I really didn't want to rant this week, I just wanted to bask and reflect and feel to my toes how different this this election feels. I wanted to laugh, mock, invite CU to kiss my big white one.
I wanted a week of amazement, of praising the most flawless campaign any Democrat has ever run. I wanted more time to gloat over Karl Rove's meltdown, Mitt's $25 grand fireworks display of doom, a slapped together concession speech. I wanted a chance to compare Sarah Palin's gobsmackedness with that of Anne and Mitt Romney. I wanted someone to mention that the people who think they're God's chosen really do have trouble when God chooses another.
I wanted some praise for Team Obama, for the incredible wins for the most Progressive
candidates we've run in a long time, the fact that we did so damn well in a viciously gerrymandered House election, that we won governorships that were fairy dust wins in January. I wanted time to bask in the radical shift we see in support for the civil rights of GLBT's. Tammy Fucking Baldwin Fucking won!!!!!!!!!
Minnesota ended it's brief flirtation with the RW, California can be governed with a 2/3 majority in both houses that allows for sensible fiscal policies and increases in funding to all the things we hold most dear. Ohio and Pennsylvania smacked the Republican's ugly little voter suppression tactics, and even Florida pulled it's head out of it's ass and managed a relatively clean election. For Florida.
There's a whole lot of partying going on, and I'm enjoying the hell out of it, but there's a nasty little wave of depression trying to overwhelm the successes and the joy. It's now time for gloom and doom to raise it's ugly head. Time to work harder to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Time to be Very Afraid that Dick Cheney will be Obama's choice for SOS! Panic that SS and Medicare are DOOOOOOMED!!! Despair that Elizabeth Warren isn't running the CFPB because Obama was too chickenshit to fight for her.
Oh wait, it's Senator Warren. Erase erase.
Time to give up on Wall Street fraud ever being prosecuted.
Except that Holder wins every time.
What a pity that Obama didn't come out of the gate hammering on DADT and DOMA. We'd have been able to lose another 4 election cycles if he'd just shoved LGBT rights down the ugly craws of bigots.
Better to lose fiercely than win enormously by making friends, right?
It's all about using the bully pulpit and making those assholes squirm. Actual policy wins, actual election victories are far less important than making Republicans hurt the way we hurt during the Bush years.
Besides, even though Republicans are massive failures at governing, it's a whole lot harder to actually govern than it is to snipe at the idiocy of the RW. Let's go for the easy path and not be forced to deal with the fact that we're not yet the driving force behind the Democratic Party, that it will take a lot of work before Progressives can count on winning most of the time. And God Forbid we might have to admit that without Obama our Progressive heros and heroines would be today's losers, not the victors. Without his oft-despised OFA Tammy Baldwin would probably not be Senator-elect Baldwin.
Without the 3+ years Obama invested in defining the Republican Party, and then in further defining it's standard-bearers, we'd be wearing ashes and beating our breasts today. If the Bush Tax Cuts had fallen first time out, what's the hook for teaching people that the Republican Party has no interest in you? Without the battles for expanding unemployment insurance vs keeping tax cuts for the wealthy, how would this reality ever have sunk in?
The RW have controlled the narrative in this country completely since Reagan, and well enough to empower Grover Norquist since Goldwater. It's about fucking time some of the gloom and doomers on the left got a firm grip on their tightly twisted knickers and unknotted them enough to allow some blood to reach their brains.
This isn't politics 101 boys and girls, this is advanced-degree politics 21st Century.
This is taking the time to figure out what those low-info-voters are believing that allows them to justify their consistent votes against their own self-interest. This is figuring out that those beliefs are so deeply imbedded it will take time, patience, and gentleness to move them gradually away from those ill-conceived voting patterns.
This is having an overriding vision that Change means more than policy victories, it means attitude changes, it means taking a fractured and divided nation and beginning the process of healing in the face of a media that thrives on division and terror.
Could we, just one time, just for one fucking brief shining moment in time, be thrilled that we won, we won big, there weren't any serious gut-punching losses to take the fun out of this?