Why are Democrats so stupid?

Put another mark in the "no shit Sherlock" column as the Washington Post reveals the results of yet another poll that shows a majority of Americans would like to see taxes on the very richest Americans go up, while keeping benefits like Medicare in their current form.  (http://wapo.st/g4bGH5)

To progressive Americans, this comes as no surprise as we have been yelling as loud and as often as we could for the past 10 years.  Americans are sick and tired of seeing massive tax cuts benefiting the likes of Warren Buffet, Steve Forbes, and the Walton Family, while the middle class sees its wages frozen and its benefits being chipped away.

As much as it pains me to borrow from the GOP talking points, this really does highlight a massive failure of leadership from President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the previous Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.  All three of them had the means to cut out the tax cuts for the richest 1% at any point in time between January 2009 and December 2010.  This could have been their big election issue going into last Fall.  They could have forced Republicans to vote NO on tax cuts for the middle class and held their feet to the fire...but instead they blinked as they always do.

The excuses that have come out of the Democratic party since the Fall elections have been that they had to act to save tax relief for the middle class.  But that's only because they failed to act on it sooner.  The first day back after the summer recess Democrats should have been hammering away at the GOP to pass tax relief for the middle class and the middle class only.  Leave out the estate tax breaks that will save the Walton family over $34 billion.  Forget about the keeping the marginal tax rates for the richest 1% lower than it's ever been since the creation of the income tax (it's not like any of them pay that rate anyway http://bit.ly/dL6mer).

But no, that's not what they did.  Instead, Obama, Reid and Pelosi tried to hang on by moving to the center.  And we saw how well that worked out for the Donkey.  One would think after the "shellacking" Obama and the Dems took in 2010 they would find some new vocabulary and really hammer home to people the importance of getting tax rates back to at least where they were under Clinton, if not pushing them back to where they were under the great Conservative himself, Ronald Reagan.  As Anthony Weiner said to Mike Huckabee "why should the guy working 70 hours a week on a construction job pay a bigger percentage in taxes than the do-nothing child of a millionaire who inherits a massive fortune?" (It's a really great clip: Anthony Weiner vs Mike Huckabee)

Not Far Enough...to the left

In the aftermath of Bloody Tuesday, in which over 60 Congressional seats, 19 State Legislatures, and at least 11 Governors have gone from blue to red, the pundits are saying over and over again that this is the result of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid cabal going too far to the left for the American people to stomach. While that feeds a great narrative if you are arguing that the GOP has a big mandate to roll back what little progress has been made over the past two years, it misses the reality of what happened this election. President Obama and the gang were not too far to the left, they weren't even on the left. They were barely in the middle.

As this NYTimes blog from last year points out, many progressives were very upset with the administration for its caving to Republicans and conservative Democrats in the healthcare legislation that violated many of the campaign promises then candidate Obama made in 2008.

Once again, the GOP have managed to move the markers for what constitutes the "left" and "center" of political discourse. By consistently lashing out at policies proposed by the administration and the Democrats in Congress as being far to the left when in fact they are right of center, the Republicans have waged an incredibly successful public relations campaign and if polled, many Americans would believe that the Affordable Care Act was far to the left but that's without a single payer system or even a public option. How can something so vehemently decried by real progressives as over compromised and a gift to the insurance industry also be some Maoist takeover of the American government?

What caused this dramatic swing in the electorate was not so much people changing their voting patterns from 2008 but rather so many of the Democrats' key supporters being disgusted with the horse trading that went on in the last year and a half. African Americans voters and young voters who show solid support for the President did not come out to vote on Tuesday. While some of that can surely be chalked up to the unreliability of young voters to show up at the polls with some celebrity urging them on, it looks like a larger part of it was simply voter disappointment with how the Democrats had compromised their legislation and themselves in the short time that they held massive majorities in both houses of Congress. This disappointment resulted in much lower turnouts in those core constituencies.

This further boosted Republican outcomes because those who disagreed with the fundamentals of helping your fellow citizens and ensuring that everyone has access to health care regardless of what pre-existing conditions exist were clearly fired up to come out and vote for the GOP, but those who were upset with the Democrats and saw little differences between the two parties are the ones who stayed home. And while I personally believe that not voting is one of the most cowardly acts a citizen in a democracy can commit, I understand the frustration that made people feel that packing the bong, playing another round of Madden on the xbox, and proving pundits right that young voters are unreliably AKA should be ignored, was the best thing to do on Tuesday.

The Democrats lost on Tuesday because the early economic predictions of bad times to come were too cautious, the stimulus was too small, the health care reform too conservative, and the financial reform too toothless. The Democrats, in an effort to woo independents who are too stupid to stick with one political direction for more than 2 years, lost their base and were abandoned on election day by the people who sent them there in 2008.

Might as well earn it

Why should someone like Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) be selected as the next leader of the Democrat minority in the House? Because Democrats might as well earn the characterizations that the Dems are presenting policies that are from the far left of American politics. Perhaps a few years of seeing an actual progressive politician in charge will remind America that killing the public option for the Affordable Care Act was not the result of some vast socialist conspiracy. Watering down the financial regulations at the behest of the banks was not part of some radical liberal strategy. And yet both the Dodd/Frank Act and the Affordable Care Act were made out to be the result of the Democrats in Congress forcing through a supremely leftist agenda. So if they're going to do that when the policies are already center-right to begin with, what more can they say?

If there's one thing I wish that the Democrats would learn from their Republican colleagues it would be that there's no inherent problem with advocating policies that are far from the middle, so long as you do a good job of making your opponent's most moderate proposals seem extreme, and you phrase your own arguments so that people can identify some familiar aspects of your policy. We've seen this with the Sarah Palins, Jim DeMints, and Rand Pauls who advocate very right wing policies yet attack anyone who opposes them as some far left wing nut.

Having a true progressive at the reins for a few years will remind people that they really are in favor of the so called "socialism" in America; from social security to Medicare, Americans like their government programs. Somehow the Democrats' messaging in the past couple of years was so weak that they allowed the GOP to take up the mantle of defending Medicare against spending cuts.

So now that Pelosi has to hand in her gavel, maybe it's time to take a real progressive activist, who almost voted against the Affordable Care Act because he recognized it was far too big of a gift to the insurance companies and not focused enough on providing quality care to Americans, a chance to lead his party and remind America about the differences between what the GOP offers and what the Democrats can offer. Maybe if the public could see what real liberal policies were, they wouldn't be so quick to accept Karl Rove's and Sean Hannity's instant labeling of so many moderates as extreme leftists.