By the Way, Robert Reich

agrees with me about what last night's debacle REALLY means: It's the economy, stupid, especially jobs.

From Reich:

What happens next November depends both on the extent of joblessness and the direction the economy is moving in. The usual political rule is voters pay more attention to the latter. They’ll forgive even relatively high unemployment if they’re confident the economy is improving. But that old rule hasn’t been tested under conditions of extremely high unemployment. If next November one in five Americans is still unemployed or underemployed or working at lower pay than before the Great Recession, voters may not care that the economy is showing signs of improvement. They’ll vote the rascals out.

Yet when it comes to doing more about the jobs crisis, Obama and the Dems are in a box. The only sure-fire way to get jobs back is for them to do more deficit spending. After all, consumers are still in no mood to spend, businesses won’t invest without consumers to buy the fruits of such investments, and exports are still in the tank. Government remains the purchaser of last resort. (And for those of you still unconvinced, focus on the ratio of debt to GDP, and know that it won’t improve until the denominator of that equation — the GDP — starts growing quickly again, which won’t happen until there’s sufficient overall demand.)

They NEED to ACT like Democrats, not like Wall Street shills.

Still More Silly Commentary About the Mass. Mess

Sorry, bud, but Obama's friends are NOT the nutroots who backed him and wasted their hard earned money on or the "progressives"; his REAL friends ARE the Wall Street banksters and privatizers of our public institutions, including public education.

The "progressives" or rank-and-file Democrats are useful to Obama only for votes, but it is clear who is calling the shots.

For some, the Kool-Aid will NEVER wear off.

The Mess in Mass

It's the day after the outrageous debacle last night in the Massachusetts Senate race, and now all kinds of finger pointing are going on.

As I wrote last night, the blame rests squarely on Obama.

THE issue facing this country is jobs, or the lack of them. THAT is what voters are wanting solutions for, not this sideshow shit of "health care" or bailouts to bankers.

Actually, I don't think the nutroots should be paid much attention to, for after all, the nutroots were the ones promoting Obama over other candidates thanks to 24/7 media propaganda.

The Democrats, whether blue dog, "progressive," liberal, or whatever, NEED to focus on the economy and unemployment to the exclusion of all else.

Another look at the mess last night is here:

First of all, this obviously did not cost us any "filibuster-proof majority." We never had any such majority. At our high we had 58 Democratic Senators, plus the dependable Bernie Saunders (Socialist), and the Republican/Likud Joe Lieberman (Independent) who caucused with us butopposed us on almost every issue. Furthermore, we had to put up with the likes of Ben Nelson, who has almost nothing in common with the Democratic Party when it comes to any matters of policy, Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln who seem to think that ignorant crackers are the future of America (alas, they may be right!), the turncoat Arlen "Single Bullet" Specter who is not now and has never been an actual Democrat despite playing one on TV, and a number of Democrats beholden to, if not actually owned by, the insurance and finance industries and who have proven perfectly willing to buck the leadership and the President to serve their true masters. The best we've ever really had to support the actual policies that We the People voted for was maybe 53 or 54 Senators.

For another thing, Martha Coakley may be the very worst candidate for office I have ever seen in my life (and believe me I have seen a few -- Lynn Yeakle in Pennsylvania, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in Maryland, Creigh Deeds more recently in Virginia, and a multitude more). She not only did not make any effort to connect with the voters, she seemed, actively and purposefully, to strive to disconnect with them. I mean, she misspelled "Massachusettes" (sic) on a piece of her campaign literature. In the closing days of the race she managed both to insult the voters of Massachusetts and their #1 icon, Fenway Park, in a single sentence, after having traded Curt Schilling to the Yankees somehow. It was as if someone in college was doing an experiment to see if a candidate could be so arrogant, isolated and tone-deaf that he or she could blow 30% lead in two weeks. Their hypothesis was confirmed.

And also, this became sort of a backhanded referendum on health care reform. Brown ran against it. Of course, the thing that seems persistently absent from any analysis of this issue, which is being universally interpreted as a public rejection of government health care reform, is that Massachusetts already has a highly popular state-run health care system better than the ones being bandied about in Congress these days. If I lived in Massachusetts and was being asked to choose between them, I would choose the state plan. It was almost as if the voters of Massachusetts were demanding that the government keep its hands off their government health plan.

But lastly and of greatest importance, this defeat STILL would not have been possible to snatch from the jaws of victory, even with Coakley's outrageously blithering incompetence, Brown's checkered past and Swiss-cheese brain, and the bass-ackward nature in Massachusetts of the health care question, without the complete and utter demoralization of the Democratic base. This effect has been caused to an equal extent by Obama and by Congressional Democrats in their obstinate refusal even to TRY to bring about the "change we can believe in" that we tried to usher in by our votes back in November, 2008. Obama, despite his fair words, has by his actions almost seemed to be an agent of continuity rather than change, tinkering around the edges of Bush-era policies in every area, including social policy, fiscal and regulatory policy, and defense, rather than rejecting them outright as We the People voted to do. He has fought to save those policies rather than replace them, and this has thrown us into a deep depression as even our stunning and overwhelming victory has become yet another defeat, albeit in disguise.

Barack Obama has demonstrated what I am beginning to realize is extreme arrogance in his quest for an unachievable "bipartisanship." It's as if the guy thinks he's Superman, able to leap great divides in a single bound and achieve what is simply not possible to achieve, merely through the strength of the fact that he's so much better than anyone else.

But there is no victory to be had by that effort. When you strive for bipartisanship it hands the success or failure of your efforts over to your adversaries They have the sole power to decide whether or not you succeed or fail, and Republicans are petulant to a fault. They will only agree when they get 100% of their way, and even then they are quite willing to send the United States of America to hell in a handbasket rather than hand Barack Obama any policy triumph. We have very nearly given them everything they seek, thereby destroying the value of the policies we pursue, and still they do nothing but sabotage our efforts and insult our leaders at every turn. This only succeeds in sending our own base of supporters into deep depression, as will any hopeless cause.

I could have told this poster/blogger Obama's talk about "reaching across the aisle" and his admiration for Ronald Reagan as some kind of "transformative" figure were bad signs.

Just as I Had Figured,

the good-looking airhead and one-time Cosmopolitan centerfold Scott Brown handily beat Democrat Martha Coakley in a true embarrassment of a race, since this had been Ted Kennedy's seat for all of those years.

True, the Dems could get the seat back in a couple of years, but make no mistake: This was a disaster of epic proportions. Worse than that, it looked as if the Democrats were deliberately throwing this special election.

There had to be people in Massachusetts who were far better than the one who got the nod. Moreover, it seemed to me what support Coakley had was half-hearted.

It doesn't look good for Democrats in the fall. I squarely blame Obama for this mess. He squandered a golden opportunity to actually help people to get back to work--after all, the economy and jobs are really all that matter, not the sideshow of health care "reform" which now is all but dead and never was alive to begin with. Or to bail out Wall Street.

What is truly scary is people will vote the Republicans in, knowing full well they have NO use for working people and would have them as slaves if they could.

link

Who Would Take Kennedy's Senate Seat?

If by chance Ted Kennedy cannot finish out his Senate term, which expires in 2012, who would be the person to take over the seat?

Kennedy himself is said to favor his second wife, Vicki, 54, a Washington attorney who founded an organization, Common Sense About Kids and Guns. In a way she would be an odd choice because she has kept a low profile in the sixteen years she has been married to Kennedy. On the other hand, she is from a well-known Louisiana political family, the Reggies, who knew and were friends with the Kennedy family for decades.

I hope nothing happens to force Ted Kennedy out of his job, but we will have to wait and see about this.

Aside from a brief period (1961-1963), a Kennedy has held that Senate seat since 1953.