Dear Dr. Democrat:
After the midterm elections last night, I feel like I just want to go into a corner and cry. I think rather than distancing themselves from President Obama, Democratic candidates should have used him to motivate the base. I’m frustrated and not a little frightened about what the Republicans will do now that they hold both houses of Congress.
Depressedly yours,
Devastated in Loserton
Dear Dr. Democrat:
The Republican Tea Party scares me. I worry that the Democrats won’t be energized enough to re-elect Obama. Could there be a third way? I’ve heard of this group, Americans Elect, that’s trying to nominate a centrist candidate over the Internet. Do you think that’s possible?
— Worried in Weehawken
Dear Worried:
Movements like Americans Elect are just sad. These people have to know that our system has calcified in a way that prevents the birth of “third parties” — even the fact that we call them “third parties” out of habit is an indicator of this. A healthy political system could sustain multiple parties, not just two or three.
There are only two known ways a new national party can form and become powerful enough to win the presidency: 1) Replace an existing party, as happened in the 1850s when the Republicans replaced the Whigs, or 2) rise up like a brush fire out in the districts, a real grass-roots movement (to mix metaphors, sort of) that starts in local elections, rises up through the state legislatures, governorships and then into Congress. That’s a generational project that has never actually happened before.
Americans Elect and their ilk are seeking a messiah, a post-partisan George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Jesus all rolled into one who is capable of leading us into a promised land of world peace bipartisanship, where the parties govern without all this rancor and bickering. (This has also never actually happened before.)
Dear Dr. Democrat:
I find that since the election I am just really feeling defeated. Reading the news is so painful right now.
Things in Florida are beyond bad. The legislature has no brakes and is loaded with everyone aboard and steering right over the side of the mountain. They have two priorities right now: overriding all Crist’s vetoes, including the ultrasound and education bills; and challenging the recently passed redistricting amendments. The money flowing toward that particular pursuit blocks out the sun.
Nationally, I am disgusted and disheartened as well. I am so ashamed of the Republican women in Congress who joined the filibuster against the Paycheck Fairness Act, and I get sick to my stomach at the thought of people who quote Genesis to dispute climate change chairing the House energy committee.
And if I see one more thing about Sarah Palin or her redneck mean girl children, I will scream.
Will I get past all this? Right now things seem catastrophic and it’s hard to see them as manageable.
Gobsmacked in Gainesville
Dear Gobsmacked:
I don’t mean to trivialize a good catch phrase but I promise you: It gets better. Or, more accurately, for the GOP, it’s gonna get worse, much worse.
Dear Dr. Democrat:
Is it true that Tea Partiers are boycotting the 2010 Census, and if so, why should I join them?
– A. Hugh Patriot
Dear Hugh:
Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, one of the heroes of the Tea Party movement, called for a boycott of the Census last year. Now, as Obama prepares to send out 2010 Census forms, many true Tea Party patriots are considering protesting via non-participation.
Here are five reasons Tea Party activists might object to the Census, written in the style of the paranoid emails that our friends on the right send each other. Please feel free to email this list to every Tea Party patriot you know:
1. Obama and the entire Democrat Party support the Census, which is sufficient cause for suspicion among Tea Party activists on all other issues.
2. Many libertarians believe the Census should not be under government control, not just because it is bona fide socialism, but also because, unlike private industry, government is inept. Who knows what mistakes the government has made in censuses over the past two centuries? Libertarians believe the Census should be outsourced to a private company with experience collecting data, like Equifax, Experian or other credit reporting companies, which hardly ever make mistakes.
3. According to World Net Daily, the popular conservative news site, Obama seized control of the Census from the Commerce Department within weeks after he assumed the presidency. The fact that the 2010 Census will be taken under the direction of the Obama White House worries Rep. Bachmann, who has raised concerns that Americans’ personal data could end up in the hands of ACORN. What ACORN might do with it is anyone’s guess.
4. Bachmann also pointed out that the government has used Census information in the past to round up Americans and force them into concentration camps. She cited the example of the internment of thousands of patriotic Americans of Japanese descent by FDR’s Democrat socialist government during World War II.
5. The Obama administration has already put patriots on notice that it will fine anyone who refuses to submit to the Census. However, boycott supporters say that if the government can’t round up 20 million illegal aliens, how could it possibly find millions of real Americans who boycott the Census because they choose to exercise their rights to be free of government intrusion?
For these reasons, true Patriots believe it is crucial that their fellow activists boycott the 2010 Census — so that their voices will not be heard by the career politicians in Washington.
I can’t say I agree with them, but it is fine with me — and better for the country — if the tea party folks leave governing the United States to the smart people.
Dear Dr. Democrat:
You have been very cautious about Barack Obama’s chances this year. In fact, you predicted that John McCain would win with 51 percent of the vote. With just one day before voting, do you think he will win handily, with, say, over 311 Electoral College votes?
Second question: And if so, will you admit you were wrong?
Butchie Yost
The answer to your first question, Butchie, is yes. And to to the second question: I will be happy to admit I was wrong.
Dear Dr. Democrat:
I’m scared. Is John McCain going to win the election?
Worried in Walla-Walla
Dear Worried:
If John McCain loses, in his post-campaign career he could be the next George Burns. Like Burns, he’ll probably live forever and could be wheeled out to do his schtick on important occasions.
What’s going here, of course, is two things and both are a bit remarkable because, for the first time since Karl Rove’s boy Steve Schmidt signed on, the campaign is pursuing strategies rather than short-lived tactics designed to win news cycles.
First, McCain is laying the groundwork for losing. If there is a landslide and if he does not rehabilitate his image before Nov. 4, his entire career before this campaign will be trashed by the choice of Sarah Palin and the ugliness that she has unleashed. By showing his inner George Burns at the Al Smith dinner and on Letterman last night, he’s reminding his friends in the media of his old self with the hope they’ll help him regain some of his dignity. (It’s a cinch that they will.)
I expect we’ll see very little of the snarling Grampy character and much more of amiable Mr. Moderate
The other, much more difficult strategy at play is to an attempt to reverse the polls and win the election. This strategy has two opposing parts: First, regain the high ground in his public performances and, second, simultaneously pursue nasty tactics under the radar, like the robocalls going on in Virginia and elsewhere that claim Obama had “close ties” to Ayers.
I expect we’ll see very little of the snarling Grampy character Schmidt and others created and much more of amiable Mr. Moderate, whom he reintroduced in New York last night.
To make this work, they will have to muzzle Palin — their only big draw — by making it increasingly difficult for the press to cover her. Expect to hear her stump speeches softened to pablum and to see her sent to increasingly remote venues. There were reports yesterday that campaign operatives are preventing reporters from interviewing ruffians in her audiences, which is an alarming development, and that they are even using the Secret Service to keep reporters at bay.
It’s hard to say what’s worse here — the fact that the campaign is restricting reporters’ access to crowds or that the reporters are such cattle that they allow themselves to be restrained
The problem with bringing back Mr. Moderate now is that it is probably too late. McCain’s campaign has had the extreme right-wing base sewn up since Palin made her Gidget-at-the-Reichstag speech in St. Paul. Just about every tactic they’ve deployed since then has alienated moderates and driven them to Obama — where, frankly, most of them don’t want to go. There are still plenty of undecideds and squishy lean-Obamas in Florida and Ohio who could change this thing at the last minute. All McCain has to do is give them a rationale to come back to him.
So what we should expect for the next 14 days or so is much more of Mr. Moderate (and less and less of Reichstag Barbie) on the stump, and a simultaneous surge in nastiness underground like the robocalls in red states where Obama is doing well. We probably won’t know the full extent of the dirty tricks until after the election.
It may well work. But if McCain is elected, he’s going to have a problem few presidents other than Bush in his second term have had: He will enter office with the absolute loathing of at least half the citizenry. Worse for him than Bush is the fact that he’ll face a solidly Democratic Congress (although if he wins, there won’t be super-majorities in either house).
There will be no honeymoon for President McCain.
Dear Dr. Democrat:
I’m confused by this whole economic bail-out deal. How did we get here? What can we do to fix it? Should I be burying my cash in coffee cans in the backyard?
Befuddled in Biloxi
Dear Befuddled:
The coffee can idea is probably not a great long-term solution due to the risk of forgetting where you buried the cans.
The “root cause” of the problem we’re facing is not monetary policy. It’s the fact that we’ve outsourced our manufacturing to Japan, China and the Third World. We don’t make anything. We just reassemble debt into portfolios and provide services to each other.
The solution to this is a gubmint incentivized program to make the U.S. the world’s leader in green technologies. This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. I call it the “Los Angeles” project, which refers to the Manhattan project, the program rushed into existence during World War II to create the nuclear bomb. The objective is not to solve all the energy problems at once but to pick one or two major components — say, cruise ships, trains or airlines — and put $1 billion or whatever into finding a new energy source for that large-scale fossil fuel consumer. A part of the deal with taxpayers for funding the research would be that every component in the new technology would have to be manufactured in the U.S. for set period of time.
The cause of the present crisis is deregulation of banks that allowed them to make unsecured housing loans and then sell that “toxic paper” over and over. We were a good loan bet when we bought our condo in 1999, and our mortgage was sold five times in the first five years. In that same period, our condo doubled in value, even though we have not fixed a single broken tile or done anything other than repair leaky faucets.
There is no upside to letting the U.S. banking system fail. Personally, as a “regulatory capitalist,” I believe that markets that misbehave need to be spanked. It’s time for the mortgage industry to go to the woodshed. And when we’re done with that whuppin’, we should haul the health insurance industry in while the paddle is still warm.
Republicans have gamed the system, as usual, by calling any effort to regulate “socialism.” They don’t mind socialized fire-rescue, law enforcement, education, libraries and military. But regulating financial services and health care is the first step to communism. Right.
What we as a society should learn from this, as Barack Obama said, is that trickle-down economics does not work. (This is a lesson we learned already, at the end of the first Bush administration.) What works is balanced regulatory capitalism.
Dear Dr. Democrat:
I don’t know how thinking people can go along with the lies McCain is spitting out — Weather Underground, black liberation theology, etc. The extent of the unrecognized racism in this country (all 50 states), and how easy it is to tap, and how easy it is to manipulate people with it, is depressing. How can people accept McCain and Palin at face value when it’s impossible not to notice their flaws? How can Hillary-ites say they’ll just stay home rather than vote for Obama?
Mystified in Micanopy
Dear Mystified:
They’re carpet bombing Obama with lies in order to a) keep him and the media distracted as they scurry around refuting lie after lie, and b) shredding Obama’s biggest asset, his charisma. Carpet bombing with lies is how Swiftboating works. John Kerry decided not to engage in the scurrying around, and it lost him the election. It’s also what Rove did to McCain in South Carolina in 2000. It always works.
Republicans have gamed our imperfect system. They have thoroughly discredited the media (often with the media’s help), so that when the MSM debunks one of their lies, GOP voters discount it out of hand. They also carefully craft the lies so that they’re not easily disproven, a la “I never had sex with that woman.”
A currrent McCain-Palin lie is, “Obama requested $1 billion in earmarks this year.” This year, he requested $0. In the four years he’s been in the Senate he has requested about $1 billion, but unlike the other senators he made his request amounts public. Oh, and Palin has requested $495 million in earmarks in her 21 months as governor. None of this really matters on the political stage, however, because the average voter starts snoring after the “B” in billion.
Even the best strategy that doesn’t involve lying and skullduggery has little chance against the dirty politics being played by McCain and Palin.
The best news I saw last week was that Obama had lunch with Bill Clinton. With all his faults and recent missteps, Clinton is better at political strategy than Rove. But even the best strategy that doesn’t involve lying and skullduggery has little chance against the dirty politics being played by McCain and Palin.
The only way to win is to play offense on their sleazy turf — as I like to say, to cram the truth down their throats. Republicans absorb minor defeats. They don’t care if they get caught lying by the MSM or the Dems because they have created an alternative reality among their followers in which their accusers — the Dems and the MSM — have no crediblity. Obama has proved that he can nail them, but what needs to be done is a total annihilation, something that leaves McCain totally discredited.
I don’t know what that is — maybe a zinger a la “You’re no Jack Kennedy” in the debates. Otherwise, this is, as it always has been, John McCain’s contest to lose. The best we can hope for today is that Obama can take all the states Kerry took plus Ohio. That is possible, mainly because the GOP in Ohio is in disarray from scandal, but even there, those scandals are now two years old and fading in voters’ memories.
Dear Dr. Democrat:
What is your take on Hillary Clinton’s performance at the Democratic Convention last night?
Hoping for Hillary
Dear Hoping:
I think Hillary hit it out of the park last night. She certainly won me over. I’m prouder now of the vote I cast in February than any primary vote since 1976. I can’t resist indulging in momentary regret that she (or Biden or anyone with a record of playing hardball) is not the nominee, but I’m eager to do whatever I can to get Obama elected — or, more to the point, to see that McCain is soundly defeated.
The old line that Hillary wouldn’t have gotten this far if she hadn’t been Bill’s wife is a utter fiction. Bill Clinton would be the first to agree that he would have never been elected president without Hillary, so she has as much right to benefit from that success as anyone.
She got into Yale law without Bill Clinton, and Sen. Sam Ervin hired her to be on the Democrat’s Watergate legal team without Bill. She was seriously reluctant to go with Bill back to Arkansas, but once there went to work in corporate law to pay the bills while he sought very low-paying jobs as Arkansas’ attorney general for one term and governor (which paid about $35k per year, if memory serves). While he was gov, she really did reform Arkansas’ educational system and became a popular first lady in an environment that was generally toxic for Dems.
She endured lacerating criticism when they entered the national stage in ’92 that she was micromanaging his campaigns — an allegation that was fictionalized by Joe Klein in the book and movie “Primary Colors.” If even half of it is true, she did what testosterone-equipped leading lights like Bob Shrum, John Kerry and Al Gore could not do: she beat the Republicans in national elections twice, and did it dancing backwards and in a pantsuit and flats. So to have that accomplishment taken away from her now is just anti-factual.
Dear Dr. Democrat:
Is it just me, or is John McCain making mincemeat of Barack Obama? How would you assess the Democrat’s chances in the prez election?
Queasy in Quincy
Dear Queasy:
I share your growing sense of unease.
Obama’s performance at Saddleback is getting a big thumbs down in the media. If you watch it on YouTube, you can probably see their point. He was both thoughtful AND nuanced. Sheesh! I’m convinced that McCain cheated and that “Pastor Rick” was complicit. But now the cheating story is being played as whining from our side, which is seen as evidence that we know our guy lost big time. There is truth in this.
This is similar to the mysterious bulge in the back of Bush’s suit jacket during the Kerry debates. The media is determined to avoid real investigation into the cheating allegations at Saddleback, just as they deliberately turned a blind eye to whatever device Bush was wearing.
Yesterday at the VFW convention McCain repeated his charge that Obama is treasonously bent on “losing” in Iraq in order to win the presidency. He’s getting slimier and more evil by the day. Too bad it is working so well. The polls are still roughly even in aggregate but McCain is advancing into double digits on key issues like energy and among white men, etc.
Can this campaign be saved? My honest assessment is — absent a macaca moment from McCain — we are in serious shit. There’s yet another spate of headlines out there about how Obama’s fixin’ to get ready to get started thinking about really walloping McCain. Any day now. I swear.
The Obama campaign got in “rope-a-dope” mode with Hillary where they went round after round without taking each other down. The Obamas are still in that mode, and I think what stops them from executing a coup de grace against Grampy is the reticence of the candidate to do the ugly deeds that must be done. What saved them in the primaries was a combination of Obama’s charisma — they’d send him into a state, where he would charm the liberal electorate and get them out to vote — along with the countervailing bitter taste of hardball Clinton politics.
If the campaign stays near 50-50 through October, McCain will win it on terror politics, with a classic Rovian 50+1 gambit.
The problem now is that there aren’t any more liberals for Obama to woo, while there is a simultaneous drip, drip, drip of security-conscious (read: terror-addicted) independents moving away from Obama to McCain. If rope-a-dope continues and the campaign stays near 50-50 through October, McCain will win it on terror politics, with a classic Rovian 50+1 gambit. Plus, as long as the vote is close, the Republicans can finagle the ballots in key districts, as they’ve done in the past.
The next big event will be the VP pick. Conventional wisdom has settled on Joe Biden, and the atmospherics seems to be right for him. However, if the warning bells are going off at Obama HQ, as I hope they are, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a big surprise, and, yes, I mean Hillary. Why? Because what I suspected from the outset is true: Obama can’t/won’t do the slash and burn that is required to win. The attack role traditionally falls to the VP, and obviously, Hillary can do the job.
To recap: In the early primary days, I was for anybody but Hillary and settled for Richardson until he screwed up the gay question (Is being gay a choice?) and then I drifted to Biden and eventually voted for Hillary. My prediction in February was that Hillary could beat McCain by a point or two, but Obama would lose to McCain by a point or two. I am queasily standing by this prediction as of today, but hopeful that things will change.
If Obama’s internals show him losing independents as badly as I think he is, he’d have nothing lose by putting Hillary on the ticket and would gain in solidifying the base among, shall we say, Scots-Irish Dems.
That being said, I suspect the conventional wisdom is right and Obama will choose Biden. The challenge presented by Biden is that he talks too damn much, which contributes to his status as one of the most gaffe-prone pols on the scene.
On the other hand, Biden has good foreign policy creds and solid liberal bona fides, so he’s acceptable to a wide range of folks along the lefty spectrum. He’s as good as anyone I can think of to sit in the “heartbeat away” spot.
After naming the VP comes the convention. I believe Obama approved the roll call for Hillary because a) that’s how it’s been done since the 19th century — but not in the last few cycles because the vote was not close; the last Dem roll call was Jerry Brown against Clinton in 1992; the last time a candidate was picked in a roll call was Ford in ’76), and 2) Obama has made a deal with Hillary that she will spend the fall bringing her supporters in line. I believe she will be the point person on exposing McCain’s stand on choice.
To hear Trump talk, he’s the only one
Who’s ever stood trial for crimes he’s done.
But instead of courtroom drama,
We get Trump in his pajamas,
That’s how he earned his new nickname: Don Snoreleone.
