Slate - "The Democrats Are Losers. Democrats in Congress fail, again, to deliver for an active, [View all]

[NRaleighLiberal]

energized base"

By OSITA NWANEVU

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/the-democrats-are-losers.html

About one year ago, an estimated 4.2 million people participated in the Women’s March, which is thought to have been the largest demonstration in American history—several times larger than the massive protests of the Vietnam War Moratorium of 1969. By the end of 2017, thousands of anti-Trump protests across the country brought a total of between 5.2 million and 8 million people to the streets. This past weekend’s marches again brought out hundreds of thousands of participants. These protests are only the most visible manifestations of broad and seething discontent with our president and those advancing his agenda in Washington, discontent that has also encouraged tens of thousands of people to consider running for office and prompted hundreds of thousands of phone calls to Congress last year from those hoping to defeat the repeal of Obamacare, one of the key items on the president’s legislative agenda.

Through all of this, the Democratic Party has exhibited little of the confidence and daring one would expect from a party on the right side of what may well be an unprecedented movement in the history of American politics. Monday was no different. “After several discussions, offers, counteroffers, the Republican leader and I have come to an arrangement,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the ranking Democrat in Washington, announced this morning. “We will vote today to reopen the government to continue negotiating a global agreement with the commitment that if an agreement isn’t reached by February the 8th, the Senate will immediately proceed to consideration of legislation dealing with DACA.”

So ended, in Schumer’s words, the “Trump shutdown.” This moniker is a not insignificant bit of obfuscation on the Democrats’ part. It is of course true, as Schumer and others have said over and over again, that the Republican Party has the presidency, the House, and the Senate, making the shutdown the first to occur with ostensible one-party control of government. It is also true that moving forward on a funding bill required 60 votes in the Senate that the Republican Party did not have, even with the support of vulnerable shutdown-wary Democrats. The vast majority of Senate Democrats, who did not lend them that support, are responsible for the shutdown. Those Democrats have spent the past three days blaming it on Republican procedural incompetence rather than making a straightforward, honest case to the American people that the shutdown’s true purpose—securing a DACA deal—was worth it. “It’s the president’s and congressional Republicans’ responsibility to govern,” Schumer said in a speech Saturday. “It’s their responsibility to keep the doors open and the lights on around here.” The word for this is cowardice.

There may well be another shutdown in the coming weeks. But an opportunity was blown Monday.
Luckily for Democrats, polls repeatedly showed that the American people backed their framing. A Public Policy Polling/Center for American Progress poll released Sunday found that 52 percent of Americans blamed President Trump and Republicans for the shutdown. It also found that 58 percent of Americans wanted to include Dreamers as part of a package deal to reopen the government. Forty-two percent of Americans, the poll says, would have strongly supported this.

snip - more at the link.

(Again - don't shoot the messenger - but reading around the progressive web, few share much good about what just happened.)