What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.
What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It's that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky "leftists." I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity. Read more.
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UPDATE: I just read Dougl's Balloon Juice post about Jane Hamsher's piece in which she points out that the teabaggers and progressives are in common cause in their opposition to the senate bill. Seems an innocuous enough point to make because it's true. It's a point that I've made here as well. But the Balloon Juice commenters don't seem to get it. I get that these commenters are responding to FDL's arguments to kill the bill, which I don't agree with either. But I do agree with her that the Teabaggers are more right about this bill than the typical "don't-let-the-perfect-be-the-enemy-of-the-good" Balloon Juice reader wants to admit.
It's not the bill in itself that is the source of the negative emotional response it's getting from those who oppose it, or those like Bob Kuttner or me who hate it but would support it anyway; it's the corporatism it symbolizes. As I've said before here, if you're ok with that corporatism or have just come to accept that's an unchangeable reality, you're probably in the don't-let-the-perfect-be-the-enemy camp. But if you can't see that these Dem corporate giveaways essentially validates the Teabaggers, then you don't really understand what's going on.
I'll say it again: We're looking at a future when the Teabaggers are going to be perceived as the only ones telling it as it is, because Dem supporters will be forced to defend an essentially indefensible corporatism that is now defines what the Democrats are all about. The country understands this and is disgusted by these Democrat corporate collaborationists, and that empowers the populist right.
I don't agree that the bill should be killed, but I do understand the argument that if corporatism is the enemy, this bill, because it so egregiously enhances the corporate agenda, needs to be opposed for that reason alone. Opposition to the bill is not primarily about this particular HCR bill; it's about disgust with and opposition to the underlying structure that produces bad bill like this one.
Where I disagree with Hamsher and other kill-billers is in thinking that opposition moves the ball even one inch against that corporatism, and it will deny people who need the coverage the bill does provide. And it's important that the Republicans not be perceived to win on this one. They must be pushed further and further into irrelevancy. This is an intramural fight within the Dem party.
But the Jane Hamsher/Glenn Greenwald/Howard Dean are all purist extremists trope plays right into the corporatist game plan. Maybe these true progressives need to repackage communications strategy, because theirs is essentially and educational task right now. The good people at Balloon Juice are exactly the ones they need to win over.