Two Guys On The Same Train For Different Reasons

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 19th, 2010


Observations:


1) Two guys go into a voting booth, both pull the lever for Brown, one says 'Ha! I have finished off Obamacare and Death Panels once and for all, my Tea Party brethren will be so pleased', another says 'Ha! That’ll teach Obama for abandoning the core principles that made me vote for him in the first place, real universal health care, defending America from the lobby effect, an end to Government doublespeak'.


One lady goes into a voting booth and pulls the lever for Coakley, she is lonely, she has been abandoned by her husband, who has had enough of defending his Obama vote at the union hall, and she doesn’t understand why she has also been abandoned by the Democratic party that has performed like an amateurish small state street team in it’s national job of message and candidate management.


How long have we said there were three factors in this governing conundrum? This is a cornerstone of the warnings Joe Scarborough has been issuing to anyone who would listen forever, the path chosen by the Obama camp has been to compromise (nice way of saying take for granted) it’s progressive left to move it’s mandate through in as diluted a fashion as the center required. The far left and right feel equal in their rage, and the middle wonders why they can’t sell a platform that no one can latch on to.


I concede the message of the day is the Mike Barnicle message that 6 million Massachusetts voters have zero ability to catalog any part of the President’s national mandate on health care, and that is catastrophic.


2) I would force Axelrod, Emmanuel, Obama and Plouffe, to watch the Mitt Romney bit on the show this morning, 100 times. To be versed on the clarity achieved by the opposition as a direct result of your lack of clarity, of the energy Romney has captured in a room where your energy left via the vacuum your leadership created in your first year. I will give you one more little gift for your nightmare, in the same scenario faced by Reagan, Clinton, and GW Bush, their adversaries were non entities like Mondale, Dole and Kerry. Romney is real, he got his Reagan-esque minor league experience in the last election, and is so far out in front this time, that he is not even going to bother with Republican primary objectives. Tea Party loves him, independents seeking confidence in the economy love his business experience, the shadow elite really love him (he is one of them).


So get out the toothpicks, wedge those eyes open, and be motivated by this: the downside of creating a grassroots revolution and being swept into power by a generational majority, is that if you turn in a lukewarm “where is he?” performance in your crucial first year, the laws of physics apply to politics too, and the reversing trend will be equally violent, as if spring loaded.


And these little tornadoes cropping up in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virgina are accurate early indicators that we are headed that way.


3) Is there an incrementalist theory out there that the country would have been better off with a Hillary Clinton presidency followed by an Obama administration that would’ve benefited from some groundwork like that spoken of above with Romney. That Hillary could have made a more palatable case for the mid level progressing of health care leaving the sweeping NHS version to a spitfire Obama forced to wait in the wings until he was 56 years old?


Are we being tricked as an electorate into voting for change that is structurally impossible, and losing our gravitas not at the promise of change, but the impossibility of the change being implemented by our government with it’s omnipresent tether to corporate interests effectively and defiantly wagging it back towards status quo?


In that moment of a lost battle to a corporate lobby power structure and it’s propaganda department known as the Republican party, are we unable to see the greater conflict and only vote on the nearest dimension, that of the previous 12 months, completely forgetting the atrocity of eight years of outright rule by that same industrial complex?


If I had a regret in the world, it’s that the media as we have come to be saturated by, never made this point to us, not that we should be led by them, but that they too are only able to see the first dimension, missing or denying that greater struggle, and perpetuating a flat out distortion of what is really at stake today in Massachusetts.


And Obama, via his now normal tepid nothingness, is an accomplice to his opposition at this point.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.