Dem Talking Points: Laser Focus On Jobs Since Anger And Anxiety Factors In MA-Sen

Republicans have made that exact point in their reactions tonight, but a senior Democrat told TPMDC tonight that while Martha Coakley's loss stings, it wasn't the White House's fault.

Obama does accept responsibility. I can't say there's anything going on in DC that he would not have control over. Keep moving inertia in his direction and things go his way.

It was a referendum on Obama, no matter how much the parties (and maybe Ralph Nader has been correct all along) say it isn't. He wasn't elected to be a timid DLC candidate, and he took all the wrong lessons from the first years of the Clinton presidency. Yes, tpinlb, but we didn't elect anyone capable of being FDR, did we.

It's the economy. stupid!

The DLCers (the Kerry "faction") failed to recognize the imperative to capitalize on Coakley's hard-scrabble roots, while Brown's "people" were sending him all over MA in his old pick-up.

This deaf-dumb-and-blind reaction by the upper-crust Democrats can only be called one thing; elitism.

If the Massachusetts Dems had started from day 1, promoting Coakley's roots instead of taking her for granted, this could have been much different.

And don't let the spinmeisters and compulsive credit-takers fool anyone into thinking this is some sort of progressive backlash against Obama, the privileged status quo is getting pinched from right AND left by their own hubris. NY23 and MA Senate seat represent those two sides closing in on the middle.

It is much more reminiscent of the non-partisan league from the early 20th Century northern plains, where the (D) and the (R) were still behind candidate's names, but they had to be bona fide populists, approved by the non-partisan league, or they could not get elected.

That may be happening again, as the public, though divided itself, demands an end to those constant compromises that benefit only the privileged few, at the expense of the masses.

This current struggle harkens back to Eisenhower and his MIC admonitions, which we failed to heed, at great expense to our national promise. Obama is a victim of it, much more than a perpetrator, and putting blame on his shoulders for 50 years of patent greed in our book-cookin' Wall Street ranks is disingenuous, at best, and glaringly opportunistic at worst.

This is a referendum on achieving legitimate popular government, not on Obama. Blaming him for these decades-old, deeply seated conflicts is cheap propaganda.