Where Is The Middle?

It would seems that The Villagers have taken their cue from Time magazine airhead Michael Scherer that they should now ascrbe any losses by Democrats this fall not to the economy and high unemployment but to "librul overreach" by President Obama. Nowyou hear asshats like Tom Friedman repeating this lunacy on the Sunday shows and I'm sure pretty soon it will be conventional wisdom. And we all know that Republicans have been hollering ridiculously that Democrats need to "come back to the middle" even though there is no compromise that they are willing to say yes to. None whatsoever.

So along with a littany of other arguments, one argument the Democrats are going to need to engage in and successfully win is what constitutes "the middle" when it comes to today's politics. And they need to learn how to do it without alienating their own base.

Where President Obama fucked up royalty is when in the bigger fights like for health care reform he put legitimate policy concerns of people who knew what they were talking about on the left on the same level as the thoughts of rigid ideologues on the right who couldn't care less about postive outcomes. It did absolutely nothing to help with the passage of the bill, with the people of America's acceptance of the bill or with the perception of the party by voters. All it did was to give the impression that those lefty libruls were just as crazy as those wingnuts, even though those lefty libruls were right on policy grounds. Most people understand that you can't always get everything you want when you are fighting for legislation, but to make it seem like the things the left were asking for were illegitimate or unreasonable basically allowed Republicans to push and push to make the health care reform bill look more and more Republican.

And it is. But guess what, because President Obama started off trying to stand in the middle then the perception of the middle moved further left. And again that's where he fucked up.

So this time around what Democrats who are running for Congress should be focusing on are the actual contrasts between what would have made some of these bills good like a bigger stimulus and why citing experts like Paul Krugman and then talk about what the GOP was offering up as an alternative. Which for the most part was nothing. And yet Democrats still moved the bill to the middle on their own and to the detriment of the country.

Wait, scratch that. Got a little caught up in emotion for a second.

Back to what I was saying. It is important for Democrats to redraw the lines of where they were versus where the GOP was so that people understand that all of the legislation that has been passed in the last almost two years has indeed been centrist no matter how the vote count came down. And its important to show that Republicans never, not once offered an alternative from which there could be any negotiations anyway. Their version of the middle is "do everything we say or we won't participate". Basically theirs is the governance style of a five year old. And it should be pointed out over and over again.

Also its worth remembering, and pointing out, that everything that has been done so far save the stimulus bill was something President Obama actually campaigned on. So here is one time where a guy is fulfilling his campaign promises and The Village has decided to define that as a librul over reach or some kind of misreading of his mandate. Now would be a good time to point out that John McCain ALSO campaigned on a lot of the same issues and while his proposed legislation would have undoubtedly looked different he did pledge legislation to fix health care reform.

Now the media will still try to portray most races as left wing versus right wing, that's just how our shitty media sees their job nowadays. But Democratic candidates had better find a way to get their message through that they are willing and have been willing to compromise but Republicans have been acting like petulant children who want everything to go their way or else we really will have a a huge wave of loses in a couple of months. If the media and Republicans are basically able to define Democrats then we are screwed, plain and simple.