What Glenn Greenwald said:

What’s going on here couldn’t be clearer if the DNC produced neon signs explaining it. Blanche Lincoln and her corporatist/centrist Senate-friends aren’t some unfortunate outliers in the Democratic Party. They are the Democratic Party. The outliers are the progressives. The reason the Obama White House did nothing when Lincoln sabotaged the public option isn’t because they had no leverage to punish her if she was doing things they disliked. It was because she was doing exactly what the White House and the Party wanted. The same is true when she voted for Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, serves every corporate interest around, and impedes progressive legislation. Lincoln doesn’t prevent the Democratic Party from doing and being what it wishes it could do and be. She enables the Party to do and be exactly what it is, what it wants to be, what serves its interests most. That’s why they support her so vigorously and ensured her victory: the Blanche Lincolns of the world are the heart, soul and face of the national Democratic Party.

Also:

There is clearly a need for new strategies and approaches that involve things other than unconditional fealty to the Democratic Party, which weigh short-term political fears that are exploited to keep Democrats blindly loyal (look over there! It’s Sarah Palin!) against longer-term considerations (the need to truly change the political process and the stranglehold the two parties exert). In sum, any Party whose leaders are this desperate to keep someone like Blanche Lincoln in the Senate is not one that merits any loyalty.

It’s tough being a progressive.

Yesterday Tom Tomorrow, probably the most brilliant political cartoonist of our time, posted a brilliant piece on how the right wing portrays President Obama as a left wing nut, when he is in fact a very center-right president. The irony that I tried to point out in a subsequent exchange with Tom on Twitter is that many, many Democrats and progressives even view Obama as a progressive just like them, and that disconnect is not dissimilar to the one the right wing maintains.

As Glenn points out, the question of who owns the Democratic Party and which factions in it have sway over its direction is becoming a pointed issue under President Obama. The blind support of corporatist senators like Blanche Lincoln or outright Republicans like Arlen Specter is deeply troubling to anyone who thinks the party should be something greater than a mechanism for reelecting any individual with a D after their name in Washington. If this is what the Party is limited to, why would progressive activists, environmentalists, LGBT advocates, civil libertarians, or labor continue to blindly support whoever the Party puts forward?

I’m not big on turning my back on problems. It’s less about finding a way to feel better about ones vote than to force the corporatist center of the Democratic Party outwards and seize control for the base. How can this be done? Progressives need to run for office. Progressives need to support progressive candidates and progressive candidates alone. Donor strikes have to happen. Progressives have to learn to ignore the shiny object (as Glenn points out, this is what Sarah Palin is). Maybe it means in the end there will be some electoral victories for Republicans and some bad legislation will result. But it’s not like the victories won by Democrats has yielded the results progressives have wanted. To say it will get worse before it gets better isn’t saying much, because right now things are not getting better and key parts of the Democratic Party are losing influence they should have over the course of events.

That said, nothing that is happening with the administration’s response to the Lincoln primary victory makes me feel good about the administration or the people running the Democratic Party. Why be loyal to something that isn’t loyal to you?

Thers, at Eschaton:

I can’t help thinking that in some big giant wheels-of-the-gods grindingly exceedingly small fashion, one of the lessons of the current mess in the Gulf is that when you try to make policy based on the politics as opposed to the merits, you always, always, always get bit in the ass. Maybe in the future the Democrats will support some horrible fuckup of a war and come to regret it, and then they’ll learn this lesson forevermore. One can but hope.

Yeah. Part of the problem with Obama coming out in favor of offshore drilling recently is that while it may be politically expedient, it is just a bad idea from a policy perspective.  The reality that Democrats oftentimes (er, always) seem to expect when embracing Republican ideas for perceived political gains is that there is such a thing as a good idea and a bad idea. Some ideas are right. Some ideas are stupid. And there is not often any increased correctness by using the other side’s ideas in pursuit of bipartisan appeal. Most importantly, government policies have real world consequences. This catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is a direct consequence of energy policies that included off-shore drilling.

Leo Hindery has a great piece on Huffington Post about the need for the administration to shift its focus and stop triangulating against the left to set itself out as moderate and reasonable.

It’s pretty obvious that there are people in the administration telling the president every day that he’s exactly ‘where he needs to be’ in the tug-of-war between Progressives on the left and the Tea Party-goers on the right. But there’s a big difference between moving away from the ‘crazies’ and ignoring your true political base, which I would argue for President Obama is mostly the American workers who gave him victories in those states that John Kerry unfortunately was not able to win in 2004.

Those of us at that dinner desperately want President Obama to succeed, but even more desperately we want to see the entirety of his/our government focused on a full and fair economic recovery that quickly creates and then retains millions of new good-quality jobs. The House Members among us at dinner were compelled in Obama’s first year to accept compromises on the stimulus package and on the bank bailouts, and we all grew to accept (if not really like) the administration’s ‘promise’ that after health care reform, everything would be about jobs, jobs, jobs.

Beyond winning politically, as I said yesterday, there has to be an intentional effort to make the public understand the value and importance of government as a positive factor in Americans’ lives.

As regular readers know, I haven’t spent a lot of time over the first 15 months of the Obama administration feeling great about how things are going. But the passage of healthcare, while not the bill that I would have written in the slightest, does allow for an opening for the administration to do more elsewhere. It’s undoubtedly a political victory that came at a high price; but that cost must be leveraged into momentum to accomplish more things. This one law, historic though it may be, will not completely inoculate Democrats from electoral perils in November.

In The West Wing President Jed Bartlett frequently ended discussions by asking his staff, “What’s next?” The statement was definitive, making clear that the fictional President was ready to address something new. I’ll certainly grant that there is a lot of possibilities for what is next for President Obama. Even last week, he was able to bring together a major nuclear arms deal with Russia. But there needs to be a clear statement about where this administration is heading over the next eight months.

Moreover, the healthcare victory should embolden Democrats to push their agenda farther and faster. Maybe that means working on high level regulation of the financial industry, while simultaneously pushing through smaller infrastructure and jobs bills to help the Main Street economy recover. There’s need for comprehensive immigration reform, with or without Republican support. There could be a major reevaluation of Pentagon spending on Cold War era weapons systems that have no value in the fight against small groups of terrorists and irregular insurgents.

In short, now is the time for President Obama to push for a Democratic agenda, big and small, high profile and low. We can’t afford to spend another 15 months on the next issue, whatever it is. Obama and the Democratic majority has to produce results and show the public that they are the best choice to govern America now and in the future. And while they’re doing this, every argument must tie back to the importance of government as a social support network for all Americans, the value of us coming together to care for and protect each other. The Teabaggers will only keep trying to tear apart not just this administration, but the idea of government. It’s up to the President and Democratic leaders to fight back against this anti-democratic (small d) rhetoric.  Failure to do so, coupled with a failure to achieve more legislation that helps working American, will lead to electoral defeat.

We’re not at the point yet where the results of November’s election are clear. But President Obama setting out his priorities and pushing hard and fast for them will be one of the best lines of defense for the Democratic majority. Now is not the time for timidity. We need the President to tell the country what’s next.