Sirota on Colbert

David Sirota of Open Left appears on Colbert to promote his new book. He does well, but the best part was Colbert comparing him to Che Guevara - will college students wear his face while having no clue who he is or what he actually did? I was rolling on the floor last night at that one.

more about "Sirota on Colbert", posted with vodpod

A real new Democrat?

Is Barack Obama the first of a new generation of post Reagan Democrats?  Joe Gandelman analyses…

Getting serious about diversity

Over the years it’s been pretty hard to be anything less than sneeringly derisive of the GOP’s view of itself as a “big tent” party. It’s been pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that the real big tent is found among the democrats, not just in terms of the party members themselves, but in the wide range of views and ideologies found in the mix. To be sure, there are factions and divisions within the Republicans - theocrats, libertarians, business,etc. But for all the whining and complaining outside in the hall, when it comes time to vote the GOP caucus has been held under remarkably tight discipline.

Why do I bring this up? There seems to be some concern among Democrats, now that we’re winning, that not all democrats are going to toe the “party line” as defined by the person making the criticism, who these days are usually progressives. As Digby summarizes:

There has been a lot of chatter over the week-end about the apparently startling notion that Democrats winning in conservative districts might produce more conservative Democrats.

Jason Rosenbaum expounds:

I do believe in Crashing the Gate’s political calculus. If we elect more Democrats, we will be more likely to pass progressive legislation. In the short term, that means ending the war, health care for all Americans, and a renewed investment in our economy and in green energy. Certainly, electing Republicans will do nothing to advance that agenda, but electing Democrats will only get you so far.

As the Times points out, we’ve elected some shockingly conservative Democrats in recent years.

I understand their concerns. Just as the Religious Wrong is shocked, shocked, to find that a majority of Americans don’t agree with their social agenda, the bottom line reality on the street is that while America is moving toward a Democratic majority - one we hope will be long lasting - that is not the same thing as a progressive majority. Even apart from progressivism, Matt Stoller observes that there are few avenues of support for liberals running as liberals.

I’m noticing a problem related to infrastructure, and that is that liberal candidates on a Federal level have no logistical support in either election or reelection contests. Blue Dogs only give to candidates who pledge to become Blue Dogs, and plenty of good Democrats and liberals are willing to help out Democrats in swing areas regardless of ideology. The DCCC and the DSCC help Democrats with a chance of winning House or Senate seats, and EMILY’s List helps women running for office with fundraising, mailers, field help, etc. NARAL, the AFL-CIO, and Moveon have criteria to help candidates as well, and VoteVets helps veterans. But if you are running as a liberal in an open seat, a primary, or a general election, there is no specific group to back you.

This is important, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle.

A few observations are in order. First off, the “L” word isn’t as powerful as it used to be. After decades of running away from the term “liberal,” democrats who embrace it do well both in primary challenges and in winning general elections and this is true even in traditionally Red districts such as the recent surprise victories in Mississippi and Louisiana. GOP operatives saturated the airwaves with cries of “San Francisco Values” and tied Cazayoux and Childers to Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and still got an electoral whuppin’ on election day. The lessons here are twofold: If your constituents know you, they’re not going to be afraid of the liberal boogeyman, and populist concerns will resonate with the folks back home, allowing candidates in marginal districts more confidence in doing what’s right.

If we are trying to build a lasting coalition, diversity of opinion and differences in approach aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Yes the GOP leadership ruled with an iron fist but that’s not the way to bring about good government. Politics is the art of the possible, the sharing of power and actually governing. We can do it better and it’s time to show what that really means.

Even from a progressive standpoint, all caucus members are important. Moderate Democrats who vote with you 60% or 70% of the time are going to get you a lot farther than “moderate” Republicans who vote with you 0% of the time. Moreover, they cast certain key votes - for a Democrat as speaker/majority leader and for Democrats as committee chairmen. With the majority you control the process and when you control the process you have exponentially more influence over what the legislation looks like.

But there’s still a lot of room for the “More and Better Democrats” call to action. The last couple cycles we’ve seen, for perhaps the first time, real primary challenges being made against conservative Democrats, and in many cases the challenges are quite reasonable. It’s fair to ask whether a conservative Democrat is truly representative of a bright, dark blue district, and to hold them accountable for indefensible votes they’ve made. For several years I’ve accused the congressional GOP of holding the lube while the Bush Administration systematically rapes the Constitution. This is true, but the extent to which the Bush Dog Democrats have enabled and provided a bi-partisan veneer to things is deplorable, and they deserve some hard questions. It becomes even more repugnant now, with Democrats in the majority, that things like retroactive immunity for telecom abuses are even on the table.

We really are poised at the brink of an historic election. It’s time to think strategically and pragmatically.

Markos’ keynote

He’s looking awful spry for someone with a newborn in the house.

Avi Lewis is a moron. Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts him in his place.

As seen at The Reaction:

This clip from a Canadian news show of sorts reminds me why I despise certain segments of the western left. And, no offense to our Canadian readers, but those segments seemed to dominate in Toronto when I was there. Canadian intellectual and political life is at times so provincial that simply spouting a series of crudely anti-American cliches and canards seems to be not only encouraged but to be the only type of public discourse allowed (the fact that Canada’s political and economic well-being rely entirely on American hegemony makes it more annoying still).

Adios

And don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. Then again, I don’t care, just go.

It appears Ms. Cindy Sheehan has finally figured out that nobody gives a damn about her, although some of the moonbats appreciated her work to the extent it helped them vent their Bush anger.

John Cole says it very well:

I felt she was nothing but a pathetic woman devastated by grief, and I felt she was used for a good long while by people who don’t really care about her, but found her position to be useful. Oddly enough, she and I somewhat agree on that point in the end. The real moral of this story is that you just can’t run around spewing nastiness at everyone and expect to make a lot of friends or retain a lot of influence. Who would have thunk it?

I never really figured out - or cared to figure out - whether she was just naive or incredibly stupid and self righteous. Either way, she was irritating and ultimately probably did more harm than good to her own cause.

The development of ideology?

Interesting.

“All people are born alike—except Republicans and Democrats,” quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

 

Faux news Democrats

Great piece at Salon on what it means to be a Democrat at Fox News.  Read the whole thing but a couple of points tand oint:

But if one actually watches a lot of Fox News, the in-house Democrats don’t come off as effective evangelists for their party or for liberal politics in general. It sounds harsh, but think of most of the Fox Democrats, at least those who appear on the opinion shows, which take up half the network’s airtime, as one of three types. They are either scary liberals, losers or enablers. Representatives of each type may score some points for Democrats when they appear on-air, but ultimately they help further Fox’s larger narrative about Democrats and liberals and what they stand for.

 Charlie Reina, a Fox News producer from 1997 to 2003, says Fox is “not going to put somebody on there who’s very strong or very articulate in terms of advocating Democratic values or positions … It’s not to say that they’re not truly Democrats or articulate in their own way, but they have to get with the program so to speak.” Reina was once witness, along with “Fox News Watch” host Eric Burns, to an explanation from a Fox News vice president of why Alan Colmes was the right man to appear across from Sean Hannity. Reina paraphrases the Fox executive as saying, ” You know who the perfect anchor is here? Alan Colmes. Because he knows what his role is — he knows that he’s there to set Hannity up, and that Hannity’s the star of the show.”

It’s a pity.

Willful ignorance on the left

It’s not just the wingnuts who ignore reality.  We have more than a due share of moonbats too.  And Nick Cohen calls them out on it.

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders?

Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can’t those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

Hat tip:  Sullivan 

Liberal libertarians

More from CATO on a libertarian shift to the left:

The conservative movement–and, with it, the GOP–is in disarray. Specifically, the movement’s “fusionist” alliance between traditionalists and libertarians appears, at long last, to be falling apart. To understand what’s happening, look at the Democratic gains made in previously Republican strongholds on Election Day. In “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire, both House seats–as well as control of both houses of the state legislature–flipped from the GOP to the Democratic column. Out in the interior West, Jon Tester squeaked past Conrad Burns in the Montana Senate race, while other Democrats picked up a House seat in Colorado (along with the governorship) and two more in Arizona. These parts of the country are all known for their individualism and suspicion of officialdom–in short, for their libertarian sympathies.

Libertarian disaffection should come as no surprise. Despite the GOP’s rhetorical commitment to limited government, the actual record of unified Republican rule in Washington has been an unmitigated disaster from a libertarian perspective: runaway federal spending at a clip unmatched since Lyndon Johnson; the creation of a massive new prescription-drug entitlement with hardly any thought as to how to pay for it; expansion of federal control over education through the No Child Left Behind Act; a big run-up in farm subsidies; extremist assertions of executive power under cover of fighting terrorism; and, to top it all off, an atrociously bungled war in Iraq.

This woeful record cannot simply be blamed on politicians failing to live up to their conservative principles. Conservatism itself has changed markedly in recent years, forsaking the old fusionist synthesis in favor of a new and altogether unattractive species of populism. The old formulation defined conservatism as the desire to protect traditional values from the intrusion of big government; the new one seeks to promote traditional values through the intrusion of big government. Just look at the causes that have been generating the real energy in the conservative movement of late: building walls to keep out immigrants, amending the Constitution to keep gays from marrying, and imposing sectarian beliefs on medical researchers and families struggling with end-of-life decisions. 

Read it in full.

Libertarian Democrats

Kos gets it - and understands how the wingnut overreach with the Republican’t dominated government turns people off.

It was my fealty to the notion of personal liberty that made me a Republican when I came of age in the 1980s. It is my continued fealty to personal liberty that makes me a Democrat today.

The case against the libertarian Republican is so easy to make that I almost feel compelled to stipulate it and move on. It is the case for the libertarian Democrat that has created much discussion and not a small amount of controversy when I first introduced the notion in what was, in reality, a throwaway blog post on Daily Kos on a slow news day in early June 2006.

A correct analysis

Joe Gandelman at TMV has a good review of Al Franken’s movie God Spoke.

And, in the end, Franken remains perhaps less a comedian and snark-artist than a verbal political wrestler. He explains:

I take what they [conservatives] say and use it against them. What I do is jujitsu. They say something ridiculous and I subject them to scorn and ridicule. That’s my job.”

In a sense his comment underscores a structural weaknesses of Air America itself.

Being reactive — the anti-Bush or the anti-conservative — will definitely attract part of the public but to expand and survive, it needs to attract and keep listeners who aren’t already part of its political choir and a broadcast product that has intrinsic informational and entertainment value. Just being there to answer conservative talk is not enough.  

I’ll admit up front I’m not a Franken fan.  He strikes me as a vulgar clown, and an embarassing ambassador for liberal ideas. 

But Joe seems to have gotten the essence of why Air America isn’t competetive.  Reacting vs. acting.  Read the whole thing as it’s interesting.

Enlightened self interest

At Salon, Colin McEnroe offers some perspective on Bill Clinton’s willingness, even eagerness, to go on the stump for Joe Lieberman:

Hillary Clinton has undergone a gradual but very public transformation into a kind of Bride of Lieberman, hawkish on the war, adamantly pro-Israel and tracking right on social issues. She even likes to bash video games, just like Joe. Hillary’s politics are Joe’s politics. If Lieberman sinks, it will raise a lot of questions about the current Clinton strategy, which is really just a post-millennial version of that old-time DLC religion. When I asked Waters why she thought Clinton was coming to Connecticut, she said there were rumors in Washington that he and his wife are freaked out by the sudden progressive insurgency. The DLC is putting down a small rebellion before it spreads.

True enough.  If Joe can’t make it as an incumbent in a very blue state, what chance does Hillary have in the Democratic primaries?

TMV has some good comments on both the substance and tone of Clinton’s remarks.

The master debators

Great stuff at Kos on the Lieberman/Lamont debate.

But can she win?

Brendan Nyhan analyzes the current state of the Hillary spin.

Worth a read.