I’ve known Dennis since 1988. We don’t really talk, or hang out, or even associate much anymore. But I was there with Dennis, as a very green college intern, when he ran in a primary against Mary Rose Oakar in 1988, and got 25% of the vote. At the time, Dennis was attempting the comeback from his disastrous stint as mayor of Cleveland, an office which Dennis handed on a silver platter to George Voinovich in 1979.
Dennis is reprising his stubbornness from his mayoralty over the current health care bill. Like he is today, Dennis as mayor, took a single issue (the continued existence of a public utility, Cleveland Public Power) to the then logical extreme of leading the city of Cleveland into default. Yes, Dennis was right at the time. Yes, Cleveland Public Power is still with us, thanks to Dennis. Yes, Dennis has been proven right over time.
All that “being right” also led to George Voinovich, a Republican mayor of the largest Democratic vote base in Ohio, in the most important presidential state in the country, Ohio. Dennis, in effect proven by facts, created with his own hand a kryptonite for Democrats statewide. By giving birth to George Voinovich and a Voinovich GOP machine which could count on Democratic votes from the Democratic base, Dennis Kucinich, through his own stubbornness, doomed Ohio to two solid decades of Republican misrule, which in turn led to Ohio being the turning point for at least two Republican presidencies, each of which has been utterly disastrous for this country. Just take one look around Ohio.
Now that I’m running for office, I have no incentive to criticize Dennis over his current idiocy on health care reform. Dennis represents a good chunk of my county council district. My voters like Dennis. And I’d love to have Dennis’ support. But I’d much rather have Dennis’ vote on this health care bill.
Because if Dennis gets his way on health care, and this bill fails, Dennis will again, as he did in Cleveland in 1978, doom this country to further Republican misrule. Only this time, Dennis will be doing it with full knowledge aforethought. Dennis knows that if this bill fails, Democrats across this country will pay a heavy price. It may cost Barack Obama re-election. That’s just the politics.
More importantly, if this bill fails, Dennis will doom the rest of us, for the foreseeable future, to a health care system that is fundamentally broken. Dennis will claim that he again is in the right. Despite Dennis being completely unable to posit a scenario in which his position for single payer will ever be implemented, yes, he may be still be right.
The rest of us will pay for Dennis being right. I know. I’ve paid that price as a Clevelander, and an Ohioan, for a very long time. I’m running for office in part to help clean up the mess “Dennis being right” left behind.
But you are wrong, Dennis, to vote against this health care bill. The saddest part is that you know it.
Thank you for being the Senator who every Senator knows is two bricks shy of a load, off your rocker to the point that your majority leader forced you out of the Senate this term. Thank you for getting your colleague’s support, to the point that Jon Kyl claims unemployed benefits make people lazy, to the point of standing behind your filibuster for days, despite knowing how bat shit cray you are, all to prove their ideology on the backs of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Those hundreds of thousands of Americans will now spend weeks fighting paperwork to get unemployment benefits that you, Jim Bunning, halted, unpaid Medicaid claims that you, Jim Bunning, convinced your Republican colleagues to support, every one of whom possess full knowledge of your bat shitness. Because your Republican Senate colleagues were so desperate to win an election, those hundreds of thousands will fight bills that go overdue, check bouncing fees, car payments, defaulting on their mortage, running out of medication, FOR MONTHS.
In an election year.
All because your Republican Senate colleagues, Jim Bunning, who are 100% convinced that YOU are the crazy one, wanted to serve their ideology to win that election.
So in between stumbling upon a very interesting story about WKYC (stay tuned!), I watched the health care summit. I liked it. It was an exercise in transparency that I don’t think any president in my lifetime has ever attempted. So, what did we see?
We saw the Republican Party’s desperate refusal to govern in stark relief. Republicans not only said “no”, they said it in a rehearsed, robotic, scripted display of total obstruction. Late last night, Chris Matthews lined up all the instances of GOP talking points – “start over”, “kill this bill”, “scrap it”, “step by step”, “blank sheet of paper”, they said them all so often, so precisely the same, it was like watching North Koreans praying “Dear Leader”.
This was Barack going the last, agonizing mile to get any Republican at all to address the country’s problems. It’s hard to watch, hard to endure, but that effort will pay dividends. We are used to seeing Democrats cave to Republican obstructionism a lot quicker, with a lot less patience, than Barack Obama is displaying. Think about it – we are approaching March. This bill has been declared dead countless times since last August. It looks likely now to become law, over the protracted, petty, partisan, pathetic petulance of Republicans. The electorate very much likes, and rewards, that kind of determination.
Short term, the White House has their issue for the fall. The way is free for Democrats to pass this bill through reconciliation, and let the chips fall where they may. And if this bill has any visibly positive effects in the population before the election, any at all, Republicans won’t win either house of Congress.
Long term?
Barack Obama is proving that you will not outlast him. Ever.
Time to comment on Martha Coakley, Scott Brown, health care, Barack Obama, and the Great Panic of 2010.
What the hell is wrong with you people? At this point in the Clinton presidency, Republicans were claiming that Hillary had murdered Vince Foster, put him in a trunk, and dumped in a park. At this point in the Reagan presidency, the economy was in the toilet, with predictions that Reagan wouldn’t even dare to run for re-election. At this point in Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the country was teetering on the brink of societal meltdown.
Democrats just lost Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat to an unknown Republican, so yeah, that sucks, and so do Democrats for losing it. Health care reform is on the brink, it shouldn’t be, and that’s our fault, too. Call the fucking wahmbulance. Remember this scene from The Godfather? ”AHHH what can I do! What can I do!”
Time to start acting like men. And women. Instead of like whining children.
Change isn’t easy. That’s the lesson that we are learning. If you thought you could walk down to the polling place, put a mark on a ballot, and get every single thing you wanted from your country, you’re a lazy, sorry excuse for an American. Grow the fuck up.
It don’t work that way. You get from your democracy what you put into it. If all you put into it is one campaign for president, and then you sit back and wait for your plate of goodies, chances are, that plate isn’t gonna be what you want.
This especially applies to members of Congress. Barack Obama called your bluff. Every member of Congress, Democrat & Republican, has been campaigning on health care reform for years. The White House said “show me what ya got”, and ya’ll came up with bullshit. Members of Congress have done nothing but play games to save their own skins, from Max Baucus, to Ben Nelson, to House blue dogs, every one of whom has made losing their seat more likely as a result. And Republicans showed their hand from inauguration day – they have no plan, and they want no plan to pass.
Does Barack deserve criticism for failing to show leadership on the issue? Maybe, but I tend to think not. I don’t know what else this president could have done to provide leadership on health care reform in a total absence of leadership from Congress. We do not have a system that allows a president to declare what health care reform should look like. We have a system that rewards leadership in all branches of government, punishes cowardice, and gives ample opportunity for change to those who choose between leadership and cowardice wisely.
As Barack has said, change will not come if we wait for some other person, or we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Democrats need to make better choices. We need to grow a pair. Republicans have nothing but, waving their flacid vapid arrogance around as if it amounts to policy. Once Democrats meet Republicans on that battlefield, we win. Every time.
Howie Klein from HuffPo left a comment here today as follows.
Tim, there’s a lot of legitimate anger towards corporate Democrats and towards Blue Dogs. Helping Republicans, though, is (AT BEST) naive. Today Digby had a great suggestion for using that anger towards helping elect BETTER Democrats ( Mary Jo Kilroy is a great example and there needs to be more Democrats like her, not more Republicans like Steve Stivers). Digby’s post: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-sendi…
And we have a new Blue America page up that we hope people will use as a jumping off point towards helping elect better Democrats and not teabaggers:
I’m front paging the links because I like the sentiment of putting these battles into primaries, and leaving them there. But here’s my problem with Jane Hamsher and her ilk. They never leave the fight in the primary, because that’s not Jane Hamsher’s business model. Frank Rich’s teabagger column today applies to Jane Hamsher as much as it applies to teabaggers.
[This] behavior is not anomalous. Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain. In this cause, Steele is emulating no one if not Sarah Palin, whose hunger for celebrity and money outstrips even his own.
Hustlers like Steele and Palin [my addition - and Hamsher] take the money and run. All their followers get in exchange is a lousy tea party T-shirt. Or a ghost-written self-promotional book.
Any first year political science major knows that on the political spectrum, the hard left meets the hard right in perfect unison, eventually. In this instance, they meet at the cash register. Jane Hamsher is a media whore, plain and simple. And no, that’s not a female slur, it is a fact. Jane Hamsher is not advocating in good faith for any change, she is an opportunist who is sacrificing the good of her own country for the sake of her own self aggrandizement. She is eating up this attention, because there is money to be made in pretending to be, or actually being, an idiot.
Lucky for Jane, she’s both. Which makes her perfect fodder for my Youtube channel if she ever shows her money grubbing, attention seeking, lying, double-crossing, sorry face in Ohio.
The question, raised by Nate Silver and others: Is Firedoglake trying to scare vulnerable Democrats into retirement in order to kill health care reform? All indications point to “yes.” I’m hearing that FDL will conduct more polls in vulnerable Democratic districts, based largely on this chart of the “top 20 Democrats who could lose their seat over health care vote[s]. Snyder was at the top of that list, posted by FDL’s Jane Hamsher on Jan. 6. (One irony: Snyder is a fairly progressive member of Congress, and not a member of the Blue Dogs.)
Tension between FDL and some other progressive sites has increased since the Senate’s health care compromise took shape–Hamsher has campaigned aggressively to “kill the bill.” A month ago she predicted that “left/right populist outrage” would do so, and she hasn’t slowed down since.
The three Ohio Democrats on Hamsher’s hit list are Steve Driehaus, who Hamsher’s already gone after, Zack Space, and Mary Jo Kilroy. A lot of Democrats in Ohio have gone to the mat for these seats, for decades. Ever since I’ve been in Ohio politics, all of those seats have been targeted, and I’ve done more than my share over those years to help make them go Democrat.
As I’ve written previously, Hamsher and her staff, Bob Brigham, spent all last year getting Ohio bloggers to lobby these same Ohio Congressional Democrats to vote FOR a health care bill. I was one of the people who helped them out. I will never make that mistake again. This woman is a cancer, her tactics are repulsive, and if I ever meet her face to face, she will own that.
Jane Hamsher is no better than teabaggers. She’ll be a perfect fit for my Youtube channel.
When asked what the bill would have to contain to get his support when it came out of a House-Senate conference committee for a final vote, he wouldn’t answer. When asked why Medina County Democrats should continue to trust him, he didn’t have an answer. He repeatedly told us how he was sacrificing time with his family to meet with us on a Sunday afternoon, even though he had chosen the date and the time. In short, he was defensive, evasive, and condescending.
If you get banned from DailyKos for calling out painfully obvious self-promotional Glenn Beck biz model media whoring by Cenk Uygur and Jane Hamsher weeks before everyone elsenotices, can you get un-banned? Just askin.
Proving that no good deed goes unpunished in Kos-land, I posted this diary today, and got flamed like a champ.
Ok, so I wrote a diary with a lot of invective in it against Jane Hamsher. I apologize to this community for the invective. I do not apologize to Jane Hamsher. Here’s why.
Like the Kos diarist who called this to my attention, I didn’t know much about Jane Hamsher until she started getting paid to advocate for the public option. I never even read her blog, Firedoglake. I had barely come across her in 2008 as yet another whiny blogger complaining that the Obama campaign wasn’t advertising on her website. Called her out on it during the general. Called her out on her thinly veiled blackmail threat last summer. Told her to blow me once. Good times.
So it’s no surprise to me that Hamsher is now advocating a sordid alliance with teabaggers to kill the health care bill, and wallowing in the attention by pimping it further, complete with another pitch for another blog of hers. The pimping never stops with these people. Never.
What was surprising is that Bob Brigham would work for her this summer, getting paid by Firedoglake to advocate to state blogs for the public option. In Ohio, we remember Brigham for his brief tangential role in payola-tinged Jerome Armstrong infected blog bullshit during the 2005 Sherrod Brown primary early days. Not the most fond memories of Bob Brigham on my end. So this summer, when Bob Brigham called me on the phone, completely out of the blue, that was surprising, too.
But I’m all about building bridges to get something done to move our country forward, so I took the call from Bob Brigham, heard him out, and helped out with some pretty damn good public option blogging. I support the idea, still do, liked the idea of making House members pledge to vote “no” on a bill without a public option. I had no delusions that any of this would make the public option reality, I just wanted to do what I could do. Put my money (which equalled zero) where my mouth was (which equals something more than zero).
So it didn’t take much convincing from Bob Brigham, who at the time was pitching the same schtick to every prominent blogger in Ohio. I pressed Bob Brigham on his funding sources, which he said were all small online donors. I have no reason to doubt that, so I even gave Bob Brigham advice, some intelligence, some inside scoop, over a few Gmail chats and long late night phone calls. I got nothing out of it, just a few links to my blog, and a good warm fuzzy feeling that I was doing good.
Then Jane Hamsher, who paid Bob Brigham to “reach out” to bloggers in Ohio and other states, decides to align with teabaggers to kill the health care bill.
So here’s my advice to Bob Brigham, and anyone else who is paid to “reach out” to bloggers for any reason. If you ever, EVER work for someone this duplicitous, this disloyal, who will turn on Democrats in such a manner, DO NOT CALL ME. I don’t want to hear from you. Bob Brigham, that means YOU. This is Ohio. Democrats in Ohio fight for Democrats to win. We do not, EVER, pull the horseshit your paymaster just pulled. Maybe your previous experience with Ohio didn’t teach you that lesson, Bob, but I certainly hope this one will.
And to my readers who may wonder why I was the most vocal public option blogger in Ohio, here’s your answer. I believe it’s a good idea. Period. I was asked to blog louder on the public option, repeatedly, by a paid member of Jane Hamsher’s staff. And I still support this health care bill without it.
Why? Because I’m a Democrat who supports a Democratic president who I helped elect. And if you’re not on board with that, at any time, on any issue?
I’m liking the fact that Markos is getting some exposure on Meet the Press today, because I like that political pressure is coming from the left in a way it never did before Markos began this site. However….
There’s a reason why Joe Scarborough had that smile on his face, laughing all the way to the Republican bank as he was surrounded by people happily bashing Barack Obama.
And if you can’t figure out the reason that Joe Scarborough was laughing and smiling and sitting with the smugness of a duplicitous game player watching his opponents join him in the game, well……can’t help ya.
I did like two things I saw today on MTP. First, both Markos and Howard Dean walked back this “kill the bill” nonsense. Second thing I liked was the notion of regulating the health insurance industry as a public utility, both from Howard Dean and from Markos. No public option? No public competition for the insurance industry? Fine. Regulate them like a public utility.
Everyone needs health care, just like everyone needs electricity, water, sewers, garbage pickup, you name it. I’d like to see if the reconciliation process will go in that route.
And I suspect you’ll find open ears. Dennis Kucinich might even be interested, and could even take a lead role. After all, Dennis cut his political teeth on public utility battles. Dennis was almost recalled as mayor of Cleveland, in fact, put Cleveland into default, over a fight with public utilities, in order to save Cleveland’s only municipal power company. Those of us in Cleveland know that battle still defines Dennis’ career, for better or worse.
Progressives get it. If you regulate the health insurance industry as a public utility, you can justify mandating everyone buy their product, because of that regulation. I haven’t seen that level of regulation in any of the previous bills, perhaps this can be a part of conference discussions.
For example, public utilities must go through open, transparent, and government approved processes before they raise their rates even one cent. Why shouldn’t this apply to health insurance? I’d just love to see Republicans defending against the notion. They’d twist themselves in knots.
At that point, I think Markos will be getting the last laugh on Joe Scarborough.
I’m trying to follow the rules here, which say I’m not allowed to call out users by name in a diary title. So I didn’t.
But I’m getting sick and tired of Cenk Uygur wandering along every time something happens in a media cycle that gives him the opportunity to poke Barack Obama like some RedState neanderthal having a Tourette’s moment.
And that includes gratuitously calling in to the BBC’s World Have Your Say program, broadcast on NPR, on the one-year anniversary of Barack Obama’s election, while I was on the air, in studio, from WCPN in Cleveland, the only guest defending Barack Obama against the absurd BBC chosen title of the program “Has Barack Obama Let Down His Supporters?”, thank you BBC for your objectivity.
Who pops in as a caller? Among the entire nation of potential callers? No WAIT the entire GLOBE, yes the WHOLE WORLD can call in to that program and get on the air, yes, EVERY PERSON ON EARTH. Who calls in? Cenk Uygur, doing precisely the same thing he’s doing here, repeatedly, over and over.
Now, a lot of folks in this community think that Barack Obama has let down his supporters. In fact, on the BBC program that day, I was the only person defending Barack Obama. Cenk Uygur didn’t need to call in and pile on. But he did. Sounds like a business plan to me. Or RedState.
And I’m damn tired of it.
I’m just as disappointed in this health care reform situation as anyone. But I WILL NOT take this as an opportunity to smack around Barack Obama, for any reason. I look at this disappointment as an opportunity to re-commit to working harder to change this country, as I’m quite certain Barack is doing this moment.
That’s why we elected him. Not to give us all we want, not to be our personal punching bag whenever we see an opportunity to land one on his jaw, but to bust his ass for us. That’s what he’s doing.
I just finished watching Olbermann and Rachel, their thorough demolishing of the sorry human being who is Joe Lieberman, and just had to put this down.
I was one of the people most loudly objecting to the Ned Lamont campaign to primary Joe Lieberman. At the time, I felt it was counterproductive. At the time, regrettably, I was supporting the Iraq war. And at the time, I thought Joe Lieberman would never forget it, and seek revenge.
I was so wrong to support the Iraq war, ever. That’s my bad. I still think the Ned Lamont campaign was counterproductive, for the reasons I state. We’ll have to disagree on that one.
Joe Lieberman doing precisely what I thought he would do after the Ned Lamont campaign – that’s HIS bad. I don’t take any consolation in being right about that. No, in fact, I can’t believe Lieberman went through with it. Least of all, against this president.
Lieberman is exhibiting the most repulsive behavior in all of politics, a behavior that repels average Americans from engaging in their democracy. A behavior so transparent, it’s laughably easy to pull out tape to prove it.
And his staff basically admits to Howard Fineman that he’s doing this for revenge. This man, who once was our VP nominee, who we all campaigned for in 2000, has let the darkest corners of his soul overcome his own humanity, with proof of it, in real time, every step of the way. It is quite a sight.
Some will argue we should take this as a lesson. Or we could accept it for what it plainly is – a thoroughly pathetic politician sacrificing the good of our country for the most petty of human emotions. Lieberman not only screwed this community, he’s now screwing people like me, who stood up for him during that primary he now wants to price as high as the health of his fellow citizens.
Lieberman is learning that these things do get recorded somewhere. Maybe only in media clips, or blog posts, or Senate vote tallies. But probably, somewhere Joe Lieberman piously prays to so.. so….how should I put it……”sincerely”, in that place, they are recorded more permanently. And in that place, Joe Lieberman will learn the lesson HE needs to learn, unfortunately too late for the Americans whose lives Joe Lieberman plays with like a toy.
The rest of us? Listen folks, I argued against that Lamont thing as loud as anyone. BUT DON’T YOU DARE AVOID DOING IT AGAIN. This community stood up for what was right, when doing so was unpopular, in the most American exercise imaginable. Don’t listen to ANYONE who tells you to “learn some lesson”.
The lesson I learned is that this community was CORRECT to go after Joe Lieberman, that this community should be APPLAUDED for doing so, and that this community should continue to look at Democratic primaries as THE PLACE to make sure that the foul rot of Joe Lieberman NEVER has this much control over our political party ever again.
