I wrote last week that the Democrats should be making a stronger case against Republican obstruction in the Senate:
If the Democrats want to get anywhere, it’s time for them to make Republican obstruction the issue. Stop capitulating, stop sacrificing your agenda. Get a spine and use your massive majorities and Obama’s bully pulpit and demand that Republicans do some actual work for a change.
In case the anecdotal evidence wasn’t enough, a new Pew Public Knowledge Poll shows that only 32 percent of Americans even know that Republicans refused to support health reform. If that’s not serious proof of the Democrats’ communication failure, I don’t what is.
It’s not too late to turn this around, but the Democrats are running out of chances. Right now, they have one of their best chances in a while. After Obama’s State of the Union, they have what is perhaps their final opening to start making a bigger issue out of Republican obstruction. Will they take it? Given their history, I sincerely doubt it.
Six years ago, we launched two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on a 90-day mission to collect data about conditions on Mars. They’re still going. Or rather, Opportunity is still going, and scientists are looking for ways to turn the stuck Spirit into a stationary laboratory; it can’t move, but it can still do science. That announcement was made on day 2213 of Spirit’s 90-day mission.
Every few months, after reading a report about one of the rovers, I marvel that they’re still going. In the span of their original 90-day mission, the rovers contributed immeasurably to our knowledge about Mars. They then proceeded to stretch their lifespan by 24 times their original mandate, and they haven’t stopped yet.
Below the break, as a Friday distraction, don’t miss webcomic xkcd’s take on the Spirit rover.
David Carlson is a Republican running for the Minnesota State Senate in Eagan. Carlson is pretty active on twitter, particularly during Vikings games, but he might want to be a little more careful before hitting “update.” Last month Carlson retweeted a tweet that included a racial slur directed at President Obama. A screen shot of the tweet is available after the jump (but please be warned that the tweet does contain a racial slur and may be NSFW). Carlson has removed the tweet from his twitter feed.
If that weren’t bad enough, Carlson decided to throw some rocks in his glass house, using twitter to publically criticize fellow Republican State Senate candidate Mike Parry for his (nearly identical) twitter troubles. Parry, while a candidate for the State Senate seat vacated by Dick Day, got in some hot water for writing that President Obama was a “Power Hungry Arrogant Black Man” and subsequently scrubbing the tweet (and forty others) from twitter. Carlson responded by tweeting: “Good thing Team Carlson does not condone such behavior on twitter.” Carlson appears to have had second thoughts about this tweet as well, as it also has been removed. Fortunatley, a loyal reader has preserved the tweet for posterity and it is also available after the jump.
Mayor RT Rybak released his fundraising numbers today, which is a bit odd because Fridays are usually dumps for bad news and these numbers are pretty good. But, whatever the strategy, here’s the important part of the release (emphasis mine):
R.T. Rybak’s campaign for governor announced today that it has raised a total of $278,000 in less than three months. This includes $138,000 raised during the last eight weeks of 2009 and $140,000 raised to date through January 2010. The Rybak for Governor Committee was created on November 5, 2009.
In addition, the Rybak for Mayor Committee, a separate committee, will report raising $389,000 from 2,457 donors in 2009. In total, Rybak has raised $667,000 in 13 months through these two separate committees.
Rybak was long assumed to be running for Governor but only formally entered the race at the tail end of 2009, making him one of the latest entrants on the DFL side. This is obviously why the campaign chose to shore up the numbers with additional information about his Mayoral fundraising. Regardless, raising $278K in 12 weeks firmly places Rybak in the ranks of the more impressive fundraisers in this race.
Again, fundraising is not everything — by a long shot — but it is an important indicator both of the candidate’s ability to connect with voters and his or her ability to access the resources to mount a serious statewide campaign. That being said, every single DFL candidate has posted numbers that should leave little worries on either front—especially given the dense field. The only candidates’ fundraising that I’d be worried about are Tom Emmer and Marty Seifert. And, well, that makes me happy.
Good grief. While Republicans continue to rail about Federal spending and the deficit, it has apparently become verboten to ask them to go into details. Presumably because they don’t have any. Here’s what happens when you ask a Republican Senator like Judd Gregg what he would cut from the budget:
Okay, it’s becoming quite clear that this isn’t just about policy differences. Senate Republicans are going to vote against every single thing the Democrats do, even if it’s fiscally conservative. The latest example: pay-as-you-go:
60 Democratic senators voted to adopt the pay-go measure (short for “pay-as-you-go”), which would require that new spending measures be offset in the budget by other funds, typically raised through tax increases or cuts to spending.
Republicans have said that by installing the rule, pay-go would become an excuse for tax hikes, since spending cuts are frequently unpopular.
All Democrats voted for the measure, and all 40 Republicans voted against it. The House adopted such a rule in a 265-166 vote last July.
They voted against it because spending cuts are frequently unpopular? Give me a break. So are tax hikes. I know it was never the practice during Republican rule, but sometimes, our leaders need to actually make tough decisions, and that means doing things that are unpopular. Yes, we’re going to have to do unpopular things to get the budget balanced. If you’re not willing to make the occasional tough choice, you’re not fit to be a U.S. Senator.
Finally, some straight talk from House Minority Leader John Boehner on how Democrats can get some Republican voters. It’s so simple: Just abandon all of your principles and use only the GOP’s ideas, and you might get some Republican support. That’s the gist of Boehner’s comments in an interview yesterday:
When it comes to bipartisan legislation you’ve got to look at the balance. If the balance leans in our direction, and things that we believe in, I would think that we would support it.
Democrats simply aren’t going to get any support from Republicans until they learn to respect the GOP’s 178 to 256 majority.
Updated, see below — smells like the MN GOP fished a lie of a story to Politico, Politico screwed up by publishing it and quickly corrected it… but not before the MN GOP tweeted and posted about it.
The Minnesota GOP has been shopping around the lie that Mark Ritchie was Al Franken’s “guest” at the State of the Union last night. Of course, it’s completely false. That doesn’t stop Luke Hellier, however:
We received an anonymous tip re: Ritchie and due to a communication breakdown, this was incorrectly reported. I thought the error had been removed from all story references on the site. We are issuing a correction in the story the item appears.
So Politico screws up because someone lied to them and didn’t get the record straight from who they named as their source. Mark Ritchie wasn’t even at the SotU. Very interesting how quickly the MN GOP jumped on the story right between the time it got posted and got corrected. This story is bigger than a misquote: it sure seems like the MN GOP was fishing to get this story published with a lie.
On a related note to my discussion of the voting public’s anger at politicians, corporate interests, and anyone else who could be considered a part of the “power structure,” I can’t imagine that this video clip will play well for the GOP. Here’s Obama saying that the banks can afford to pay a small fee to help out the American public which helped to bail them out, to the applause of Democrats, and the complete silence of Republicans.
Somehow, it’s hard to imagine that continuing to support the “anything-goes” policies of Wall Street can be a recipe for success in an election that will be dominated by angry populism.
The dominant emotion amongst the American voting public these days seems to be rage. Barack Obama, as the president, is the most visible target of that rage, but plenty of it is directed at the Democratic Party, and at least as much at the Republican Party as well. It’s not even limited just to politicians: Ultimately, voters’ anger is directed at anyone they consider to be the Powers That Be.
The desire to punish the Powers That Be was on full display in a special election in Oregon, where voters passed the first new income taxes in over 70 years. The goal of the tax increase was to balance the budget, but “balance the budget” wasn’t the message that won the day:
Campaign ads by supporters highlighted banks and credit card companies and showed images of well-dressed people stepping off private jets. They also hammered on the $10 minimum tax that most corporations have paid since its inception in 1931. [The Oregonian]
Over the last six months, GOP has gleefully ridden this wave of voter anger to regain its relevance. But I think the Republicans are miscalculating the level of voters’ rage. They can’t bottle this populism and use it for their own ends; it will come back to bite them just as much as it will the Democrats.
That was pretty interesting. Obama has definitely come out with a different tone; he’s less grandiose, more direct and plain-spoken, and more confrontational.
For instance, talking about health care reform, he sarcastically said “if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.” Explaining that the budget freeze wouldn’t go into effect until next year, he testily told Republicans “that’s how budgeting works.”
He also chided both parties for gridlock and partisan games in Congress. There was at least a small taste of the sort of language I want to hear more of from Obama:
Greg Sargent articulates my frustration with Obama exactly:
This gets at, I think, an underappreciated aspect of liberal disappointment with Obama: On multiple fronts, Obama seems to be abandoning the idea that Dems can win arguments and achieve fundamental shifts in public opinion.
…
Obama is one of the most gifted public communicators in decades. His campaign was premised on the idea that liberals needn’t shy away from arguments with the right or cede them any rhetorical turf. For this reason, each time Obama does cede rhetorical ground on this or that issue, liberals see Obama engaging in a larger capitulation. He seems to be giving up on his own potential for persuasion.
Bingo. I was desperately hoping for a communicator who could do for liberalism what Ronald Reagan did for conservatism: shift the entire national debate a few clicks in our direction.
Now, that’s not to say it’s too late. Obama still has seven (yes, seven) years to go, and I can only hope that at some point in the near future, the lessons of the past year make themselves apparent. Tonight’s State of the Union Address is another chance to make the argument for liberal policies, and I’ll be hoping against hope that Obama takes it.
I won’t go into all the details surrounding the absolutely bizarre situation unfolding down in Louisiana—you can read about it at the NYTimes, TPM, or basically anywhere—but the Star Tribune notes today that there’s a Minnesota connection to all right-wing bag of nuttiness. Namely, one of the four men charged with tampering with the phones of a United States Senator (if there’s ever an appropriate time to use the “gate” suffix for a political scandal, this is it) cut his conservative teeth at the University of Minnesota-Morris:
Basel was the editor of a conservative magazine published at the Morris campus and one of more than a dozen College Republicans who attended the 2005 presidential inauguration.
Basel also was the campaign manager for Minnesota Sen. Bill Ingebrigtsen, R-Alexandria, three years ago. Ingebrigtsen said he’s talked to Basel only a few times since then and was “baffled” by his former aide’s arrest.
I’m not going to paint with broad-strokes here—these kids are just absolutely nuts. I’ll wait on the reporting of others before I decide on what the broader connections mean…
[NOTE: The WordPress plugin that powers this poll tracks people via IP address. Unfortunately, this means that if you’re in an office building (for example) that shares one IP address, only one person in the building gets to vote. There’s really nothing I can do about this, sorry. If you can get to a different IP address (a phone, for example), you will be able to vote]
I fully intend on participating in precinct caucuses next Tuesday night (find your caucus location here). I don’t dare miss caucuses because I want to be part of my DFL party unit and, basically, I just want to be involved. But this presents me with a bit of a pickle when it comes to candidate endorsement time. See, I’ve been trying my darndest to stay above the fray on this one—this website gives me a bit (read: very small) of a megaphone and I think our slate of possible candidates is just too good for me (or any DFLer, for that matter) to start a mud-fight (I want to throw mud across the aisle!). As I’ve said many times before, I’d enthusiastically support any one of the candidates who has a hat in the ring. Of course, I have my own private feelings about each, but I truly don’t have an overriding favorite.
So, with all that being said, I have two polls for you.
[EDIT: I’ve reversed the order of the polls because I think it makes more sense to have the catch-all first; and that might reduce overvoting on the caucus-goer poll]
For the first poll, everyone should vote. The title of this post is a bit misleading because I won’t actually defer to the poll, but I am interested to see where people are at. And I sincerely will take it into consideration when I caucus, so if you can’t attend, this is your chance to influence the outcome from your computer.
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For the next poll, you’re on your honor: please only respond if you plan on caucusing. Obviously you can be a sourpuss and respond even if you’re not caucusing, but that kind of ruins it and it makes you a big jerk.
Considering the political climate, and the fact that this seat has been held by a Republican for decades, I think Jason Engbrecht did a great job. In the end, though, Mike Parry won last night’s special election with 43 percent of the vote to Engbrecht’s 36.50 percent, with Roy Srp pulling in 20 percent.
There’s really only one point I want to be sure to make: Mike Parry is not Minnesota’s Scott Brown. He has not altered the balance of power one iota, nor pulled off an astonishing upset. DFLers were hopeful of winning the race, but given Democrats’ disappointment with the situation in Washington, problems with turnout were to be expected, and turnout is everything in a special election. Minnesota Republicans are going to make a big deal of this being the start of a Republican “wave,” but it’s hard to see how Republican replacing another constitutes a wave.
Was this a disappointing election for the DFL? sure. Was it a particularly momentous one? I personally don’t think so.
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