Buck Up

Just in time for the 2010 elections, centrist Democrats have a message for disengaged, apathetic or apoplectic Democrats:

“Those who didn’t get anything they wanted, it’s time to just buck up here, understand that we can make things better, continue to move forward, but not yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything that we stand for in terms of the initiatives we put forward,” Biden said last night when appearing on the debut of Lawrence O’Donnell’s new show on MSNBC.

Biden said Democrats maybe “didn’t get every single thing they want” on big issues like health care, but said the reform bill that’s taking effect now was an “incredibly significant move that’s progressive and helping people.” He said people were upset health care didn’t include a public option, but said that if Republicans win this fall, “they are going to repeal health care.”

“This is a choice,” Biden said.

That’s true. And I’ve always said that political choices are always the choice of the lesser of evils (right Ara?). And I suspect that tried and true, politically-engaged liberals will make that choice on November 2nd, in spite of “not getting everything they wanted”. The problem for Democrats will be what happens to Obama ’08 voters who otherwise get their politics with the sound turned off. It’s a meta problem, a bigger problem than this election and a centrist problem that afflicts the Democratic Party and the nation.

Here’s the centrist problem as I see it. Whether it’s because they believe in corporate-centered public policy or simply believe in its political expediency (or some combination of the two), it has two electoral problems, one particularly severe for holding support from Democrats. One, it makes it extremely difficult for Democrats to differentiate themselves from Republicans, which is the key to all successful marketing, even (especially) political marketing. The relative degree of difference in tax-cutting, war-making, corporate welfare or expansion of the police state simply isn’t an effective difference. Two, it puts Democrats, along with Republicans and the plutocrats, on the wrong side of the raging class war. I suspect that everyone, even the most partisan winger you can find, deep in the cobwebbed recesses of what’s left of his rational mind, knows that he’s on the losing side of this war being waged against him but, as of yet, no national political figure has really engaged the war on his behalf. That alone explains the political cynicism that grips this country and certainly any apathy about Democrats on the part of liberals.

5 thoughts on “Buck Up”

A couple of observations:

1. This appeared in my Facebook status update so now people think I am far more insightful than I really am. Thanks!

2. Simon Rosenberg has published a couple of blog posts called “Hope for the Dems?” wherein he picks apart the conventional wisdom that this will be a bloodbath election for the majority party. http://ndn.org/blog/2010/09/poll-watch-hope-dems
http://ndn.org/blog/2010/09/hope-dems-part-ii
Check it out.

3. POTUS had a few choice words to say to Jann Wenner in the Oval Office that more than reinforced Biden’s message. “People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up,” Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and “if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

This has infuriated Hamsher, Aravosis, et. al. but I don’t find much to object to myself. Any person involved in politics (especially politicians) discovers that you start out wanting to change the world and quickly discover that you’d be happy to change a local zoning law or two. Either way, success is defined as steady progress (hence the word “progressive”) towards a worth goal. If progress is measured in millimeters, so be it.

4. Lastly, if Democrats think they can sit this one out and get a better crop of Democrats next time around, good luck with that. It didn’t work out so well in 1968, 1980, 2000 or … anytime.

The future is now, baby.

“It didn’t work out so well in 1968, 1980, 2000 or … anytime.

Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Any chance we’ve, all of a sudden, come to our senses? /jk.

I think all this rhetoric, as usual, is for centrists inside and outside the Village and left-leaning independents. The fact that liberals haven’t yet figured out that The White House and centrist Dems don’t care what they think is really…perplexing.

Whadayaknow, Digby’s got it (small surprise she’s the first on the “professional left”)!

He and Gibbs and Biden aren’t admonishing the base by accident. It’s a strategy. And that means they assume that the base is already going to vote and they are trying to attract independent voters by making them see themselves as common sense adults in comparison to the self-indulgent and petulant liberals. Because unless they really believe that hectoring people into feeling guilty for not recognizing how great the administration has been (which seems remarkably undisciplined and immature for Obama) nothing else makes sense.

Nothing else makes sense indeed.

I’m not convinced that it’s a strategy. It could just be that they’re wound a bit too tight. It’s not like they’re under a lot of pressure or anything working at the top of the political food chain and getting their asses handed to them day in and day out, right?

So now they’ve lost it? Seems we’ve been seeing this sort of hippie-punching from the get.

I’m going with strategy – ignore both bases because you won’t change the way they vote and play for the pathologically bi-partisan, centrist/independents, especially the Village scribes who can help move those independent votes (Matthews was incredulous today that the base could be so foolish as to not back their guy). It’s been the otherwise inexplicable play from the beginning and as Digby now says “[n]othing else makes sense.”

E Pluribus Unum

We're all in this thing together.

5 thoughts on “Buck Up”

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