“Not one dime! Not until Democrats pass healthcare.”
That is what DNC fundraisers who call our house are going to hear from now on.
The hacks and jackasses in Washington who took over the Democratic National Committee from Howard Dean have taken us right back to their old election-losing “centrist” techniques. Under Dean’s leadership, we witnessed the landslide election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate. All that advantage has been nearly frittered away.
Obama has spent the past year trying to engage Republicans in bipartisan governance. It’s been like a year of watching Charlie Brown trying to kick a football with Lucy’s “assistance.”
And when Massachusetts voters, one year after Obama’s landslide victory, re-fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat with a Republican? Surely something is very, very wrong. Let me just quote Howard Dean on what that something is:
If you want to win, you actually can’t sort of move to the middle and become a Republican. You’ve got to stand up and stand for the things that you got elected on and that the Democratic Party believes in and we haven’t seen that in the healthcare bill and I think that’s part of the problem.
The smartest thing Obama could do now, in my unhumble opinion, would be to beg Howard Dean to come back and run the DNC.
Update: Somebody on Daily Kos had a great suggestion about this issue: Make your own list of good progressive candidates. When you get particularly annoyed about something political, make that the occasion to send a donation to the next person on your own list.