Digby: Dems Better Not Forget Who Got Their Asses in Power.

It wasn't people who wanted more of the same old shit.



http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/dropping-anchor-by-digby-good-god-i.html



Dropping The Anchor

by digby

Good God, I hope this is just rhetorical bullshit.

Democratic leaders are tamping down on expectations for rapid change and trying to signal they will place a calm hand on the nation’s tiller.

“The country must be governed from the middle,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday. Repeating themes from election night, she said she plans to emphasize “civility” and “fiscal responsibility.”



After saying the word "change" at least 175,000 times in the last year, the Democrats had better not start sounding too much like Republican grandpas or millions of people who voted for them might get the feeling they've just been taken for a bunch of chumps. I get that they are trying to calm the village and keep the restive Republicans from staging a hissy fit right out of the gate. And delivering on all this massive change was never going to be easy.

But they had better keep in mind that they were elected by a lot of new voters and liberals too and they are going to need very high levels of support for a sustained period of time to get anything done. I don't expect them to cater to the base like Rove did, but they'd better not take it too much for granted either. We've seen what happened after 2006, when they raised expectations that they would fight Bush hard on the war. Their approval ratings ended up worse than Bush's because they were loathed not only by the right wing (who will loathe them no matter what they do) but by their own base as well. They simply can't afford to let that happen again.

There's nothing inherently wrong with co-opting conservative rhetoric for their own use, but the other side is very good at making them wish they'd never made promises they had no intention of keeping. (It's what they are really good at.) I just don't think the Dems are clever enough to play sophisticated rhetorical games and not end up hanging themselves with their own words. They should just say what they are going to do as forthrightly as possible.

Of course, that might be exactly what they are doing.

Everyone needs to calm down.

What the Obama camp wants to avoid is people giving up too quickly because we don't have universal healthcare and the DOW at 20,000 by day 100.

obviously.

and who are looking for a thoughtful, steady President who won't be a tool of his political base.

They're not the ones whose energy and fire kept this election out of Republican hands. The people who won this election were the new voters and the previously disenfranchised who refused to let a corrupt and decrepit electoral system, administered for too long by the "centrist" powers that be, keep them from exercising their vote. Down south, according to the NY Times, the African American vote was up by 15% in some counties. Those kinds of surges are what made the difference.

I know that Barack remembers everything that happened this election season....including Digby. :eyes:

Just sayin'.

The ones who benefited from Howard Dean's fifty state strategy.

Contrary to her belief, they were not just the liberal base (not even mostly them) but those blue-collar Reagan Democrats, and Independents, and former Republicans, and centrist Democrats, and red-staters voting for a Democrat for the first time.

Digby, before 2004, used to argue that the left should not pin the Democrats to the wall like the right-wingers pinned the Republicans to the wall. (That didn't work out too well, did it?). Somewhere along the way, she changed her mind. But she's wrong.

Obama has not even taken office yet. So relax, enjoy the win, and let Obama pick his team and transition into being president.

The Dems in Congress, people. See who's quoted? The Dems in Congress.

and you should be ashamed of yourself for showing us this bullshit.

That site was just put together and is not a credible site.

we need to stop this kind of Republican attack, the primaries have

been over for months.

What is wrong with you people???

:mad:

Digby? Is doing a hit piece?

Look at the Congress we elected in '06.

the center." The people of this country are SICK OF THE CENTER. The "center" outsourced all our jobs. The "center" brought us the Iraq War. The "center" has looted us blind. The "center" SUCKS. And the "center" is NOT the CENTER. The real center is way over to the left of the Corpo/Fascist extremism of the Bush Junta and its Democratic Party leadership colluders.

So, what is Pelosi doing speaking for the peoples' house, from an extreme Corpo/Fascist position--and lying through her teeth about where the "center" is?

10% approval rating. That's what she got for a so-called Democratic Congress. She speaks for 10% of the American people: the worst 10%.

There's just a short period of time where short term memory loss kicks in. Those in congress will remember 18 months from now, in the Senate the memory loss lasts about 5 years.