Coakley Predicts Victory In MA-Sen

The klan party has no morals

Because the reality of electoral politics in this country remains unchanged. The balance of power still is controlled by a group of people who are sufficiently civic-minded to vote, but insufficiently civic-minded to actually pay attention to politics between elections. As a result, they're prone to vote on bases that are bizarre and inexplicable to those of us who do. Who'd they like to have a beer with. Whose spouse they like the most. Whether they know someone unemployed or who lost their house since the current bunch were elected, without much regard to how things got that way. Flawed analogies and metaphors, e.g., "when times are bad, I must reduce spending and pay down debt, ergo, that's what the government should do to." Superficial impressions gleaned from cursory surfing of what the MSM says and what the MSM says that the people in the wings of the parties say.

As a rule, they usually say they want "change," because the status quo is kicking their ass. But that's "change" in the abstract. When faced with the actual prospect of actual change, they recoil in horror because since the 1970s, their experience with change has been mostly negative and their anxieties about change overwhelm their anxieties about the status quo.

All of American politics for the last twenty-five years boils down to a fight for the hearts and minds of this group of voters. Their lack of connection to, or interest in, the actual issues of the day and policy discussions is totally unfathomable to us on the left. To the power brokers on the right, it's viewed with a degree of exploitive cynicism we couldn't match if we wanted to.

Among those on the left side of the Democratic party, there are those who say the best way to win those hearts and minds is to ram through purely progressive policies by whatever means necessary. Once they see the benefits, they'll come around, or at least respect the conviction and seriousness of purpose. And that they'll react negatively to anything less than drastic change because it will look weak and coopted.

It's a theory, and one that at least has the benefit of attempting to conform theory to practice, but there's not a hell of a lot of data that unequivocally support it.

And then, of course, there are those among the progressives who know only their anger and their ideology and their emotive response to seeing their ideology thwarted. They simply wave away the hard political reality these people present and respond to attempts to talk about the problem with magical thinking and invective.

At the other end, my end, I suppose, there are those who say these people have been emired in the Reagan paradigm for so long, so deeply indoctrinated into it's ideological tenents and so battered by the effects of its policies, that they're going to have to be patient with them and try to pull them leftward by littles until they gradually adjust to the new normal. That if you confront them with too much change at once, their anxiety will overcome their reason and they'll run to the perceived safety of what they know the way my cats run back into their usually hated travel crates once they get to the vet's office.

It's a theory, and one that at least has the benefit of attempting to conform theory to practice, but there's not a hell of a lot of data that unequivocally support it.

And then there are the people to my right who use the electoral reality that these people present as an excuse for continuing business as usual, for doing nothing to change their minds, for continuing to just collect that sweet campaign cash and never stick their necks out or try to make things better. Who probably don't even really have a conception of "better" anymore.

And thus we on the left fight and fight and tear each other to pieces because, to the progressives, everyone to their right looks Evan Bayh or Ben Nelson and to people like me, all the progressives sound like Hamsher and Sirota.

Nope, I don't believe that seriously, Freerider and Viva. And perhaps hindsight is 50/50, I know. But her silence early on did leave the door open for Brown to frame the election (his campaign was so aggressive -- gotta give him credit no matter what fuckin idiot he is).

Oh well, what's done is done, what isn't done isn't done... I'll keep making calls.

Later.