Enthusiasm Gap: Stop Dicking Over Your Friends
all over the blogosphere this week, but especially at Booman Tribune, which boasts four different front-page posts on the topic: that’s a LOT of angst for one of the president’s strongest supporters on the intertoobs.
There’s a lot of verbiage about the Democrats’ enthusiasm gap, and no wonder the GOP has a ten-point lead over the Dems.
This is going to be another in a series of “no shit sherlock” posts, and thus painful to write. I did a quick link to Greenwald yesterday, in which he pondered “the profound mystery” of the lack of enthusiasm: it’s difficult to choose which of his points is best, but there are many. As Californians, who are facing a crushing economy as well as a prison crisis, decide whether or not to legalize marijuana, prominent Democrat Dianne Feinstein has chose to loudly oppose it; Latinos are angry that immigration reform hasn’t happened; the administration has angered gay people and their allies by not going whole hog on repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, and they’ve also fucked up on ending the “Defense of Marriage Act”. Meanwhile, Atrios (who is as bored of blogging “no shit Sherlock” as I am) posted for the one-billionth fucking time “the good scenario – the worst is over – unemployment will drop all the way down to 9% by the end of 2011!! In January 2009, the administration projected that unemployment would drop below 7% by the end of 2011, without any stimulus.”
So since everyone else has advice for the Democrats, I’ll throw in mine too: STOP DICKING OVER YOUR FRIENDS.
The Health Care Reform fiasco is a textbook example of dicking over your friends: the democrats have promised FOR FUCKING DECADES to reform health care, so EVERYONE would have health care. it’s even in their party platform (pardon the pdf) on page 10:
Families and individuals should have the option of keeping the coverage they have or choosing from a wide array of health insurance plans, including many private health insurance options and a public plan.
This promise was totally betrayed. First they stopped talking about health care reform and began talking up health insurance reform. There is no public plan, even though a majority of americans supported it. Not only that, the bill was written by a health insurance lobbyist, Liz Fowler of WellPoint. The administration cut secret deals with the pharmaceutical companies, lied about it, and got caught lying. Finally, the price of passing watered down health insurance reforms, which take years to phase in incremental changes, was women’s reproductive rights. Those rights are ALSO in the party platform. STOP DICKING OVER YOUR FRIENDS.
Or the terribly misnamed Home Affordable Modification Program, HAMP, which promised to help underwater homeowners keep their homes, but which program administrators this year admitted was a total lie:
On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least.
In other words, the program that everyone thought was designed to help homeowners was actually designed to help the banks. And so people kept paying and paying on a home they were ultimately going to lose anyway. STOP DICKING OVER YOUR FRIENDS.
And then there’s the 10% unemployment rate, which is probably closer to 15% or maybe even 20% when you count those whose unemployment ran out, those who gave up, and the rest of the human detritus. is there a jobs bill? No, “the republicans won’t allow it” is the whiney excuse the democrats offer. Is there another tier of unemployment? no. There’s a lot of talk about cutting social security though, while blaming it on the republicans. There’s a lot of talk about why we should extend the Bush tax cuts for the very rich. There;s a lot of talk about austerity, which has not worked out so well for Ireland or Greece. STOP DICKING OVER YOUR FRIENDS.
It would be nice if, just once, the Democrats would act like the party they claim to be when they have huge majorities and the Presidency. But just like that bullshit artist Bill Clinton, who sent good jobs overseas, cut welfare for families and children, and lost his majorities in congress, Barack Obama seems determined to dick over his friends at the behest of corporate donors. “Yes We Can” has morphed in the past two years to “well, maybe we can’t” and in many cases “no We Won’t.”
People have to WANT to vote for you. Dicking over your friends is not a winning strategy. You’d figure someone somewhere would have realized that, which is why i find myself having another “no shit, Sherlock moment” and writing another boring fucking post about how the administration is pursuing policies that any common idiot could tell you are fucking BULLSHIT.
So why is there an enthusiasm gap? BECAUSE THE DEMOCRATS HAVE NOT DONE WHAT THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO DO.
