In which your author loses her temper

Several of you probably received a message like this one today:

Yesterday's disappointing election results show deep discontent with the pace of change. I know the OFA community and the President share that frustration.

We also saw what we knew to be true all along: Any change worth making is hard and will be fought at every turn. While it doesn't take away the sting of this loss, there is no road to real change without setbacks along the way.

We could have simply sought to do things that were easy, that wouldn't stir up controversy. But changes that aren't controversial rarely solve the problem.

Our country continues to face the same fundamental challenges it faced yesterday. Our health care system still needs reform. Wall Street still needs to be held accountable. We still need to create good jobs. And we still need to continue building a clean energy economy.

The President isn't walking away from these challenges. In fact, his determination and resolve are only stronger. We must match that commitment with our own.

But it won't be easy. Real change never is. For that reason, I am grateful you're part of this fight with us.

Thank you,

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

Unfortunately, Mitch is not who I want to hear from today, and this is not the message I want to hear. He should really have given it a couple of days weeks. So unfortunately, I am sending this response:

Mitch, honey, this is bullshit. Our country *does* continue to face the same fundamental challenges it faced yesterday, and I only wish the administration really *had* fought to reform our health care system and really *had* fought to hold Wall Street accountable. It's not *me*, or your other supporters in Massachusetts, who were unready to make difficult changes. It was the administration. You shmucks had a 60-vote Senate supermajority, and you dicked around with pro-corporate, pseudo-centrist bullshit until you lost it. Don't blame me; I voted for Capuano in the primary. We wouldn't be squabbling about whether the health insurance reform bill that can be passed is worth passing if it were a stronger bill, with a real public option. That whole world-weary pragmatism thing seems particularly stale coming from Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In. Your team includes the most vicious enforcer in Democratic politics today, Rahm Emanuel, and you're wasting him on shutting up your base. Why don't you have him stop by Congress and explain to everybody *there* what's at stake? Trust me, we in Massachusetts already know.

And by the way, I am not donating because I myself could still use one of those "good jobs" you speak of.

This is on you guys, on Obama and his organization and on the DNC.

So do not presume that you get to tell me what I should think today. If you get around to remembering how your guy got elected and want to know what *I* think, you'll find it here: http://laurenmerlin.blogspot.com/2010/01/coakleybrown-women-politics-etc.html

UPDATE: Of course, info@barackobama.com's server bounced my message, and the Organizing for America Web site told me to send my comments to whitehouse.gov. So I did.

Coakley/Brown, Women, Politics, etc.

What I'm thinking this morning is that Coakley's failure, especially in light of the semi-controversial brain-hurt from Clay Shirky, really demonstrates how good a politician Hillary Clinton turned out to be. Okay, she didn't make it all the way to president, but she did manage to win a senate seat in a state whose electorate, contrary to popular belief, is not entirely made up of the mythical Manhattan liberal elite. (Manhattan's real elite is not all that liberal anyway. Viz, Mayor Bloomberg, (R-Finance).)

I am not sure yet whether I think this, but it could be that both these women failed when they approached a race like Margaret from Dennis-the-Menace: "Hey! I did my homework. I'm smarter than you. It's my turn!" Except this is not a mistake made only by women -- it's also the campaign strategy that relegated Bob Dole to hawking Viagra.

So: One lesson from Coakley/Brown: "It's my turn" = still a sucky campaign strategy.

The thing that scares me this morning, and that I hadn't thought through last night, is that the Republicans did find a way to exploit voter resentment and cast themselves as some kind of party of anti-establishment change. I still think they harnessed a particular Massachusetts kink on the issue, because Massachusetts is so often a one-party state and has been one for so long that it is relatively easy here to portray Republicans as outsiders with respect to the Democratic machine. That's how you get Mitt Romney as governor. But there are, alas, clear national ramifications which I just plain did not want to credit last night. Because although the tactics will have to be tailored to the individual states and individual seats, in fact, yes, there is enough resentment abroad in the land, and Republicans can find candidates who will play as "outsiders" to tap it. I don't know if the Democrats need to do more to give people less to resent or if they need to ally themselves with resentment. I mean, I would prefer that the Dems start kicking ass, taking names, and pushing through some legislation that did some actual good. But even so, it bears noting that somehow the Bush administration was particularly good at blaming "government" even while they were the government. Maybe it's time to figure out how they did that.

So, second lesson: Republicans will continue to push their identity as the party of resentment.

Third lesson is the lesson Howard Dean tried to teach the party: Take no state for granted.

Fourth lesson  may be that the Republicans are better liars than we are, and we need to find candidates who make honesty look better than Martha Coakley managed to do. It may be true that if you are the kind of devout Catholic -- or the kind of devout Protestant, for that matter -- who can't bear to give emergency contraception to rape victims then perhaps you should not work in that part of the emergency room, but it made a lousy and unnecessarily polarizing sound bite. One of the great things about Obama as a speaker is that he speaks in carefully considered complete sentences, with the result being that he is hard to take fully out of context. He structures those sentences so that at the very least the sound-bite nearly has to contain the whole thing. He needs to spend his next vacation teaching public speaking at Young Legislators Camp (TM).

And I think the inevitable fifth lesson is that progressives are way tired of being played. There is always the danger of losing us again to a Ralph-Nader-like candidate, who may read as a mere "spoiler" to the Dem establishment, but gives us the relief of honestly voting for the policies we actually want. We wouldn't be squabbling about whether the health insurance reform bill that can be passed is worth passing if it were a stronger bill, with a real public option, etc. Compromise wears everybody down, and that whole world-weary pragmatism thing seems particularly stale coming from Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In. He's got the most vicious enforcer in Democratic politics today, Rahm Emanuel, and he's using him to shut up liberals? What a waste. If you want us to come out in the freezing rain, you have to give us something more than party affiliation once in a while. (See lessons 1 and 3 above.)

OK. Now I'm going to go focus on my personal life. Or at least, crawl back under the bed for a few more days.

9th leading cause of death? Lack of coverage

This Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance study estimates that 45,000 deaths are caused each year in the US by lack of health insurance.
Meanwhile, to get on the CDC's list of leading causes of death in the US, the annual number of victims per year has to top Septicemia, number 10 at 34,234. Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis comes in at number 9, with 45,344 -- right about even with the study's estimate of coverage-linked deaths. (Caveat: the Institute of Medicine, in 2002, found a much lower rate of death linked to lack of insurance, but still considered it enough to constitute a "crisis")

There's still time to add your picture to Move On's photo-petition to the President reminding him that his base supports a strong public option. And Paul Krugman assures you if we get health reform, it will work.

In lieu of flowers

Okay, seriously, once health reform is passed I will go back to telling stories about Ted cheating at Harvard and hitting on high-school girls after his divorce, and seeing him walk down a Boston street in February eating an ice-cream cone, which is one of the field signs of a true Bostonian but probably did not help him keep his girlish figure. But even my cynicism isn't ready to go there yet. Instead, here is a call to action in Sen. Kennedy's honor, from Joe Conason, who is not usually this good, perhaps because passion and decency really do trump worldliness and ironic detachment. At least some of the time.

Ted Kennedy wanted the public option
"...It is true that Kennedy, the friendly warrior, excelled in bipartisanship. Nearly all of the domestic reforms mentioned here were sponsored by at least one Republican senator. But in every case, those stodgy conservatives were cajoled and whispered (and perhaps shamed) into venturing much closer to Kennedy's perspective. He drew them toward him, invariably against their own habits, not by selling out his progressive goal, but by appealing to the decency he perceived in them.
... [But we] know that he could shout as well as whisper — and that he could be partisan as well as bipartisan. He believed that the time for incremental changes had passed. He was ready to fight. The tragedy of his death is not only that he didn't see the triumph he had dreamed, but that he fell before he could lead the nation to that final victory. Now that victory will have to be won in his name."

I *heart* Barney Frank

Barney, Barney, if you weren't gay and I weren't 51 I would ask to have your children: