A-LIST RIGHT WING BLOGGER SIDES WITH IRANIAN REGIME

Let's see ... who comes in for criticism in this post by Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit (click to enlarge)?



Criticism of Obama? Check.

Criticism of the NAACP (for its refusal to condemn Harry Reid's "light-skinned Negro" comment on Obama)? Check.

Criticism of Larijani or the Iranian regime? Why, er, no, I don't see anything of the sort in this post.

I might not mention it except for the fact that this clownish blog is now published by First Things, a Christian right site founded by the very influential Father Richard John Neuhaus, an adviser to presidents before his death last year.

But Hoft, of course, is just rank-ordering enemies the way most of the top wingnuts do: yeah, sure, they hate those who are trying to kill us or would like us dead or brought to heel ... but they hate liberals and Democrats more. If they could eliminate our foreign foes from the face of the earth or see all liberals and Democrats wiped out, they'd choose the latter every time.

WHY THEY CAN'T SUSTAIN THE ANGER

I suppose it's no surprise if Politico is right and Bush-bashing isn't working for Democratic candidates:

...following their recent defeats, there seems to be consensus now in the Democratic consulting community that candidates can't simply insert grainy footage of the former president into a commercial or say their rivals will "support Bush policies" and hope voters will respond.

... when Democrats, realizing in the race's final week that they were in danger of losing the seat previously held by Ted Kennedy, rushed up ads depicting Brown as being a Bush clone, it had little effect.

... In New Jersey, ... [j]uxtaposing [Chris] Christie's face with a narrator warning of "the same Bush policies that got us into this mess," as Corzine did in a September ad, wasn't as relevant as Christie's warnings of higher taxes in a second Corzine term.

In Virginia, ... "Tax breaks for the superwealthy. Job losses and foreclosures for the rest of us. Virginia calls the McDonnell-Bush approach a failure," went [an] August ad for Democrat Creigh Deeds.

Not long afterward, the Democrats running Deeds's campaign determined such a strategy was a failure....

Sure, it makes sense -- after all, Bush isn't president anymore ... except why does the teabagging, Scott Brown-loving right-wing base still get pumped up by comparisons of Obama and Jimmy Carter?

I say this all the time, but I'll say it again: Democrats and liberals don't sustain the narrative of Republican/conservative evil on a day-to-day basis, except perhaps in the blogosphere (and that's only when we're not beating one another up) and on a few hours a day of MSNBC). As 2008 turned to 2009, voters recalled that Bush was appalling, and perhaps Cheney and others in the Bush administration, but no one outside the insular precincts of Left Blogistan and the Olbermann/Maddow/Schultz programming bloc ever fit the story of Bush into a larger story of how appalling Republicans are. No narrative linked Bush and Bush and Gingrich and Limbaugh and McCain and Palin and Reagan and the whole damn lot of them.

On the right, there's always a discussion of the ongoing dirty hippieness of Democrats. Everyone can be slotted into it. There are supervillains -- Carter is one of them -- but it's the daily re-recitation of the lore (what in the past I've called the Protocols of the Elders of Liberalism) on talk radio and in the Murdoch media that keeps the story alive. Republicans can slot any Democrat into this narrative. Democrats haven't familiarized the broad public with a comparable narrative.

The broad public, at least north of the Mason-Dixon Line, does have a wary resistance to the religious right, but when you've got a guy like Scott Brown who doesn't fit that story (I half-wonder if the nude Cosmo centerfold actually helped him, by insulating him in that way), you have to run against him as an individual, not as a representative of a worldview. Democrats need to develop a narrative about that worldview -- and, meanwhile, Republicans have a decades-long head start.

MATT BAI, YOU ARE NOT, AND NEVER WILL BE, MALCOLM GLADWELL

... or whoever the hell it is he's trying to be when he argues that America is never again going to have the kind of ideological realignment we saw in the FDR era, when large swaths of America became New Deal Democrats for life, and offers this as supporting evidence for his thesis:

In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything -- laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses -- transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night.

Um, Matt? Back in 2006 we had a divorce rate that was the lowest since 1970 -- and now that we're in a severe recession, divorce rates are falling even further. As for Leno and Conan, what are you talking about? We didn't decide Leno should move to prime time, or move back; a few incompetent executives with obscenely high salaries decided that for us. Us? We're still watching Law & Order, fer crissake; we're still watching MTV reality series that are essentially indistinguishable from The Real World I, which we started watching in 1992. Hell, we're still getting some our political snark cues from Saturday Night Live, which has been on the air for a million years; how pathetic is that?

I understand Bai's point, which is that the much-trumpeted realignments of recent years don't seem to last:

Historians of the last century will note that one party -- the Democrats -- solidly controlled Congress, with only passing interruptions, for more than six decades, through recessions and wars and other challenges. The Gingrich-Bush-era Republicans, by contrast, managed to hold onto power for only 12 years; should Democrats lose their majorities in 2012 or even 2014, let alone this year, they will have ruled Washington for even less time than that.

But how different is that from what happened between 1964 and 1972, when (as Rick Perlstein notes in Nixonland) Americans gave LBJ a landslide victory, then turned around a mere eight years later and did the same for his seeming polar opposite, Richard Nixon? That wasn't because we had techno-ADD destroying our brand loyalty, Matt -- a lot of people didn't even have UHF TV in 1972.

Actually, it seems to me that we do have an enduring alignment: we threw in our lot with the GOP in 1968, and nothing's come along yet to unalign us. We went Republican because Democrats were dirty fucking hippies, and we've deviated from that alignment only three times, when Republicans (Nixon, Poppy Bush, and Junior Bush) screwed up royally -- and then we alomst immediately decided that we hated the Democrats we elected for being Democrats (even when they were betraying Democratic principles). What about that has changed since Nixon's time?

Democrats occasionally get a chance at realigning our politics for one reason only -- because Republicans can't govern -- but then they lose their chance at disalignment because they themselves won't govern. It's been that way nearly my entire life. I don't see any evidence that it's ever going to change.

PASSING THE BILL IS NOT GOING TO SAVE THE DEMOCRATS

In the left blogosphere, there are two permissible opinions on health care reform -- but I don't agree with either one.

One is that the bill is fatally flawed and needs to be either thoroughly overhauled or strangled in its bed, because as it stands it's worse than nothing. I don't agree. I think it's lousy, but I've come around to the opinion that it's a step forward and a possible foundation for further improvements.

The other opinion is that a bill absolutely has to be passed right now, and that doing so will (as Steve Benen puts it) "save the Democratic Party" and prevent "a fiasco for the ages."

Maybe that would have been true if the bill had been written and sold in a way that would have brought it broad popular support. But it doesn't have that. And it isn't going to get broad popular support during the long, long stretch of time when most of its provisions have yet to take effect. It's just going to spun even more by Republican pols, right-wing media voices, and hysterical teabaggers as the worst bill ever passed in the history of the Republic. And if the few provisions that take effect immediately win favor, the message will be: OK, fine -- but why do we need the rest of this monstrosity?

Because there's no evidence that the Democrats will suddenly develop the message machine necessary to keep selling the bill (which is what they'll need to do) in the (very long) time between passage and full implementation. One Sarah Palin Facebbok post in that stretch will probably have more impact on the debate than the entire Democratic messaging effort.

(Yes, I know that David Axelrod has said that if the bill fails, a caricature of it will hurt the Democrats who voted for it. But he's wrong that it won't be caricatured if it does pass. It will. And a caricature of a bill that's on the books will hurt Democrats much more than a caricature of a bill that isn't.)

The broad public has no clue what's in this bill, but the broad public thinks it stinks. So passing it is -- and yes, it kills me to agree with middle-ground pundits here -- going to seem arrogant. It wouldn't if Democrats suddenly developed the ability to take every argument made against the bill (it's going to bankrupt us, it's full of sleazy back-room deals) and shoot them down one by one, right now, while clearly, in a vivid and simple way, explaining what the benefits are. And no, I don't understand why they can't do that, because they're allegedly led by the most silver-tongued politician of our age. But somehow they can't.

You know what would save the Democratic Party? Passing anything -- or even trying very, very hard to pass anything -- that would address the economic concerns of Americans. The economic-populist course President Obama is on now is good, and I just hope the hell it's not all talk. Politically, passing real financial reform and the Volcker rule and Cash for Caulkers could easily make up for not passing health care reform. It would demonstrate responsiveness. It would please some of the current crop of protest voters while exposing the others as pathetic Randians with schoolgirl crushes on plutocracy.

I know, I know: I'm not thinking about the people who die or go bankrupt for lack of insurance. Well, this is a democracy. Democrats failed to sell this reform effort as a hedge against those calamities. If they find a way to undo the results of that sin of omission, if they can move public opinion back in the other direction, then they should move forward vigorously. But, absent that, I'm not sure it's worth it. The public doesn't want to be saved from these horrible outcomes. If the bill sets up a structure that will save the public from these horrible outcomes, the public won't believe it -- certainly not for the next couple of electoral cycles, as the bill gradually kicks in.

Maybe the solution is to pass the damn bill and move on to less tainted measures. But in either case, it's what else Democrats do that's going to save them, or not. Passing health care is not going to save them.

A STRONG NEW ENTRY IN THE "WORST DEMOCRATIC REACTION TO THE MASSACHUSETTS ELECTION" SWEEPSTAKES

You thought you'd seen the worst, but then came this:

Vulnerable Democrats ask Congress, Obama to extend Bush tax cuts

Two House Democrats in tough reelection races are asking Congress and President Barack Obama to extend the Bush administration tax cuts.

Reps. Bobby Bright (D-Ala.) and Mike McMahon (D-N.Y.) asked members in a "Dear Colleague" letter Thursday to support extending the tax cuts, which passed in 2001 and 2003 and are set to expire this year, for at least another two years. Specifically, Bright and McMahon are asking lawmakers to sign a letter to Obama asking him to include the tax cuts in his budget plans for 2010.

... In the letter to the president, the members say the Bush tax cuts should not be allowed to expire. That would put them in opposition to Obama's stated plan of letting some of the tax cuts meant for the wealthy to expire while keeping breaks in place for the poor and middle class, consistent with his campaign pledge of not raising taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year....

I'm sure some other Democrat will top this, of course. Social Security privatization? Overturning a comatose patient's right to be taken off life support? A re-invasion of Iraq so we can search for WMDs? C'mon, the rest of you quisling Dems -- show us what you're made of.

If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail

So, what's the plan, Stan? For every thing, from baking a cake to waging a war, there's some kind of plan. I told my daughters today that if I were the head of my own party, and I wanted to propose a party platform of sending pink unicorns to settle the moon, I'd have a plan to do just that. It might not work, but by Cthulu I'd have a plan to at least start breeding Pink Unicorns. So, what's Obama, Reid, and Pelosi's plan for getting Health Care Reform through the House and Senate and onto Obama's desk?

There is no plan. No master plan, no goal, no path, no forethought. Over at Balloon Juice an ordinary commenter, "Emily" just another schmoe like the rest of us, asks the congressional staffers in Pelosi's office a very simple question:

I figured I might as well ask what I could do for them, since I’ve already called and told them exactly what they can do for me and the country, in no uncertain terms. “How can I and other democrats help? Who are the holdouts so we can call them? What do you guys need organizationally that motivated democratic citizens can help provide?” I asked.
“Um,” said the CA rep, “I think maybe there are Web sites organizing stuff. We aren’t set up for any kind of large campaign.” She had no idea who the holdouts were, no advice on who to call. Referred me to Healthcare for America Now.
“I have no clue who the holdouts are, actually. There is a Web site, I think, but I forgot the name of it, and they are organizing to call each congressperson. I bet if you go on the Internet you’ll find it,” said the tired guy at the DC office.
When I expressed my disbelief about how disorganized the effort seemed, they both agreed and said variations of, let’s hope this wasn’t all for nothing.
“The speaker probably knows who to call,” the CA woman said.
I said I hoped she was on the phone right now. I asked the man in the DC office if he thought making calls helped—since he seemed so unable to assist, I assumed he didn’t—and he said, “Well, you’ll be one of thousands calling on the same issue.” When I said, “My point exactly, doesn’t that have influence at all?”, he explained that he was not sure.

This is basically what we are all hearing when we call our reps. There is no master plan, the congressional representatives are waiting for direction from the Speaker, or from Obama. And when you do get to talk to a staffer who seems to know what the hold up is it turns out that from the point of view of the House, or of individual congressmen, there is no particular sense of urgency. People are surprised that voters are calling and asking them to pass the Senate Bill. But that bill is flawed, they tell us, as though we didn't know. But if you ask them how delay and presenting the intransigent, corrupt, backwards Senate with a new bill, or new sets of amendments, will miraculously produce a final "good bill" they fall silent. They have less of an idea that the ordinary, panicky, Kos diarist. They seem to have less grasp of the structural roadblocks ahead than the bloggosphere does. And that's pretty scary.

The entire Health Care "debate" has turned into a massively badly structured game of prisoner's dilemma. Each individual congressman appears to have been left with the impression that what the party really needs and wants is an individual decision, on the merits of the bill, about whether to move forward or not. Capuano's office thinks that there's some deadly provision in the Senate bill that says, if the House accepted it, we will all die tomorrow. Not really. Just kidding. What they claim is that on page 1005 there is a provision that says "nothing in our bill can ever be tampered with by any later congress and we ourselves can't amend any part without a 3/5's vote of the Senate. So fuck you, house dems." This seems improbable, unconstitutional, and essentially meaningless but its what Capuano's office thinks. But in any event they also told me that the leadership--Pelosi, Hoyer, etc... have not asked them officially to take the Senate Bill and ram it through. So they appear to be under the impression that there's no big hurry on this and that there's plenty of time left to tinker with things around the margins and make them better for one state, or worse for the other. The House is acting as though there's no problem in the Senate and that there can be some sort of business as usual give and take there.

Why is this like Prisoner's Dilemma? The comparison isn't exact: among other things our criminal co-conspirators don't seem to have bothered to get together to commit the crime of legislation and aren't sure what they are being asked to confess to. Our representatives are closer to the three stooges than criminals or terrorists. They appear to have found themselves locked in separate rooms, with interrogators (or voters) demanding they make hard choices to give up parts of their scheme (health care reform) without having planned what they would do in the event that they can't communicate with each other and reach some kind of agreement. And, apparently, they can't communicate with each other and leadership isn't bothering. If you ask them, they tell you outright that there is no leadership plan to pass anything. Everything is still up in the air, still negotiable. So when you call your representative they have no idea what "the party" would like. This bill? The Senate Bill? Some hypothetical imaginary bill inthe far future? They've simply never thought about it. And they don't seem to have the faintest idea that there might be some impediment, something like an utterly failed and undemocratic Senate, that will prevent any further progress if we don't seize the moment and pass the flawed Senate bill before our enemies can regroup.

Hidden behind this rudderless hysteria is something unspoken but very real. When you ask your representative if they would vote for something to be amended later they pretty clearly either haven't thought about it, or don't think, realistically, that the bills will be amended in a good way. What does that mean? To me it means that no one can trust Pelosi, Reid, Obama or the Caucuses they represent to ram the flawed Senate bill through and then force improvements through reconciliation. I mean, that's obvious, isn't it? Right now the caucus exists in name only: it doesn't think, act, or plan like a caucus. No individual member can rely on the others to back up the Democrats' play--now or in the future. And why is that? Because Reid and Obama and Pelosi consistently let the most dangerous, least committed, most conservative members of their own caucus betray them, insult them, and attack the bill without any consequences at all. The progressive House Dems have no reason to believe Reid, or Obama, if they offer to negotiate a better bill after passing the Senate version. And they are right not to believe them. If they couldn't control Nelson, Baucus, Landrieu, Lincoln etc... before they won't be able to next time. If they couldn't bribe or bludgeon Stupak and the blue dog dems in the House we face the same issue of bad faith there. And what's worse, they've shown no inclination to try. The bad money of the bad faith Senate Negotiations has driven out the good money of current House negotiations. If I were Capuano I wouldn't believe a word Obama or Reid said, at this point.

But this doesn't excuse the house dems for not having the wit to grasp that its now or never for health care reform--and its now or never for public opinion on this matter. If they Democrats can't show they can work together to get something done they will simply lose their own voters. There's no question about that. People can stand any amount of failure--look how loved the Red Sox or the Cubs were during their own losing streaks? --but they can't stand quitters and losers who never try. Right now each representative seems to be under the impression that their individual choices matter and that they will be judged as individuals by their own constituents. Maybe that's so--Capuano certainly can be pretty sure he won't be turfed out over this failure--but for the party nationally? This is a mammoth clusterfuck. Obama can't rescue the party, and the party can't rescue Obama, from this utter failure to get anything done.

I was surfing the net a few days ago for a different post and I found this marvellously apt observation from Napoleon:

"Strategy is the art of making use of time and space.

I am less concerned about the latter than the former.

Space we can recover, lost time never."

Space, speaking metaphorically, is the legislation and its amendments. We can change them, we can repeal them, we can alter them once they come into being. But we can never recover the time the Democrats have lost, and the good opinion of the voters without a strategy.

THE CUTE ONE

Boston Globe today:

Senator-elect Scott Brown arrived in the nation's capital yesterday to a reception fit for a celebrity, greeted by spontaneous applause in the marble hallways of the Russell Senate Office building, invited to a spaghetti lunch with Senate Republicans, and smothered by reporters....

AP:

Washington greeted the Cosmopolitan centerfold, followed through the complex by a camera-clicking mob, more like movie idol Brad Pitt -- who created a major fuss at the Capitol in March -- than Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith who went to Washington.

The pols think he's dreamy. So does the press. So, we're told, do rank-and-file voters.

Um, isn't it about time for someone to start scottbrownisyournewbicycle.com?

(Or, to make it a bit more apropos, should it be scottbrownisyournewpickuptruck.com? After all, his truck is being fetishized.)

Or would the idea that Republicans and other Browniacs are acting like schoolgirls at a Justin Bieber concert not be "sticky" because, we'll be told, only Democrats act like that, even though Republicans have responded that way to George W. Bush and Sarah Palin as well as Brown in just the past decade (and I'm not even mentioning the necrophiliac crush they have on Reagan, or the near-necrophiliac one many of them have on, God help us, Dick Cheney)?

As Kevin Drum said today:

Did a lot of people really think Obama would be a miracle worker? I don't personally know of a single person who felt that way, and the fact that he got huge crowds for his speeches means only that he was a charismatic guy, lots of people liked what he had to say, and liberals were stoked at the prospect of dumping Bush and Cheney. Sure, maybe a few thought he was the salvation of American politics, but there's really not much evidence that this was a very widespread belief -- and no evidence at all that Obama himself ever believed it.

In fact, this is mostly the triumph of a conservative narrative. It was conservatives who spent months during the 2008 campaign taunting Obama for his alleged messiah status and it was conservatives who were constantly misquoting him about being "The One" or griping about how he thought his silver tongue could save the world and induce vicious dictators to swoon.

So why don't we turn the tables? If he's the new GOP rock star, Palin with a penis, or even if we could merely make a plausible case that he's being regarded that way, why can't we put him in an ad with Paris Hilton?

KRAUTHAMMER: 1 (OR 3) IS INFINITELY GREATER THAN 36

Democrats lose one Senate seat (and a couple of governor's races, including one in a state that always elects a governor from whichever party is out of power in D.C.) ... and Charles Krauthammer describes it as a revolution:

You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.

... something is going on beyond personality.

That something is substance -- political ideas and legislative agendas....

"If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call," said moderate -- and sentient -- Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, "there's no hope of waking up."

Funny thing -- after Democrats picked up 30 seats in the House and 6 in the Senate in 2006, the K-Hammer was a tad more cautious in his rhetoric:

Only a Minor Earthquake

... But the great Democratic wave of 2006 is nothing remotely like the great structural change some are trumpeting. It was an event-driven election that produced the shift of power one would expect when a finely balanced electorate swings mildly one way or the other.

This is not realignment. As has been the case for decades, American politics continues to be fought between the 40-yard lines. The Europeans fight goal line to goal line, from socialist left to ultra-nationalist right. On the American political spectrum, these extremes are negligible. American elections are fought on much narrower ideological grounds. In this election the Democrats carried the ball from their own 45-yard line to the Republican 45-yard line.

So a "proletarian vanguard" is shaking pitchforks now, based on evidence from three states (and ignoring evidence from other elections), but the nationwide reaction to Bush and a GOP Congress in 2006 was just a tweak.

Well, I can't blame K-Ham for saying this -- the more it's repeated (and not refuted by Democrats), the more it's accepted as truth.

I Am Legend

Walking around in MA today I can't shake the feeling that half the people I encounter, normal looking people, were mysteriously infected by a novel virus which turned serious political thinkers into brain dead right wing zombies. A few days ago I was greeted everywhere with a cheery "Happy New Year" from people I hadn't seen during the winter break. Now our surreptitious greeting is more like a whispered "What the fuck?" I, for one, don't welcome our new senatorial overlord, but we are stuck with Brown until the inevitable Republican bimbo eruptions bring him down.

aimai

TAKING CORPORATE PERSONHOOD TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION

I don't know if yesterday's Supreme Court ruling is really going to lead to the apocalypse predicted by so many, or if the corporate influence on American politics is already at its absolute maximum and this is merely going to alter the number of tools in the fat cats' political influence toolkit. (The ruling is awful, yet I lean toward the latter view -- it seems to me that corporations have found a way to have as much political influence as possible already.)

But I find myself having the same naive reaction to the notion of "corporate personhood" that I've always had when it's come up: If corporations are persons in the eyes of the law, why has no one pursued the argument that we can do to corporations what we routinely do to persons, namely imprison and execute them?

I know it's never going to happen, but a corporation that engages any act that on the part of a human being would be considered a felony ought to face the possibility of decades without the right to function in society. A corporation that kills ought to face execution.

We may never again see in America a trend toward progressive legislation, but on the off-chance that it can happen someday, shouldn't some legal theorists be thinking about corporate personhood in ways that subvert the idea as it exists now -- i.e., corporations have all the privileges of personhood and run none of the risks?

****

I see that the Huffington Post's Rob Warmowski is having somewhat similar thoughts:

Shouldn't it follow that when a corporation is bankrupted -- killed -- that its management could be found guilty of the capital crime of murder?

... Wouldn't adding murder charges to the consequences of executive failure in corporate stewardship go a long way toward restoring the long-lost arrangement where the corporation serves the society, as opposed to the other way around?

Put another way, if the the penalty that management faced for causing bankruptcy was an orange jumpsuit instead of a golden parachute, wouldn't we see less wild-west, insanely reckless capitalism from our economic engines?

Didn't think of that -- a corporate person can also be a victim. (And if this ruling states that unions are also, in effect, corporate persons, then isn't union-busting also murder?)

HAROLD FORD, TEABAGGER

I meant to point out yesterday that Harold Ford Jr. had an op-ed in the New York Daily News in which he tried to attack soon-to-be-opponent Kirsten Gillebrand using rhetoric shameless cribbed from Scott Brown:

The defeat of Martha Coakley in Massachusetts represents the latest rejection of a governing style that takes the taxpayers for granted and puts partisan, insider politics ahead of everything else.

Put simply, the defining moment in the Massachusetts Senate campaign was during the final debate when David Gergen asked Scott Brown whether he would be willing to "sit in Teddy Kennedy's seat" and block the passage of health care reform for another 15 years.

Brown responded, rightly, that "it's not the Kennedys' seat ... it's the people's seat."

And while I disagree with Brown about most issues of public policy, I absolutely agree that a United States senator has to put the people first when making decisions.

I have made it very clear that if I run for the U.S. Senate, and if I am fortunate enough to be elected, I will be an independent Democrat who puts the people of New York before the politicians in Albany and Washington.

All the time. Every time....

"Independent Democrat" is, obviously, the self-applied label that's made Joe Lieberman such a beloved figure in this region of the country (that's sarcasm, folks) -- but it's also a nod to Brown who branded himself an "independent voice" about as often as he invoked his truck.

In the Daily News piece, Ford sounds suspiciously like Brown on health care:

Health reform remains important. But in the wake of this week's election, the legislation should be narrowed to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for preexisting conditions, enact responsible tort reform and provide health coverage to all children. And states must have more input into how health coverage is expanded.

And while Ford supports some sort of financial reform, he adds:

But [Congress] must also take great care not to harm the great engine of New York's economy.

We know what he means by that from his earlier New York Times interview:

I think immediately, we need to lower the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent. We need to make clear that dividends and capital-gains taxes not go up -- we do not want to see decisions made that are rash.

Sounds a bit like ... um ... Michelle Bachmann:

The Minnesotan detailed a list of fiscal changes: cutting the effective income tax rate to 22 percent, dashing capital gains taxes and eliminating the estate tax will stimulate the economy plenty, she said....

Oh yeah -- Ford's definitely going to start working teabags into this campaign the second he either wins the Democratic nomination or qualifies for the ballot as an independent.

THE WINGNUT RESTORATION, TWO YEARS EARLY

In a post about whether Democratic voters should stay home in 2010 if a health care bill isn't passed, Ezra Klein writes:

If a demoralized Democratic base stays home in 2010 and Democrats lose 14 seats in the Senate and 60 seats in the House, is that really so different, in outcome, than if they keep a bare majority in one or the other chamber? Maybe. But maybe not. Republicans wouldn't be able to get anything over Obama's veto. And maybe they'd be able to use the fact that they're in charge in Congress to take some risks and compromise with the president on some major legislative achievements. Divided government does have some advantages.

I know Ezra's just giving us an extreme what-if, but let me tell you something: If Republicans really were to take over both houses of Congress in 2010, the results would be virtually indistinguishable from a complete restoration of GOP control -- with Sarah Palin as president.

"Republicans wouldn't be able to get anything over Obama's veto"? You sure of that, Ezra? Add terrified surviving Democrats to the new GOP majority and I think you'd absolutely be able to get to a two-thirds override on quite a few issues. And what would those issues be? Waterboarding and other elements of Cheneyism, budget-busting neo-Hooverite tax cuts for the haves, an obsessive focus on the 10th Amendment, "drill, baby, drill" and the complete abandonment of the notion that humans cause climate change -- and that's just a very partial list off the top of my head.

It wouldn't be divided government -- it would be the humiliation of a sitting Democratic president that Gingrich et al. dreamed of in 1994 and '95. There would be no compromise, no meeting halfway: the GOP restoration would begin in full -- with tea party crazies setting the agenda.

Yes, the Democrats are awful. But the Republicans, if they're back in power, will be immeasurably worse. And it wouldn't take much to make that so.

IN HARRIS'S TELLING, OBAMA BATTLES GHOSTS

John Harris, Mark Halperin's former book-writing partner, slings some conventional wisdom in a Politico column written with Carol Lee. Here, Harris and Lee offer a list of what they see as mistaken beliefs on the part of the Obama White House in the first year:

• Obama and his team believed that the 2008 election represented something seismic -- in other words, something fundamental and long-lasting -- in the country's governing landscape. They believed that the historical cycle had turned, that voters had not only rejected George W. Bush's brash conservatism but also moved beyond Bill Clinton's tepid and defensive-minded progressivism.

The nation's problems and mood put momentum behind Obama's vision of robust, large-scale government action. But there had been no seismic shift. The country's ideology is fluid -- and depends on perceptions of the economy and the daily flow of news out of Washington. The assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naive in retrospect.

Did Team Obama believe the zeitgeist had simply changed? Yeah, I suspect so. (That belief was in the air -- remember James Carville writing a book called 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation?) But it wasn't crazy to imagine that something had changed. Voters had rejected Bushite bellicosity. Voters had rejected racism. Voters had declined to elect a Daddy. The guy they voted for had never supported the Iraq War and wanted to raise taxes the rich and wanted to engage Castro and Ahmedinejad. That didn't seem new?

The key factor here isn't that "the country's ideology is fluid" -- it's that it's malleable. Democrats stopped trying to mold public opinion after the election. Republicans, on the other hand, redoubled their efforts. What changed things wasn't "the daily flow of news out of Washington" -- it was the daily flow of propaganda out of Washington (as well as out of Rush Limbaugh's studio and Fox News headquarters in Manhattan). Harris and Lee want you to think this was the nation's ideological center resetting itself naturally. It wasn't.

• Obama believed that early success would be self-reinforcing, building a powerful momentum for bold government action. This belief was the essence of the White House’s theory of the "big bang" -- that success in passing a big stimulus package would lead to success in passing health care, which in turn would clear the way for major cap-and-trade environmental legislation and "re-regulation" of the financial services sector -- all in the first year.

This proved to be a radical misreading of the dynamics of power. The massive cost of the stimulus package and industry bailouts -- combined with the inconvenient fact that unemployment went up after their passage -- meant that Obama spent the year bleeding momentum rather than steadily increasing public confidence in his larger governing vision. That vision was further obscured for many Americans by the smoke from the bitter and seemingly endless legislative battle on Capitol Hill over health care.

Early success might have been self-reinforcing ... if early success had actually been success. But Obama came into office amid talk of getting 70 or 80 votes in the Senate for a stimulus package. What could possibly look like a success after that kind of prediction? The nature of Obama's early acts, along with their cost, certainly hurt his standing somewhat. But practically the first thing he did as president was get down on one knee and propose marriage to the Republicans, in public -- and they turned him down and attacked him as Hitler reincarnate. No, that didn't work out.

• Most devoutly of all, the Obama team believed that there was something singular about the president's appeal and ability to inspire.

This faith seemed well-placed in the context of 2008, when Obama won states such as Virginia that Democrats had not carried in decades. But it was misplaced in the context of 2009. Virtually everything Obama did to fill in the blanks on the timing and specifics of the agenda he had run on managed simultaneously to unite Republicans in opposition and divide Democrats into camps that thought he was going too far or that thought he was not going far enough.

So it was what he did that "unite[d] Republicans in opposition"? I don't think so. That's what Republicans want you to believe -- but it's clear when you look back that the decision was made early on to establish a posture of total resistance. There was never a damn thing Obama could do to appease the GOP, short of resigning and taking the entire preside ntial line of succession with him, or asking Pelosi and Reid to enact the 2008 GOP platform.

I'm looking for a pattern in this analysis, and it seems to be that GOP intransigence is invisible -- Obama fails because he goes against natural law, not against a resistance army disguised as a political party. Yeah, he made a lot of mistakes. But he had nothing to work with.

OOPS: OUR NEW TRUCK-DRIVIN' OVERLORD ENDORSES A BIRTHER

The man who's been declared the new Emperor of the United States, Scott Brown, has issued his first endorsement since his coronation, and it's a doozy:

Brown endorses birther for Congress

Sen.-elect Scott Brown has endorsed a candidate for Congress who has asserted that President Obama was born in Kenya rather than the United States, and who drew complaints from his neighbors during the 2008 presidential campaign for putting up signs on his property depicting Obama as Osama bin Laden.

The Salem News reports that the Brown campaign has issued a statement endorsing Republican lawyer William Hudak of Boxford, who hopes to unseat U.S. Rep. John Tierney, a Salem Democrat, this fall....

Back in November, it was reported that the signs on Hudak's property included

One large, roughly 6-foot-by-4-foot sign ... with words -- such as socialist, Marxist, and lazy -- surrounding [a] picture of Obama dressed as Osama Bin Laden….

(Excuse me -- "lazy"? Hmmm. Wonder if Hudak didn't know how to spell "shiftless.")



Now, if our side had every AM talk-radio slot in America and a 24-hour propaganda TV channel, this would be unavoidable news. Hell, if the Democratic Party had anyone other than Alan Grayson with even the slightest taste for partisan combat, this would be unavoidable news. But I bet it will slip by nearly unnoticed.

Want to know why prominent Democrats (Obama, Bill Clinton, Harry Reid, Tom Daschle) fall so far so fast in the modern era? It's because as soon as anyone rises to the top in the Democratic Party, the GOP message machine declares total war. No waiting around for a big scandal to emerge; instead, Republicans simply seize on anything -- anything and everything -- and hammer away at it until the prominent Democrat is tarnished. And then, if something big hits, or the public begins to sour on incumbents, the prominent Democrat is already the object of ridicule.

That's what needs to happen to the GOP's new "rock star." The election's over and Brown won? That's no excuse to stop running against him. Don't wait until he has to run again in 2012 -- start roughing him up now. And don't let up for a second. (You know that Karl Rove strategy of aiming your attacks at your opponent's strength? Pretty Boy Brown, right now, is the GOP's strength.)

Now, this has to be done right. Use the Republicans as a model on when to go sarcastic and when to go for a phony sense of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger. Republicans are excellent at calibrating this -- sometimes they send Beck out there to cackle maniacally, other times they get some World War II veteran or Average Joe to lament how the values our Founders embodied have been, sadly, lost. I'd go the latter route on Brown-Birther-gate -- I'd ask Hudak's neighbors (who, it's reported, complained about his signs).

But whatever the approach, don't let up. This is an alley fight. The Queensberry rules don't apply.

(Via tc in comments.)

*****

UPDATE: Hudak is now denying he's a birther.

Brown is now denying the Hudak campaign's claim that Brown endorsed Hudak, while Hudak is denying Brown's denial.

Isn't there a story in this? Anyone?

BROWN: A STRAIGHT UP-OR-DOWN VOTE IS "POLITICAL MANEUVERING"

Here's Brown in an interview with Time's Karen Tumulty, talking about the health care bill:

... It's not even a conference committee. They are bouncing it back and forth pursuant to a special maneuver. That just says to people [that] it's automatically "Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding." It's raising red flags, and people don't trust it. We can bring it back to the drawing board and do it again.

One possibility that people in Washington are talking about now is to ask the House to pass the Senate bill.

That's what I was talking about, the political maneuvering.

So a simple, open, public, broadcast-on-C-SPAN House vote on a bill that passed the Senate with 60% of the available votes -- which I would remind you is 8% more than Scott Brown got on Tuesday -- would be some sort of sleazy backroom deal? Some sort of arcane maneuver? A vote? An up-or-down vote?

This is the kind of talk that passes as reasonable when one party, and one party only, has been attacked for years on a 24/7/365 basis as subversively sleazy and hell-bent on acting in defiance of the people's wishes by the other party's ruthlessly efficient message machine, on every secular AM radio station in America and via a billionaire's hydra-headed media empire, whose flagship is a 24-hour propaganda puke funnel used by by millions. Brown is counting on readers' familiarity with the ongoing narrative of Democratic perfidy, and he's not wrong to count on it. Everyone's familiar with it, so every attack on alleged Democratic sleaziness is "sticky." Outside the small, insular world of committed liberals and lefties, there's no similar widely known narrative of Republican sleaze, not even after the Bush era.

Brown is also tapping into the tea partiers' Calvinball-like sense of what constitutes representative democracy. It isn't duly elected officials passing laws through the powers vested in them -- not when that process leads to results teabaggers don't like. When that happens, it's a tyrannical usurpation of power, and revolution is called for. Elections, in other words, should have only the consequences teabaggers like. Anything else is fascism, or totalitarianism, or something.

DID PRO-HCR LEFTY VOTERS ACTUALLY PUT BROWN OVER THE TOP?

If a Research 2000 exit poll is accurate, there were actually enough voters in Massachusetts yesterday who were angry about the health care bill from the left to ... um, elect Scott Brown. Whose election ... um ... virtually guarantees that nothing whatsoever, left, center, or right, will now be done on health care at all.

Excellent work, folks:

... the firm discovered that 18 percent of Obama backers who voted in the Senate race ended up casting ballots for Brown.

Of that group, 82 percent said they favored a public option for insurance coverage, with 14 percent opposed....

If 18% of Obama supporters went for Brown and 82% of those wanted a stronger bill, that means 14.8% of Obama supporters who went to the polls cast a vote for a wingnut tea party champ despite a left-wing view on health care. If Obama voters made up a mere half of the electorate -- which has to be an underestimate -- that's more than 7% of the overall electorate picking Brown despite holding progressive views ... and 7% is more than Brown's margin of victory.

If you think Senator-elect Brown will show his gratitude to the people who actually elected him by working to strengthen the health care bill, I've got a fire, a dog, and a lake I'd like to sell you.

OK, HERE'S WHERE I PISS ALL OF YOU OFF

I'm going to say this as carefully as I can, and probably still piss you off:

We are making a mistake if we conclude that the measure of how much fight is left in Obama and the Democrats is how hard they work to salvage health care legislation.

I'm not saying they shouldn't try. I'm saying that it's not the best way to win back independent voters -- and, frankly, it's not necessarily the most progressive thing to do. In fact, moving forward on a strong jobs bill and real Wall Street reform would be more progressive than scrambling to salvage a compromised, watered-down health bill -- and I believe that it would be more impressive to persuadable independents.

I see David Axelrod's point:

"We need to move forward aggressively, continuing on job creation, and on financial regulatory reform," White House senior adviser David Axelrod told the Huffington Post. "But we should finish health care because the caricature of that bill is there and everyone who voted for it will have to live with that. The way to deal with that is to pass the bill and let people see... the value of it."

So, yes, there's a good reason to go forward. And not going forward would make Democrats look even weaker.

But dragging through this process for another few months also risks making Democrats look weaker. And clearly Democrats have simply given up on winning the messaging war -- what Axelrod is arguing is that Dems simply can't defeat the caricature except by having the bill in effect as law. Which means that until at least some provisions are in effect, Democrats are still going to be seen as defying the majority of Americans (because most Americans don't understand the bill but are sure that it sucks).

You'll say that Democrats should pass a stronger bill in pieces through reconciliation. But if they do that in the absence of a fight to win the messaging war, they're still going to seem as if they're defying the will of the people. If they do that, they need to learn how to sell the damn provisions better.

The left blogosphere is going to define strength as sticking with health care, and define weakness as any pivot whatsoever. But a pivot to truly progressive financial and jobs legislation would be popular and progressive and a manifestation of strength and resolve. Whereas a grubby, desperate fight to save compromised health care legislation might be none of those things.

HERE COME THE FOLKS WHO THINK "ACCOMMODATION" IS A SYNONYM FOR "CAPITULATION"

Adam Nagourney in today's New York Times:

Stripped of the 60th vote needed to block Republican filibusters in the Senate, will Mr. Obama now make further accommodations to Republicans in an effort to move legislation through Congress with more bipartisanship, even at the cost of further alienating liberals annoyed at what they see as his ideological malleability?

Or will he seek to rally his party's base through confrontation, even if it means giving up on getting much done this year?

Obviously, Republicans, pundits, and frightened Democrats are going to demand "accommodation." And, of course, when you're dealing with Republicans, there's no such thing. They're going to demand that Obama throw out everything he wants to do and enact their policies in toto. This is what they'll call accommodation.

And the media and many spineless Democrats will agree.

Which is why I'd love to think Obama will push hard right now for serious reform of Wall Street. Why? Simple reason: the Republicans don't have an alternative on this, except doing absolutely nothing that might hurt bankers' feelings.

I warn you, Republicans do have a health care plan. As near as I can tell, it consists of two items:

1. Limiting lawsuits.
2. Letting people buy insurance across state lines.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that they're not going to be able to sell this as a complete plan. They're brilliant at messaging. We're awful.

Yes, limiting lawsuits will hurt ordinary people. And yes, allowing interstate sales will inevitably lead to one state becoming the consumer-shafting capital of the nation with regard to health insurance, the way South Dakota became the state where you wanted to base your credit-card operation if you wanted the option of charging obscenely high, usurious interest rates. But that won't matter. What Republicans say will seem reasonable -- unless Democrats get their messaging act together.

They're also going to have a "plan" to create jobs. Guess what it'll be: tax cuts! Snicker if you must, but Democrats need to have a rebuttal.

Remember that House Minority Leader John Boehner is planning a new Contract with America, and has just hired a prime mover behind the 1994 Contract as his chief of staff.

These guys are not going to be "the party of no" -- they're going to try to get the president and congressional Dems to enact their (half-assed) agenda as if they actually run things now. The Republicans might actually have some success at this -- unless Democrats actually treat it as a war of ideas, however absurd the GOP's ideas actually are.

A MORE COMPLEX STATE THAN YOU'D THINK

Those who are shocked at the outcome of the Massachusetts Senate race because they believe Massachusetts has been unswervingly liberal since dinosaurs roamed the earth need to be reminded of how well George Wallace did in the 1976 Democratic presidential primary:





"Disaffected voters who were ... likely to distrust the government." Sound familiar? Teabaggers -- in 1976!

Remember, this was just four years after Massachusetts gave George McGovern his only state victory against Nixon. (And note that the winner in '76 wasn't Jimmy Carter -- he came fourth -- but, rather, Scoop Jackson, the quintessential Cold War Democrat. Carter said Jackson also exploited the busing issue. As a Boston native who remembers the "white flight" set off by busing, I strongly suspect that many of those anti-busing voters in Boston, or their kids, now live in the very suburbs where Scott Brown yesterday outpolled John McCain in '08 by 15% or more.)

There have always been a lot of Reagan Democrats in the Massachusetts mix -- in fact, Reagan won the state twice. Those voters didn't vote for Kennedy and Kerry and Dukakis because they saw those candidates as flaming lefties, but because they didn't.

Massachusetts has had a Republican governor for 26 of the past 45 years. And its Democrats haven't always been liberal -- John Silber, who lost a squeaker to William Weld in the 1990 governor's race, was a close friend of William Bennett who almost got a gig as secretary of education in the Reagan administration (Bennett got the job instead); he compared Jesse Jackson to Hitler once and argued for draconian cuts in welfare; he ran to Weld's right on social issues.

Oh, and the Democrat who temporarily drove Michael Dukakis from the governor's office in 1978 was Ed King, a right-winger Ronald Reagan called his "favorite Democratic governor."

Early polls in the 1994 Senate race between Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney had it as a dead heat, though Kennedy went on to run a strong campaign and won handily. John Kerry had to outdebate William Weld to win a 7-point victory in the 1996 Senate race. And Niki Tsongas struggled to beat Republican Jim Ogonowski in a special election to fill her husband Paul Tsongas's old House seat in 2007.

So what does it mean to say that Massachusetts is, or has been, "solid blue"? Why did so many people involved in Coakley's race think it was impossible to lose?

And hell, I now live in "solid blue" New York City -- where Democrats have lost five straight mayoral elections and the state may elect a Republican governor and senator this year. So what the hell does "solid blue" even mean?

My First Response: