Yes, I’m with kos on his latest post. I hate just about everyone for their roles in this latest election and the decade before that. Myself included.
Sure, Liberals lost their damn minds, again. In 2006 and 2008 Daily Kos was a beast. Markos couldn’t find new orange-to-blue opportunities fast enough for us. Franken, Burner, Grayson, Titus, Polis, Massa, Hagan, Begich, Kleeb and Noriega. The money just poured in, Senate race in Nebraska? Here’s a lot of money! Noriega for Senate in TX? Of course! Here’s 11.11 for me and 22.22 for 2 others who can’t afford to donate! I helped raise thousands that year for AL-03 Joshua Segall! We came single digits away from winning that race, for Congress, in Alabama. These were high times at the dK! From 2004 to June of 2008 ActBlue brought in 50 million dollars for Democratic candidates, much of that from right here. There was a sense of shared purpose, a long term strategy to elect more and better Democrats, everywhere. I remember pumping every dollar I could spare into those races because someday we were going to win in Alabama and Texas and Nebraska, red-to-blue started here. And even though Kleeb, Burner and Segall lost, Barack Obama and a lot of other Dems won. But there was no time to celebrate, the economy was in free fall. It was shocking times. There was an unbelievable appetite to prosecute the titans of wall street. And yet we didn’t.
Just two years later, this place was a ghost-town for fundraising. The public option fight pretty much broke our ability to fundraise and GOTV. I know Kos is proud of his decision this year to tamp down the anti-Hill talk (I am too). But in 2010 he refused to put his finger on the scale, leaving us to pie fight month after month. What’s the worst that could happen seemed to be a sensible plan for all but a few of us. The Republicans had run a massively stupid and costly war, and crashed the economy, there didn’t seem to be a way they could be brought back to power ever, certainly not soon. But they did. And boy was 2010 a bad year to let our guard down. They took the House and enough state houses and governor seats to insure through gerrymandering that the House of Representatives would stay in the red column through December 2020. Until a few weeks ago, I thought that night in Nov 2010 would be our low point. We let a lack of a public option potentially keep us from ever having another argument about what’s to be in (good) new federal laws FOR THE NEXT DOZEN YEARS! In poker terms, we lost one hand, went on tilt and shoved all our chips to Mitch and Paul (unfortunately in the last fair tournament many of us may ever know).
6 years later, we’re crushed, again. Hillary was a compromised candidate with a sub-great campaign. Stronger together just didn’t cut it. We knew she had already faced an unprecedented 25 year pre-campaign from rightwing radio and tv. They installed a hatred of Hillary that permeated outside of usual political bubbles. People who normally had few words for politics were suddenly talking about Vince Foster, Benghazi or a general indescribable but lingering distrust. But we went with her anyway. Our only other option was Bernie. I never thought he had a chance to win. In my mind there were only a handful of representatives like him who could get elected anywhere. In fact most of the pols I considered like Bernie were freshly out of work Grayson, Kucinich, Feingold, Weiner. I couldn’t see how Bernie could win outside Vermontafornia. But now that she lost we have to look, could he have won? It’s imaginable, his supporters had much more passion and she only lost by a few points. So swap ‘em out and sure. He could have won. Those of us that resisted the Bern should chew on that what if. We’ll never know what would have happened if more of us felt the Bern. But we’ll also never know if she could have pulled it off were Bernie and his supporters less savage and dedicated to their campaign against her.
Where do we go now?
1. Back to Our Roots, Work to Bring Back the Blue Dogs: We need to get back to the focus on electing both more and better Democrats. In order to do that we need to find common ground in the netroots. And it should be easy now. We have to be able to appreciate that we need to elect someone like Max Baucus in Montana, he’s no Bernie but when he was in the Senate, Bernie was in the majority. When Steve Daines is in the Senate not so much.
2. Listen to Them: if there’s one message that we needed to hear from the public option or bust crowd, that we didn’t, was that symbolism matters. We told them over and over that there weren’t votes for a public option, and they told us they wanted President Obama to fight for it anyway. They wanted him to stand up and scream about how great the public option would be. Not necessarily because we would get it that way, but because then we would be the people who fought to get nasty profiteering out of healthcare. They wanted us to fight for the best law possible and talk about what the law could be if Republicans weren’t being obstructionist tools helping out profit mongering paper pushers. That was a fight worth fighting for. It was a just cause and it is what we need to fix healthcare. There should be profit for pharmaceutical companies that want to make better medicine, and for the best doctors and nurses who excel at their end, but there’s not enough for insurance companies who can only profit by squeezing us.
3. Dip Into the Republican playbook:
a. We need to find a way to get our story into the national conversation. That involves the tedious task of repetitive messaging. There shouldn’t be a Democrat that goes on TV for the next two years and doesn’t mention “Trump won because Republicans made it harder for people to vote”. I don’t care what the topic is, get the message in there, over and over until it sticks. We can be so much better. When they started whining about e-mails we had no common message to respond with. Shouldv’e said something like “more than 4 thousand Americans went to an early grave because of a poorly conceived and executed Republican war in Iraq. Those are real things to worry about. Emails are not. Before Obamacare 45,000 people a year were dying because they didn’t have health insurance. Emails that didn’t affect anyone? GTFOHWTSS!”
b. Can our billionaires step up their game anymore? the Kochs are just savaging you. $2B could buy or partially buy 40,000 houses at 50k per for people in need, who also want to vote Democratic in swing states. There’s gotta be a little more juice that can be squeezed out there.
4. Sharpen the Tool: the netroots was a hugely successful tool for Democrats in the recent past because it brought enthusiasm and creativity to organizing as well as significant money. While Citizens United has been a significant setback I think it’s still possible to crack open the potential of this thing. If I were kos I’d organize a video contest. Fundraise to air the videos, and pay the winners of the contest. It’s a win all around. Organizers get some cash for themselves and the candidate/cause they video about.
5. Accept that We’re Always the Resistance: we’re always skiing uphill. The political fight takes place on a mountain slope. Every inch we push upwards is opposed by giant corporations and their allies. The political gravity is against us as well with that constant wink-wink that they will lower taxes (and we will raise them). We’ve got a long road ahead, but hopefully we can rebound with both pragmatic incrementalism and passion for the unlikely righteousness.
