Life is easier when WordPress doesn’t eat 1,000 word posts.
Shorter Me: If New York has had a carpetbagger for a senator and a rep who moved far to the left after being appointed senator, why would a carpetbagger who claims to be moving to the left be so bad? Answer: Harold Ford Junior is the Chair of the DLC and shouldn’t be trusted, while Gillibrand is backing up her words with votes in the US Senate.
Chris Bowers is right – the process with moving the health care bill can be fouled by the results of the Massachusetts Senate special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat. Bowers predicts another 14-18 days before a bill is signed at best and since the MA election is on January 19th, it is hard to imagine the winner not be seated prior to the completion of a health care bill in the Senate.
There are three possible ways that this can play out.
If Democrats are not confident that both a bill can be completed prior to the seating of the winner of the Massachusetts election and that Martha Coakley will defeat Republican Scott Brown, the process could be sped up by the House taking up the Senate bill, as passed, and vote on it. That bill would then go to the President’s desk and would become law about as quickly as the House could pass it. The Senate would not have to take up the legislation again, but it would mean the House has to swallow a vastly inferior bill in the process.
The process can continue as it is — with the leaders of both chambers in negotiations with the White House — and maintain the same pace. This won’t really affect much if Coakley’s win is likely, something that has generally been confirmed by polling but is certainly a little close for comfort. If the pace is maintained, the MA special election will not influence the content of the bill, but will be determinative of whether or not a new piece of legislation passes the Senate.
Finally, if Coakley goes on to lose to Brown and the House does not pass the Senate bill as written, then it is highly unlikely that anything will again pass the Senate, at least without being written primarily by Collins or Snowe. This is the feared outcome of the Massachusetts special election really determining the outcome of this legislative fight.
It’s scary stuff and even more troubling that there’s the slightest chance that the election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat could result in dramatically altering health care legislation and even stop it from passing.
Rudy Giuliani, 1/9/10:
“What [Obama] should be doing is following the right things Bush did. One of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama,” Giuliani said.
Former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino, 11/24/09:
“We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term”
Clearly the GOP knows that if they repeat the same lie enough times, it will become the truth. What’s so bizarre about this selective form of amnesia is that the imminent and present threat of terrorist attacks within the United States is a driving force for the Republican raison d’etre in the early 21st century. Without 9/11, the Republican security state and war machine can’t get rolling, let alone stay rolling. Without the threat of Al Qaeda, the GOP would only be able to foster fear in the US populace with the threat of a gay man marrying your son.
What’s so depressing is that it looks like the hosts of Today let Rudy get away with as bald-faced a lie as can be told in America today. George Stephanopoulos let’s it go un-rebutted and even his blog entry on the exchange does not point out the Giuliani lied to him and to his audience. Your media, ladies and gentlemen, still not liberal.
One of Connecticut’s top political commentators, Colin McEnroe, has pretty much the same assessment of Dodd’s legacy as I do:
Chris Dodd will be understood, generally, as one of the great senators of his generation.
Agreed.
The New York Times editorial board, “Will the Real Chris Dodd Stand Up? 1/7/10:
That coziness — especially the V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage he received from the now-defunct subprime lender, Countrywide Financial — is one of the reasons his state’s voters have turned against him. [Emphasis added]
The New York Times’s David Herszenhorn, “Senators Are Cleared of Ethics Complaints,” 8/7/09:
The committee noted that the Senate’s gift rules allow lawmakers to obtain loans provided they are made at terms available to the general public. And that seemed to be a crucial factor in its decision.
“The loans you received,” the committee wrote, “appear to have been available industry-wide to borrowers with comparable loan profiles.”
It’d be great if the editorial board at the New York Times read their own paper’s reporting. According to both the New York Times and the Senate Ethics Committee, Dodd did not receive a “V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage.” He received on “at terms available to the general public.”
To be precise, when the Times editorializes that CT voters turned against him because he received a “V.I.P. cut-rate mortgage,” what they really must mean is that voters turned against him because Republicans and a lazy press accused him of receiving a special deal, when there was zero evidence to support it. It was a media swarm that had no bearing on the truth — a truth that even the New York Times reported in the end.
There isn’t anyone in American politics who I respect or think more of than Senator Chris Dodd. I had the privilege to work for him for most of 2007 and the early days of 2008. I was fortunate that not only did I get to work for him, but helped him wage some of the most important progressive fights of that period — the May Iraq war supplemental fight in which Dodd fought for putting a timetable for withdrawal and the fight against the FISA Amendments Act, which would include retroactive immunity for telecoms that illegally spied on US citizens without warrant. He was also there with the netroots, standing up to Bill O’Reilly’s attacks on the Yearly Kos convention and whipping BillO’s butt six ways from Sunday on his own show. In all of these fights, for different reasons, Senator Dodd made me incredibly proud to work for him.
Beyond the big issue fights where Dodd lead both the Senate and his presidential opponents though, I was able to work closely with Senator Dodd in my role. My job including traveling with the Senator on just about all of his political trips from May through January. We criss-crossed the country, but spent most of our time in Iowa and New Hampshire. The vast majority of these trips weren’t on big tour buses, but rented minivans, packed with staffers and luggage and a Senator who always had energy for the next event. Along the way I was fortunate enough to get to know Senator Dodd very well on a personal level and, to some extent I’m sure, he got to know me. No matter how long I spend working in politics, I do not doubt that my year traveling with Senator Dodd will remain one of my fondest experiences.
It’s common in politics that politicians will put on one face with the public and the press and be complete terrors with their staff. Not Chris Dodd — he was the same guy hosting a town hall with 100 people in Manchester or have coffee with 10 people in Dubuque or talking to a journalist or having dinner with staff at 11pm after a six event day that covered hundreds of miles of Iowa corn fields. He has the same wit, charm and sense of humor, the same commitment to his Democratic beliefs, and the same faith in the goodness of the American people regardless of where he is or who he is talking to.
I also got to know his wife Jackie and his daughters, Grace and Christina. Though Senator Dodd would not cite his family as the explicit reason he was no longer seeking reelection, the real benefit is he will now get to see his girls grow up without having to commute back and forth from Washington, DC to East Haddam, CT. His girls are fantastic and you could see that today, as Christina was in Jackie’s arms, her big smile, just like her father’s. Some of us politicos may not be happy to see Senator Dodd retire, but I’m sure Grace and Christina will be happy to have him home with them. And I couldn’t be more happy for the girls.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that Chris Dodd is his generation’s most prolific and accomplished Democratic legislator. The Family & Medical Leave Act is the most important piece of social legislation since the 1960s. He’s been an impassioned advocate for children, the disabled, and the disadvantaged. He’s been a leading voice for ending the war in Iraq and an even louder voice in defense of the Constitution and our civil liberties. Just in the last year he’s authored four major pieces of legislation, including a housing bill and the CREDIT CARD Act. He’s also chaired the Banking Committee and be the acting chair of the Health, Education, Labor & Pension Committee, ushering the Senate’s best health care reform legislation (which included a public option) through the Senate. The man is a true lion and progressives will be undoubtedly worse off without his voice in the Senate.
But it is because of all of his accomplishments and all of his work fighting for things that I believe in that I am glad to see him leaving the Senate on his own terms. I can’t imagine how hard a decision this was for Senator Dodd and his family, but it is his decision. I hope that he takes the last year he has in the Senate to redouble his efforts in fighting for the agenda he has long fought for. I hope he holds nothing back and bookends his career not just with the passage of health care reform, but financial reform, education, student lending, and restoring the rule of law to America. With a year to work, I know Senator Dodd can still accomplish more than any other one of his peers. Just watch him do it.
Senator Dodd, your voice will sorely be missed in the US Senate. Thank you for all of your service to Connecticut and to our country.
Chalk up another instance of the Chinese trying to control every little instance of Tibet in the rest of world (illegally occupying the nation does not appear to be enough). The New York Times Arts Beat blog reports that two Chinese film makers are pulling their entries to the Palm Springs International Film Festival because organizers have refused to cancel the screening of a film about the Tibetan independence movement, “The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet’s Struggle For Freedom.” I’m sure that these film makers are making this pro-China protest of their own volition and not at the behest of anyone in their government.
A trailer to “The Sun Behind the Clouds” is embedded above. It looks great and includes interviews with Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin Tsundue, two of the Tibetan independence movement’s most important young leaders.
The New York Times editorial board has a truly righteous condemnation of Uganda and the American Christian Evangelical preachers who are leading the charge to pass a bill outlawing homosexuality in Uganda. There is plenty that is being written already about Uganda’s odious bill, which if passed would punish homosexuality with death. But what is equally important is that these Evangelical leaders must bear responsibility for being architects of this agenda of hate. The NYT editorializes:
Now the three Americans are saying they had no intention of provoking the anger that, just one month later, led to the introductionof the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. You can’t preach hate and not accept responsibility for the way that hate is manifested.
I think it goes beyond that. If Americans are going abroad to help push a legislative agenda that, when realized, leads to the execution of one Ugandan for their sexuality, these Evangelicals should be prosecuted here. There must surely be a way for the US to claim universal jurisdiction for prosecution of the architects of this hateful, murderous law. That some of the architects happen to be American should make the case that much easier to mount.
The Times editorial board thinks that if the anti-gay bill becomes law in Uganda, the US should cut off aid to that country. Surely that would be a nice gesture, but we’re not talking about a move that might affect one or two poor Ugandan gays. We’re talking about a bill that is the functional structure for genocide; it should be treated as such. If it becomes law, the people who made it reality should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Campbell Robertson of the New York Times, reporting on the intense fear Blue Dogs have about being Democrats these days, writes:
In the deep-red states of the South, it is very hard these days to be a Blue Dog, as members of the group of 52 centrist House Democrats are known. Suspicions about the Obama administration’s expansive view of government power have made the Democratic label so toxic in some parts of the South that merely voting like a Republican — as many Blue Dogs do — may no longer be enough.
First, Blue Dogs are conservative Democrats, not centrist Democrats.
Second, the problem described here can’t be one of Blue Dogs suddenly finding the Democratic brand toxic. After all, the whole motus operandi of the Blue Dogs, as described by Robertson, is that they vote like Republicans and then tell their constituents about it. That is, they convince their constituents that when they vote for a Blue Dog, they are getting a Republican with the power of a member of the Democratic majority. Conversely, Parker Griffith, a Blue Dog who jumped ship to the GOP last month will now have to try to get through a GOP primary that he isn’t likely to do well in.
“Bright and Parker won, despite the poor showing of Obama, because they are conservative and therefore not open to attack from Republicans on social issues like abortion, prayer, guns and taxes,” John Anzalone, a Montgomery-based Democratic pollster, wrote in an e-mail message.
Mr. Anzalone argued that Mr. Griffith’s calculation was likely to end up hurting him, since he now has to face a Republican primary, while Mr. Bright’s conservative record could potentially expand his base.
Blue Dogs get a great deal by being part of a large majority, with a large enough bloc of coherently unified conservative ideologues who frequently bring the Democratic Party to its knees. They get millions of dollars of cash from the DCCC to support their re-elections. And they get this backing from the party, often in districts where if they ran as Republicans they would likely face strong primary opponents. Why would these Blue Dogs be ready to jump ship from the Love Boat the Democratic Party has them sailing on?
I’m sure there will be at least another Blue Dog or two who either bolts the party or decides not to run for re-election. That’s all well and good, in my book. But it’s silly to think that this band of conservaDems who have masterfully gotten everything they want from a more-liberal national party are so politically inept as to think they are going to start bolting en masse to become GOP back benchers.
Stories like this by Robertson really just promote the narrative of Democrats in disarray. As I’ve tried to lay out here, I don’t think that is the case, even if it is a common meme pushed by Republican operatives and DC insiders.
Natasha Chart, one of my favorite progressive bloggers, has posted a real gut-check of an open letter to Democratic elected officials. In it, Chart eviscerates the do-nothingism of Democratic office holders, who spend their time lying to the base about what they will do for them if elected, then painting corporate victories in office as progressive ones. Chart charges that Democrats must cease demanding the base to stop believing our lying eyes.
What I’m certain of is that if an illusion must be maintained at all costs, it will eventually cost everything.
It’s already cost us affordable health care, and likely much of women’s access to reproductive healthcare, in your proposed insurance reform. Like many other registered Democratic voters, my plan for health care reform, or health insurance reform, whatever, was to get you elected. Because you said you wanted it as much as I did. You had watched your own loved ones suffer, and heard the heartbreaking stories about people made to endure tremendous hardship or even death, at the hands of bureaucratic executioners working underwriting desks at Aetna, Cigna, etc. You told us you wanted to work for us and make the negotiations over reform transparent, because you were on our side.
And even if the bills you came up with are being hailed as must-pass progressive legislation, I think you know you lied to us about what you were going to deliver. You lied. There’s no point pretending it isn’t so, either to myself or anyone else. You just lied.
The stock market isn’t lying about it. Health insurance stocks are up, because the people with a lot of money and power in this country know who won this fight. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t your typical voter. I might not be the equal of anyone in the investor class in your eyes, but I think I at least have the right to as much truth as they do, and they know you lied to me for their sakes. I’m sure they’re very grateful.
I could go on about the bank bailouts, your disastrous bribes to polluters masked by trite pennies thrown at renewable energy, failed promises to the LGBT community, the abandonment of the unions, yadda, yadda, yadda. But why? You started selling us out when you took over Congress in 2006 and you never stopped, not with the trifecta, not with your damn 60 votes, not with the earth-shattering momentum of the most successful small-donor fundraising campaign in the history of the whole *ing world.
Natasha goes on to a place where I wouldn’t go – telling officials to stop actually doing anything, just collect their paycheck and go home. I think there is a step where we push for accountability and the keeping of promises that is too important to skip.
Nonetheless, Chart’s letter is a searing indictment of what we’ve seen out of Democratic elected officials over the past three years. There’s only so far the people whose activism and small-dollar donations carried these officials into office will go when they feel like they’ve been lied to. Now I don’t expect any significant number will flip to the GOP or go join the Tea Baggers, but people suggesting this is a possibility are only insulting the convictions of progressive base activists. Instead, I expect people to tune out, become cynics, and refocus their efforts back into the issue campaigns they care most about.
For a long time I believed, like Natasha, that the best way to accomplish a progressive agenda — spreading human rights, health care, equality, and rebuilding the middle class — was best accomplished through elected strong Democratic majorities. A majority, I thought, was a better vehicle for achieving our goals than stronger single-issue campaigns. In many ways, the growth of the progressive online movement and the campaign for “More and Better Democrats” is predicated on this assumption. Sadly, we have consistently seen that this is not in fact a recipe for achieving progressive policies.
The alternative electorally is to push for “Better and Better Democrats,” something that has been discussed by me and many others over the past two years. To be even more pointed, progressive change can only be achieved when the blue parts of this country are made bluer. Elected officials need to, at minimum, mirror their districts. No more Blue Dogs in D+20 districts.
The balance between electing real progressives to office and increasing our energies and resources towards the issue campaigns that we really care about is a tough one. After all, environmental and energy policy reform can’t be done blind to the needs of labor law reform. There must still be a strong enough progressive compass that groups working independently of each other still move in the same direction.
The last issue is simply that for movement issue activism to be successful, elected officials have to be convinced to listen to the base. They have to be committed to keeping their promises from the campaign trail. How can these results be achieved? That’s less clear. Do promise-breakers need to be primaried? Will it help to make examples of turncoats? Or will it only cause the wall between Democratic elected officials and the base to be raised higher? These are tough questions and answers may not be forthcoming without some field testing of different strategies.
Hold Fast 