Obama/Dem Critics, please don't blow this chance to electorally crush the GOP.

Of course I am fine with opinions and disagreements on specific policy matters, but anyone on this blog who insists on continually negatively criticizing Obama and Dems, especially only after a few months in power, needs to understand that your are causing divisions that thwart this golden chance to deal a knockout electoral blow against the GOP for decades at least. The GOP is in leadership disarray. Rush is their leader, and Cheney confirms it. You have Rush saying Obama is worse than Al Qaeda. You have crazy, angry right wingers on their blogs spewing insane hate against Obama, Dems, and progressives in general. You have right wing whackjobs actually shooting people. You have the GOP and Rush etc. condemning Judge Sotomayor. They are saying "hell no" to everything from health care, to student loans, to green technology. 200,000 moderate R's left them in PA just last year before the fall elections. They are shrinking into a band mainly of old angry white male right wing nutcases so out of step with the overwhelming majority of Americans that we have a golden, very unique opportunity to stay united, stay mainstream, and deal them an electoral knockout in 2010 with even more House seats and a veto-proof Senate. Stay united folks. Keep your eye the ball. Train your fire on the GOP nutjobs and their crazy right wing media ilk. If we stay united and focused, we knock them into electoral oblivion because public sentiment against them will continue to mount, and the overwhelming majority of Americans will not stand for these people who are in off-the-charts-crazy-land-right-wing-field.

Or some dumb shit like that.

:eyes:

Political and policy accomplishment is about coalitions, unity, and beating the opposition party. Your "dissent" will never get close to meaning anything if you are forever adrift in a powerless desert. You get the POWER by BEATING the political opposition. You BEAT the OPPOSITION through UNITY, and you get at least some of what you want once you get the power. Otherwise you are lost in a crazy loop of dissent dissent dissent, accomplish nothing, defeat your own purposes, dissent dissent dissent... at some point, the crazy loop needs to stop and unity, consensus, and focus need to occur. You will never, ever, ever get EVERYTHING you want no matter who is in charge of any organization or endeavor you are associated with. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. We got rid of Bush and have a MUCH better alternative now. Train your fire on the GOP. It is a golden opportunity.

they miss their opportunity to crush the GOP.

is what it is called. They said that is what helped Deeds to win the primary in Va. Moran was able to destroy mcauffie but was seen to be so negative that it caused a self-inflicted fatal wound.

Grinding the Rethugs into the dirt with the ballot box is well within our rights. With the GOP in a circular firing squad and Rush calling the shots, all we need are a few people with some guts who'll stand up for what's right, and we'll have the GOP wandering in the wilderness for 40 years!

At least that's how I interpreted the OP.

Don't get too excited by these shifts. There will always be a party called the GOP. It will just morph into a different set of leaders. The more you "crush" the current set of leaders, the easier you make it for the new set to rise. The truth is the further left we pull the government in general, the easier we make it for the right to rise.

There are basically two philosophies at work here:

1) We've got the power, lets go as far left as we can until we lose.

2) We've got the power, lets hold on to it as long as we can.


Obama appears to be functioning somewhere near #2. Do left leaning things, but not so heavily left that we lose the midterms. I suspect DADT is going to be pushed off until after midterms. If they survive them, they can move forward. If they take a beating, it'll be shelved.

gays will punish them in the mid terms. We are getting kicked for this.

It's like some people learned absolutely *nothing* from 2000. Back when Gore was too corporate and there was "no difference".

is easier than coming up with creative ways to make their country better.

that just isn't going to happen. We can complain from hell to breakfast, but it would be a waste of energy.

IMO the most important priority right now is to CHANGE CONGRESS (re: the link in my sig).

train the frigging fire on the GOP. Their electoral jugular is so exposed right now. Those "dissatisfied" with Obama and Dems are simply not being very realistic, aren't giving them enough time, and aren't considering all that we have accomplished and what the alternative would be without Dems and Obama. No one can expect to be 100% satisfied. But, what we have now is one hell of a lot better than what we had with Bush. Also, the goal has to be to continue to win over the moderates and Indys who control national elections. We can't do that if we surge too far to the left. Like it or not, we remain essentially a centrist nation, perhaps a bit left leaning on balance at the moment, but mainly centrist. If we surge too far left, we risk alienating too many moderates. It's great ground for us right now because the GOP has surged so far to the right they have alienated moderates who are now voting Dem. We need to continue to secure the middle of the nation as the GOP slides further and further into right wing crazy land, and we also need to focus on making our moderate/progressive-leaning policies work for middle America so they will continue to support us. Obama and most Dems are playing it smart. We can't risk surging too far to the left.
The great moderates and Indys will balk. You have to proceed carefully. And, one hell of lot better to be moderate/progressive-leaning than have Bush/Cheney neoconism. The glass is half full, and MUCH better than where we were. And yes, some folks need to quit the bitching and moaning and spend more time working with our new leaders to get some things accomplished for middle America.

...please don't blow your chance to crush the GOP electorally by emulating those fearful, willfully ignorant corporate whores. And if you do, please don't blame those of us on message boards who criticize you for it.

:thumbsup:

I found this "Obama Tracker" from NPR

http://www.npr.org/news/specials/2009/obamatracker/

Take a glance at it every once in a while, then think back to our 8 years of Cheney/Bush. Makes me proud to be an American right now.

I realize that different people have different agenda that's important to them. I'm most concerned with healthcare at the moment, while for others it might be gay marriage and the repeal of DADT. The fact is that President Obama can only be expected to focus on a finite number of issues at once, and that includes unexpected things that are thrown at him (like that lunatic in North Korea) which absolutley can't be put on the back burner.

They see their path back to power in obstructing everything the Democrats try to do. They say no to our bills in Congress, and if allowed to propose amendments, they only want to put in poison pill additions to scuttle it.

The right of center folks want a new political party, but the Republicans are not it. The right-centrist people will never be Democrats, and now they don't want to be Republicans either. They are hungry for a new party, and will form one soon.

Now is the time to utterly crush the Republicans and send them packing. We need to pass our most important bills now, before the center-right has a chance to recover. The reason for the urgency is the new centrist party may take a number of Democrats out of our party when it forms.

Obama defending DOMA, Obama covering up all of Bush's war crimes and extending the wars for God knows how long, Obama bailing out huge banks and corporations while turning his back on the middle class who need help, Obama barely paying lip service to single payer health insurance much less fighting for it, Obama nominating a SC judge who sided with Bush on the gag rule and putting a pro-life Catholic in charge of birth control/abortion policy, Obama defending cutting the tops off mountains to mine coal...

What the FUCK did I vote for?????

He has been a huge disappointment so far, with absolutely NO sign that he intends to do anything to make me think he's not going to continue the same way he started. In fact, the news about him just gets worse and worse.

So live in denial all you want but my eyes are wide open and pretending that things will be just hunky dory if I keep my mouth shut would be superstitious nonsense.

My belief in equal rights for everyone trumps my desire to see the GOP crushed. My beliefs aren't beholden to any party.

If you want us to shut up and take it, then go fuck right the hell off.

:eyes:

My loyalty to the principle of human rights and human freedom trumps my loyalty to the Democratic party.And If I see fellow human Americans denied the full spectrum of human rights and human freedoms, I will complain and criticize.

If it's MY party that is doing the denying, the discriminating, then damn fuckin SKIPPY I'm going to criticize my party. A son who allows his father to harm others is not a loving son. The loving son takes steps to correct his father's misdeeds, but NEVER pretends they don't exist. The loving son will criticize his father if his father is fucking his friends over.

If your party's doing the wrong thing, you need to acknowledge it.

"Stay united?!" Yeah, tell that to the GLBT community, who has been routinely disinvited to the table by this supposedly "liberal" administration. This here's a straight guy, who's always voted Dem, who's not gonna shut up when the Dems fuck over his fellow humans.

I really don't give A FUCK if that hurts us politically. Sorry! :shrug:

That's what I thought the OP was talking about. Not attacking their civil liberties. Just thrashing them on the first Tuesday of November - a fine American tradition, don't you agree?

If they start doing things that I can support, I will stay with them.

I personally don't give a fuck about "crushing the GOP"... I give a fuck about changing the direction of policies. If the Dem's are too worried about losing their phoney baloney jobs to do anything about changing the direction of policies... I don't owe them a thing.

And, if the policies aren't changing, then the letter behind an official's name makes no fucking difference to me. If I have to vote for a Nader again... I will.

We should be acting like the victors here! I knew I should have stayed out of GDP. Ugh.

That's been obvious for the decade I've sampled and posted on progressive sites. We treat gov seats as bonuses, nice to have but a clear second or third tier priority behind presidency and other federal races. Even last year I saw almost nothing on sites like this, or Kos or MyDD, regarding coin flip gov races like North Carolina.

IMO, it's the one dangerous vulnerability for Democrats right now, underestimating how vital gov seats can be and allowing Republicans to potentially fortify their bench with big gov wins later this year and in November 2010. There is no way the Republicans can weather the devastating demographic shifts unless they have new star power in key elected positions. We can head off plenty of that potential by denying gov seat turnover, but I'm worried we'll be preoccupied with irrelevant current event shouting matches.

about progressive progress.....of which there has been very very little of since jan 20th. Its hard to remain "united" when progressive ideas are being crushed daily.

we have to wait until we win another election before he will start implementing progressive policies? What's to stop him from moving the bar after that election as well?