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In reply to the discussion: Would everyone take a deep breather and Chill the F**K OUT! [View all]BlueWI
(1,736 posts)I'm trying to get to that point, but I'm not there yet. I do think it's also possible to understate the magnitude of the breach in process and minimize how a lot of core Democratic voters feel about it - and not just the right wing. Dem voters, volunteers and staffers who admired and supported Al Franken, who do not get to be represented by him anymore due to this chain of events - there's emotion involved. With other factions within the Democratic base, this action against Franken taps into perceptions, fairly or unfairly, that the party leadership is disconnected from its base, cares about the base on election day, but soft-pedals the party's platform after that. Some of what you're seeing is pure frustration about what I think is a major error in judgment by a group of senators that we have all supported, donated to, been inspired by.
This is a not completely parallel example, but it's like the Dem votes in favor of the Iraq War Resolution - we'd all like to take the high road and be measured when we criticize other Dems, but sometimes the issue is bigger than the next election. The 38 Democratic Senators who pressured one of their colleagues to resign should have considered the unintended consequences more carefully, and in my opinion - before we go on to the practical matters of the next election, these senators need to hear from those who disagreed with the call-outs of Franken, so hopefully the rush to judgment and lack of attention to process will never be repeated.
I've expressed my opinions directly to my home state senator, Tammy Baldwin, and I'll be mailing my Bernie Sanders T-shirt back to his office with a note expressing my opinion as well. I would like to see all of the senators involved be very purposeful about explaining their decision, and at least some of them have started going at Trump with similar sentiments. But the decision that was made to publicly call out Franken on flimsy evidence has had a predictable response of unfocused outrage, some of it over the top, but in these times, what did they expect? Good public leaders should have anticipated that and accounted for it before going forward with a campaign against Franken.