If fighting wins votes why did Alan Grayson lose?

[dkf]

[rucky]

1. Money wins more votes than fighting. nm

[leftstreet]

2. +1

[dkf]

4. He got outspent?

I thought he had a ton of money.

[AlabamaLibrul]

7. He has a ton of money for a person, but not a ton of money for several PACs and corporations n/t

[Soylent Brice]

12. that concludes this thread

Spot on, rucky.

[Renew Deal]

33. Grayson had unlimited money

[Occam Bandage]

3. I believe the Received Wisdom is that the Party did not fight hard enough for him.

[DirkGently]

5. Because his is a laughably gerrymandered Republican district?

[nemo137]

6. like many districts

This is, I think, a bigger problem than people give it credit for.

[DirkGently]

9. Yep. Grayson's looks like some malicious conservative Popsicle.

[dkf]

10. But he won it earlier.

Couldn't have been that bad or the D would have prevented his win.

[DirkGently]

18. He came in on an anti-incumbent, anti-Republican landslide. A miracle not likely to be repeated.

[NuclearDem]

8. The Taliban Dan ad probably didn't help either...

I actually unsubscribed from his email newsletter after that.

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

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[NuclearDem]

14. He took what Webster said completely out of context

Webster said, in fact, the exact OPPOSITE of what the ad implied he said.

I don't like Dan Webster at all, but that ad was just sleazy. Alan Grayson's better than that.

[DirkGently]

19. He didn't actually. The ad was in poor taste, but Webster was saying what Grayson said he was saying

Webster is a Christian Dominionist, and taken as a whole, he suggests women sublimate themselves to their husbands. The particular quote in question was a case of Webster dancing around that position and saying, disingenuously, that women don't "have" to do that (assuming they want to defy God).

[Nye Bevan]

30. Webster actually said "*Don't* pick the (bible verses) that say 'She should submit to me'."

Grayson's ad edited this down to just "she should submit to me".

See http://www.factcheck.org/2010/09/rep-grayson-lowers-the-bar/

As factcheck.org points out:

The full context of the remarks make clear that Webster is not telling wives to submit to their husbands. Just the opposite.

Grayson certainly has his good points but his cynical and dishonest ads during his campaign made me lose all respect for him.

[DirkGently]

31. I don't agree with that assessment. He also actually said husbands should pray for

their wives' submission. I don't condone distorting his actual words, but Webster was being cute in characterizing a wife's submission as something that was up their husbands to pray for. Wifely submission was still what he was preaching

As PolitiFact notes, Webster did tell men that they should pray for their wives to submit to them. He said that men should pray that they meet their own responsibilities. But he also described submission as part of a wife's responsibility to her husband, just as he described obeying as part of a child's responsibility to his or her parent. He described these responsibilities in parallel construction; to argue that he doesn't believe wives should submit to their husbands, you'd also have to argue he doesn't believe children should obey their parents. And in the full context of his remarks, it's plainly obvious that he believes both.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/9/29/906298/-FL-08:-Yes,-Taliban-Dan-Webster-believes-wives-should-submit

So, Webster didn't tell wives to submit, but he did tell their husbands to pray for their submission. I'd agree his words still should not have been muddied in the ad, but this is not Shirly Sherrod being misrepresented as a racist when she was saying the opposite.

Whether you respect Grayson after the admittedly ill-advised ad is up to you, but he did not misrepresent Webster's views at all. The man is a radically conservative Christian who absolutely does preach a woman's subservience to her husband.

[Nye Bevan]

34. So if Webster really said stupid things, show a video of him saying those things.

Don't dishonestly splice and dice his words to make it look like he is saying the *opposite* of what he is really saying.

Grayson screwed up very badly with this ad and was punished for it. The voters were not as stupid as the campaign seemed to think.

[TheKentuckian]

16. He went a step too far and got busted for taking the words out of context

TeaPubliKlans get away with similar and worse but Democrats don't have that kind of latitude.

Not saying the spirit of the ad was false because "Taliban Dan" probably does suck much ass but the speech was taken out of context and some of Alan's truth teller shine probably came off.

Grayson seemed to be in fair shape and pushed a lil beyond with the ad.

[Fearless]

13. You can't fight alone. You can't fight without press coverage. You can't fight Fox smears alone.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. Like Feingold, he was specially targeted and the Democratic establishment

didn't fight hard enough for him. (They find the progressives to be embarrassing.)

[bemildred]

17. Are you really suggesting that not fighting wins votes?

:rofl:

[Recursion]

21. I suggest that accomplishments win votes

The trick is, judging when "fighting" vs. "compromising" will yield accomplishments, and if I had a magic formula for that I'd be running the world right now.

[bemildred]

25. I think accomplishments tend to cause a reaction which gets you thrown out of office.

The only way to stay in office is to keep your head down, move with the herd, and spout meaningless drivel about "social issues". I will never forget, for example, Biden's behavior at the Thomas confirmation hearings, and the consequences of it, and I will never vote for him if there is any viable alternative because of it, and I would wager that what most people remember about their Congresspersons is what they did wrong.

[Recursion]

28. Clearly there's some of that too

And there are plenty of people saying we "spent" our majority on health care reform.

The only way to stay in office is to keep your head down, move with the herd, and spout meaningless drivel about "social issues".

Well, I think it depends on the office. If you're a freshman Congressman like Grayson, then yeah, in general, but I literally think there was no way on heaven or earth Grayson or any other Democrat was going to keep that seat in this election, and too few post-mortems of that election seem to recognize that fact. Gene Taylor and Ike Skelton lost, for Christ's sake; how was Grayson going to hold on?

If you're a Congressional leader, you're generally from a pretty safe district or state (which is even more odd when you consider how many states split their Senate delegations -- VA is a splitter, but Webb's seat is reasonably safe; ditto WV), and you make it even safer by getting a lot of pork sent back home.

Grayson offered a model of being a progressive who "fought" (which apparently means appearing angry on C-SPAN) in the hopes that his electorate would respect that even if they disagreed with him and send him back. He just was doing it in the absolute worst year to test that hypothesis.

What irritated me about Grayson was his frankly ludicrous Medicare For All bill: no mention whatsoever of funding. Doctrinaire reductionism is not what we need right now.

[bemildred]

32. "Fighting" doesn't mean you always win, or that you always lose.

What it does mean is you have some sort of principles, and in my view, if you are unprincipled, you belong in the private sector. Being in the government is not just another job opportunity like working at WalMart.

[Angry Dragon]

20. Poor comparison

[last_texas_dem]

22. No rule is one-size-fits-all?

[kctim]

23. Because the voters did not agree with him

EVERYTHING else are just excuses.

[jtown1123]

24. I believe he was from a pretty conservative district that got swept up in the Obama wave

A lot of seniors voted in the midterms and many were duped by the Medicare cut lies so that could also be a factor.

[kentuck]

26. Winning is not measured by votes only.

David Vitter "won". He's a loser. Alan Grayson lost. He's a winner.

[AndrewP]

27. $$$$$$$$

[Recursion]

29. No Democrat would have won in that district this year

Period. Too many analyses from both sides ignore that fact. If Gene Taylor couldn't hold MS-4, and Ike Skelton couldn't hold MO-4, nobody was going to hold FL-8.