Vote For The Skunk

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 25th, 2010


Observations:


1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:


A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.


We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?


We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.


We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?


There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.


That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.


As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.


Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.


As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.


2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.


Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?


I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.


Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.


3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.


We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.


Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.


If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.