[ Posted Monday, January 25th, 2010 – 18:54 UTC ]
There has been an interesting alignment which has slowly happened over the past year, between two groups not normally in agreement -- inside-the-Beltway mainstream media types, and the bloggy Left. This alignment has occurred not in favor of some issue or another, but rather against a certain movement: the Tea Parties. Both the Serious Persons in the media, and pretty much the entire Left, have agreed that the proper thing to do with the Tea Partiers is to mock them, in the hopes that they'll go away soon. This, I fear, is a mistake, and it could be a costly one indeed for the Democratic Party.
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[ Posted Friday, January 22nd, 2010 – 17:26 UTC ]
Here's a bit of news you may have missed: Democrats still control the Senate. Really! This seems to have escaped a lot of people, leading the Village Voice to run the hilarious tongue-in-cheek blog headline: "Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate."
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[ Posted Thursday, January 21st, 2010 – 17:30 UTC ]
It's about time to start fighting for the little guy and against the fat cats. It's about time to start fighting, when it comes right down to it.
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 – 15:31 UTC ]
It is significant, to me at least, that President Barack Obama's true first anniversary in office is about to be overshadowed by a special election to fill a Senate seat in Massachusetts. Think about it for a minute -- Obama's milestones have been obsessively tracked by the media, with countless stories about his "first 100 days" in office (and even quite a few on his "first 50 days"), lots of followup "second 100 days" articles, and then a truly bizarre paroxysm of stories on the anniversary of his election night. But as we approach the real milestone, tomorrow at noon (East Coast time), any "first year" stories are likely to be buried beneath microscopic analysis of whatever happens tonight in the Bay State. This is a stunning turnaround from not just a year ago, but from a few months ago. And, as I said, it is significant, because many are now left wondering: how did we get here? How did Obama get to the point he occupies now, from where he was a year ago?
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[ Posted Friday, January 15th, 2010 – 16:43 UTC ]
Much of the frenzied activity took place this week behind closed doors (and most decidedly not on C-SPAN), as healthcare reform entered its final negotiating phase. President Obama even decided to get involved, meaning we must be almost at the end of the fight. Ahem.
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[ Posted Thursday, January 14th, 2010 – 16:53 UTC ]
Let's be blunt -- this coming year may be Obama's last, best chance to have a successful presidency. Or, at the very least, make any progress at all on his agenda. Because, no matter what happens in the House of Representatives, all it is going to take is Democrats losing one or two seats in the Senate for massive legislative gridlock to descend upon the Nation's Capital until 2012.
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 – 16:14 UTC ]
So here is my suggestion for a survey to send out to that multimillion-name email list. A quick quiz for OFA supporters, as it were. Actually, to save time, I would suggest just choosing 1,000 names off the list at random, and send the quiz out to them. Because I would bet that even a random sampling of their supporters right now would be cause for deep concern at the White House. At the very least, it would tend to give Gibbs (and his boss) some sort of idea why they have lost so much support so quickly.
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 – 17:18 UTC ]
To be blunt, Obama needs to pick a few fights. Healthcare reform is winding up, but this particular fight has been so long and hard-fought that even proponents of the reform bill are exhausted and would really prefer not to hear or talk about it much longer. This is telling, because Democrats (all the way up to Obama) have simply not done a good job on the communications front during this battle. Who would have thought, a year ago, that Obama's main problems would be a lack of communication skills, and a perceived lack of passion in fighting for what he said he believed in?
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[ Posted Monday, January 11th, 2010 – 17:27 UTC ]
So please don't read the rest of this article as a defense of Harry Reid, for sheer political reasons. Reid has a few political options now, none of which have much to do with what he said to a reporter during the 2008 presidential campaign: he can stick it out, hoping for an upset victory which would allow him to remain Majority Leader; he can step down from the leadership position, campaign as just another senator in the midterms; or he can announce he will not be running this year, and give another Democrat a shot at his Senate seat. My preference would actually be for that last one, but my political instincts tell me that he'll run and not step down from his leadership spot, choosing instead to "tough it out," and hoping that he can spend enough during the campaign to convince Silver State voters to send him back to Washington.
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[ Posted Friday, January 8th, 2010 – 17:01 UTC ]
Which is why I'm actually feeling pretty good about Democrats' chances in the upcoming election. We think we can energize our base, and convince swing voters that we are the ones offering good ideas for moving the country forward. And, with Republicans offering nothing more than a vision of moving this country backwards, we think our chances are actually pretty good this year -- especially since it looks like Republicans will be defending more open seats than Democrats.
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