Democrats are fairly uniformly irritated with the Obama administration. It does not so much evil like the Bush regime, but it also fails to do much of the good we were expecting. I blame this on the stranglehold Wall Street has on Capitol Hill - and we ought to help put a stop to this.
This would be a problem for the incumbent in a normal election year, but 2012 is nothing at all normal. The GOP don’t have an enthusiasm gap, they have an enthusiasm chasm … and we ought to rub salt in their wounds daily from now until November 2012.
The GOP and their aggressive, fragmented, badly behaved offspring the Tea Party are besieged by opportunity. Never has a U.S. political party had so many unelectable presidential contenders in one cycle.
Tea Party darling Sarah Palin appears to be out of the running. She’s taking steps to establish residency in Arizona, apparently eyeing the seat of retiring Senator John Kyl. I would imagine that we’ll be getting our Senate rules reform if this abomination comes to pass; no way will Americans tolerate our government held hostage to one extremist Senator’s use of holds as a pocket veto.
Tea Party caucus head Michele Bachmann plays well with the fragmented Tea Party groups themselves, but this is a declining minority and animus between the factions is easily stirred to open conflict. She might be able to unify them, but she can’t attract the Republican masses, let alone make an appeal to independents that will be anywhere near the mark.
Newt Gingrich gets an E for effort, an F for fidelity, and a G for “Go away, old man, your time is long past”. Newt the Nasty is an echo of a bygone era, with too much baggage in the past and too much of, well, Newt in the present. America will easily avoid having a salamander in chief.
There are a bunch of Republican governors who think they have a shot. They have less baggage then these first three, but unless they’re offending their home states with union busting they won’t have a chance with Tea Party extremists. I do hope they continue convincing themselves they have a shot long enough to get to the mud throwing phase.
This ABC piece tries to keep a straight face but it’s hard not to smile at the thin veneer of serious hastily applied to some of these folks.
Now, about that whole Tea Party thing. I think the best resource out there for understanding the various factions is the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights maintained TeaPartyNationalism.com. If you need to know who’s racist, who’s an Islamophobe, the relative sizes of the groups and so forth, this is the place to look.
This fringe group has been propped up by Koch Brothers money and a complicit media so that it looks like a grassroots movement. The good natured Coffee Party is roughly double the size of the combined Tea Parties, no one seems to have a good census on the aggressive USuncut, and our labor movement has been dramatically reinvigorated by the ALEC guided antics of the Wisconsin GOP. A recent ‘huge’ Tea Party rally in D.C. drew not quite a hundred people. Deprived of free buses and journalists with marching orders to pump them the Tea Party collective is a fragile, ungainly object that is falling rapidly after having been boosted to an unnatural height in 2010.
We have nineteen months to figure out how to repay the Koch Brothers, corporate America, and our rotten ass media for the mess they made in the 2010 midterm. There’s a famous saying - “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
So chill for a minute, think it over, and then go out there and make it happen.
This seems quite apropos, no?