Dear President Obama & other “bipartisan” Democrats:
This is addressed to those of you who compromised. Who “threw bones.” Who fawned. Who laughed. Who shook hands. Who capitulated.
Over and over, you got one Republican senator to vote for priority legislation in committee only, at the expense of more effective policy.
You did all of this to look moderate. To win votes come election season. How’d that work out for you?
Do you really think things could have been any worse? You lost an election, in the grandest terms of the modern era, even though the victorious party is more hated than you are. You lost to a corporate-funded “movement” that is morally and intellectually bankrupt in the most obvious terms.
The alternative was to stand strong, together. To fight back. Perhaps it’s at least conceivable that your electoral prospects might have been similarly poor had you stood strong; but it’s inconceivable that things could have been worse. Republicans, for all their stupidity and malice, should have taught you that.
Stand strong. No matter what.
If you’d made Republican senators literally filibuster; if you hadn’t tabled priorities at the mere threat of a Republican filibuster; this country would understand that Republicans are to blame for the lack of strong solutions to all the problems we face. Instead, you never made the assholes follow through on their threats. You never gave them the delightfully horrible PR situation of filibustering politically, mathematically, and morally righteous health insurance reform. Investment banking and housing reform. Civil rights reform.
Republicans voted against health care money for 9/11 responders, and still you couldn’t make them pay politically! They started a trillion-dollar war on false pretenses in the name of 9/11, and you couldn’t make them pay — politically and legislatively — for 9 billion dollars of health care for those who were there? Back then, you caved to the hysterical opinions of red-state soccer moms who quite insanely believed they were under threat on 9/11; but you couldn’t make Republicans pay for failing to honor the health needs of those who risked everything, without promise of reward?
Speaking of health, you could have pushed a health care bill that reflected ours and your principles — a single-payer bill set to initiate in 2010, instead of a compromised bill that couldn’t even muster the inclusion of a 70%-supported public option, set to fully initiate 2.5 election cycles later, in 2014. If you had, things could not have been worse for you politically. But at least you’d have enacted a policy that works, a policy that would have given you a chance in this election.
Will you learn? Will you understand? Or are you like Republican voters — easily manipulated, psychologically disturbed, reality-disconnected?
Yes, the average American is an ignoramus. But what is politics except the art of communication? And you know what communicates better than anything? Courage. Followed closely by real-world policy.
In this election, reality stares you in the face. You were weak. You lost. If you want to win: stand strong, together. And you must win.
A set of rules to live by:
1. The media need you (not the other way around).
2. Progressive policies — because they take into account reason, science, and history — work.
3. Republicans are bad-faith negotiators. They will never meet you halfway. Their promises are empty, their intentions malicious.
4. You are held to a different, stricter set of rules and standards regarding your intelligence and your conduct. Embrace and exceed them.
I send you a cry in the night. A plea for sanity and duty, upheld. If you heed it, you will succeed. Ignore it, and you lose. We all lose, even those of us who don’t realize it.
This is your wake-up call. You’re already late. Now it’s time to make up for it.
Never leave home without it.
