Senator Mary Landrieu is likely about to lose her powerful political job in a crushing defeat.
Because of how the Senator operated while she was in a position to do that important job.
Not because of Hippies. Or Purity Trolls. Or The Media. Or Somebody Wanting a Pony. Or Hollywood Elites. Or anyone's Favorite Liberal Fenemy Online. No. Not at all. Mary Landrieu is to blame for Mary Landrieu's upcoming likely blow-out loss. Yes, it sucks that we are about to lose another Democratic Senator. So be mad at her.
Because it's her own fault.
Hers.
Not mine. Not yours. Not her Peers in the Senate. Or the DSCC who pulled the plug on pissing away millions for nothing. Not environmentalists. Or Native American activists. Or MSNBC hosts. Nope. It's all on the Senator. She has spend a long time working hard to earn a lonely political end in a humiliating blow-out by how she governed and what she thought was smart and persuasive politics.
I'm sorry so many Democrats have lost this last cycle.
I did as much as I could to get a cannon fodder Democratic candidate, Erin Bilbray, elected in my home state. I made sure that every Democrat I could knew Joe Heck's opponent's name. I made sure than I ran as many people I knew to be Democratic voters to vote for Erin Bilbray. She got crushed. I'm not beating myself up for an institutional failure. Or political malpractice. I did my part. Many of you did too.
In the end, your party earns the outcomes that it enjoys, or suffers, at the polls.
Mary Landrieu is going to lose because she's going to get the loyalty she's accrued.
Nobody is going to war for her in her home state, because she hasn't earned that kind of loyalty, trust, and sacrifice. She wasn't betrayed. She wasn't abandoned. She wasn't left hanging out to dry. She worked very, very hard to make people who were always going to get a better deal from a freakshow wingnut Republican happy. They are repaying her for her service by helping her opponent bury her, and all the people she held in contempt are not to blame for what comes next.
"A Republican will be worse."
Yep. True. A Republican will be worse.
But she has meticulously laid the groundwork for a mind-bogglingly shitty wingnut of a US Senator to be crowned in a straight-up laugher. An ultimately friendless political failure, out in the weeds tangled and matted in briars, and utterly surrounded by hostile forces who serve the very people she used to pander and cater to the most to get ahead in DC. Whose fault is that? Easy. When a pol goes out this way? It's earned. That's on her. Nobody else.
Harry Reid gave her her XL Pipeline Shitshow, and she paid him back by stabbing him in the back in the minority leadership vote. Making her look like a vile, petty, and cowardly backstabbing opportunist you trust like you trust a snake.
You could send her 40 million dollars right now, and she'd still get crushed.
The XL Pipeline vote could have gone her way, and she'd still get drubbed.
What Mary Landrieu has been robbed of, in the end, is the ability to blame Barack Obama vetoing her sad XL Pipeline pander for her defeat at the polls when it comes.
Because Mary Landrieu, in the end, found herself alone, on an island, doing desperate and stupid things to save her job, because this was always where she was going to end up in the end. This is the ending that Blanche Lincoln earned. This is the ending that Evan Bayh ducked in Indiana, and Ben Nelson ducked in Nebraska. Both having learned that going out like this is an ignoble, but earned, political epitaph.
When somebody like Mary Landrieu goes down in flames, there are always attempts to spread the blame to those who had nothing to do with the crash. This isn't about anything other than specious nonsense being revealed to be specious nonsense yet again. This way of behaving in office ultimately doesn't save you from the GOP. It is a party completely governed by bad faith.
To think you can pander Rightward, and inoculate yourself from the GOP, is based on the beltway fantasy that the GOP is, somehow, handicapped by your ultimately self-defeating vaccination actions. Inoculation presumes that a bad faith movement is governed by good faith. Like rules. Facts. Decorum. Respect for institutions.
Wrong. You vote like Mary Landrieu, and they damn you as if you voted like Bernie Sanders. The letter (D). That's it. That's what makes you a Socialist, Big Government, Radical Leftist. A (D). Mary Landrieu is learning the lesson that Blanche Lincoln should have been a posterperson for. You can be as Rightwing a Democrat as you can. Oopsie. There's that magic (D) after your name. That magic letter that makes you born in Kenya and baptized in goats blood by Saul Alinsky and the ghost of Joseph Stalin if you are the first black President. The one that makes you for death panels, re-education camps in the desert, and UN black helicopter aided gun confiscation. Be you Elizabeth Warren, or be you Mary Landrieu.
You can be a moderate, or even a conservative Democrat, and not act this way.
Governing this way was a premeditated choice to believe you would be handsomely rewarded for being a bad political friend and a mediocre ally. As much so as being a ride or die partisan rock that others could always rely on. You find out who your friends are when you are in the place like this. You also find out who has been taking and eating your shit with a smile for as long as they could remember, and they aren't really all that sorry or sad to see you go. It's not their fault. They know it. They tried to give you what you said you needed. No AG push. No. The XL Pipeline Panderfest. It turned into a shitshow, as I bet many knew it would, because they are better than a Mary Landrieu. They took a hit for "the team" that wasn't about "the team" at all.
So, ultimately, it's Mary Landrieu's fault she's about to get run out of town by a 20+ point margin. That's who should ultimately get the blame when she loses her run-off election by a blow-out. The blame lies with the people who chased likely Republican voters, and thought that an echo was an argument. For decades, Democrats have been told, over and over and over and over again, that this political behavior inoculates you from the GOP.
It doesn't.
Anymore than the DLC playbook made the GOP extinct because "they have no place to go".
No. Move the middle Rightward? So what? They shrugged, gave the Democratic Party the finger for a thank you, and gleefully moved farther Right. Bad faith means you can lie, cheat, steal, and make shit up if your opponent bends over backwards to be the worst Democratic politician in the party. The (D). That's it. That's what makes you a Commie. The lessons were there to be heeded. The political gravestones of others who had done the same thing, and fallen the same way Mary Landrieu just tried to save her job, by saying she would help pass her opponent's agenda too.
And she thought this was a brilliant idea that undermined her opponent and gave her an opening to win. Which is like thinking scoring own-goals is how you win the World Cup. Or Throwing interceptions is how you win the Superbowl. This is all her fault. She earned this outcome. This XL Pipeline Theater should be an object lesson in thinking that rank stupidity is how you get into MENSA.
It sucks that another Democratic Senate seat is about to be lost.
But from the moment the election results came in, and Senator Landrieu had to run in and win a run-off election, she did everything in her power to highlight and emphasize that she was a cynical, self-centered, self-serving, grandstanding, backstabbing, petroleum industry lobbyist in a Senate seat. Nobody made her do that. She thought that was the way to go. You couldn't have saved her from what comes next after that wildly embarrassing debacle if you tried.
Who thinks that saying you will fight for your GOP opponent's bill is an argument against that GOP opponent and in favor of themselves? Nobody with a clue.
In the end, she clearly wanted to go out furiously blaming President Obama for her sucking air through your teeth it's so bad run-off loss. For a veto. A veto that, thanks to one colleagues vote, never had to be delivered. What does it say about how respected soon-to-be Ex Senator Mary Landrieu was when it was Indy Senator Angus King, no liberal he, who took a brief look ahead at what was to come next and ended up voting 'No'.
“Congress is not – nor should it be – in the business of legislating the approval or disapproval of a construction project,” King said in a statement. “And while I am frustrated that the President has refused to make a decision on the future of the pipeline, I don’t believe that short-circuiting the process to circumvent his administration is in the best interest of the American people. I urge the President to make a decision soon, and, if he doesn’t, I look forward to working with Congress to put a time frame on this decision.”
That's what a "sucks to be you" blow-off looks like, delivered to a desperate and floundering Senate colleague who has framed this entire event around saving her job, when it's delivered by a guy like Angus King. Who is exactly the sort of Senator that this entire episode was targeted towards. The veto was clearly coming. So, this was all about going out bitterly lamenting how Obama had tossed her under the bus. Twice. CYA to the very end.
When an Angus King throws you an anchor, shrugs, and walks away nodding 'no' very slowly?
You've earned that kind of last ignominious look of blatant disrespect from that kind of a peer.
This is how you go out when you have spent years courting exactly this kind of political end.
Perhaps she will be a much better lobbyist when he can do the job more directly.