Blame Invertebrate Congressional Dem Leaders For Local Campaign Losses
By Rob Kall
Thousands of local Democratic candidates for office in local elections nationwide- line candidates, candidates for supervisors, council seats and the like lost in close races because of the spineless or compromised failure of Pelosi and Reid to do what the dem majority in congress was mandated to do-- end the war. The tragedy is that the local candidates and dem leaders did what they were supposed to and should have won.
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Thousands of local Democratic candidates for office in local elections nationwide- line candidates, candidates for supervisors, council seats and the like lost in close races because of the spineless or compromised failure of Pelosi and Reid to do what the dem majority in congress was mandated to do-- end the war. The tragedy is that the local candidates and dem leaders did what they were supposed to and should have won.
On November 6, all over America, Dems lost in local races by tiny amounts. The Local Dem leaders spun the losses as improvements-- as losing by less. But many of those losses should have and would have been wins if not for the dems in congress.
Blame the democratic leadership in the house and senate-- Reid and Schumer, Pelosi and Hoyer-- for many of the near misses. The 110th congress should and probably will go down in history as the invertebrate congress. These spineless leaders were given the gift of majority control of the congress because the voters wanted them to end the war and clean up the corruption. They have done neither.
Sure, the "supervoters" came out to vote in this off-year election. But to make real gains, the Dems needed the less committed voters to show up at the polls. And they didn't come out. Who can blame them?
In the last election, when the voters who were not supervoters DID show up, they voted for candidates who won. Then, those candidates let them down. They made a little bit of noise, went through motions of voting on legislation that had no chance of passing, and basically, got nothing done, in terms of ending the war.
I can just imagine the thinking; "I voted for this guy and he won and, here, ten month later, things are just as bad as they were-- no progress. Why should I bother going out to vote this time? So I can elect another Democrat who makes promises he doesn't keep?"
Now, the Dem leadership keeps telling us about that 60 vote "wall" in the senate. But that didn't stop Mukasey from being confirmed with less than 60 votes.
And then, there's that annoying fact, that all it takes is 40 votes in the senate and a simple majority of votes in the house to PREVENT legislation funding the war. All Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have to do is persuade their majorities to refuse to fund the war any more, to refuse to approve any legislation that does not bring the troops home.
You see as majority leaders, they can refuse to bring a bill to the floor of the house or senate, and, as long as they can hold their troops in line, then the Dems can officially notify Bush that he will not get the funding.
Of course, Bush will come back by having his military butt-kisser generals and appointees whine and cry that the Dems are not supporting the troops and costing the military money because of the need to transfer funds. So? The Dems know this is coming. Part of their plan must be to be prepared to have answers that spin the story another way-- that the Dems are doing the hard job of really supporting the troops, that Bush and his supporters are betraying them.
Let me say it a bit more clearly. The Democrats are afraid to take a stand, blocking funding, because they fear being called names by the Republicans, so they are allowing the war to continue, troops to be maimed and die.
But it's not all fear. Naomi Klein, in her blockbuster new book, Shock Doctrine, describes the new "disaster capitalism" where war is perhaps the greatest new source of new business opportunity and profit. There are plenty of Dems who know that their campaign contribution bread is buttered by disaster capitalists. There are plenty of DLC right wing Democrats who are happy to call anti-war progressives extreme left liberals.
It's been reported that DLCers like Schumer and Emmanuel believe that keeping the war going until the November 8th election will hurt the Republicans. But it seems to me that already, this misguided policy has hurt a lot-- probably thousands-- of Democrats who could have won, but lost in close elections.
Here in Bucks county PA, if just six more democrats per district had come out to vote, the Dems would have won control of the county-- for the first time in decades, and there were many other line offices and local positions that were close calls that a better turnout could have turned around. .
One reason I blame the congressional Dem leadership is the failure of the freshmen dems to deliver on their promises to end the war. But they have little choice. The way the system works today, members of congress are almost totally dependent upon DCCC support for their re-election campaigns. You rock the boat at the risk of losing your job. All the freshmen Democrats elected with the mission to end the war are betraying their constituents because that's what the house and senate leadership has led them to do. They could make futile gestures that would cost them their jobs, because the Dem leadership wouldn't support them in the primaries.
Let's walk through this one more time. If Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi choose to, they can refuse to bring any legislation to the floor that funds the war. As leaders, they could go to Bush and tell him to pound sand, that they will not provide another nickel. They WOULD have to lead the dems on the right. But they hold the same power of the purse over the blue dog, conservative dems that they hold over the more progressive dems. They could use it to lean on them too.
Now, I want to deal with the argument citing Tip O'Neil's famous quote, "All politics is local." There's some truth to that but let's look at what has changed since the time he said that, over 35 years ago. We didn't have 24 hour cable news. We didn't have the internet. People had nowhere near the familiarity with the activities of congress or the personalities. We live in a much smaller world. Politics IS local, but today, the things that happen at a national level have a much bigger influence on what happens locally.
The bottom line is that the congressional democrats failed all the passionate, hard working democratic candidates out there in the grassroots at the local level. The congressional Dem leadership's decision to NOT exercise the power the people elected them to embrace was a betrayal of the constituents.
The big question is, will the policy of betrayal that failed thousands of candidates throughout the nation in November 2007 also fail all the tens of millions of people who will work so hard, canvassing, phone-banking, writing, rallying to support the opposition to the right winger who wins the Republican presidential primary? Will Nancy and Harry, Chuck and Rahm continue to misguidedly prevent the Dem congressional majority from the tapping the true power they really have?
Maybe that is the ultimate question. We have leaders who won't embrace the power they have been given.
It may be due to spineless cowardice. Or it may be due to these Dem leaders embracing the big business interests who are thoroughly enjoying the profits from this ongoing war. We did see them fail to take on the hedgefunds in recent legislation. Either way, the Dem leaders are betraying the people who voted for them and it actually makes sense that Dem voters failed to come out to support Democratic candidates.
The sad thing is, those voters who didn't show up are the ones who have the power. The supervoters who the Dems WERE able to depend upon are often taken for granted and their calls to congressional offices are marginalized by staffers who say that they don't represent the mainstream voters. Yeah. Right. Well, I know a few too many great candidates who should have won, but those mainstream voters finally spoke on November 6. And what they said was, "the hell with the Democrats. They're not worth coming out to vote for." Maybe the dems ought to listen a bit better to the people who did show up, or even those supervoters won't bother doing the volunteer work the Dems will desperately need come fall 2008.
Authors Bio:
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.
To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.