When Outreach is Foolish and Dangerous

The world has changed.  The old ways don't work any more. Bipartisanship is as outmoded as handwritten thank-you notes.  They still exist, but they are inefficient and counter-productive.

Batocchio at Hullabloo:

It wouldn't be right to abandon political outreach completely, but it's wise to identify who can actually be reached and who's a lost cause, at least in the short run. It's folly to expect conservative and Republican leaders to develop a conscience. It's dangerous to believe that their donors, who have invested in a long game of increased and hoarded power, want a democracy and a fair system. It's madness to think that rank-and-file conservatives and Republicans will abandon spite or party loyalty. And it's wishful thinking that mainstream corporate media outlets will abandon bothsiderism bullshit and other shallow analysis, no matter how much it hurts the nation. For now and the foreseeable future, the key thing to do about American conservatives and the Republican Party is to vigorously oppose them. It's up to the rest of us who care about good policy and responsible governance to talk, learn from each other, support each other and mobilize.

How Bipartisanship on Free Trade Will Destroy the Economuy

Bipartisanship is no longer the hallmark of a thing that both sides want and that therefore must be good.

It's now hallmark of a thing that because both sides want it, it must be catastrophically bad.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

But there is one significant area where Obama and the Republicans agree and that is on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is a free trade deal that would straddle the Pacific Rim, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S., and Vietnam. It would create the world’s largest free trade zone. If you liked NAFTA sending millions of jobs out of the United States with no labor or environmental protections for the nations receiving these jobs, you will love the TPP. So far the TPP has gone nowhere because of Harry Reid and Democrats in the Senate. This law is anathema to senators like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown and should be for any of us who value American jobs and the dignity of the working class. The Obama Administration last year sought fast-track authority for the TPP from the Senate. Democrats refused. Republicans won’t.

SNIP

Is giving American companies even more incentive to move American jobs abroad what we want from a Democratic president? No. Is giving corporations the ability to defeat national attempts to hold them accountable what we want from a Democratic president? No. Is outsourcing pollution to the world’s poor what we want from a Democratic president? No. Fighting the TPP needs to be central to the political agenda of progressives over the next two years.

Ignore Bullshit Calls For An Imaginary Consensus

You can't compromise with people who want you dead.


Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

I can’t imagine that Jon Huntsman’s strangely anachronistic call for non-partisanship on behalf of the “No Labels” organization at WaPo today is going to strike many chords. Huntsman’s plea to his own party for a less stridently ideological message and agenda during his wildly unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign didn’t exactly win over the GOP. But more importantly, he doesn’t seem to understand that getting leaders of the two parties together to embrace extremely general goals for the country would leave them a million miles away from practical cooperation.

SNIP

Trouble is, Republicans by and large think “creating 25 million jobs in the next 10 years” should begin by radically reducing benefits under “Social Security and Medicare,” which is how these programs would be “secured,” and how we would achieve a “balanced budget.” Democrats by and large think insisting on a “balanced budget” any time soon would make “creating 25 million jobs” impossible. They also tend to think the path to a “balanced budget” inevitably involves a stronger public role in health care to hold down costs, a strategy which Republicans almost universally reject not only as unworkable but as a direct threat to both economic growth and essential liberties. How does one sit down and work out a “national agenda” for reaching common goals when the two parties diverge so fundamentally on the very basics of how these issues fit together?

As I’ve argued in the past, a “split the difference” approach to economic, fiscal, health care and energy issues, even if it could happen, would produce an incoherent agenda arguably worse than a tyranny of either party.

SNIP

Despite a decisive election victory and Democratic control of Congress (including a super-majority in the Senate), Obama reached out repeatedly to the opposition and had his hand repeatedly slapped away. And while some of that triumph of partisanship reflected a strategy of obstruction by the GOP, a great deal of it represented genuine differences of opinion and principle on how to achieve common goals. Just asserting that unity will be achieved when people of good will desire it is not only naive and obtuse, but an insult to those in a divided country who are trying to offer a clear path ahead.

Repugs think compromise is surrender and consensus is for suckers. Repugs respect power and the threat to use that power violently.  I swear, Obama would get more cooperation from congressional repugs if he implemented his domestic agenda by exercising the "unitary executive" power that Smirky/Darth used to kill 10,000 Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And threatened to spend billions in corporate campaign cash to take out every repug congress critter who so much as uttered a peep in protest.

Power and violence. That's what they respect. That's the only thing they respect.

Bipartisanship is Racist

Americans have always been viciously partisan.  The bipartisanship of the 40 years from FDR to Nixon was a freak episode due solely to the willingness of liberals to cut African-Americans out of the deal to get "socialistic" benefits for whites. Civil rights blew that deal to smithereens, and now we're back to normal: viciously partisan. 

 

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

There was something crucial that changed all of American politics after 1960: the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement and its aftershocks had a dramatic impact on the country that would not be reflected in most issues polling. One of those impacts was on political partisanship. I've noted in the past that it was largely the impact of the Civil Rights Movement (combined with the power of big money to lobby the racist vote) that gradually killed bipartisanship in the United States:

But by far the biggest is that the bipartisanship of the mid-20th century was a special artifact of the uneasy alliance between traditional urban liberal tribes and religious Dixiecratic populists in the South and Midwest. As I've written before, FDR was quite able to aggressively take on the financial and corporate interests of his time with a broad coalition. But he couldn't pass an anti-lynching law without destroying his support base, and he was all too willing to institute the Japanese internment camps. In other words, FDR could take on the power of big money with ease, but he couldn't take on the power of Big Racism.

The result of this dynamic was an uneasy bipartisanship between otherwise competing interests. Men like Strom Thurmond would vote for "socialist" policies as long as only whites got the benefits.

The advent of the Civil Rights movement marked the beginning of the end of bipartisanship. As tax dollars were increasingly seen as going toward non-whites, Dixiecrats became Republicans and allies of big business interests. Similar dynamics occurred with anti-Hispanic sentiment in the West. All the religious fervor that had been reserved for progressive social justice issues by the "Progressive" movement in the late 19th century (which included, by the way, quite conservative ideas like the prohibition of alcohol: late 19th century progressives would have strongly opposed modern liberals on issues like marijuana legalization alone...) flipped to socially conservative issues. The women's equality movement only added further fuel to the socially conservative patriarchal fire.

At this point it was easy and natural for the racist culture warriors to align completely with the corporatists. The need for uneasy alliances disappeared. The rationale for men like Strom Thurmond to support New Deal policies and chat about them at cozy cocktail parties disappeared. The battle lines were set.

I'm sure the fractured media environment is partly to blame for the increased partisan fervor. But that's not all. It's also a largely cultural phenomenon driven by a difference between the legacy of those who favor expanded rights for women and minorities, and those who don't. That in turn affects cultural issues of urbanism versus suburbanism and a host of other touchstones that are merely reflections of that same divide, but wouldn't show up on most issues-based polling that is the bread and butter of political scientists and media analysts.

Increased partisan fervor, in other words, is a real cultural phenomenon, not a media-driven tribal epiphenomenon. But to call out why that is would be hurtful to some people's feelings and cultural heritage, and thus cannot be said in polite discourse.

The problem with bipartisanship today is not that it's racist; it's that it's downright destructive.

When both parties hold the same position on a policy that's harmful to the economy - say, letting Wall Street loot the Treasury and kill Main Street - that's bipartisanship and it's bad for the country.

When both parties refuse to discuss the elephant in the room - say, the covert use of drones to murder civilians in countries with whom we are not at war - that's bipartisanship and it's bad for the country.

Vicious partisanship by both parties is essential to successful democracy.

We need Democratic office-holders who will stand up and proclaim: "cutting entitlements is wrong, and anybody who claims otherwise is lying."

Elect vicious partisans who will chew nails and spit rust. They will save the country.

"Centrist" Gimmick Fails; But Centrism Always Fails

Anyone who's ever voted knows that the Beltway analpundits' claim that Americans want "bipartisanship" is bullshit. Americans want My Side to Win. We vote for winners - candidates who will give us what we want, not fence-straddlers who won't take a stand.

So the death of "Americans Elect" is no surprise.

Steve Benen:

Last summer, there were plenty of centrists who expressed genuine excitement about a project called Americans Elect, which its backers perceived as a vehicle towards bipartisan governing. Thomas Friedman, last summer, devoted a column to singing Americans Elect's praises, saying its organizers are "really serious, and they have thought out this process well."

As it turns out, that wasn't quite right.

Americans Elect, the deep-pocketed nonprofit group that set out to nominate a centrist third-party presidential ticket, admitted early Tuesday that its ballyhooed online nominating process had failed.

The group had qualified for the general election ballot in 27 states, and had generated concern among Democrats and Republicans alike that it could wreak havoc on a close election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

But just after a midnight deadline Monday, the group acknowledged that its complicated online nominating process had failed to generate sufficient interest to push any of the candidates who had declared an interest in its nomination over the threshold in its rules.

I never fully understood the appeal of this enterprise. Voters were supposed to gravitate towards Americans Elect out of a desire to see a presidential campaign committed to centrist, compromise-focused policymaking. Americans Elect did not, however, have a candidate. Or a 2C but nothing else.

But the centrism fetishists never give up, even though they are always wrong. As David Atkins wrote last month:

Oh how cute! The Blue Dogs are starting to realize that their brand might be getting a little tarnished, so they're remaking themselves. Behold: The
"Blue Dog Research Forum" is now...Center Forward.

They have the following quote prominently displayed on their site:

America is neither right nor left. Republican nor Democrat. Red nor blue. The solutions that will move us forward come from where they always have – the center.

Most political agendas engage in a level of historical revisionism, but this one takes some serious chutzpah. The level of blind mythmaking in this comically inaccurate statement is breathtaking.

It was radical revolutionaries who helped birth this nation and free it from the British crown. It was centrists who urged on the disastrous compromises on slavery prior to the Civil War, including and especially the Compromise of 1850. It was Centrists who encouraged Lincoln to simply allow the South to secede. It was Lincoln who took the radical step of insisting on fighting the war and emancipating the slaves.

Social Security and the New Deal were not centrist legislation, nor was much of anything FDR did centrist. The one major "centrist" move FDR made to appease the Blue Dogs of his day was the attempt to close the deficit in 1937, and it was a disaster.

It was radicals who earned women the right to vote, radicals like Rosa Parks who helped end Jim Crow and segregation, radicals who earned 18-year-olds the right to vote, and radicals who pushed through Medicare. And today, it is radicals who have fought and clawed their way to allow LGBT Americans to live relatively openly and share in most of the same civil rights as their fellow straight Americans.

On the conservative side of the aisle, it was not the Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans who were responsible for the movement that begat Ronald Reagan, but rather the insurgent and radical conservatives of the Goldwater stripe. As a progressive, I view the Reagan ascendancy as a very negative thing, but insofar as any of the Reagan mythology is to be believed, it wasn't centrists who created him, but conservative revolutionaries.

On the Affordable Care Act, it was centrists like Baucus and Nelson who delayed and stalled the passage of the bill, demanding bribes in exchange for their votes and attempting futilely to earn the support of even of a few Republicans even as the nature of the bill shifted further and further to the right.

In fact, centrists have almost never helped create the solutions that have moved us forward in our nation's history. They have either been irrelevant, or actively harmful. There is nothing honorable or noble about the centrist position in American politics, partly because the system is intrinsically so resistant to change and easily corruptible that radicals are the only ones who are ever able to move things in any direction except in favor of moneyed interests.

Which leads us to the first issue listed in the Center Forward Solution Center: opposition to greater taxes on the wealthy.

Politicians often cite the fact that Warren Buffet’s secretary pays a lower effective tax rate than he does as Exhibit A on why the tax code is unfair. But as our economy claws its way back from a recession does it make sense to target one particular group of taxpayers with a tax increase? In this series, we examine opinions from the center left and right on how we can make our tax code fairer without impeding economic growth.

Hmmmm...I wonder where the center of American public opinion is on this question. Oh, right:

Americans favor raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for President Barack Obama’s proposed jobs plan by a margin of two-to-one, a new Gallup poll Wednesday says.

Sixty-six percent of respondents said that they backed increasing income taxes on individuals earning over $200,000 and families earning at least $250,000, while only 32 percent were opposed.

An even greater majority thought that taxes should be raised on corporations,2C000 and families earning at least $250,000, while only 32 percent were opposed.

An even greater majority thought that taxes should be raised on corporations, with 70 percent of respondents favoring hiking taxes on corporations by eliminating tax deductions and 26 percent were opposed.

Centrism, ladies and gentlemen. It has little to with what the American people want or need, or with the solutions that make sense and have worked in the past. It has everything to do with what the narrow band of people who happen to fall in between the modern Democratic and Republicans political parties happen to think Americans deserve. And it's just an amazing coincidence that it happens to align with the interests of the nation's most well-off.

Centrism Kills. Stay away politicians who praise it.

Bipartisanship is for Suckers

Or, "Aren't dems tired of always being the bottom with never a reach-around?"

Digby:

Michael Tomasky does an interesting analysis of the congressional support for Bush vs Obama. He discusses a number of high profile votes and crunches the numbers, coming up with this:

Here’s how it all adds up:

Average Democratic Senate support for Bush: 45.5 percent.
Average Democratic House support for Bush: 36.8 percent.
Average combined Democratic support for Bush: 41.1 percent.
Average Republican Senate support for Obama: 8.8 percent.
Average Republican House support for Obama: 2.7 percent.
Average combined Republican support for Obama: 5.75 percent.

It's fairly clear that the "both sides do it" trope is nonsense. And to my eyes, knowing the kind of centrist and right wing policies the president has proposed, it shows just how radical the Republicans have become.

However, judging from how the Villagers have interpreted this sort of result in the past rather than it being proof that the Republicans are mindlessly obstructionist, it proves that the country is "center-right." The point isn't that Republicans refuse to vote for a "liberal" president's proposals, it's that all those Democrats voted with President Bush. That's how you "get things done in Washington."

And they're not entirely wrong, unfortunately. The fact is that in Washington the only things that are even contemplated in the first place are center-right or right wing policies and the only way to "get them done" is to let Republicans do them with Democratic help. Anything else is considered out of the mainstream, regardless of the substance.

Still, it's good to see the numbers laid out so starkly. There can be no doubt of the imbalance. The only question is what it means.

Liberals are good-hearted souls who are easy to take advantage of - once. The next time, we fight back.

When You Hear "Bipartisanship," Think "Killing Social Security"

It's looking more and more like President Obama's apparent emphasis on "competitiveness" is a shiny object to distract liberals from what he really means by "bipartisanship:" letting Democrats take the fall for destroying Social Security and Medicare.

Digby:

So, David Axelrod had a blogger roundtable (Wednesday) and he addressed what Obama really meant in his spech about Social Security. It looks like we're going to play a game of semantics>

SNIP

Conrad doesn't seem to be worrying about "strengthening" social security in that conversation. But I have no doubt that is how they plan to sell it. After all, people are already signing on to the idea that because social security will have a slight shortfall in 2040 or so, we need to cut the program right now. It's one of those Orwellian "war is peace" things: strength through weakness.

If I hadn't seen the administration negotiations of the past two years on such things as tax cuts and stimulus and health care, I might be more sanguine about this one and give the benefit of the doubt about what they mean by principles. But that would be foolish at this point.

SNIP

As far as I can tell from Axelrod's conversation with the bloggers and everything we've seen and heard from the political establishment, the only real "principle" here is bipartisanship. Obama gets high marks from the Villagers and Democrats when he forges a bipartisan deal with the Republicans --- no matter what the deal is. That he was praised and rewarded for cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans in a time of deficit fever tells you how far the American people have fallen down the rabbit hole. Don't think he doesn't get that.

The debt ceiling is pure kabuki. If the president allows them to use it, whatever "compromises" he makes will be because he wants to. The Republicans have already acknowledged that they must raise it. Here are the two real hostages that the bipartisan budget slashers have taken:

If the new Congress doesn't act, debate over how to control the federal debt will be one issue at the forefront of the 2012 presidential campaign. That may be fine, but MacGuineas worries that pushing action into 2013 means flirting with the possibility of an event that triggers a debt crisis. Even then, she says, "It's not clear the markets don't lose patience with us before 2013."

The "markets", of course, which care deeply about cutting social security even though it doesn't contribute to the deficit, and care nothing for health care costs, which are strangling the nation. Markets aren't very bright, apparently. But still, let's this could all cause a huge crisis and then where would we be?

But the big, important hostage is the election, isn't it? They are threatening that this is going to be the huge issue unless Obama does exactly what they want. Of course, it will be a big issue anyway, and Obama will be accused of hurting seniors anyway, but Democrats and Villagers will be thrilled because he worked in a bipartisan fashion so maybe it will all work out for him. Sadly, I don't think it will work out as well for Democrats who follow him.

Hey, Congressional Democrats: want to guarantee yourself reelection in 2012? Start now condemning President Obama for sacrificing Social Security and Medicare to fake bipartisanship. Democratic voters will love you for protecting the social safety net, and teabaggers will love you for bashing that ni**er in the White House.

That you'll be doing the right thing for your constituents and the nation is just gravy.

It's a win-win-win.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?

Real Bipartisanship

The indispensable Rude Pundit explains how bipartisanship should work in the Obama era. (Warning: X-rated)

Well, of course Barack Obama took the oath of office again. The man knows who he's dealing with: the petulant little fucks of the right who will do anything they can to invalidate his presidency.

SNIP

Here’s what bipartisanship meant to Republicans: let’s say a Republican and a Democrat are stuck on a desert island. The Republican knows how to survive in the wild, the Democrat knows how to build a raft. They need each other, right? They’re stuck there, and while they may hate each other, they gotta work together or they’re gonna die on the island. While the Democrat is, you know, building the raft, the Republican is gathering coconuts, keeping the fire lit, you know, that kind of shit. It’s all nice and cooperative. And then, when the raft is done, the Republican slits the throat of the Democrat, eats his flesh, drinks his blood, and uses his bones and his clothes for a sail. Bye-bye, island.

Here’s the Rude Pundit's deal: we’ll be bipartisan if you apologize. Not just an eye-rolling “We’re sorry.” Not good enough. We each need to come up with a way for Republicans to apologize. For the Rude Pundit, it’s simple. Blow jobs. He wants to get blow jobs from Republicans. Every time he meets a Republican, he wants to just point at his cock and have them nod, get on their knees. And blow him.

I'll take public professions of belief in and support for evolution, gay marriage, secular humanism, abortion on demand, drastic measures to reverse global warming, and the prosecution of George W. Bush for Desertion of his Military Post in a Time of War.

How do you want repugs to demonstrate bipartisanship?

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.