Ed Kilgore was right about the "sense of cold fury" that liberals must "bury".

madfloridian

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Sun Aug-14-11 05:09 PM
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Ed Kilgore was right about the "sense of cold fury" that liberals must "bury".

That term was used recently in another of the many warnings to those of us who are often the feet on the ground members of our party, aka the "left", the "liberals", the "progressives".

From a very scathing opinion piece by Ed Kilgore at Salon:

Liberal voters are precisely the least likely Democratic-leaning segment of the electorate to sit on their hands in 2012, no matter how they feel about Obama.

And that reality, I suspect, is contributing significantly to the anger and despair expressed by progressive elites about Obama. They may now regret his nomination in 2008, or even (on strategic grounds) his election. But they know in their hearts they will be voting for him in 2012, and for the most part, speaking out for his re-election. Next time there is an open Democratic presidential nomination contest, the organized left will almost certain to make far greater ideological demands on candidates, and make a far less speculative choice of a favorite, than it did in 2008. In the meantime, liberals will mostly have to bury a sense of cold fury that they have been "had" by a politician who in the course of less than three years has devolved from being the left�s great hope for a "transformative" presidency to a heresiarch over whom the Left has virtually no leverage.

What triggered this bout of my "cold fury"? A simple thing really...like not being able to get through to either the business office or doctors' section of a very large medical clinic. It is one of the two top clinics in our area, but their phone system is archaic and dysfunctional.

I got a large bill that is an obvious error...things like that happen a lot with them. But I still had to call and verify the error. Haven't been able to get through to the business office after 2 days. Called the section for our doctor, waiting 20 minutes then. When I explained the problem I was given a long lecture by the answering receptionist on how they were not the business office. I was told no one else could get through to the business office either. Then she got mad when I questioned why. She said they were having to deal with benefit cuts by Medicare, and there was nothing they could do. I continued to ask her a few things, but she got even madder. I said I was a concerned patient asking about a bill, she said she was going to hang up.

I realized that health care will probably continue to deteriorate in this country.

I realize that in November they will be meeting to come up with cuts to Social Security and Medicare, in spite of the fact that the great majority of Americans oppose such a thing. I remembered how they are dismantling public education in order to allow billionaires to set the education agenda and make a profit. I remembered how when I posted recently about they are hitting retirees so hard with taxes on Social Security....I was in effect said to be whining and not wanting to pay my fair share. When I post about the vital importance of public education, the thread becomes an attack on teachers and how lousy they are. When many of us show concern at the renewed blending of religion and government in the Faith-based initiatives, we are told it is really not happening.

So I guess that "cold fury" that Ed Kilgore mentioned is going to be hard to contain.

Kilgore's rant is only the latest. I remember the way Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars put it on a progressive blogger conference call last year with David Axelrod. She was right to call it hippie punching.

"That tension burst out into the open when Madrak directly asked Axelrod: "Have you ever heard of hippie punching?" That prompted a long silence from Axelrod.

"You want us to help you, the first thing I would suggest is enough of the hippie punching," Madrak added. "We're the girl you'll take under the bleachers but you won't be seen with in the light of day."

Axelrod didn't engage on "hippie punching," but he said he agreed with the blogger. "To the extent that we shouldn't get involved in intramural skirmishing, I couldn't agree more," Axelrod said. "We just can't afford that. There are big things at stake here."

Madrak replied that Axelrod was missing the point -- that the criticism of the left made it tougher for bloggers like herself to motivate the base. "Don't make our jobs harder," she said."

Liberal blogger confronts Axelrod

If they do not consider us important it makes it easy for them to tune us out, make us irrelevant. And it is easier then to ignore the issues that are vital to our lives.

The Vice President last year told us to stop whining.

Biden, speaking at a frozen yogurt plant in New Hampshire, said he wanted to �remind our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives.

�It�s idiotic is what it is,� says Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, one of Obama�s most pointed critics on the left. �If Democrats, with the White House and Congressional super-majorities, had delivered on what they had promised, and if people had jobs, no one would be whining. They have reaped what they sowed. They haven�t delivered on what they�ve promised � and instead of making the case as to why they would do if they are reelected, they are insulting people.

Read more: Quit Whining.

Obama appeared to approve of Biden's remarks later on.

�Folks wake up! This is not some academic exercise. As Joe Biden put it, Don�t compare us to the Almighty, compare us to the alternative,� Obama said at a fundraiser in New York last week.

�It was easy showing up for the inauguration even though it was cold,� the president said, recalling, �I�m polling at 70 percent, Beyonc� and Bono are singing. But I believe that the reason you got involved at the outset was not because we had cool pollsters, not because it was the trendy thing to do, not just because my predecessor had become unpopular, but because at some level we understood that the American dream had served each of us very well.�

Robert Gibbs called out the "professional left" also last year and said we could not be satisfied.

"During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

�I hear these people saying he�s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,� Gibbs said. �I mean, it�s crazy.�

The press secretary dismissed the �professional left� in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, �They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we�ve eliminated the Pentagon. That�s not reality.�

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: �They wouldn�t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.�

WH unloads on professional left

When Howard Dean spoke out in the beginning, he could really hit the nail on the head. There is a paragraph from his 2004 book, You Have the Power, which should make party leaders think before antagonizing their own.

Without the involvement and commitment of people at the ground level, you don't really have a party. You have no pool from which to draw future congresspeople, senators, and presidents. And you have no genuine excitement.

..."He says "the truth is when you trade your values for the hope of winning, you end up losing and having no values--so you keep losing.

We have to reconnect to the base.

..."In recent years the Democrats, in our pursuit of big dollars, have neglected the people we're there to serve. We let our connection to our base atrophy and have forgotten, as they say in politics, who brought us to the dance. In service to a falsely named "centrism," we've sidestepped every major request from labor unions, especially on including worker protections in our free-trade agreements.

False centrism that passes for moderation.

I think Ed Kilgore was right to use the words "cold fury." But I think he was wrong about the reason for much of it.

I think it is a first step in a helplessness, when one really realizes that no party is standing up for things people need to have a decent society.