Democrats In 2010: Not Fired Up, Not Ready To Go

Let’s see what happens in Pawlenty’s world…

And then we have this too…
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37399.html
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“Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich gives President Barack Obama only a 20 percent chance of being reelected — and says he might be the one to give Obama the boot.

Gingrich, who this week published a book called “To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine,” said he thinks Obama has “about one chance in five of getting reelected.” and called him “the closest thing to Jimmy Carter I’ve seen.”

“Because he’s so radical, you’re now going to have, I think, the most consequential campaign since 1932,” when Franklin D. Roosevelt clobbered President Herbert Hoover, Gingrich said.

Giving predictions for November’s midterms, Gingrich said House Republicans will pick up “somewhere between 40 and 65 or 70 seats” — enough to gain control of the House. “I believe John Boehner will be speaker in January,” he said.”

Newtstradamus?

There may be an opportunist/idealist dichotomy going on here. In the Florida U.S. Senate race, there are four candidates & every one is ethically challenged. Tea Partiers don’t seem to care that Marco Rubio may have misused gobs of Republican party funds — they love him anyway, which suggests to me they’re short on idealism. Why would you vote for a crook, much less contribute to his campaign?

In yesterday’s news I learned that both a Meek staffer AND his mother, who formerly held his seat, had benefitted from an indicted contractor whose project Democrat Meek had lobbied for. I just became so unenthusiastic about Meek I may not vote at all for a Senate candidate in either the primary or in the general election. Meek sure isn’t getting my financial backing. I’m an idealist.

I expect liberals, whose philosophy is to use politics for the greater good, not for their own advancement, are simply less cynical, less opportunistic than conservatives, who seem willing to take what they can get.

The Constant Weader at http://www.RealityChex.com

Such a smart guy. Why did he resign again?

Agree with Marco Polo’s so-called Tea Party Teflon.
Can you point where you found this info about Meek’s staffer? And don’t you think this is guilt by association?

See also Prissy, Miss.

“…less cynical, less opportunistic…” or just more cowardly and self-congratulatory? Look, no candidate is perfect, if that’s what your “idealist(ic)” temperament requires. But not voting at all? Well, then you deserve what you get.

Newt Gingrich never served a full-term the House, having resigned before his term was up after the GOP lost five seats in a mid-term election while he was Speaker. He was also the first Speaker in the history House to be sanctioned for ethics violations.
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I’ve said this before: Why is it that the best way to be a spokesperson for the GOP is to be awful at your job and quit early? (see also: Palin, Sarah)

…neither is it a good sign for President Obama.

Yes. Obama must be really concerned about the 2010 presidential election.

“The challenge for those on the political left is that, not only are there proportionately few self-identified liberals — 20% of registered voters interviewed so far in May identify as liberals, compared to 42% who say they are conservatives ”
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Up until recently one could assume self-identified conservatives would be automatic republican votes.
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Is that true anymore?

“None of this is determinative–there are still months to go–but neither is it a good sign for President Obama.”
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One-dimensionally, simplistically speaking this is perfectly true, but as has been considered by others the GOP representatives might find they actually have to pass something instead of saying “no” when they get their slight majority. If the right-wingnuts are in control and all they want to do is make sure Obama looks bad, you’re going to see an Independent uprising in the middle like the alien punching out of the Tea Party’s chest (obscure sci-fi ref).
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As for Obama’s chances in 2012, after the bloodbath that will be the GOP primary and the appearance of the deer-in-headlights disfunctional candidate that will emerge you’ll see another Independent fueled landslide for Obama. Only the righties “fear” Obama at this point. Democrats and everyone else won’t stomach the likely Tea Party spawn. That will be their “energizer”.

Just proves that Hate, and Fear are bigger motivators.

The Republicans have always been political opportunists. And republican voters don’t care what kind of skeletons can be found in their candidates’ closets. I’m not saying the dems are all that much better, but it is the republican party that has been the focus one scandel after another in recent years.
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As for Gingrich, I hope he does run in 2012. The man is a big joke. Run out of office on ethics charges but not before he insisted on impeachment of President Clinton all the while he, himself had been cheating on his …. what was it, his 4th wife?

Any prediction by Newt Porn King Gingrich requires as much salt as a Maine road during a blizzard.

What do you expect?

With a leader who proclaimed change and then nothing that has changed except “fixing” things which have never been broken thus breaking them now as the only change?

With a leader that is still fighting an election and leading a country by criticizing the previous incumbent whilst offering no indication that he is ever going to grow up?

One has to ask this question: why are there daily polls? Who pays? and over time how accurate are they? I am not going to be pushed into a decision about whom to vote for until late October. So I have no interest in polls on that election. Do pundits and journalists have become reliant on polls to fill in a number of column inches a day. I have heard about the 2010 elections since January; and I am sick of the polls.

After reading about Blumenthal and Soufer (Family Values hanky panky) I have no respect for the self-righteous.

There is something wrong about a system that gives a platform to an idiot like Gingrich. And what does that say about those who pay him? Has this man held down a decent job with a basic wage or has he lived off his propagandistic nonsense for ever?

http://ikejakson.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/hillary-for-president-%e2%80%a6-what/

I don’t believe more Americans are actually “conservative” now. I think the convervatives have been more successful in promoting their agenda in a positive light (and better at downplaying the parts of their plank that most Americans don’t agree with).

If a poll was to ask specific questions, such as “Do you believe the federal government should regulate insurance companies from charging too much?” and “Should the federal government forcefully regulate Wall Street, oil company regulations, the food and drug industry, etc, I think most Americans would answer “yes”.

Also, the Dems are not talking enough about the success of the stimulus plan in keeping/creating jobs.

Ask the self-identified conservatives to define conservative. How deep does their conservatism go beyond no new taxes?

Question to minority of self-identified liberals:
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How’s that “progressive” vs “liberal” labeling thing working out for us?

Okay, april, how about a less intrusive government, a scaling back of the “welfare” state you liberals love so much and a government that actually LISTENS to the will of the people. Just three examples to start with, but the list goes on and on. Conservatives are realists and strong advocates for for standing on your own two feet and assuming responsibility for your actions….liberals, ANYTHING but this. I saw a bumper sticker yesterday I absolutely loved. “If ignorance is bliss….then you must be one HAPPY liberal”. That pretty much sums the whole thing up in a nutshell.

SZ, are you saying that the self-IDing liberal # is low b/c some liberals prefer to call themselves “progressive”?

I prefer “radical,” myself. But then, I appear to have wandered in from the wrong decade, anyway. (Or perhaps the wrong continuum – projecting myself onto a traditional left-right spectrum always requires a tedious amount of vector calculus.)

earlj: I am well aware of your definition of conservative. My point is ask the people they are polling their definition. After all many people say they support the bill of rights, but when asked about individual rights they are not so beneficent.

SZ, last week I was about to ask a similar question: What would one call themselves now, since “liberals” seem to have been marginalized to the point where they live in enclaves within the US?
More importantly, how would liberals/progressives mobilize themselves? Seems to me Tea Partiers have organized themselves well through religious organizations.
By what means do you think it would be possible to organize more expediently? Thank you and many of the commentators at Swampland for enlightening me.

The three big expenditures in our budget (besides interest payments on our debt) are Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid, and defense. Ask ‘conservatives’, especially the older white ones, if they are willing to cut any or all of those programs and you’ll hear no.
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There was a time before Reagan when conservatives hated deficits and debt more than taxes. Eisenhower and Nixon raised taxes to avoid debt. No longer. Now it’s ‘deficits don’t matter’ as Cheney succinctly put it, so the time of taking conservatives seriously on fiscal matters has long been over.
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(The only ‘conservative’ willing to cut all three of those programs, really, is Ron Paul. He’s the only one on the right not shooting smoke up peoples’ bums.)

The Meek story is from the Miami Herald, & it’s here:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/14/v-fullstory/1630399/builder-under-a-cloud-wooed-meek.html

No, it isn’t guilt by association, when your own mother, who formerly held your seat, is a $90K-a-year “consultant” to a crook you’ve backed & she drives around in a Cadillac Escalade paid for by the crook. The chief-of-staff bit could have got by Meek, but Mom’s sudden good fortune? — no way.

If the answer to a choice in the voting booth is “none of the above,” not voting for any of ‘em is the right thing to do. I have often voted for the lesser of evils, but in the Florida Senate race they all seem to be equally awful. I’ll admit, before election day one or two of these “public servants” may really “distinguish” themselves, by, say, being indicted, which could cause me to rethink my current position.

Constant Weader

Don’t be patting yourself on the back and think you’re doing democracy or your state and country any favors when you refuse to vote, for whatever reason.
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My personal opinion is Florida is a pit, and if it broke off and floated away no big loss. But you get a governor, 2 senators, a number of reps who are part of the national dialogue, and it would behoove us all if you’d send some decent people. That said, no vote is essentially a vote for the worst guy in the race. You know it’s true.
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This is in no way an endorsement of Meeks. No one liked him much before this news came out and there had to be a reason.

Oregon JC:
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That may be one factor, yes.
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Another might be electing a President who won’t identify himself as anything (except not socialist).
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Another might be that liberals don’t know what liberalism is, whether they self-identify or (mostly) not.
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Another might be that, in accepting the self-loathing encouraged by right and center, liberals made a big mistake still (predictably) not rectified by the failed re-branding “Progressive.”

gaeliclass1:
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Not sure I can “enlighten” anyone, but I don’t think that “liberals” have been marginalized to the extent that we’re tiny minorities, it’s that huge populations of Americans have been marginalized, period. I live in an “enclave” of over 8 million people, for example
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I think that the reason why liberals have a problem self-identifying is because the Democratic party is led by people who consider liberalism to be dangerous, both in political and policy terms, and liberals to be relatively easily manipulated fools.
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It’s somewhat of a chicken-and-egg thing, but if there were leaders making the case for liberalism, and a party committed to such an agenda, there might be different dynamic. As it is, liberal ideas have a great deal of currency. Just imagine what it might be like if an enormous political party took credit for them, and used their power to implement them. Of course, the party would have to be led by liberals, and that would mean that rank and file liberals would have to A) know what the hell they stood for, and B) be more invested in hope and dedication than fear and self-loathing.
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As long as the vast majority of liberals are cowed into electing leaders who refuse to make the case for liberalism we will continue to exist as a shameful, yet multitudinous appendage in American politics.
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What do we do?
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A) know who we are
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B) know what we’re fighting for
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C) know who our enemies are
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D) defeat them
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Organizing around these activities seems to be of paramount importance.
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I don’t think that the Tea Party movement is particularly organized, nor do I think that it’s primarily invested in churches the way that the social conservative movement has been, but to the extent that they are, they have an advantage: everybody who shows up in a “bible-based” church knows who they are, what they’re fighting for and who their enemies are.
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They also have decades’ worth of cottage industries that have sprung up to create materials with which conservatives have amassed a body of ideals and goals that define popular rightism to them, however incoherent it may seem to us at times. All of these materials help conservatives answer the question “Why am I a conservative?”, “Why is conservatism good?”, “How do I know when leaders are conservative?”, “Who are the enemies of conservatism?” and “Why will conservatism ultimately prevail, if we fight hard enough?”. They made these industries at a point at which communications and organization were a thousand times harder than they are now, by the way.
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We must do better. We must take advantage of the means at our disposal to first organize amongst ourselves, to talk, to debate, to really know ourselves for who we are, and what we believe. We must be honest with ourselves, in ways that documented communications allow and encourage. We have to use this time to solve our critical ideological problems, and to really understand the world we live in.
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And we need to start talking to other people, apolitical people, low-information people, rightists, centrists, cafeteria liberals. Not in a proselytizing kind of way, I just mean setting the record straight about who we are.
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That means that when a rightist says “You hate America!,” we say “F*ck you, we love America.”
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That means that when a centrist says “They’re all the same, the problem is there’s too much ideology, too much partisanship, not enough pragmatic compromise,” we say “No, the problem is that you can’t compromise with people who don’t want to build a bridge by building half a bridge. Liberals want to build bridges, not bipartisan half-bridges. Who’s pragmatic?”
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That means that when a cafeteria liberal says “But think of all of the poor people who will be helped by this bad policy…” we say “Liberalism is about helping all of the people all of the time. We’re about fixing America’s problems, not alleviating our own guilt. People have a right to ask what our policies will do to make their lives better, and we’d better have good answers. Liberalism is about solutions, not compensating.”
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We have a strange kind of tribalism, we liberals. We don’t really know who we are anymore, but we have all of the rituals and problems of a tribe anyway. We need to correct that, then move on.
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I think talking about who we are is the best step toward organizing into a real movement capable of taking back the Democratic party from people who do not share our political philosophy, at this point.
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Thanks so much for reading and considering this, gaeliclass1.

Thank you, that is alot to think about, so for now I will just focus on one dynamic.
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According to Wiki red/blue state cartogram (for counties, population densities,etc.) definitely show blue enclaves.
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Also 73% of people making under 15K voted for Obama and they made up 6% of voters. Sixty-three percent of this population’s education level was high school or below. I would guess these to possibly be students and/or poverty-stricken people.
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Also 52% of people making 200K+ voted for Obama and made up 6% of the voters as well. Fifty-two% of this population had post-grad or above education.
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So maybe there are enclaves within enclaves? Possibly the elites have some self-loathing and possibly the “cafeteria liberals” are just young and/or poverty stricken and/or uneducated? This may account for the strange tribalism, and you are right this needs to be addressed, corrected and most definitely we need to move on, move forward, educate and speak up.
You are lucky to live in an enclave of 8 million! I will consider your other points. Thank you, SZ.

I think, having seen the way “liberal” is tossed around here, the question may really be irrelevent. As is MS’s analysis.
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Why?
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Because there was never any tightly defined group that was self-defined as “liberal”. The right, for years has instead redefined it as being synonymous with “everyone else” to distinguish them from “us” which of course, is the GOP of old.
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Now, most conservatives seem to have absorbed that lock, stock and barrel without question and actually believe that everyone else (save the vague “independent”) is a “liberal”.
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Though I know there are likely deep technical differences between “liberal”, “progressive” and “independent” the definition as it stands now, is everyone that is left of the far right.
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Micheal Scherer has fallen into his own trap by looking for “self-identified” liberals and using the old pre-2008 GOP definition. A total red herring, for there are some, but they represent just one portion of the Democratic spectrum…

SZ, I dunno, I call myself a liberal, a progressive, a DFH, and a social democrat, among other far more pejorative terms. But when a ? like that is posed, of course, I’d self-ID as liberal. Anyone who can’t do so (in a poll, for god’s sake, not in your office cafeteria or church) is either stupid, cowardly, and/or hardly worth pursuing/reliable as we get ever closer to the great progressive revolution!
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Anyway, you may be right that if we assorted lefties starting embracing a single term, we might get marginally closer to our goals, but I think these are minor symptoms of some far more pernicious issues at play in the field of our lord(s of democracy). Many of which you allude to/I lack time to address in your subsequent post.

Correction to my post @ 16:

Fifty-eight percent of the 200K+ income voters voted for Obama. (possibly good news for liberals)
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and
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correct “possibly the elites have some self-loathing” to “possibly some of the intellectual and/or socio-economic elites are somewhat self-loathing”.

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And I believe the Tea Party movement and the social conservatives are aligning with one another…for the time being.

I find it interesting that the author said:

“To make matters worse, there are far more self-identified conservatives than there are liberals.”

Read more: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/05/18/democrats-in-2010-not-fired-up-not-ready-to-go/#ixzz0oO6GyucP

It would be reassuring to see that corrected to read ‘To make matters worse for Democrats/Liberals/Pres. Obama (choose one). As stated, it reads as if it is automatically and indisputably worse for everyone if there are more self identified conservatives than liberals. Leaving aside ideologies, the very fact that there are more self identified conservatives shows that plenty of people do indeed dispute this implied contention.

Of course, Mr Sherer could be as poor a proof-reader as myself and have not intended any bias.

The questions you suggest are rather non-specific and biased in themselves. It would be just as fair to ask “Do you support forcing every single American to buy Health Insurance from Private Insurers in the name of regulating these insurers; since you didn’t buy the excuse of covering the 45, er 30, er 13 million Americans who can’t get it?” Or “Do you support the attempts by a cabal of former Lehman Bros. Executives to rush through legislation designed to oversee Lehman Bros?” Actually, the poll reflects an answer to my rephrasing of your questions, or at least shows a large number of people are reading them that way.

As to talking about the supposed “success” of the stimulus plan in saving/creating jobs, I doubt that the Dems really want to discuss this in any depth. Remember that during negotiations, our newly-elected President issued a dire warning that if we did not pass Stimulus that unemployment might rise as high as 8%. This was Obama’s worst-case scenario, 8%. Since the “official” unemployment rate is currently 9.9%, a very good argument can be made that either we would have been much better off without the Stimulus, or that Obama had absolutely no idea what he was talking about when he got to fear-mongering about that 8% number.

You are basically making the assumption that Democrat/Liberal polling would be better if the Conservatives weren’t doing a better job of spreading their message. Does this mean that you think Palin, McConnell or Steele are more articulate than President Obama? Or could it be that a growing number of people are beginning to question the validity of Obama’s message?

JCJapan,

Adapting a uniform name will do little to cover the fact that the Left is made of a coalition of mutually antagonistic constituencies. The Labor faction’s goals are abhorrent to the Environmentalists. Labor wants to sell more pickups and build more McMansions. That’s where the money is. The GLBT platform revolts the typical hardhat or dockworker. Peaceniks want to kill all those Pentagon Contracts that keep Union Members employed, Catholics and Pro-Choice are in a fight to the death, etc., etc. Without an external unifying force, like Bush, internal friction tends to fracture the Left.

The same is not true of the Right. While not always in harmony with reach other, various subfactions of the Republican Party rarely end up at actual odds with each other

I think the republicans are a little over confident about Obama not being re-elected. He is a very powerful president who has passed a health reform bill for the first time in history and his character is impeccable. Also I’m sure he has some tricks up his sleeve to regain minority votes.

An alternative to these particular politicians is former Miami Mayor, Maurice Ferre, who is by-far the most qualified candidate in the race. Read more about his campaign and his solutions for Florida at http://ferre2010.com

Stuart,
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You are one of only a couple Liberals who post to this site that makes rational comments.
Most of your peers simply demonize anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs. That’s no way to influence anyone.
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They spend most of their time demonizing the few conservatives that post to this site rather than trying to engage them in meaningful debate.
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Your description of the Tea Party is quite accurate. Most of our citizens don’t know a lot about Liberalism except they think it is a philosophy that wants to change America into a Socialist country. America politically in a center right country whether Liberals want to admit it or not.
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If Liberals are going to be a significant factor in the USA, they are going to have to better define themselves, communicate more effectively to Mainstream Americans and stop all the demonizing of those who don’t believe as they do.
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To illustrate my point, watch the comments that Liberals on this site make regarding this post.

“His character is impeccable”.
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That statement only shows how much in a dream world Liberals really live.
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Any 10 year old conservative could come up with a list of 15-20 items showing major character flaws of this president.