[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: How un-Democratic can you be? (click to view)
Date: October 25, 2010
With little over a week to go before the 2010 mid-term elections, embattled Democratic candidates have been trying anything and everything to avoid going down in what most are predicting to be a fairly good night for many of their Republican opponents.

With Barack Obama's numbers super low, and more than a few of his past (or future) legislative goals having morphed into political slurs, a number of Dems have resorted to aggressively "distancing" themselves from the president —  which is a politically polite way of saying they've been ostentatiously pretending to hate and oppose him. And no one has been more ostentatious in his showy hate than Joe Manchin, the wildly popular Democratic governor of West Virginia, who has proven to be a less than wildly popular candidate for the United States Senate. In one of the most infamous campaign commercials of the election, Manchin filmed an ad, which you can see here, depicting himself literally firing a gun at the Obama administration's proposed "cap and trade" legislation.

Other Democrats have resorted to different kinds of gimmicks, that, while less violent, still make their "independence" clear. It's recently become somewhat fashionable for Democrats in tight races to declare that they will not support the re-election of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House, for instance, since many Republicans around the country have been explicitly campaigning against Ms. Pelosi as a symbol of the supposed "far-left" agenda of the present Congress. President Obama himself has similarly been a persona non grata at a lot of Democratic campaign stops, as nervous candidates in conservative ridings worry his presence — or, God forbid, endorsement — would actually do a lot more harm than good. One beleaguered Democratic candidate in Mississippi even went so far as to declare that he didn't even vote for Obama in 2008, so preemptively distrustful was he.

Will it work? Who knows. In general I think it's a pretty dopey Democratic strategy in any electoral race to try and out-conservative the GOP candidate. When I hear about someone like the Mississippi guy, my first thought, rather than "wow, what a respectable moderate!" is just: "so you're too stupid to know which party to join?" You can argue that the liberalism of Obama, Pelosi, and company is falling rapidly out of fashion with the American people, and perhaps it is, but I still think a lot of voters ultimately respect a candidate with the guts to defend his own ideology and partisan initiatives a lot more than someone whose underlying principles melt and distort the second he's made to justify anything even the teensiest bit controversial.

I'm reminded of the great line of Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons, when presented with evidence of the new political flavor of the month. "If that's the way the winds are blowing," he says, "let no one say I don't also blow!" A lot of Democrats really blow this year, so it should be no great surprise if they procede to blow the election.

[Pseudonym]

Hey, did anyone else catch the Rhode Island Democrat gubernatorial candidate telling Obama to "shove it" over a lack of endorsement?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101025/ap_on_el_gu/us_ri_governor_caprio

Should be relevant to the discussion.

[martin14]

Rats leaving the sinking ship.


The days are ticking down.

[PaganIdol]

Firing at legislation isn't anything more than marketing which all politics seem to have become. All these politicians are more interested in staying in power rather than actually doing anything.

Expect more of this gimmickry as the years go on as politicians discover YouTube and Facebook.

I'm still waiting for Washingtonville from Zynga before I throw in the towel

[BartSimpson]

PaganIdol wrote:

Firing at legislation isn't anything more than marketing which all politics seem to have become. All these politicians are more interested in staying in power rather than actually doing anything.

Expect more of this gimmickry as the years go on as politicians discover YouTube and Facebook.

I'm still waiting for Washingtonville from Zynga before I throw in the towel

Nice first post - using the smiley and all.

I'm a guessing a 'Welcome Back!' (whoever you are) is probably more in order than a mere 'Welcome!'

[Kjorteo]

As a liberal, the only semi-good news about all this is that, if some of these Blue Dog types are trying that hard to out-conservative their opponents, I can take solace in the fact that their inevitably losing anyway doesn't matter all that much--the next Senator from West Virginia (as but one of many examples) was clearly going to suck either way. Sigh.

(That's why Democrats seemed so incapable of doing anything despite supermajorities in both houses when they had them, in case anyone was still wondering--they never really had 60 seats in the Senate if they had to count people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to pretend they did.)

The biggest tragedy at this point is Wisconsin--that appears to be the only place (aside from maybe California, which looks fairly safely Democratic again at this point) where there is a clear difference between the two candidates... and the good one is probably going to lose. That makes me sad. Almost everyone else... eh, I clearly wouldn't have liked the Democrat either anyway.

I am also paying attention to local politics, where things are more interesting. I have the rare fortune of living in a swing district with an actual legitimate liberal versus conservative contest going on for the House seat (incumbent Martin Heinrich (D-NM1) vs. challenger Jon Barela (R)) so that should be exciting. I've more or less accepted that Democrats probably aren't going to hold the House overall at this point, but I really like Heinrich, so as long as he's okay then I can at least take some solace from that. Currently, it's not a lock or anything but he does appear to be in the lead. Also, slightly to the south of me, Steve Pearce (R) is trying to get his job back after his disastrously stupid Senatorial run. (See my post filibuster-cartoons-f72/unsettlingly-strong-tea-t91697.html here) That will at least be fun to watch.

[Teikiatsu]

Kjorteo wrote:

That's why Democrats seemed so incapable of doing anything despite supermajorities in both houses when they had them, in case anyone was still wondering--they never really had 60 seats in the Senate if they had to count people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to pretend they did.

Of course it had nothing to do with the fact that the Democrat ideas are/were so terrible that their own people couldn't stomach them.

[Kjorteo]

Of course. I just expressed sadness over the the fact that the Democrat is probably going to lose one of the very few Senatorial races in which the Democrat isn't trying to run as the Other Republican, so clearly my problem is that I reject Democratic ideas. This makes perfect sense.

[Murray_Smith]

Okay, it's dissection time.

Teikiatsu wrote:

Of course it had nothing to do with the fact that the Democrat ideas are/were so terrible that their own people couldn't stomach them.

Sarcasm indicates negation of the statement: Demmy-crats can't maintain a true supermajority because their ideas are terrible.
Therefore, if an idea is good, the people will like it.

Your statement is the logical inverse of argumentum ad populum.

[Psudo]

The problem with the American two-party system is that people think of it as a two-party system. The parties aren't monolithic like that. Both parties contain a lot of independent thinking, and that independent thinking is encouraged (thankfully!) by the political system itself.

Democrat leaders made some mistakes that their own legislators couldn't follow; Democrats opposed the possibility of Obamacare covering abortion procedures, for example. But that was hardly the primary reason the bill had such trouble getting through. The fact that opposing legislators can oppose their own party leaders is far more relevant. For contrast, what would happen to a Canadian MP who voted against the party line on such a major pet issue of their party's PM?

[Proculation]

I never believed in Obama. He won because a lot of factors like the first black president and because of the Bush mess. Plus McCain was not the best candidate at all.

But after two years, he didn't resolve anything. The "spotlight" was about the economy and he decided to worsen the crisis but spending lots of money and by passing a law about healthcare. Now the unemployment is out of control. Some people are regrouping into an extreme message. The bankers and Wall Street, close to the Obama administration received lots of money while normal people lost everything.

I understand the Americans. After two years, the "it's Bush's fault" argument is no longer standing.

I just hope extremism do not take power because of a weak leader in those bad times.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

Psudo wrote:

The problem with the American two-party system is that people think of it as a two-party system. The parties aren't monolithic like that. Both parties contain a lot of independent thinking, and that independent thinking is encouraged (thankfully!) by the political system itself.

Democrat leaders made some mistakes that their own legislators couldn't follow; Democrats opposed the possibility of Obamacare covering abortion procedures, for example. But that was hardly the primary reason the bill had such trouble getting through. The fact that opposing legislators can oppose their own party leaders is far more relevant. For contrast, what would happen to a Canadian MP who voted against the party line on such a major pet issue of their party's PM?

He/she'd be shitcanned from the party and whoever voted for them would suddenly have no real elected representation other than a backbencher. It's happened, several times. And even if the party in power has a majority and the PM still can't whip the vote, there are still ways to railroad his pet issue through the system.
IIRC, Mulroney petitioned the Queen to "flood" parliament or something so he could shove the GST legislation through. Don't quote me on that cuz I'm not 100% sure if that's how it went down. I was on some serious pain meds back then
Hopefully someone can confirm or correct that.

[Kjorteo]

I don't know what "flooding" the Parliament means. I'm sure it must be some arcane and boring Parliamentary procedure, and that Mulroney didn't actually petition the Queen to tie members of Parliament down and literally flood the chamber like some sort of Bond villain until they all agreed to vote yes on the GST, but that mental image is just too awesome for me to not believe that is what happened.

[Bruce_the_vii]

Proculation wrote:

I never believed in Obama. He won because a lot of factors like the first black president and because of the Bush mess. Plus McCain was not the best candidate at all.

But after two years, he didn't resolve anything. The "spotlight" was about the economy and he decided to worsen the crisis but spending lots of money and by passing a law about healthcare. Now the unemployment is out of control. Some people are regrouping into an extreme message. The bankers and Wall Street, close to the Obama administration received lots of money while normal people lost everything.

I understand the Americans. After two years, the "it's Bush's fault" argument is no longer standing.

I just hope extremism do not take power because of a weak leader in those bad times.

Yup, good post.

[CKASlacker]

Kjorteo wrote:

I don't know what "flooding" the Parliament means. I'm sure it must be some arcane and boring Parliamentary procedure, and that Mulroney didn't actually petition the Queen to tie members of Parliament down and literally flood the chamber like some sort of Bond villain until they all agreed to vote yes on the GST, but that mental image is just too awesome for me to not believe that is what happened.

As cool as that would have been, it was actually a fairly boring procedure where actually the Senate wouldn't pass the legislation that the House has passed (because the Senate was stocked with Liberal senators appointed by a previous Liberal PM). So Mulroney asked the Queen to allow him to temporarily add 8 senators to the Senate to pass the GST.

I do think it still odd that Canada, despite having its own Constitution and all, still had to petition the Queen to resolve an internal affair of the country, but there you go.