the nomination and the blogs
I wrote this two weeks ago here regarding the Roberts vote:
So much of what gets written on the blogs is about the ping-pong news cycle. You can get neck strain. It's good, no it's bad, no, it's good, rrr, it's bad. Very little of it helps with the critical work of building majorities.
Like many bloggers, I'd like to see us get our heads screwed on straight about winning back the House in 2006. It's the single most impactful thing we can do in this country, period. To do this, we will have to be more than political ping pong players. In fact, we'll have to be focused on something that never really comes up in the news cycle: pragmatic politics for working families...real, local, kitchen table stuff. We'll also have to learn how to paint vulnerable GOP representatives as the 'friends of Tom DeLay' that they really are. That shouldn't be so hard. We just need to do it. (No, not my style, but...it takes a village.)
In the meantime, for me, we need to fully reserach Miers...and if she's undeserving of being on the court, for whatever reason, which is the only real standard here, our goal should be that she never makes it out of committee, "friendly Harry" be damned.
In order to oppose Roberts, or any nominee, we needed to build majority positions on issues like Choice, like Privacy, like the Patriot Act...and bring every one of our coalition members on board. We need to build support for our positions in a broad-based way so that any nominee who is not clearly acceptable to our side is branded as running against the clear majority view in this country. It's about creating a political climate before any name is announced. Congressional Democratic leaders aren't doing that. The DNC, even under Howard Dean, has not done that...[snip]
In my view, majorities are won, they are defined, they don't magically appear when you need them; majorities are the product of winning coalitions. And that is the core difference between the failures of the Democratic Party and the successes of the GOP today.
So much of what gets written on the blogs is about the ping-pong news cycle. You can get neck strain. It's good, no it's bad, no, it's good, rrr, it's bad. Very little of it helps with the critical work of building majorities.
Like many bloggers, I'd like to see us get our heads screwed on straight about winning back the House in 2006. It's the single most impactful thing we can do in this country, period. To do this, we will have to be more than political ping pong players. In fact, we'll have to be focused on something that never really comes up in the news cycle: pragmatic politics for working families...real, local, kitchen table stuff. We'll also have to learn how to paint vulnerable GOP representatives as the 'friends of Tom DeLay' that they really are. That shouldn't be so hard. We just need to do it. (No, not my style, but...it takes a village.)
In the meantime, for me, we need to fully reserach Miers...and if she's undeserving of being on the court, for whatever reason, which is the only real standard here, our goal should be that she never makes it out of committee, "friendly Harry" be damned.
Comments
we have to get smarter, and more fearless.
Thanks for that....we've got a lot of flipping to do.
re: wu ming
I know this sounds stupid, but I'm convinced that simply doing opposition work on vulnerable GOP Congress Critters would be tremendously powerful...a good friend of mine makes this great point: people really don't know how their representatives vote because papers don't cover it. When people find out, they are often shocked.
Governors, we read about every day, but Senators and Congresspeople....only when they put out a press release....we need to flip that rock. And we can.
P.S. wu ming, feel free to drop me an email sometime. I wanted to write you to congratulate you on being cited in Barack Obama's article..but couldn't. That was cool.
kidoaklandatcomcastdotnet
other than pombo, the other northern california wingnut who might suffer for his record being exposed is lundgren, in district 3. the district is wingnutty in a rich white exurban kind of way, but lundgren is a so-cal carpetbagger, and far more looney right than even his biff and buffy placerville constituents might be comfortable with. gabe castillo apparently ran a pitiful campaign against him in '04, but a staffer that i talked to during the campaign said that when they called people and told them about lundgren's positions, even gabe the bland picked up ground fast against lundgren. some muckraking might be somewhat beneficial in a big dem year like '06 is turning out to look like.