Salon: When a party flirts with suicide

[MADem]

26. No it isn't. It's reality. There is a big mushy mess of people in the middle. They are not like

many of us. They don't have a "progressive checklist" that, if not followed, will doom a candidate to hell. They are liberal on some issues, conservative on others. They are independents. Some are liberal minded Republicans. Others are conservative-minded Democrats. They are the majority. They are the ones who elect Presidents. They are the Target Audience, and they are persuadable, and they can be moved.

They are the ones who need to be fed, otherwise their votes go elsewhere. Or worse, they stay home.

I never once suggested that "Obama" (never mind Rahm Emmanuel) used the term, so I don't really understand why you inferred that this was the case. The rest of your four paragraphs worth of imaginings about what I meant by "mushy middle" (and I did not mean "centrist, as in "He or she is a centrist Democrat"--so drop that argument, or non-authoritarians, or people who don't like the rule of law, or any of those other invented theories you spun out of the air) are just not accurate. And how you can imagine that someone in the "middle" can be a "fanatic?" Well, I don't know where you're finding this stuff. You plainly aren't getting it from me.


We didn't "give him a Democratic Congress." We gave him a slight Democratic majority, for a very brief moment, full of blue dogs and foot stompers with agendas, hamstrung by floor rules. There's a difference. Pretend there isn't if you'd like, but you'd only be fooling yourself.

FDR had a Democratic Congress. It's amazing what can be done with a solid majority and a little party discipline.

I don't want Obama to "act like a Kennedy." If he did, people on this board would be calling him a DINO and a sexist. I do, however, expect him to adapt that "public service" attitude (which wasn't invented by the Kennedys, but they did a superb PR number on the public to associate the idea with themselves in the public mind) in his final term, when he is less constrained by politics, because he won't be running for reelection and he has no clear successor.


You keep telling me how you think I feel, and what you think I think, and what POVs you think I have--and you're completely and overwhelmingly wrong. It might be better for you if you don't do that when you engage people in discussion. It certainly makes for an annoying and unproductive exchange if a person has to spend all their time saying "You are putting words in my mouth" and "I never said that" and "How in hell did you manage to spin that meaning out of what I said?" Less extrapolation would make for a better conversation. Say what YOU know--don't try to tell others how you think they 'feel' about something because you didn't get it right, not once.

If you don't "get" that the second term is the Legacy Term, I can't help you get that. If you don't understand the need for a pragmatic approach, I can't help you with that either. Go read some of the premier Presidential historians, though--they'll tell you.