The New York Times' Tim Eagan has been lost (if he ever wasn't) to Barak Obama.
As president, he's been a sober, cautious, tongue-shackled realist - a moderate Republican of the pre-crazy, pre-Tea Party era. Having failed to come up with a Big Idea to guide his presidency, he will sink or swim now on strengths that don't lend themselves to large rallies or passionate enthusiasm. Sobriety and moderation, by definition, are boring.
Urban liberals, labor, blacks and Hispanics, environmentalists, the young - the core of Obama's army in 2008 - are disappointed in the president of August, 2011. They're right when they say he caved on the debt talks: the evidence is House Speaker John Boehner's boast that he got 98 percent of what he wanted from the president.
Instead of staying home he suggests we focus on electing allies in the House and Senate.
But instead of waiting for an arm-flapping populist to emerge from the genteel summer redoubt on Martha's Vineyard, the left should focus on the coming ground war, and try to fill Congress with new people who can at least tell fact from fiction.
I agree.
We have our legislature up for election in 2012 and we can now put up candidates who can move the Overton Window from the crazy right, which we now are experiencing, toward a more rational middle right and toward a desirable centrist or center left position. I think this will take 3-6 cycles or a very big event which isn't on the horizon.
If as one writer has noted, that some Democratic Senate leaders are not willing to support a candidate in a marginal-swing district, others need to help win the seat...or, at worst, make the R's spend resources defending it.
We have 4 Congressional seats which can be filled by people who are allies or will, at least, listen to us. Now is the time to find viable candidates in the three districts: CD3, CD4 and CD6. They can be taken back.
So, if you don't like our Eisenhower-era President, work down-ballot and come together to elect those who will support a House which doesn't crash the economy, the government and the people and which will make the governments responsive again. |
