I have mentioned more than a few times that in the South and in conservative districts, Democrats who campaign on liberal values normally win their reelections. Conservatives vote for true conservatives, not fake ones.
Those liberals who lost in this election fell prey to hundreds of millions of outside money from corporations and billionaires from Wall Street, Big Oil, and Hedge Funds or through Special Interest Groups such as the National Chamber of Commerce.
In spite of huge amounts of money, a seven to one in favor of Republicans, most liberals survived even in Massachusetts who elected conservative Republican. All the winners were Democrats from governor on down including Martha Coakley who lost to Scott Brown because she did not campaign. Coakley easily won her old job as Attorney General of Massachusetts easily.
Polls indicate that if Obama got the public options through by putting pressure of a carrot and a stick on Liberman and Nelson of Nebraska, he would have passed a much better Healthcare Bill. About 80 percent of Democrats and slightly less with independents, and 50 percent of Republicans wanted the Public Option.
Write President Obama that we do not want a weak President. Go for the fences and tell the public immediately if the Senate tried to block it. The Senate is the only place Obama can exert control. The crazies in the House are hopeless. Tell him not to support a tax cut for the millionaires and billionaires or top one percent to count on your support. We have to play hard ball too. Being neutral or accommodating always lose in politics.
Obama lost half of the young under 35 vote. They did not vote while the senile seniors made up 25 percent of the votes. Shouldn’t we require a test for dementia before they can vote. Same reason we do not give the vote for ten year olds.
One reporter asked Adam Green of the www.boldprogressive.org why do the exit polls indicated only 39 percent of the voters did want Obama to do more and the rest said do less. Green pointed out with a big smile on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show at 10:00 PM ET that the poll was not taken for those who did not vote. Americans wanted Obama to do more, not less.
Jim Kawakami, Nov 3, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 03, 2010
Adam Green on why Dems lost: 'weak, watered-down change - and weak Democratic leaders'
http://www.americablog.com/2010/11/adam-green-on-why-dems-lost-weak.html
by Joe Sudbay (DC) on 11/03/2010 09:18:00 AM
"What the average voter saw of Democrats was weak, watered-down change - and weak Democratic leaders who cut deals with the very Wall Street banks and insurance companies they are supposed to be fighting," Adam Green, the cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee said in a statement.
Green said Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, who lost his reelection bid Tuesday, was "dragged down in a national rejection of Democratic Party weakness."
"Progressives will be stepping up and insisting that the Democratic Party be bolder, not weaker," Green added, saying his group's mission is now to "save the Democratic Party from its own incredible weakness that savaged Democratic candidates in 2010."
Fake Republicans Lost Half of Their 20 Seats in the House, Liberals None Adele Stan, AlterNet, HuffingtonPost.com, Nov 3, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adele-stan/gop-wave-progressives-not_b_778451.html
In their frustration at last night's sweep of the House by the Tea Party-fueled GOP, progressives are assessing just how this happened.
"We should have been more bold," Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Lynn Woolsey told Pacifica Radio's Mitch Jeserich last night. Woolsey suggested that if the Democrats had started out of the gate with a jobs bill in 2009, Democratic fortunes might not have fallen to their current lows.
Longtime labor activist Bill Fletcher, Jr., speaking on Free Speech TV, complained that leaders of the progressive coalition that elected President Barack Obama were sent activists "back to the barracks" once the election was won.
Van Jones, who was purged from the White House through a Fox News-orchestrated smear campaign, told a gathering of activists in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, that the day after Obama's election, "you gave away your power" by receding to the sidelines or turning their attention to individual issues while neglecting the overarching narrative.
While all of these assessments are true, they don't tell the whole story. The "enthusiasm gap" touted by pundits about this year's elections is really more of an infrastructure gap. As Thom Hartmann noted last night on The Big Picture and on Free Speech TV, the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United -- the case that settled the burning question of whether money equals speech -- allowed for such a flood of corporate dollars into the campaign process that 2010 saw the first legal theft of an election since the passage of the 1906 Tillman Act, which limited the use of corporate money in elections.
But that still doesn't get to the heart of the matter, which is infrastructure. Even if the left had access to the kind of money that fuels the right, it would not be poised to use it as effectively. Just as the progressive coalition tends to break apart into issue silos once Democrats are in power, its infrastructure also lacks the links and coordination that occur on the right. So the question is, what do we plan to do about that?
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