Return of the Wimpocrats

Posted on November 3, 2010 in Campaign 2010

I think Rachel Maddow said it best: Democrats, if you don’t campaign on your accomplishments, the Republicans will. Once again, however, the Wimpocrats appeared and acted as if all they had done was something to be ashamed of. And that lost them the House.

Here are the elements that did the Democrats in this time:

• They pissed on the progressives. Get it through your head, Democrats, you don’t win elections without the progressives. If they don’t like you, you lose the people who will go door to door for you and make calls. Register the case of Blanche Lincoln who would not give an inch on health care. Even when progressive leaders made up, she still would not give ground and she lost. Those who had the love of progressives won.
• Rahm Emmanuel. Good riddance. Obama and Congress LOWERED taxes, but somehow this information wasn’t getting out. Instead, everyone just wonked into the Oval Office and said nothing in their own defense. When you say nothing, the word doesn’t get out.
• Tim Kaine. We need another Howard Dean in this role.
• Harry Reid. He couldn’t keep his party in line and badly misread Joe Lieberman. Harry, please step down.
• As suggested by the first paragraph, the Democrats utterly failed to take credit for the good they had done.
• They ran scared of corporate America. They figured that there was nothing to be done about scare ads and big money. Yet here in California, Jerry Brown shellacked Meg Whitman by running a campaign that promised to put corporations in line. Maybe we understand these things better than they do elsewhere having endured the disaster that was AHnold, but the rest were utterly silent on the matter. Brown’s campaign needs to be studied and emulated elsewhere.

The Democrats got to stop being the Chicago Cubs.

Progressives, we will be back. I just hope to live to see it.