(I know most of us have put the Mass Election behind us...but I missed this "Bill Moyers Journal" interview about it and NOTHING HAS CHANGED since it aired. Instead we Dems on this site are wandering around in a stupor after losing Teddy's seat...and this interview Moyers did is worth the watch because it speaks to GOING FORWARD.) It answered a lot of questions I've been pondering since we lost Teddy's seat...as to what's gone on since then. WORTH THE WATCH or TRANSCRIPT READ.Cheers...KoKo..
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BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. Only about 100,000 votes separated the winner from the loser, and the outcome was to increase the minority party in the senate by just one vote — from 40 to 41. Nonetheless, this week's election in Massachusetts has been declared a repudiation of Barack Obama and a resurrection for Republicans. But I checked just before this broadcast, and Democrats still controlled the White House, still had a 78 vote majority in the house, and 59 of the 100 members of the Senate. But from all the spin this week, you could imagine there had been a coup in our nations Capitol — a tea party to beat all tea parties. No doubt about it, the pundits said — people have spoken — 100,000 of them, at least — and America is red again. Listen to the right's partisan boom box:For the DU "Dial-Ups" and others there is a
FULL TRANSCRIPT at the site. I actually read the Transcript before watching the video. The whole interview, however one reads it or watches it is worth it. "INCREDIBLE!" I think the views represent both the DLC and Lefties views...(and you know how we fight with each other here on DU) :evil grin:
Interview with Obama Supporters: Professor MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL & Blogger and Professor Eric Alterman:http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01222010/watch.htmlMELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Let me just suggest that there was one great potential lesson behind the Obama Presidency that I feel progressives in the broader sense missed. And that is that for all of our sort of we really like to be outsiders, we really like to talk about how difficult the system is. And that's certainly true. But one of the things that we might have done is we might have looked at an Obama candidacy and said, "This now is the moment to field a team of new and interesting and lefty people willing to run for office from dog catcher to the U.S. Senate." That his candidacy was so unlikely to have happened and yet managed to happen, despite the structural constraints that we might have said, "Hey, I'll run for office. Me for the school board. Me for dog catcher. Me for mayor. Me for-" and instead we said, "Oh, thank gosh, we've got Barack Obama. Now we can go back to tweeting and blogging."
-SNIP-
ERIC ALTERMAN: I mean, personally, I spent eight years blogging every day about George Bush. And every day I'd wake up and there'd be some new nightmare that I had to deal with that I didn't even know about the day before. When Barack Obama was elected, something I never would have thought was possible two or three years earlier, I felt like I could relax a little. That the country was in the hands of reasonable people at worst. And yet the other side didn't go away. The other side found — did exactly what you described. The same thing that the Christian Coalition and others on the right have been doing now for 20 or 30 years, and in some ways, this very- the way that you describe, they are better Democrats than our side, because they stay there for the meetings, they stay there- they run for these local offices, and they took over their party. And we whine about our party, and they took over their party.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01222010/watch.html
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