann
Sorry, I don’t believe there is/was *any* HCR that would get 12 Rethuglican votes. Their entire strategy is to defeat Obama, who cares what happens to the country. And of course carry water for their moneybags.
Any HCR that had anything remotely acceptable, not just to us commies, but even centrists.
The Moar You Know
@wrb: Wrong, wrong wrong.
You can only change the rules at the beginning of a session of Congress. The next one is coming up in January of 2011, if I recall correctly.
A rules change, such as dropping the filibuster, will require a supermajority – 67%. Good luck getting that.
ericvsthem
@maye: This. Reid gave Bad Max way too much rope, allowing the process to drag on through the summer, losing support and momentum, and precious time, and now the 60 votes for cloture are gone. Reid is Senate Majority leader, he had the power and authority to put a stop to Bad Max’s bullshit Gang of 6, but he didn’t. He will have plenty of time to reflect on this mistake after he loses to some teabagger in November. If the Dem’s still control the Senate in 2011, then perhaps a new Senate Majority leader be more effective. But I won’t be holding my breath.
John Quixote
@Martin:
They see the cloture vote and the actual vote on the bill to be one and the same. The Pigfucker has said as much. And the Pigfucker is not alone.
Brien Jackson
@Martin:
The problem with that is that they’re not functionally any different at this point.
Martin
@Lee Hartmann: You’re still missing the point. The point isn’t to get 12 votes. The point is to get one out of 12 to drop the filibuster. That’s it. You put all your eggs on one Senator, they hold all the cards and dig in. You put them on 12 Senators, everyone second guesses that their colleague is getting a deal over an issue you might not care that much to oppose and you might just take a reasonable deal knowing you can still vote against the bill and wave that to voters back home.
danimal
@The Moar You Know: I’m absolutely certain we can get 7 or more (whatever it takes to get to 67) Republican senators to vote against the filibuster next January, so we should really put a lot of effort into it. Very worthwhile effort.
Hopefully I’ve set off some sarcasometers.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@aimai: And since we punish people for trying and failing rather than people who don’t try, we’ll get our Republican majority and no one will try for HCR until the next generation takes over. Lovely.
inkadu
@aimai: The way this is going, Democrats will need to explain why people should vote at all, much less vote for Democrats.
Thanks for your comments. They are almost too measured for this blog.
Dr. Squid
@mcd410x:
I stopped reading that clown after he threw a fit and deleted a bunch of comments saying that posing with Katherine Harris was a bit hinky.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@aimai:
Blaming or not blaming the Republicans is entirely beside the point.
No. It is entirely the point. When Democrats block the Republican agenda, Republican activists attack Democrats unmercifully. The low information voters hear the racket they are making, and it increases their negative perceptions of Democrats.
When Republicans block the Democratic agenda, Democratic activists (like you), in concert with Republican activists, attack Democrats. The low information voters hear the unified racket they are making, and it drastically increases their negative perceptions of the entire Democratic agenda.
The result is EXACTLY what we are seeing now. Support for Democratic proposals dive off a cliff. Democratic politicians get skittish. You have a greatly reduced chance of getting, even a small part of what originally wanted, passed.
Martin
@Brien Jackson: But they are different. I agree they’re closer together than they were, but a Senator can still go home and say they voted against the bill and 95% of their constituents will be none the wiser.
I know I’m fucked up for assuming that no Senator is a 100% pure partisan asshole, but Snowe did vote to move the bill out of committee. That didn’t kill her with the party or at home. Hell, 90% of the people HERE have probably forgotten about that.
inkadu
@danimal: Well, if we start by getting 20 Republican senators into negotiations, I’m sure we can peel off 7 of them to vote for repealing the filibuster.
And if it doesn’t work, we fire Rahm Emmanuel.
Win-win from my perspective.
Martin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: This times infinity.
BTD
@John Cole:
You are not becoming – you are.
This Rahm fan boy act is weak.
Ash Can
What I’d like to know is, in all this kerfluffle over HCR and conjuring Republican votes for it out of thin air, where the hell is Richard Lugar, supposedly one of Obama’s BFFs while he was in the Senate? Has he been locked in the john? Is he pissed that he wasn’t offered a cabinet position? Did he hit his head and suddenly remember that Obama was a Democrat? I can’t figure that out.
I guess he just wasn’t that much of a BFF in the first place.
wrb
@The Moar You Know:
Right and wrong. True that it can only be done at the beginning of a new congress. I wasn’t sure when that was.
But it does only require a majority vote. At least unless Krugman among others got such a simple fact wrong.
NR
@Ash Can: Here you go.
jibeaux
@Martin:
These are very good points, and makes the situation make considerably more sense. But I remain highly skeptical that anyone other than the Maine ladies would have been at all persuadable on the filibuster issue. For reasons unclear to me, their mostly non-Republican voters like them a great deal and I don’t think would punish them at all. I don’t think talking to Lindsay Graham about breaking ranks on health care reform filibustering is worth the breath, personally.
@inkadu:
What I don’t understand about union intransigence on this issue is that if we don’t do something, pretty soon Warren Buffett is going to be the only person in America who can afford health insurance. I don’t see how there’s any force that can make those plans stay immutable over time. They just are going to get worse as the costs spiral out of control. My dad retired with a package that was supposed to cover his and my mom’s health care premiums. That later got dropped to just his. Eventually I’m sure they’ll drop him and I just hope he can get on Medicare before that happens. My state health benefits plan is charging more now if you smoke or are obese. It’s managed to absorb the increasing costs for years now by never giving anyone a raise or cost of living increase, and employers just can’t keep absorbing costs that double every 9 years even with the wage suppression. I don’t know why the unions think their plans are immune to that sort of pressure, if we do nothing they’ll be back at the table renegotiating (downward) their health care plans within a couple of years.
fasteddie9318
Isn’t the real miscalculation that they went after ANY Republicans without ever realizing that there was no way in hell that so much as a single Republican was ever going to vote for the final bill? They could have gone to the 25 most moderate/liberal Republicans, asked them to write the entire goddamn bill, and not a single one of those 25 would have voted for what they wrote. But the White House still wants to play footsie with them as though Congressional Republicans are straight shooters with honest policy disagreements and not the obstructionist political hacks that they really are. I do blame them for that, sorry John. Fool me once, etc. How many times does Lucy have to pull the ball away before Charlie Brown figures out what’s happening?
They should have gone straight to Lieberman and Nelson and gotten them aboard and passed whatever bill that was, which is ultimately what they did anyway. Dithering around with a group of people more interested in scoring cheap political points than in governing caused this process to drag on too long and crucial momentum was lost.
sy2d
@John Cole
Brought to you by the gang couldn’t shoot strai– err, count. Republicans and conservadems were always a problem. Rahm and Obama knew this from the beginning.
Just Some Fuckhead
There was a plan B. Plan B was the way it played out with Lieberman providing the 60th vote for cloture.
Plan A was a bipartisan effort involving a couple of so-called moderate Republicans. Plan A failed so Plan B was initiated.
Those were the only two plans and the result is a bill that is very unpopular with the electorate that has something in it to alienate everyone and the potential to doom Democrats in the next election cycle. So it’s not surprising various factions in the house don’t want to PTDB.
Not sure what all that has to do with Rahm. Shrug. Also not sure why I’m supposed to care if a COS gets unfairly blamed for something. We may be personalizing this more than is healthy in our efforts to ride herd.
inkadu
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: This is the Blame thread, isn’t it?
What you are describing is not the result of Democratic intraparty activism, but several other factors, the most significant of which is the Democratic leadership being far too accomodating to Republicans and not aggressive enough.
Progressives were told to STFU all through the Bush administration while Republicans called us traitors and the Democratic Party, instead of pushing back, supported every war-mongering and executive-power-expanding bill the GOP could pass. And then we got Obama, who is growing a pair now, but began with hosannahs to bipartisanship. Activists know their voice is loudest inside their own party. When the Democratic party leadership goes to war with the GOP you’ll hear the activist base quiet down.
Rhoda
Rahm did his job.
All of this is on Harry Reid IMO. The White House told him to go with a trigger and get Snowe on board; that was the plan. But Reid bent to the firebaggers who were running ads in his state and pissed off Snowe and lost a lot of centrists who were going to use her for cover.
When this became an all Dem bill Nelson, Landrieu, and Lincoln panicked in the press over this and there were a lot of folks there with them. It’s also part of the reason that the Medicare deal got killed; Liberman was carrying the water for red state senators thinking of ads about tax and spend liberals.
MA being lost was a huge setback. It was off everyone’s radar screen and Menendez should have been on this. He wasn’t. Kaine wasn’t. The White House went into panic mode and they seem just now to be rolling out their plan C.
But this isn’t Rahm’s fault. He’s done stupid shit on civil liberties IMO but that has all been political b/c we live in a 24 Jack Bauer America folks; once the debate on torture started it pretty much was won by the neocons. He’s done a good job sheperding this through the legislative process and Reid screwed the White House here.
Progressives also played a huge part; they became a part of the problem and stepped all over the White House messaging IMO and allowed the MSM to tell a story of Democrats fighting and the Republican attacks rather than have this become a real policy debate. A huge part of this IMO was because the public option became a power play in some circles and it was so watered down and useless in the end; it became impossible to wonder why folks didn’t fight to gain something for compromising the public option away?
I honestly think a huge part of Hamsher’s jump into crazy was b/c she wanted the glory of pointing to something in the bill and saying I did that. And her and those like her who were attacking the administration in personal terms and questioning the integrity of the administration and reiterating Republican talking points weren’t fighting for progressive ideals; they were fighting for their own political power. I honestly think FDL wants to become the Club for Growth of the left.
Health care isn’t over. The White House is rightly focusing on jobs and a jobs bill and a showdown over that; and then they’re going to move back to health care. And if they get both of these things and the unemployment numbers continue to fall they’ll get political benefit and the knives will be sheathed.
That’s a big IF through.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
What percentage of the Dem core is LGBT? How many votes are represented there? Numbers, please.
And, where would those votes go if they decided that the party of Rahm just wasn’t their best option? To the party of Pat Robertson?
Inquiring minds want to know just what the “core constituency” really is and what it thinks its options are.
wrb
And for those who don’t like waiting.
Kaboom
Martin
@jibeaux: But it doesn’t matter if you can persuade anyone else. The only thing that matters is that one of the Maine ladies worries that you might persuade someone else and instead of digging in for the gold, gives in for a reasonable deal.
And remember, the criticisms being made here aren’t about winning over GOP votes – they’re about the cost that had to be paid to win over Democratic ones. At the time, no GOP votes were needed – just Nelson and Lieberman, but because it didn’t appear that there was any potential path out without those two, they held out for everything, which included expanding Medicare – something that probably would have gotten passed in the House.
Had Nelson and Lieberman been worried that Collins and Snowe (and best to have a few more names getting murmured around) might drop the filibuster, they might not have held out for so much. And you don’t even need to have someone like Graham agreeing – you can still call him in regularly and whisper his name. Everyone will of course deny a deal, so that’s not a risk in this game.
Come on guys, this is classic prisoners dilemma game theory here. It’s a proven formula.
liberty60
@dmsilev:
This. Is. The. GOP. Platform
Nothing else matter, nothing else even comes close, and they don’t even bother to dispute or hide it.
Imagine if the GOP under Bush had had 60 Senators; how many bills of theirs would stall and die?
The blame is not that Rahm is insufficiently attuned to the Senate Baron’s ways, that he did not sufficiently stroke enough egos;
Had Lieberman/ Nelson/ Landrieu been willing to behave like progressives, we would have a bill today.
They killed this bill, no one else.
danimal
@sy2d: Agreed. I ignore most Harry Reid bashing, but he screwed up with his belief he could get a public option passed in the Senate. Rahm and Obama were right to be skeptical on that one. It falsely raised hopes for progressives and wasted a lot of political capital.
Waynski
@Cat 48, slag and aimai — I don’t blame the House, they did their job, but they’ve got one more job to do. PTDB. The Senate’s effing useless and I think Senators blaming Rahm is basically a signal to the house in this game of chicken that they’re not going to blink. They’ve got an excuse in the fillibuster and the chickenshits are more than happy to use it. So the House needs to regroup, whip the votes as hard as they can and cram it through.
L. Ron Obama
@John Cole:
Americablog screaming bloody murder: an illustrated primer
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@Just Some Fuckhead:
When personalizing is outlawed, only outlaws will personalize.
And, the blogs will shut down. I mean, come on.
MikeMc
I understand that there are policy/strategy differences with rahm. I don’t understand the hate that accompanies it. It’s irrational. Shit, the east coast/west coast rap wars made more sense. I’ve had my fill of John Avavarosis, Jane Hamsher, and their followers. Fuck ‘um! If you’re going to blame Emanuel for the collapse HCR wouldn’t you also have to give him credit for getting HCR farther than anyone…ever. In the end, what have John and Jane actually accomplished? The big game is being played and they’re sitting in the bleachers heckling the players. Their routine is getting stale.
Ash Can
@NR: And from this article:
Not exactly the “ample evidence” I was looking for.
MNPundit
@John Cole: You should probably point out that the freakout would then be justified, because any bill supported by 12 Republicans is guaranteed to melt down the health-insurance system.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I can tell you what Jane has accomplished. A person with exactly nothing useful to say on any subject has gotten herself on national cable tv with a chance to say it.
It’s a pretty mean trick, really.
If you don’t think that’s hard, try it yourself.
wrb
@Rhoda:
Exactly.
Best summary I’ve read
Mary
@Rhoda: And in her zeal to become the Club for Growth of the left she went for advice to the actual architects of the Club for Growth, who turned her into a weapon against the Democrats and gave her money too. Bad judgment plus corruption is something we definitely don’t need.
lol
I thought the criticism was that Obama spent too much time talking to Republicans like DeMint and Grassley who had no intention of voting for the bill but now the criticism from the netroots is that he didn’t talk to enough Republicans who had no intention of voting for the bill?
There’s no ideological consistency in the Netroots for anything.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@inkadu:
What you are describing is not the result of Democratic intraparty activism, but several other factors, the most significant of which is the Democratic leadership being far too accomodating to Republicans and not aggressive enough.
BS. When Democrats are actually working toward something you want, attacking them is IN FACT being VERY accomodating to Republicans. If you want something, you fight the opposition, not your own side. The way to get Democratic leadership to be more aggressive is to BACK THEM UP. Beating them down does the opposite. It makes them run for cover.
lol
@Rhoda:
THIS
jibeaux
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I know this is just round four million in the purity wars, but I just can’t resist some of this stuff.
The polls are nearly a toss up when asked pro or con, and people are very supportive of nearly all of the actual provisions of the bills when they are informed as to what they are. Unlike for your assertions, I will linky. They don’t like the individual mandates, but you just can’t get elimination of the pre-existing exclusion without the mandates. It’s the same ol-same ol that people want shiny things, but paying for shiny things not so much. This is a battle we are losing on misinformation and apathy and a failure to get messages across, not substance.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@lol:
Never has been from day one of the invention of the purely marketing slogan in the first place. “Netroots” as near as I can figure out was a catchphrase whose main usefulness was to pimp books by Markos. Netroots is about as cohesive as the Tea Party.
scav
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
A) which TV channel are you watching?
B) Really. Also.
liberty60
I am still new to the left side of the aisle; as a lifelong Republican, I have to say one thing I admired about them was that they never, ever blamed themselves for a defeat; the message discipline and self-confidence of the Right might be grating, but my God, it can carry the day against larger forces.
What I would say to the progressives- stop self-flaggelating, and focus on who is blocking this thing; accept that we never, ever had a 60 vote supermajority. We always only had 58 votes tops, maybe 54 for something like single payer.
A decade or so ago I would have agreed with compromise, when there were sane and moderate Republicans; but today the Teabaggers have taken over the party, and as another has pointed out, nothing short of installing Sarah Palin as Queen-for-Life would satisfy them.
In this environment, the nuclear option or reconciliation seems like the only sensible direction.
kay
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I think it’s hysterical. He didn’t need Congressional experience, he needed Senate experience. Thank goodness we now know what the problem is.
They could play this out forever, you realize that, right?
“He doesn’t have experience in The Department of Education, so we cannot muster the votes for student loan reform.” Of course not. The very thought!
It’s just comical to me. Especially because Obama was a Senator, and so was Joe Leiberman.
“Doesn’t count! Has to be Rahm!”
inkadu
@jibeaux: I agree. It is short-sighted of unions to knock this bill because of the short-term interest of its members; especially since medicare can pick up most of those legacies. The state-assisted insurance in my state just jumped a bunch, too; and it’s only going to get worse. The economy is in the toilet. People who can drop coverage are dropping coverage, leaving the more expensive people on the plans, driving costs up…
@Rhoda: I don’t understand your point. Without Democratic activisists, HCR would have been a public policy debate? The left shouldn’t have pushed for the public option? Wasn’t that, in itself, a key policy debate?
danimal
@jibeaux: And remember, the individual mandate is a liberal concept. When I see so-called progressives rail against the individual mandate, I’m very skeptical of their motives.
MikeMc
@liberty60:
Do you sixty votes to pass reconciliation?
JMY
The fact of the matter is this: It ain’t Rahm’s fault. I don’t care what you think about him. I’m not even a huge fan, but this is far from his fault. He tried to do what ever he could do to get HCR reform through. He learned from the debacle that happened when Clinton tried and it has gotten us to this point. Could anyone have foreseen that Democrats in the Senate would be the ultimate enemy to HCR? I don’t think anybody but Rahm, the Pres., and others involved in this process did. These liberal blogs didn’t. They figured “hey we have 60, we can do anything” forgetting the conservative Dems in the Senate. So they tried the moderate Republican, she wanted a trigger, liberals screamed no – public option – well public option is out of the original bill, when we could have had a good bill with a trigger already and fix it with a public option, Medicare buy in ect.
The fact of the matter is the leadership in the Senate didn’t get the job done. Stop waiting on Rahm, Obama, or whoever to do your damn job.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
God, that’s beautiful. So true, one has to laugh out loud and spit coffee when one sees it.
Tell it to the LGBT crowd. Tell it to half the commentariat here. Tell it to the flies buzzing around Dkos.
But don’t tell it to the Republicans. They already understand this, and their power, such as it is, is based in the principle. In a world where coalitions are everything, discipline counts. In the world of machine politics, the best machine, not the best idea, wins.
Right now we outnumber the bad machine’s ranks. A shame to waste that on infighting.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@scav:
MSNBC. It’s new, you might not have heard of it.
Ailuridae
@Martin:
This. Also I am not in the business of promoting Olympia Snowe but from all of her policy talks about the bills as they were leaving committee and after she was going to be much more progressive about the actual meat of the matter than seven or eight Democratic Senators. With her instead of any of them there probably would have been better subsidies, Medicaid to a higher percentage of FPL and a higher (better) medical loss ratio. She was insistent however that she would not support an immediate expansion of Medicare or a public option. As was Lieberman. As were the other possibly attainable Republican votes (Collins and Voinovich). Which, of course is why the White House told Reid that the public option was a no go. Because, well it was.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Just words!
Fulcanelli
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: At last… Thank you!
We’ve had a generation of Republican led hard wiring of DC and the political process coupled with a relentless media propaganda machine so effective that half the freaking country believes a phone book full of bullshit GOP talking points.
Right. This is the age of UFC politics and this is a death match over who gets to claim representation of the middle class. Period.
Anybody, including Obama, who thinks that bipartisanship is gonna work in this political climate needs to get their hand out of their pants. Especially on a signature issue like HCR.
ruemara
@aimai:
How is it possible that HCR wouldn’t possibly get through the Senate and yet there was some plan that might work if they had only listened to who from early on?
And regarding your follow up post, I’d say there’s a lot of proof that putting in the opt-out was the wrong tactic, which was why the White House didn’t ask for it in the Senate bill. What’s the proof? The fact that over 7 months after the original deadline, we’re still arguing about it. Reid was trying to look like he was as good as Pelosi. Instead, he failed. Badly.
kay
@JMY:
I blame Obama for the MA debacle, because he should have realized no one else was doing anything. Even that’s a little weird, though, because we gave Schumer all kinds of credit for overseeing great Senate campaigns in 2006, but the Senator in charge of getting Senators elected this time around was barely mentioned.
So, you get credit, but never get blame, if you’re a Senator?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@brat:
As for your “chronic contempt” thread, I’m a L in that LGBT. Democrats have never been friends for us. NEVER. Maybe you don’t know that because you are too young to have seen years of Democratic backtracking on supporting the gays.
For all their flaws, they haven’t been enemies, though. They haven’t campaigned against us, like the Republicans. They haven’t proposed legislation to harm us, like the Republicans. Denying us equality isn’t part of their party platform, like the Republicans. Occasionally, the Democrats have actually come through for us by blocking harmful legislation sponsored by Republicans.
Rahm isn’t my friend, but he is the enemy of my enemy. I am perfectly happy to help him harm them.
JMY
@liberty60
I think reconciliation and nuclear option is something liberals hated when Bush was in office. So we just cannot just say well he should do it because “our guy” is in office. Even if their is obstructionism by Republicans. But if it’s done…fine. We can’t complain if a republican majority does it again.
scav
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio: A TV channel full of people saying deeply meaningful things? Definitely haven’t heard of it.
fasteddie9318
I thought the WH was wrong to go after HCR first anyway. What if they’d come in riding the wave of populist outrage at the banksters and really gone after serious regulatory reform first? Put the GOP on the side of Wall Street and dare the conservadems to oppose a reform that would have had broad public support. Win on that issue and you’ve amassed a huge cache of political capital and gotten the populist wave riding with you instead of against you. Then you go for HCR, attacking big insurers with the same fervor and rhetoric you used to go after the banks. Doesn’t that make more sense?
Meh, they’re Democrats. They would have figured out a way to fuck that up too.
jibeaux
@Martin:
You make good points, but it just seems to me that when the GOP wants to do lockstep, they can do some lockstep and they can rest assured that the others are also in lockstep. To use the prisoner’s dilemma analogy, I’m not sure how, if we’re the cops, we plausibly convince the suspect that his friend is ratting him out. If the marching orders come from Boehner not to rat, my experience is there’s not gonna be a rat. But maybe I’m not interpreting the analogy right.
danimal
I wish Dems could be realistic and accept that we got the best deal we’re going to get with the Senate. Want a better deal? Recruit, support and elect more progressive senators. Easier said than done, but it’s the only way that will work. 50 true progressives could do a lot within the existing senate structures.
jibeaux
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
That is good news. Very brief article, though, doesn’t explain why. Hopefully more information will come out later.
JMY
@kay
No, the MA debacle was Coakley’s fault and her fault only. She screwed up. She thought is was going to be handed to her b/c she was a Dem and it’s Ted’s seat and didn’t really work for it like she should have…She had it in the bag but again she kept screwing up her chances and then at the last minute the President is there for support, but is shouldn’t have gotten to that point.
Elie
@Rhoda:
This was huge IMHO and scared the independents in Massachusetts and kept Dems at home. Not saying they werent stupid, but it did. I had a Democratic friend in Maryland saying she would not have voted Democratic in MA because of the image she had of the Democrats not knowing what was needed and how to get it done. (I know, just one case study and a denominator of one).
The progressive actions were very important — obviously not the proximate blame, but very important notheless in influencing public opinion about the health care bill.
inkadu
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Fighting for a progressive bill is the job of the progressive activists. It can be done responsibly (and irresponsibly, as we have seen). There is going to be some squabbling over any major bill.
I know there are bomb-throwing jerks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t play an active role in moving the party.
Martin
@jibeaux: Most legislators can be bought by the WH. You give them something they want – steer a project to their state, etc. Focus on the ones that aren’t ideological about health care specifically, or have more democratic constituents, etc. And start offering deals – the first taker to drop the filibuster wins the deal. If everyone in play knows there are others in play, they start positioning around each other. Some will never deal, but you can still give the appearance that they might.
Everyone denies that they’re dealing, so even if they ask each other, they get no information. Yeah, the GOP is playing hardball, but there has to be limits.
aimai
This is just nonsense:
No ordinary voter reads anything I comment about on a blog. I am not responsible for “low information voters” not getting good information. In fact, quite the opposite. I have been very concerned from the get go about the Democrats’ inability to manage messaging to low information voters *because I talk to people and talk up Democratic initiatives all the time* and I have a hard time doing that because there’s no serious full court press on the good things the Democrats are doing.
Support for Democratic proposals dove off a cliff in August when the Democratic leadership in the house and senate let democratic members go back to their districts without a coherent plan to market to their voters and left them to the antics of the teabaggers. If you want to complain about leftist firebaggers as well go ahead. No clear bill meant that people who wanted to push for the bill, any bill, had a hard time explaining to the low information voter just what we were proposing to deliver. That was a failure of marketing. The White House and the reps were caught by surprise. They shouldn’t have been.
I think the continued obsession in the bloggosphere about either blaming X or excusing X is totally misplaced. The democrats are not a very organized party–never have been–but if they want to get the slightest thing done over the next three years they’d better figure out how to be. If they don’t it won’t be because of FDL or anyone else on the left snarking and bitching about them. It will be because, institutionally, the interests of individual democratic reps and senators don’t align with that of the party. The party is going to have to figure out a way to implement a national strategy that can’t be derailed by panic on the part of individual senators. That’s their job. Its not up to individual voters or commenters–we can try to help, we can try to hurt, but ultimately they pay no more attention to our complaints than to our praise.
aimai
Bill E Pilgrim
Oh for pity’s sake.
Pass a health care reform bill.
Forget about the Republicans, 2, 10, 12 or all 41 of them. Don’t waste your time. If it takes reconciliation, use that.
How anyone would think it’s worthwhile to waste more time on trying to “look bipartisan”, so see, then even if they walk away, everyone will see that they did, and blame them…
Hogwash. The Republicans just want to topple this Presidency, and they’ll work toward that whether they’re courted, or ignored. It’s the same either way. The public sees them being treated as if they’re to be taken seriously, and it helps their cause, it doesn’t hurt it.
We can spend years figuring out whose fault it all was later, the idea that “it’s all Rahm’s fault” is imbecilic, but so is “it’s the Democrats’ fault” (excluding those in the White House).
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@jibeaux:
How often are gays and lesbians reinstated after being kicked out for DADT? It isn’t like they found out subsequently that he really isn’t gay.
Elie
@JMY:
Sorry — while I agree that she was not a good candidate, the WH and Kaine needed to sniff out her weakness way before they did with so much dependent on that win. You just cant leave that to chance if you are doing the political calculations with the right kind of awareness. Sorry — as obotty as I am, he ultimately has to take a full share of the blame for this since it is his administration and the HCR was his centerpiece legislation that he could not flub up — but he did.
Dr. Squid
Shorter aimai: just because I’m part of the noise doesn’t mean I’m part of the problem.
Ailuridae
@kay:
I’ve made this mistake here in the comments as well. This isn’t on Shumer anymore. Bob Menendez is running the DSCC these days.
http://www.dscc.org/about?type=leadership
Same difference though.
JMY
@Elie:
We agree to disagree, but Menendez should have been on the ball. He’s in charge of getting Democratic butts in Senate seats. I think most people would agree that she made plenty of blunders during the campaign which led to her defeat. Exit polls show that her loss had nothing to do with Obama, HCR, etc. but her. She screwed up – period. She didn’t do what it takes to keep that seat in blue.
Elie
@aimai:
Ultimately I think that this is right on — even though I assigned some “blame” to the progressives in my comment above, this is more true — in fact, key…
Midnight Marauder
@aimai:
Valid point. But where, oh where, does that panic come from, I wonder?
JMY
I mean, just imagine if Obama carried on as if he had the Presidency in the bag and he was going to win because America hates Bush and Republicans and wouldn’t vote a Republican back in office, so he really didn’t have to campaign as much? We’d have McCain/Palin. Who would you blame? Dean? No, you would blame Obama.
Just Some Fuckhead
@jibeaux: How about moderately unpopular? I’ve seen polling numbers on the actual bill hovering under 50% for quite a while. If you want to pretend it’s a popular bill that’s just not getting the credit it deserves because of the individual mandate then you should at least acknowledge that progressives like Atrios, for example, were warning really early on that a bill with a mandate and no public option wouldn’t go down well with the public. This shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Ailuridae
@danimal:
I wish Dems could be realistic and accept that we got the best deal we’re going to get with the Senate. Want a better deal? Recruit, support and elect more progressive senators. Easier said than done, but it’s the only way that will work. 50 true progressives could do a lot within the existing senate structures.
This. I personally want a Medicare expansion and think if explained to Americans well and campaigned on it can be added into the insurance framework by 2013. But Democratic leadership and those advocating for it or the public option haven’t done the necessary work (yet) to create the popular push for the program. It can’t just be that 55-65% of Americans support it; it has to be that enough Democratic Senators from states where such an expansion polls at well under 50% can cast a vote for it and not have it be career suicide.
Dream On
The reason Health Care Reform failed is because the Senate wanted to pass a Health Insurance Angle, with a bare majority. And Obama helped them try, with electorally catastrophic mandates and gifts to the big biz health-care racket companies. Then the Senate lost its nerve, and rightly so. This is a terrible bill, and thank God it’s failing. If it passed, the Democrats would be in a world of hurt.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Well then you have just tossed out the main driving force behind the blogosphere as it currently exists. It’s a public bitch box, all about bitching and blame, and not intended to be a place to learn the fine points of political science. It has never been much else, even going back to the early days at DKos. “Netroots” is really “Netrants” and a haven for the disgruntled and frustrated.
Sure, there is the occasional Kevin Drum or Steve Benen (and the wonderful Hilzoy) to be the exception that proves the rule. But the rule is what it is. Even here at the friendly confines of BJ, the bitch box is nearby most of the time.
MikeMc
Wasn’t Coakley picked to take the seat by Vicky Kennedy? Vicky ruined it!!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Elie: Not the WH’s job to run senate races.
@fasteddie9318: As someone pointed out earlier, the Republican party platform is to make Obama fail. They would have done exactly the same thing to a banking bill. And the teabaggers would have gone right along with it.
slag
@Dr. Squid: So if aimai sits down and shuts up, then what? No more comments on Balloon Juice ever. Problem solved?
Really, context is important. Aimai isn’t shouting SAME AS BUSH from the rooftops. There is room in this country for reasonable people to discuss issues reasonably without concern that the overall message will be muddled. If anyone should be aware of that fact, I would think it’s people who inhabit blogs about politics.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
What percentage of those people do you think can name three actual provisions of the bills in question?
The public doesn’t know anything about the bills. What they know is the circus around the bills, and that is what they are basing their views on.
Eh?
aimai
Well, the individual senators who panic, as far as I know, are all the ones in conservative districts (Nelson, Landrieu, Bayh, and Lincoln) –so their panic is not related at all to FDL or the left. Lieberman’s interests are also, of course, not driven at all by constituent interests or agitation.
Also, of course, ideally, the Democratic initiatives we are talking about are difficult votes because they run counter to the interests of large corporations and big donors and wall street. That being the case the specific interest of many Senators will, in fact, lie in opposition to the ordinary voter.
aimai
Dr. Squid: I don’t get what you think I’m responsible for? I never argued to kill the bill. I’ve always supported Obama and the Dems. I’ve routinely called my Senators/Congressman and urged them to get with the program. Just because I don’t think washington tittle tattle is what is preventing the dems from voting to pass their signature legislation doesn’t make me some kind of party traitor. I don’t always think Obama, Reid and the Dems are doing the best job they could do of fighting for their own programs, or of handling the noise machine and getting their message out. So sue me. I’m interested in figuring out ways in which they could do so, that’s generally the thrust of my posts here and elsewhere.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Dream On: No, a terrible bill is whats-his-name’s budget bill that wants to privatize social security and medicare. The HCR bill is not great, but it’s not great in the same way that the original social security bill wasn’t great either.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
OK folks, we’re starting to see the kind of infighting that occurs on the losing team’s sideline during a football game. Gotta watch that.
liberty60
@JMY:
Yes We Can!
I know its dangerous; but when every single fucking bill and appointment is filibustered, we have to, or else admit that 41 votes makes a majority.
American want things to get done, they value effectiveness, not ideological consistency. They will tolerate wrongness longer than incompetence.
Maybe what the progressives need to hear to get motivated is:
“Speaker of the House Michelle Bachmann and Senate Majority Leader James Inhoff met today at a America 4 Jesus prayer session with President Palin…”
onceler
@wrb: yes, you are correct. the apologists saying this can’t be done appear to simply not understand the rules in this case. but yup – all it would have taken, and all it would still take at the beginning of the next session, is a simple majority vote to amend the rules. and again, they should have done it in January, and some of us were screaming for them to do it, but to no avail. will they even try in Jan ’11? I highly, highly doubt it.
lol
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
It’s pretty funny to see progressives who were previously outraged at the national party for meddling in primaries(real or perceived) that are now outraged the national party didn’t meddle in the Massachusetts primary.
Ailuridae
@Just Some Fuckhead:
That’s because people don’t understand the provisions of the bill. When people have the provisions explained to them they are overwhelmingly in favor of each provision by itself with the exception of the individual mandate and something else that escapes me.
One of the reasons the bill is unpopular is that there is an entirely predictable onslaught of misinformation and lies about the bill from the right because they are terrified that they’ll run into a wall like the Tories did after Labour passed NHS. The other reasonthe bill is unpopular is that there is a
entirely predictable onslaught of misinformation and lies about the bill from the right because they are terrifiedcomparable onslaught on the bill from the left because they didn’t get their fucking pony. When low information voters (which is what true independents are) here “both sides” slamming a piece of legislation they logically assume it must be bad.MikeMc
@DonBelacquaPurgatorio:
That’s exactly right. I saw a poll where support for the public option was well over 50%. However, in the same poll, 72% of people couldn’t fucking explain what the public option was! The ignorance of our citizenry is immeasurable.
aimai
There’s a huge difference between not wanting the national party to bigfoot the local primary and not wanting the national party to help the weak local candidate who results from the primary from getting over and getting in. I don’t see any problem holding both views simultaneously. I supported Capuano in the MA primary *as did almost all of his house compatriots* but Coakley had the support of Emily’s list and a bunch of unions and other people because she was imagined to be a better statewide candidate. Once she got the nod in the primary she and her team turned out not to have the faintest idea what to do. At that point staying out of the race was a massive mistake, no matter whose feelings were hurt. Coakley was a terrible candidate but an infusion of cash and good campaign people could have gotten her over the hump. Even a few more weeks in the race might have done it.
aimai
Ailuridae
@lol:
The claim as it were is from a statement from Coakley’s pollster that they didn’t see the changing tide in the polling because they couldn’t afford to run polls or, more accurately, couldn’t justify the expense of polling in what most perceived to be a slam dunk win for Democrats. Massachusetts on a per capita basis has to be very, very expensive to poll so there might be something to that part of it.
Now, Coakley refusing to campaign is a different issue
wrb
@liberty60:
… to discuss whether the Palin Supreme Court was even needed any more since the skies were dark with the warrior queen’s bombers flying east and that which was written was nigh”
JMY
@liberty60:
I’m not saying we can’t, but IF Democrats do, we can’t complain and protest if a Republican majority does it as well, even if what they are trying to do is stupid.
wrb
@JMY:
Do you really think that today’s Republicans give a shit about complaints from democrats?
My money is on the Republicans killing the filibuster minutes after they next get the majority, regardless of what Democrats do.
Comity is just dead with those folks. Democrats who think Republicans won’t are being played for fools- imo.
Mary
@Ailuridae: I completely agree with you. I was a low-information voter who became incredibly disillusioned glancing at the Huffington Post, DKos, FDL, and the like on the internet and trusted those sources of information for far too long. They did the same thing on TV and then blasted their TV appearances around the internet.
It actually took a certain amount of effort to figure out how I had been misled. Had I been polled or had to vote during my period of confusion, there’s no telling what I would have said or done or whether I would have sat out an election. I don’t understand how Aimai could say that such an assault on the voters would have no effect on the Conservadems since their voting base was becoming disillusioned on all sides.
Paula
to echo t jasper parnell :
aimai, my personal beef w/ the A-list blogosphere and their commenters is that the meme that the last couple elections were somehow a mandate for progressive change bears no resemblance to the reality I hear from the people around me, the things that people say @ the town halls, and certainly not to the narrative that emerges from both local and national news. People may say that they “want” things like “public option” or “regulation” or “less war”, but their lack of consistent information often leads people to getting scared off by shit like anti-immigrant services rants, private enterprise chest-thumping, and deficit scaremongering. It’s random and stupid, but that’s the populace at large — even I fall into a know-nothing phase more than I’d like to admit because I don’t fucking read blogs all the time. At that point, people fall into the ideology that gets trumped daily, which is still framed in conservative terms in re privacy. personal responsibility, and our right to do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves.
The 2008 election was not a “mandate” for anything, just the expression of a collective unease and dissatisfaction with the way things were going. The sentiment may have been against Iraq, but it wasn’t broadly “anti-war”; people may have been mad about the bailouts, but it was not against “corporate interest” in any way that was substantive. When Obama stumps for “common sense”, most people are going to read it as status quo ante rather than serious reform, which was, if I remember Clinton, pretty ok w/ corporate interests and the strategic use of the military.
So, back to the “sharing the blame” — my problem w/ Rahmbama meme is that the A-listers can take that some of that blame too, because they fail to understand the difference between journalism, advocacy, and organizing. They are not journalists because they think that what they’re doing is advocacy for certain causes rather than reflecting the complexity of both the power players in DC and the electorate; rather than nuanced examination of how the system works, they write about how Emanuel is evil and say, Anthony Weiner is good and all will be great if we could have the “right” people up there. (Seriously, look @ this thread. Look @ how people like Jim Webb, Chris Dodd, and Jay Rockefeller have been alternately pilloried and championed from policy to policy.) But that advocacy is limited to working with their (limited pool) of readers and calling congressmen and not actually going out into the broader court of public opinion. This is NOT organizing, at least not in the sense of how other interest groups like unions do it. Because of that, they have NO constituency. Their movement is mostly reactionary rather than proactive.
[Anyway, pasted from another thread cuz I’m tired of writing it:]
I find it hard to reconcile the sentiments expressed in re Obama’s (lack of) backbone and/or respect for progressive sentiments. If they consider themselves a significant part of the “base” that elected him, why can’t they use their own position to influence others? Because that is what being part of the base entails—like unions, you have power because you can swing votes. If the complaint is that they are “powerless” and that it’s up to Obama to deliver progressive policy messages, then why should Obama listen to a bunch of people who are, in effect, powerless and can give him nothing in exchange? Because he told people he’d be a “good guy” and now he’s hurting everyone’s “feelings”? Because the whine of “betrayal” smacks of political naivete, not people who actually know what they’re doing in the political process. And why would seasoned politicians listen to novices? /paste
So, maybe I want blog people who believe themselves to be activists (the ones who wanted to “hold feet to the wire”, the ones who keep talking about what they want to do to the Overton Window) to pick a role that they might actually be useful in. If you want to be a journalist, don’t write about specious character crap like the MSM does. STOP FOCUSING ON PERSONALITIES AND MESSAGING AND MEDIA “MEMES”. Tell us about the complexity of policy and strategy so that people can actually use your information for more than the latest tea party/Broder/Democrat self-righteous flaggellation and … organize, to think of that “Plan B” even when the pols don’t — even just to have an accurate understanding of things like “filibuster” and “reconciliation” (because it seems that misunderstanding of these are rampant among the blogs as much as the public). If you think of yourself as an advocate, communicate policy better so that we don’t have a rash of people mistaking the “public option” as being the be-all and end-all of a health care reform policy that was actually wide-ranging. If you want to organize a change in public opinion, then STEP AWAY FROM THE FUCKING COMPUTER ONCE IN A WHILE so that if you want, say, “public option” to be impt, that you have a substantial group of people who understand what it means and what they roadblocks are in Congress and who are going to communicate to the prez and the press that it is where they draw the line for compromise. It may seem that people “liked” the public option, but they were not @ the point where they could clearly communicate that it was a dealbreaker if it went away.
Overall, the A-list blogs DO have a lot of power, but they are squandering it if they depend on politicians to execute their agenda. Because those pols have different interests. No amount of whining is going to change that.
In the meantime, I refuse to let people off the hook who demand to be taken seriously and yet are neither intellectually consistent nor organizationally effective.
Balconesfault
@Rhoda:
I’m with you.
Harry Reid can’t even keep his Democrats from filibustering key Democratic legislation or nominees.
I mean, I could give him some slack if he couldn’t keep them from voting against healthcare.
But filibustering? Really? Might as well just back a truck over him.
Lieberman … no consequences … no party discipline? Anyone?
Elie
@Ailuridae:
The complexity here (as you already know) is that success breeds success. This administration has to get something of health care done to allow it the political capital to influence the choice of and election of new or changed senators and reps.
By trashing the two bills, the progressives just loaded the deck to the negative, making the bill more likely to fail through the impact on public opinion and perception – both which made the Democratic Senators and Reps scared than they were already. Downstream, they also made it less likely that defeating the bill would result in the changes in the legislature that would give them what they want eventually. Instead, they empowered and envigorated the conservatives and would shift the types of candidates and the chances for success to the right, not the left.
Ash Can
@aimai: No, it’s not nonsense. Blaming Republicans is not beside the point. Maybe it is to a party activist, but to the great unwashed, as Sister Machine Gun of Harmony was saying, a failure to put blame on the Republicans is what allows the Dems-in-disarray meme to have legs in the first place. Why don’t more low-info voters have the impression of “Dems have their disagreements but it’s OK since they’re ultimately trying to do the right thing, unlike the GOP”? It’s because there’s no blame-the-Republicans meme to offset Dems blaming other Dems.
Also, don’t ever forget that lower-info voters are the ones who do the actual electing to office, they make up the overwhelming majority of voters. It makes all the difference in the world what kind of message they get. Unfortunately, they get these messages in dumbed-down soundbites dispensed by TV talking heads, who distill these bites down from information aggregated from multiple sources, including the Internet. If the only message these voters are getting is “Dems in disarray,” then Houston, we have a problem.
slag
@Paula: Yeah. Pretty much everything you said. And for short:
Exactly this.
Serenity Now
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
THIS x 1980983948230428340982348347342.
maus
If Rahm wasn’t all bark, no bite, nobody would care about him. It’s not so much that he’s an asshole as that he’s an ineffective asshole, he’s completely useless when it comes to putting the screws to anyone who’s not already a progressive. The blue dogs and republicans remain aloof and unreachable.
I mean sure, get angry with the people who aren’t doing enough, but it’s not as if there’s a lot to champion Rahm for.
John Cole
@BTD:
In order to be a Rahm fan boy, wouldn’t I have to have a glowing opinion of him? The fact of the matter is I really don’t care much about him one way or another.
HCR didn’t fail because of Rahm- it even passed the damned Senate, i’ll remind you, and they were in negotiations with the House to come to a compromise. So now, explain to me- how is it Rahm’s fault that health care failed because of his actions in the Senate when THE SENATE PASSED THE DAMNED BILL.
That isn’t fanboyism- that is just the facts.
This has everything to do with fixing the blame to Rahm to cover their own asses and little to do with Rahm’s “failures” in the Senate.
liberty60
@Balconesfault:
Agreed-
Why Joe Lieberman still has even a folding card table in a broom closet, much less a Senate Committee chairmanship, is beyond me.
Edited to add- maybe the Barons would behave a bit more like elected representatives of the People if they actually faced consequences for their votes.
Elie
@Paula:
Excellent
Rhoda
@inkadu:
No, I’m saying that the progressive activists went from pushing the public option as a policy issue to turning it into a power play to demonstrate their power relative to the blue dogs. I’m sorry if I was clumsy in my original post. In doing so, they started attacking the whole idea of reform as a whole and adopted right wing frames to make reform seem as a bailout. This was said in many cases, explicitly, that we would be bailing out insurance companies by mandating coverage and “giving” insurance companies 30 million more customers subsidized by the government in some cases. In polling, you could see at the end that there was a significant population that was against reform for not going far enough (a common progressive complaint).
The public option was broadly popular and the White House was echoing the progressive messaging in that context. Imagine if the progressives had not attacked the entire premise of reform and echoed the White House on the need for it too? Then they could still push for the public option and would have been at a stronger place b/c reform as a whole would be more popular.
People blame the White House for it’s communication strategy; that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the progressives hijacked their message on reform as a whole and joined Republicans in attacking it. Meanwhile, the White House echoed progressives on the public option.
What happened? The public option is popular across the board. Health reform, not so much. Which is a puzzle since the reform was a huge part of the democratic primary. What changed? Progressives started attacking the need for reforms.
Progressives hurt the administration, the progressive moment, and gave Republicans power by validating their arguments. Not just on health care; but on stimulus as well.
This isn’t said enough; but we are were we are because of progressive activists failure. It is what it is.
scav
@John Cole: & John, we should also note that not actively howling for someone’s blood inevitably means you’re an abject fan. Apparently, I’m a fan of the Jonas Brothers because I don’t think I’ve ever said so much of a word, indeed nary a syllable, about them in my entire life.
AhabTRuler
@scav: Goddamn, Jonas-bots… …I want your blood, ferchrissakes!
Elie
Paula:
I think that some of the “A” list bloggers already know and in fact like it that they have no real responsibility for actually doing anything. THAT is hard work and fraught with the likelihood of failure and frustration. They like things just the way they are.
My issue goes more in line with aimai’s upstring. Okay, okay, we are going to have thousands in the peanut gallery doing their own thing, sending all kinds of crazy messages, etc., how do we still get things done — those who actually want to get things done that are progressive and much needed for our country?
I think that the answer that you give and others is that we have to get involved beyond the phone call to your rep level and that takes time and effort. Otherwise, we are just sitting up in the bleacher seats, cheering one side or the other but not really having direct impact on the field of play.
Question: does the internet hurt or help us in doing that? How many hands on activists remain content to bang the keyboards rather than take it out on the field of play?
sy2d
Good Morning Sunshine. Surprise. More obstruction from the Party of No.
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/senate-republicans/obama-to-boehner-republicans-just-want-to-kill-all-my-initiatives/
liberty60
@Ash Can:
Seconded- blaming Republicans IS EXACTLY the point.
We need to hear a drumbeat of charges against them day in, day out, repeatedly endlessly on every outlet we can find; we need people going on Fox and asking the hosts why Repubs are such progress hating obstructionists who want to cut off Granny’s Social Security.
We need military veterans arguing on tee vee that the GOP is shortchanging our veterans, we need small businessmen asking why the GOP wants us to spend more money on health care than we do on our corporate income tax.
If the national discussion was between single payer and the public option, we could argue about Rahm.
If it was a choice of Obama versus Tom Harkin, we could argue about Rahm.
But the national discussion is about the choice between Sarah Palin and Obama.
The enemy is to our right, folks, not to the left.
DougJ
There would be ActBlue accounts by the dozens to primary Obama.
Doesn’t that mean there aren’t now?
Dr. Squid
@aimai:
You called the idea that those loud noises might move a low-information voter “nonsense”. Then you said that because they don’t hear little old you, therefore it’s not your fault. That’s an apples-to-beef brisket comparison, is completely illogical, and doesn’t support your claim of “nonsense” in the slightest.
@slag:
I just have to assume that because you think I’m suppressing free speech rights by pointing out poor logic, you must be an imbecile. Ta.
D-Chance.
Feh. Rahm is nothing.
The fun post of the day comes from Sully… it begins:
Yes, Mr “25 posts a day about Sarah! and her family” has the audacity to whine about someone’s tedious personal vendetta against him.
mak
If Steve Clemons’ triple cross-posted swipe at the big 4 was intended to create buzz around the idea of shit-canning Rahm, it seems to be working.
To me, it’s simply a case of occam’s razor: before Rahm came on, the previous Fab4 (Plouffe, Axelrod, Jarret, and Anita Dunn) ran a tight ship, and got shit done. Since Rahm, not so much.
And by the way: if, as some here have argued, the onus is on the House to pass the Senate bill, and Rahm is the master-of-knocking-heads-to-get-shit-done-in-the-House guy, why hasn’t the House passed the Senate bill?
What’s the point of having an enforcer collecting your money if he just beats people up without returning with the loot?
To those who say, “well, look at the study that says Obama has accomplished more in his first year than any previous president,” I respond that it doesn’t mean shit if they’re not getting credit for it. Campaign Obama made got their message out, loud and clear. Why can’t WH Obama do the same?
No doubt, there’s plenty of blame to go around, but if the team loses the Big Game, a coach needs to be fired. In this case, nobody’s going to fire the head coach, so it looks like the offensive (pun intended) coordinator needs to go.
kay
I’m completely ready to cede to these nameless Congressional Democrat’s demands.
I say they get to choose the Chief of Staff. They pick. Whomever. He probably has to pay his taxes, though. So if they insist on a former Senator, they better do their own vetting.
They can publicly humiliate Rahm Emanuel, for good measure (but they won’t, because they’re gutless), and so we’re all clear that it’s Rahm’s FAULT.
Once that is done, I’m sure all the progressive legislation stalled in the Senate will sail through, unimpeded.
slag
@slag: I should add, though, that I have no problem spreading blame amongst Rahmbama, the Senate, and liberal (non-)activists, in general. That said, Rahmbama intentionally stepped away from the real liberal healthcare activists–the ones who were showing up at meetings, spreading the word, trying to move the conversation, etc. Those were the single-payer folks who were first to get the shaft.
Once you cut that bunch out of the mix, your best chance at any form of grassroots action is to cobble together a hodgepodge of constituencies who are, inevitably, going to be late to the game in catching on to the fact that their influence doesn’t mean squat in this particular arena. Then, once their pet projects are inevitably rejected, you’ve got no movement left. But you still get the ensuing whinefest.
Pragmatism is no replacement for fundamentalism. You can’t lecture people into becoming better citizens. That goes for those who constantly whine about bad behavior from their representatives as well as for those who taunt the whiners with quips about ponies and unicorns. It’s been my observation that, in order to get people to change, you have to appeal to them as people. Just going door to door and telling them to “suck on this” ain’t going to get the job done. And as far as making it personal goes, I think we’ve pretty much all failed in that arena.
General Winfield Stuck
@sy2d: LOL
No wonder. Obama still has their mojo hanging on the Oval Office wall centered with a bullseye. They want no more of Obama one on 200 with the cameras rolling like last time. Might make Pence cry and that would not please little baby jeevus.
It’s more of the same wingnut grabbing the goal posts and moving it further and further off the playing field in hopes of escaping responsibility for their quasi seditious galtism to not participate and just mailing in their no vote, in hopes that Obama fails and no one notices their role in that.
Like I’ve said before, Obama doesn’t really expect them to play, but each time he drags them out of the shadows, independents take notice cause they like the theater of kumbaya government, and Obama wins a few points with them.
I think the real game is still in the dem court. They have the ball, though not with a 60 vote mirage filibuster proof senate now, which is not all bad. If this over arching effort to pass comprehensive HCR doesn’t get passed by the House and senate dems fail to go for a recon fix, then dems, particularly in the dem senate need to go to the short pass. They and Obama need to sit down and figure out how to put the wingers on the spot with pared down bills with provisions that wingnuts have either supported in the past, or would be hard for them to not support in the here and now.
It is the only way to break their defense down and make them come in and play closer to the process. A good start would be a simple stark streamlined HCR bill with only Insurance industry new regs for what wingers have professed to support, like pre existing conditions etc. Leave out, for now, ideological boogmen they can gloom onto to attack, like expansions in coverage and raising the revenues to pay for them and expose their real loyalty is with big business.
It’s truly incrementilalism and many progs will hate it and call it Obama fail, but it is what’s called for imo to defeat the goopers at their own game. Make them guard close to the basket to open up the outside shot, if you will.
Just my opinion. but I am an Obot, so be advised.
kay
@mak:
Well, I can’t take him seriously. I know I’m supposed to, but come on. I won’t.
“Set up a Team B with diverse political and national security observers like Tom Daschle, John Podesta, Brent Scowcroft, Arianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria, Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Harris, James Fallows, Chuck Hagel, Strobe Talbott, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others to give you a no-nonsense picture of what is going on.”
How did some of these people get on his list?
A lot of this list is like the guest line-up on Morning Joe. We really have more than enough “Morning Joe” in this country. Really. We’re full up on that.
If he submits a better “Team B”, I promise I’ll take him seriously.
kay
@General Winfield Stuck:
Let’s vote on the new Chief of Staff.
Jesus. Who knew it was going to be that easy? Fire Rahm, and we’re home free. I’m completely on board.
The Senate is all about solutions, don’t you think?
slag
@Dr. Squid: Ummm…ok. Whatever works for you.
les
@K.:
Citation needed. Maybe teh doomed bipartisan push came because they knew all along that Lieberdouche wasn’t voting for HCR. Or that at least one of Dems owned by the insurance cos. wouldn’t play, whether Nelson, Bayh or Landrieu. On major issues, there never was a 60 vote caucus.
General Winfield Stuck
@kay: Hell no, keep Rahm (and I know your being sarcstic) and have him deliver a message to the senate with an Obama offer they can’t refuse.
Start doing what I suggested above, or else. Start accepting responsibility and adapt as needed to new realities and doing things in a way that works, whether it is baby steps at first or not. He should relay to them they are a separate branch of government and need to deal with their own rules for getting shit done, and quit casting blame on the Executive Branch.
And if they refuse, then treat them as hostile witnesses to their own spineless whining that everyone else is to blame but themselves. Give em some time, and promise some interesting news conferences that will see an unfriendly and candid Obama shining a light on their little roach motel on Capital Hill, even though it has a donkey on it’s senate sign.
Rahm should smile of course while delivering this message. They are fellow democrats after all. :-)
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@aimai:
The party is going to have to figure out a way to implement a national strategy that can’t be derailed by panic on the part of individual senators. That’s their job. Its not up to individual voters or commenters—we can try to help, we can try to hurt, but ultimately they pay no more attention to our complaints than to our praise.
The teabaggers aren’t organized, but they are doing a mighty fine job of derailing things. It is up to the individual Democratic voters. It is up to party activists. It is up to bloggers. It is up to the grass roots to be out there screaming for passage.
You are completely wrong that they pay no attention. They obsessively pay attention. They are politicians. They are constantly worried where their votes and fundraising dollars are coming from. The responsibility is NOT top down. The responsibility is bottom up.
You want a strategy that will prevent Senators from panicking? That is easy. Give them a base that supports them when they actually try to do the right thing.
kay
@mak:
I don’t really believe that anymore. It’s hard for me to imagine that collecting Rahm Emanuel’s scalp is going to ease passage of anything.
But, what the hell. If that’s the “insider” wisdom, I’ll play.
I’m willing to do a sort of prisoner exchange. If we turn Rahm over, will Senate Democrats release the legislation they’re holding hostage?
Because I’m completely buying that he’s standing in the way of their progress, and I want only to help them reach their goals.
kay
@General Winfield Stuck:
Forget it. Fire Rahm. We have to start eliminating all of the possible impediments to Congressional action, and these nameless Democrats say it’s Rahm, and I believe them. Whoever they are.
Fire Rahm. We’ll have financial reform on it’s way to the President’s desk in a matter of weeks, Stuck.
kay
@General Winfield Stuck:
I leave you with this positive note, because I have to go home. I think we’re having a real, no-joke blizzard. I’m going to end up spending the night in this office if I don’t go soon.
I love snow, so I’m thrilled.
“As party leaders tussle over the proposed bipartisan health care summit, nearly two-thirds of Americans say they want Congress to keep working to pass comprehensive health-care reform. Democrats overwhelmingly support continued action on this front, as do 56 percent of independents and 42 percent of Republicans.
General Winfield Stuck
@kay: Be careful driving home Kay. Things in demville are never as bad as they seem, though they rarely get better. We are all Wile E. Coyote with another Acme brand trick up our sleeve. The show goes on.:)
Norwegian Shooter
These comments have not one mention of Pete Rouse, Senior Advisor to the President:
“Known as the “101st Senator” for his extensive knowledge of Congress, Rouse served as chief of staff to members of the United States Congress for more than thirty years. Before joining President Obama’s Senate office in 2004, he was chief of staff to former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) for 19 years.”
Liberals, you can attack Obama, it won’t kill him.
Just Some Fuckhead
Good luck on selling this health care bill with you don’t like it because you’re stupid. You were the folks that had all the political realities mastered and yet, so far, you all got nothing to show for your efforts except the faint hope that the progressives ya keep trashing will save yer ass by passing the senate bill in the house.
Rhoda
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Health care needs to pass for everyone on the ballot and at the end of the day; that’s why the House will pass this. Because it needs to get done.
mai naem
@kay: I don’t think Podesta, Talbot,Scowcroft and Hagel are bad at all. Granted he didn’t have to deal with the clusterfuck that Rahmbo’s had to deal with, but Podesta did a better job with Clinton.
What I want to know is what Democrat is going to tell the Repubs that “you lost, we won, we have 59 seats, you have 41 seats. We have the WH and the House with a comfortable majority.” Talk about the bipartisan stuff but at the end of the day Obama/Reid/Pelosi need to let them know who is actually in charge and who has the huge majorities.
fraught
@General Winfield Stuck: “quasi seditious galtism”
Nice!
Chuck Butcher
Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan.
It is as true here as the sources being attacked. The opposition is fairly well mapped out, the failures not so much. I say it is across the board in Democratic circles. Whatever my opinion of the competing bills.
mak
@kay (et. al.),
I don’t take that list seriously, either. Hell, I don’t think even Clemons takes the list seriously; every chance he gets – including here yesterday – he asks for better names.
My point with respect to Clemons’ (amplification of the FT) piece was simply that somebody – Craig?, Dunn?, Sebelius?, other silenced Cabinet secretary? – decided to break ranks and start slinging mud in Rahm’s direction, and the assault continues apace with anonymous Senate sources today.
It could be over HCR – let’s not forget that, contrary to what the President has said repeatedly since the Mass. election, Rahm has stated publicly that HCR might have to go on the back burner till ‘jobs’ are addressed. Or it could simply be, as the Hill article suggests, that someone smells blood in the water following the “f***ing retard” flare-up. Either way, now that it’s traveled from the blogs to the Hill, it’s only a matter of time before it hits cable news and the major dailies (if it hasn’t already). And if it gets any traction there, I suspect there will be scores of people, both in the WH and Congress, lining up to tell their personal stories about what an asshole Rahm is.
Personally, I think he was a curious choice as CoS to begin with, given the Hopey-Changey tenor of the campaign (to the point that I wondered – still do – if maybe he didn’t have some dirt on the President); at the same time, I was hopeful that it meant that Obama was going to aggressively pursue the agenda he described on the campaign.
A year or so later, I fail to see the upside of having as your gatekeeper a guy who consistently offends but can’t deliver the goods. The motto: “I may be an asshole, but I’m not very good at my job” hardly inspires confidence.
mak
@kay
Snark noted. You will not see me defending the Senate here, or anywhere else. Count me among those who are beginning to think that the entire institution is of absolutely no use.
But that doesn’t change the fact that it was his job, along with the President (and, of course, the House, and the Extortionist Branch), to get HCR done, and it ain’t done.
If only your proposed prisoner exchange would work, we’d all have cause to celebrate.
Elie
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Somehow, do you feel good about the place we are in? Whatever the blame on whichever group of Democrats/progressives, is this where you wanted us to be? If not, how do we get to where we need to be (presumably with some kind of health care legislation passed and signed by the President)? If that is not what you want, what DO you want?
If some of us own up to mistakes of blaming some among our own side for events, can you just say its on us? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that there were mistakes a plenty on the left as well and that we all should therefore own the fix going forward – trying to support a new effort rather than just beating each other up again, round 2?
Nick
@Comrade javafascist: you apparently missed the part where the WH is being blamed for not negotiating with Republicans ENOUGH.
Elie
@Just Some Fuckhead:
“progressives ya keep trashing will save yer ass by passing the senate bill in the house.”
Also, as far as I know, the progressives that are being trashed, wrongly or rightly, are not in position to pass anything anywhere. As far as I have read, we have not criticized any of the progressives in the House or Senate who voted for the Bills. Only the progrerssive blog folks who definitely impacted the message and influenced the perceptions of health care legislation.
blackwaterdog
Man, did you know that there are already million conspiracy theories regarding the return of Dan Choi to active service? It’s actually part of the big plan to NOT repeal DADT. Yes, it’s true!
cfaller96
I’m late to the party due to the website’s issues, but I suggest an alternate title for this post: “Yet More Evidence that Rahm Sucks that John Cole will Somehow Rationalize and Ignore”
It’s as if every day John wakes up and resets the Evidence Against Rahm-o-Meter back down to 0. The critiques of Rahm (that go all the way back to effing 2006) just go down John’s memory hole, it seems. At some point in time all this circumstantial/anecdotal stuff has to mean something, right John? Sadly, no- because Progressives don’t like Rahm, John must therefore defend him.
John, what would it take to convince you that Rahm is doing a bad job? Has that possibility even entered your mind? I’m guessing no.
John Cole
@cfaller96: The difference between you and me is that I don’t count anonymous bullshit in pieces in which it is clear those cited are doing a little CYA and playing the blame game counts as evidence of anything.
Additionally, the piece is blaming him for the Senate failures. The Senate passed a bill, with every single Democrat and two independents voting for it and was in conference when things blew up. I wish we had had more failures like that the last six months.
General Winfield Stuck
@cfaller96:
I took mine out back and smashed it with a stupid stick. Dug a six foot hole and buried the motherfucking pieces beneith a progressive shit pile. Only way to be sure.
kay
@mak:
That’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
The “retard” flare-up? We now take orders from Sarah Palin?
Jesus. Talk about silly.
That “retard” flare up was really the last nail in the coffin of that nasty Rahm Emanual!
Hire Arianna Huffington. Maybe she can get legislation through the Senate. Isn’t that who was recommended by wise and knowing insiders? The same wise and knowing insiders who appear on her celebrity website?
She’s like a GENUIS. Maybe she can team up with Glenn Beck and draft a health care bill. Bipartisan!
cfaller96
John, I’m not talking about this piece per se (and Rahm isn’t the only target in that piece). It contains debatable “evidence,” I’ll grant you that. It’s just gossip, and so by itself I agree with you that it’s not conclusive. I don’t think I said otherwise, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t imply that.
But as I tried to make clear, it’s not like this is the only critique of Rahm out there, and it’s not like HCR is the only reason for it. This is just another bit of straw on the pile. Not any single bit of straw is going to be conclusive, yet at some point that camel’s back breaks, doesn’t it?
Apparently not, because you only want to debate this piece and no other. Everything yesterday is gone down the memory hole. But I ask again- what would it take for you to become convinced that Rahm is doing a bad job? Do you even consider this a possibility?
kay
@mak:
In all seriousness, I’m not defending Rahm Emanuel. I don’t care.
Simply, I think Congressional Democrats screwed up health care, Obama hit the Senate in the SOTU, and they’re hitting back.
In a sort of childish and peevish and cowardly way, because they won’t attack Obama directly, so focus on the disliked Emanual, but, whatever.
I think it is ridiculous and lame for Congressional Democrats to say that they failed to pass health care because Rahm doesn’t stroke the Senate enough.
I’m not sympathetic to that argument. I also think they’re kidding themselves if they think voters are going to buy this pathetic whining.
And they’re up before Obama is. So, if they want to keep those cushy seats in the Senate, they better figure something out, Rahm or no Rahm. Be big boys and girls, and figure a way out of this mess.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
I thought @kay had the thread all sewn up right until @Paula came on strong.
Kay’s still on-target though. Obama brought it strong at the SOTU and this is the reaction we’re getting from Congress. Apparently it is the role of every post-Civil Rights Act Democratic President to become the target of congressional Dems.
John Cole
@cfaller96: Because, quite frankly, most every indictment I have seen of Rahm has come from the same people who have been fighting the DLC/Deaniac wars from the get go, and more often than not is an emotional purge rather than a solid case against Emanuel.
If you want to link me some of this vast pool of evidence, I’d love to read it.
But beyond that, Rahm serves at the will and pleasure of the President. If you think Rahm is the problem, sack up and put it on Obama. All this anonymous going after Rahm just strikes me as cowardice.
margaret
That Americablog thing is surprising to me. I used to be really down on Rahm for his inept handling of the DCCC and his urging of members to run right and Aravosis vehemently defended him. If Aravosis is just now deciding that Emanuel is a shill for the GOP, it’s late in coming. Of course like all broken, (and bigoted), clocks, John’s bound to be right sometimes. As for me, I’ve been down on Emanuel for a long time. As for Obama, if he is so insulated and clueless as to allow Rahm Emanuel to dictate policy to him, then that is more of an indictment of the President than it is of Rahm.
kay
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
I want a show of good faith. I’ll trade Rahm for student loan reform. It passed the House and it’s stalled in the Senate. I’m starting to suspect lenders own the Senate. They should prove me wrong.
Once the Senators show me they can pass something, anything, really, I’ll hand him over.
slag
@mak:
Damn. I guess I’m going to have to change my LinkedIn profile.
kay
Do Congressional Democrats really think this is going to fly?
Say it’s true. Rahm Emanuel doesn’t “know” the Senate, so screwed up health care. Plus, there was that retard comment.
They’re going to run on this? They know no average voter is going to care, right?
That worries me a little, quite frankly. Because no one cared when they said Hillary screwed it up, last time. They still got beat.
And Clinton didn’t lose. He won.
I think they should get busy and figure something else out.
craptractor
John, I like how you pivot from ridiculing the idea that an unsourced piece could still be correct to ignoring the part where the centrist Dem senator whose quote you included confirms the idea that Rahm screwed up and still manage to conclude that OBVIOUSLY THE TRUE CULPRITS HERE ARE PEOPLE WHO DON’T LIKE OBAMA ENOUGH. Here’s a crazy idea: maybe not every single problem can be solved by working your WE ARE REINFORCING REPUBLICAN FRAMES!!!! handwaving magic? It’s starting to look pretty goddamn obvious that you really do think you can prove Rahm isn’t responsible for some pretty serious strategic mistakes by ridiculing progressive bloggers.
@kay: Uh, wait. Clinton didn’t lose? So I’ve been living in a decade-and-a-half dreamworld when in reality we really actually got healthcare reform in the ’90s? Have I been hallucinating?
No seriously… wtf are you talking about? Clinton didn’t win a damn thing on the healthcare front.
kay
@craptractor:
Clinton won his election.
If I were a Congressional Democrat, and I was deluding myself that the way to keep my seat was to spend time finding someone to blame for the failure of health care reform, I’d think about how well that worked out in 1994.
Hillary Clinton took the hit, maybe deserved, maybe not, but Bill Clinton won his election.
Congressional Democrats didn’t do so well the last time they came up empty-handed, and blamed the White House.
General Winfield Stuck
@craptractor:
You got that backwards chief. You need to prove your allegations that Rahm is guilty of whatever it is you are accusing him of. That sounds like he is somehow the lord of the us senate, instead of CoS to Obama. And I think it is comically ironic that you cite the word of an anonymous Blue Dog senator as evidence. And it typifies the sheer stupidity of many so called progressives flailing about firing in all directions like a drunk sailor on liberty. But do wank on,. It is allowed here, and we are always on call to mock your juvenile antics in the name whatever it is you want.
Quiddity
John is asserting that various figures on the left would oppose a bill if it had (some) Republican support – regardless of the bill’s merits. By offering no qualifications, that could mean even if the bill was single-payer.
That’s clearly false and nowhere close to serious analysis. John is engaging in ad hominem attacks. About two weeks ago a commenter, Royce, wrote that John is a winger who doesn’t want to believe he’s a winger. This recent explosion against foes of Rahm makes me wonder if Royce had it right.
craptractor
@jibeaux: Uh, no sorry. You’re correct about the individual components of the plan but the overall plan HCR is not neck-and-neck. Oppose is up by 13 points.
http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/healthplan.php
Democrats need to bridge the gap between how people feel about the components and the overall bill. They also need to remove some of the components things people are so pissed about or alleviate their concerns about them: I mean you really didn’t notice that the 538 post you linked only mentions things that have positive favorability? There’s also a Ben Nelson sweetheart deal and all kinds of other stuff people don’t like in addition to what you already acknowledged about the mandate. Don’t pretend you’re being all facty and reasonable while you gloss that over.
kay
@General Winfield Stuck:
And thanks so much for the well-wishes on my 4 mile drive home.
It was grueling.
I got a call that there was a “level three” snow emergency, so I jumped into action and sent everyone home.
The caller was like “everyone else is already home!” So we all went home.
I have no idea what Level Three means, or even if “three” is worse than “one”. I don’t know which way the scale runs.
There’s a lot of lovely snow, though. Big drifts, and it’s still snowing.
General Winfield Stuck
@Quiddity: @Quiddity:
Is this a when pigs fly question, cause it sure sounds like it.
You win today’s prog wanker award with 3.5 purple plastic unicorns out of 4/ Congrats!!
General Winfield Stuck
@kay: I like snow, for a day or two, then I want it to go away. Luckily, that is near always the case here when we get it, being so far south. :)
John Cole
On what planet would a single payer bill pass with Republican support? Do I really need to make qualifications that absurd?
For christ sakes, these “foes of Rahm” I am allegedly “exploding” against are using anonymous insider bullshit to make assertions that are not only inaccurate but laughable. THE BILL PASSED THE SENATE AND WAS IN CONFERENCE. YOU DON’T GET TO FAULT RAHM FOR FUCKING THINGS UP IN THE SENATE WHEN THEY PASSED THE BILL.
I thought we all agreed this insider anonymous bullshit was bad stuff? I thought we worked from facts and not bizarre obsessions? I thought this was the reality based community. Now I’m a winger because I won’t join the lynch mob that can’t shoot straight?
If Rahm has an image of being unbeatable, it is probably because his opponents are so damned stupid.
General Winfield Stuck
@John Cole: I love it when you fire the Photon Torpedoes.
Chuck Butcher
Focussing on Rahm is stupid for two reasons:
He has a BOSS
The Executive branch does not run Congress
Did the WH screw the pooch on this? I think, yes.
Did the Senate D Caucus screw the pooch on this? Absolutely.
Were Reid and most of the Caucus helpless in this? If it is an answer, no prices have been paid by anyone.
That sure won’t satisfy those looking for Quislings and it will piss off those trying to white wash their favored sons. 330+ posts in the same stupid game is being played.
General Winfield Stuck
It I felt that way, I would find another game. Just sayin…
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Winfield Stuck: Maybe John will give you his jersey if you hang around after the game.
Laura W
@Just Some Fuckhead: I thought maybe Stuck had experienced his own mescaline trip up the mountain with John, toting the faux Aztecian futon throw on his very broad and masculine back, returning to us all a very different man.
Vrrrroooom.
El Cid
I think this
pretty much captures it.
I don’t like Rahm, I think he’s an over-rated douche still fascinated with idiot DLC mantras, and I think his personal role has probably been to make things harder for the policies I think would be better for the nation and for the Democratic Party, but the notion of him as a Rasputin-like force controlling the White House strikes me as silly.
General Winfield Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead: I could never match your mano man coital fluid rhetorical eros.
Besides, you are my fav huckleberry fuckhead, I dream our real time trist on that semen stained couch of yours.. Maybe LauraW can watch, if it suits her fancy. Better hurry though, my no.2 Kidney Stone is waiting in the wings.
In the meantime, I could come over to your Facebook and piss on yer wall, if that’s ok. Huh?
Laura W
@General Winfield Stuck: If I ever decide to create a sock puppet for myself, it will be a boy, and his name shall be:
ManoManCoitalFluidRhetoricalEros
Dibs, Fuckhead! I called it first!
General Winfield Stuck
@Laura W: I bet fuckhead has big strong hands ooooh/ People with empty heads usually do.
Just Some Fuckhead
@General Winfield Stuck: I have no idea what you said. Is there a drunk version of this out there on the tubes somewhere?
General Winfield Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You never have any idea about what anybody says fuckhead. But you tell a good joke, I always say fuckhead tells a good joke. You know that.
Sly
@kay:
Most people who hate RAAAAAAHM! recommend Howard Dean. Which is odd, considering on most issues Howard Dean is pretty moderate to conservative.
This leads me to believe this is just a rehash of the 2004 primaries, mostly due to this DLC memo that wasn’t written by Emanuel but by some magic pixie dust he had control over its publication, which is even more lame than a rehash of the 2008 primaries.
Or its a rehash of Emanuel’s DCCC strategy in 2005/6 to to target moderate/conservative districts, which was somehow seen as being mutually exclusive with Dean’s 50 State Strategy of building up a party apparatus in states where it had been allowed to flounder and/or die. Dean always conceded that this was a long-term strategy for the party, while Rahm always framed his as a short-term one.
Either way, stupid people are being stupid.
brantl
I think you’re over the top here, JC. If what you are saying is true, why doesn’t the White House (and Obama in particular) have to man up and put an elbow each on Reid’s and Pelosi’s heads, bare down, and say “So pass the damn thing, already!”?
They really haven’t used his leverage, and it’s like they’re afraid to lose cachet. If you don’t use it, it won’t matter if you lose it. Having it only matters if you USE it.
cfaller96
John, I appreciate you engaging me on this and I’ll compile some Rahm links and send you an email later this week. Thanks.