What’s Left To Deny?

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 10th, 2010


Observations:


1) It will be interesting to see whether the sense of denial in the Obama White House can withstand a salvo like we saw on Morning Joe today. It’s a dream world of consensus. Joe Scarborough had another “was that Joe or Howard Dean” moment that must’ve felt like a Louisville Slugger across the chops of David Axelrod. Now it is questionable if Mr. Scarborough has aligned the facts in the optimal or even correct manner, but he has achieved an unseen level of accuracy demonstrating the national mood on the vitality of this presidency.


Mr. Obama sold out and has been found out as such for the entire first year. 6 cast members Heilemann, Halperin, Ratigan, Dickinson, Mika, Joe. That’s 3 on 3, all moderate, riffing on Tim Dickinson's "No We Can't" article in RS. Consensus: You campaigned on a platform of citizen government and immediately abandoned it. You did not build a team to optimize your standing or the standing of your campaign platform in Washington, and lost every battle. Whether it was being out gunned, or you were lying to the people, you have only one minor victory, education, that no one knows anything about (more on that below).


You have overestimated your abilities as a magician. Consensus: New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, Copenhagen, the Senate. All depressing defeats that, with the exception of Virginia (that state you can see from your new house), had last minute appearances by the President that seemed like a bad student cramming for a Literature final. Not one of those cram sessions has worked and they have all voted against you by proxy. Missing from every one of those losses were the people that were on the mall at your Inauguration.


You have proven out the strategies of your opponents. Consensus: Whether it was the “Washington always wins” crowd, the Waterloo crowd, the death panels crowd, or the Dr. Strange-Cheney crowd, each of these opponents have won their respective message wars with stronger messages representing weaker points. Washington shouldn’t always win, it’s bad for America. Party of no hurts America, wins elections. Death panels don’t exist, health care frees up job growth, no one understands this. Torture makes more terrorists and the world is less safe, but don’t try and sell that in Massachusetts.


The cataloging of this across the board failure was done as completely and concisely on Morning Joe as one could’ve ever hoped. But it had a cherry on top. Joe Scarborough actually got into role playing and imitated David Axelrod failing to grasp the sheer weight of his role in America’s future capturing Axelrod’s Starbucks-esque passive aggressive demeanor unable to disguise real denial and real contempt. Then Joe Scarborough put on his Howard Dean lucidity cap and told the Democrats what a path to victory looks like, abandon the 2600 pages, put real reform in 50 pages that kneecaps special interests, and ram it through reconciliation.


It is not too late. Tom Daschle needs to replace Rahm Emanuel. And Howard Dean needs to be brought in as a competitive rival within the party and craft the 50 most lucid unadulterable pages of health care reform possible, and then Tom and Howard muscle every vote needed to gain reconciliation. Further. If Ben Nelson, Claire McCaskill, and Evan Bayh are a collection of cooked geese, then what prevents them from casting their vote the right way versus some delusional job security way for once in their political lives.


2) The only part of this story that Joe Scarborough is questionable on is the leave John Boehner and Mitch McConnell alone and concentrate on the same 3 northeastern Senators. These congressional leaders have hid in the trees long enough. They are both weak leaders. Drawing them out to a fight doesn’t just expose them as having the weaker standing, it exposes all 179, all 41 in their respective tribes.


We tried the fringe insurgency tactic before and it didn’t work because it made good people like Susan Collins look like bad people like Joe Lieberman. All of the fringe Republicans abandoned us in the end, and looked at Nelson and Lieberman as bellwethers. That is horrible for governing, as it more dilutive than directional.


No, we need to go to the heart of the opponent. When you are in a fight, you find the biggest opponent, and you take him down. The rest of your adversaries then take a recount of their assets and that's when you gain the most ‘new friends’.


Defensive wins nothing, and unless you have been waiting for some time to line up Boehner and McConnell and exact your brutal superiority while they’re out in the open, then why did you bother? They don’t hold the high ground because they are right, they hold it because you gave it to them for absolutely nothing.


3) It’s a day of two triumphs really, as the show continues to use it’s New York influence to shine a light on the battle over New York education. Bringing in the New York Superintendent of Schools kept up a regular drum beat on the matter of an old world union blocking real educational reform. This is a real chance to show a win for schools.


I was a harsh critic of the appearance of Randi Weingarten on a past show for, while representing education, she was actually shilling for status quo and putting the tenure of bad teachers ahead of the interests of school children. I continue to wish that she did not have a benign forum for what amounts to disingenuous grandstanding, but I accept this next chapter of focus as a strong correcting action in this ongoing fight.


It’s a microcosm of what’s going on across the nation. Let’s be very careful not to forget that the only player in this fight that isn’t local is Ms. Weingarten. She is the national union chief. She must be assumed to be pursuing this myopic agenda nation wide, and a New York defeat might represent a national tipping point.


4) OK, so I thought I was done, but reading observations 1 and 2 might leave the lazy amongst us with a quick read that they are mutually exclusive. Nope. Do you think that the Republican leadership is going to show up on February 25th, if there is no threat of reconciliation, or at least the sub nuclear option of a blind pass of the 2600 page monstrosity currently sitting out there? You do both the hard line and the cooperative strategies simultaneously and give the Republicans the one minute to midnight option. You will come to the table, you will not filibuster, we will trade simple unpolluted ideas, we will do an honest horse trade and build a mutual goal, or Dr. Dean will come.


That current bill is so bad, it might actually motivate both sides.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

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.