KRUGMAN: Orwellian ''centrism''

[yurbud]

It is one thing to criticize your progressive base for not being happy with your accomplishments, but it is quite something else to blame them for the sins of the corrupt conservative Democrats like Max Baucus.

I do have a minor quibble with Krugman's analysis of the process: the public excuse about looking for Republican votes was really cover appeasing corporate conservatives WITHIN the Democratic Party and the ambulatory excrement, Joe Lieberman.

I don’t usually bother looking at the Washington Post. But I’m inside the Beltway right now, so I spared a peek — and for my sins ended up reading Dana Milbank, who praises Obama for punching the hippies.

So far, so usual. But then I read this:

This is a hopeful sign that Obama has learned the lessons of the health-care debate, when he acceded too easily to the wishes of Hill Democrats, allowing them to slow the legislation and engage in a protracted debate on the public option. Months of delay gave Republicans time to make their case against “socialism” and prevented action on more pressing issues, such as job creation. Democrats paid for that with 63 seats.

Um, that’s not what happened — and I followed the health care process closely. The debate over the public option wasn’t what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican “moderates” weren’t negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.

So look at how the Village constructs its mythology. The real story, of pretend moderates stalling action by pretending to be persuadable, has been rewritten as a story of how those DF hippies got in the way, until the centrists saved the day...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/orwellian-centrism/

[RandomThoughts]

1. Yea, they been trying to spin stuff.

However if they are using your narrative as theirs, they carry with it other stuff, so can't reverse it. It opens many doors.

Not worried about it.

Its a 'vault' thing, but they can not understand it since it is not a money concept.

[Willinois]

2. It is quite something else to blame Obama for the sins of conservative Senate Democrats.

There you go. Now the sentence applies to most of the posts I see around here.

[yurbud]

4. Did Obama neuter or empower them? He treats them like his closest allies in the senate

[BrklynLiberal]

7. It appears to be the "Liberal" and "Progressive" Dems he criticizes.

Ironically, it is both the repuke conservative caucus and the Democratic Progressive caucus that have increased in size due to the midterm elections.

Kind of makes one think that if the Dems had been more Progressive, they may not have lost the majority.

[txlibdem]

9. If the Dems had been more Progressive...

Darn right. Thank you for bringing the light of truth to all these numb posts from the Capitulation Cheerleader Section.

Keep the appeasers in line! Way to go!

[BrklynLiberal]

3. George Lakoff:Disaster Messaging

http://www.truth-out.org/disaster-messaging61170

Democrats are constantly resorting to disaster messaging. Here's a description of the typical situation:

* The Republicans out-message the Democrats. The Democrats, having no effective response, face disaster: They lose politically, either in electoral support or failure on crucial legislation.
* The Democrats then take polls and do focus groups. The pollsters discover that extremist Republicans control the most common ("mainstream") way of thinking and talking about the given issue.
* The pollsters recommend that Democrats move to the right: adopt conservative Republican language and a less extreme version of conservative policy, along with weakened versions of some Democratic ideas.
* The Democrats believe that, if they follow this advice, they can gain enough independent and Republican support to pass legislation that, at least, will be some improvement on the extreme Republican position.
* Otherwise, the pollsters warn, Democrats will lose popular support - and elections - to the Republicans, because mainstream thought and language resides with the Republicans.
* Believing the pollsters, the Democrats change their policy and their messaging and move to the right.
* The Republicans demand even more and refuse to support the Democrats.

We have seen this on issues like health care, immigration, global warming, finance reform, and so on. We are seeing it again on the Death Gusher in the Gulf. It happens even with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

<snip>

[yurbud]

5. Democrats don't have a media appartus to repeat good messaging, so if someone gets it right...

it's like a tree falling in the forest that gets covered on page A28 of the newspaper then is never heard from again.

[BrklynLiberal]

6. Another sad truth.....

and amazingly, or ironically, it was Clinton who signed the law that allowed the creation of the media conglomerations that now dominate the messaging....

[yurbud]

8. I had a messenger job in early 90s, so I listened to talk radio all day and heard shift from mix of

views and some apolitical to ALL hardcore righties ALL the time.

There was even some local programming that was actually informative before the change, but now it's gone.