Some folks are pointing to the President's ratings right now as a Canary in a Coalmine. Do you know why a Canary in a Coalmine is a metaphor for warnings?
It's simple: they're stuck in a cage, and if they get hit by enough methane from the coal, they croak. Polly is no more, polly has shuffled off the mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. Polly is not pining for the fjords.
You do realize, don't you, that there are people here every day beating up on the President, telling him he's failing, demoralizing Democrats by taking what could be accepted as the compromises that get forced in a Democracy, and portraying them as conspiratorial acts, or at least as willing acts of betrayal.
Canaries don't have the brains or the means to get out of the cage. We do.
What shocks me is how many people passively accept political narratives coming out of washington, or out of pundits. As a person with fairly weak affinity to social fads, it just doesn't compute for me how so many Democrats could waste their time peddling self-fulfilling prophecies, while failing to think and act in order to change the political landscape.
However wrong-headed our opponents are, this is something they do right: they do not accept defeat. We accept it all too easily.
It will be very difficult, in my opinion, if we we make our choice of who we elect and who we support a reaction to events, to policy choices, and not an active choice, an action thought out and considered with an eye to changing policy, and who makes it.
We need to think not merely in terms of who we would like to lead, but who will. We need to think not merely in terms of what policies we will demand be passed, but how, and by what means, that policy can be brought to life in the real world. It is one thing to wish for things. We can torture our movement to death with wishful thinking that we indulge to the detriment of getting actual policy passed.
This Democratic Party we're running, it's not a mutual appreciation society for our ideology. It's meant to be a practical tool for bending the arc of America's policies towards where we wish to go. If our actions, our political discussions all point towards reasons why we should go home, sit out political contests or whatever, then we defeat our own purpose, no matter how pure the ideology and how justified the disappointment that motivates us along those lines.
It fucking annoys me to see so many people prepared to defeat their own purpose in order to express their emotional discontent. I mean, I look at it, and I say, well, folks, keep that up, and you'll have even more to complain about.
Simple fact is, it's not a choice between Obama or nothing, a Blue Dog, or nothing, a majority on our side, or nothing. It's a choice between Obama, and Rick Perry, a man almost too stupid to breathe. It's a choice between that Blue Dog, and a Tea Partier that will make him or her look like Bernie Sanders by comparison. It's a choice between a majority that wouldn't play potentially devastating games with the debt ceiling, and one that most definitely will.
Life sucks sometimes. Life hands you candidates that don't do what they promise, that don't express your values as clearly or strongly as you would have them do. Sometimes they suck at messaging. Sometimes they don't hold on the compromises the way you would like. Tough shit. Come election day, you still have a choice, and you still have an alternative.
There are consequences for bad choices, even well-meaning ones. There are consequences for letting the herd instincts that doomsayers and polls often provoke take over, and letting your despair and disappoingment guide your decisions.
My feeling, after a lifetimes worth of observation, is that this suicide by pessimism has been one of the fundamental parasitic growths on our party, a blood-sucking, will-draining exercise in self-fulfilling prophecizing.
However events may make us feel, we are conscious enough, and smart enough, I believe, to go out there, and consciously decide that however flawed or inconsistent Democrats are nowadays in Washington, they are the better choice, and the better choices need to be made in America. If you want to primary the bad incumbents, where that is practical, let's do it. But if you want to change America back from the Republicans have made of it, you will have to endure the suffering that will come from fighting against decades worth of negative changes, with the people who made these changes originally still fighting to protect their vested interests.
Republicans don't just obstruct in order to deny Democrats the ability to change the laws. They obstruct in order to hollow you out, to disappoint you, to force compromises that kill your morale. Their total political war has an objective, and the bad news is, it seems like it's doing its job.
The good news is, if we consciously decide to do what's best for us anyways, we have no reason to lose. Republicans no longer have any especially strong hold on America's hopes. All they really have left is despair and the destruction of the American way of life as people have known it for decades. They have no new ideas, all they have is the radical will to push their decrepit, wasteful, useless style of government, no matter what.
We need to get stubbornly committed to opposing that and undoing that not merely in evanescent opinion, but in substantive votes and electoral victories. Rather than buy into the bill of goods most lists of campaign promises are, we should instead be consciously working, deliberately strategizing to push our way of thinking about policy into primacy in practical terms.
We should realize that we're often not going to get what we want, because Democracy, especially ours, often frustrates that. We should realize that if we're going to dominate, we have to set up a situation where our victories exceed our defeats, where our numbers and supporters united to push policies in a way that makes them more likely to succeed.