Punishing democrats: a bad idea all the way around

[Enrique]

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/71201

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Then there are another group of angry folks, this time on the Left. They were the ones who suffered through eight years of Republican lawlessness and were inspired by the promise of change the Obama campaign offered. Many feel betrayed by the fact that change has not been as intense as they imagined. They point, with good reason, to the promises made by the President on issues like Health Care reform and the reality of what the legislative process gave us. No public option, lots of compromise and a bill that while it does good things for some is not the kind of transformational change that the Left (myself included) wanted.

I always thought the change meme was a dangerous one. It suffers from a lack of operational definition. If you say change to ten people you will get ten different expectations of change. If you say “we’re going to have a change from the past but not a radical one” you still get different views of what that is. This led to wide and high expectations from many people (again myself included) and was always going to make the failures and compromises seem more galling than normal.

The mood among many on the left (not all, surely but many) is pretty down beat. There is talk here and there about sending a message to punishing the Democrats for their failures. The thing about this meme is that it assumes that all Democrats are the same. This could not be further from the truth. We have a wide range of views in our caucus and folks like Senator Bernie Sanders should not be punished for the actions of marginal Democrats like Senator Ben Nelson or Sen. Joe “I hate the Liberals” Lieberman. Both of them are in our caucus and through their actions the whole of the party gets painted with a negative brush.

There is another problem with this meme of apathy or out right vindictive desire to punish Democrats. The weight of not voting for Dems will fall on the House of Representatives and not where the blame belongs, in the Senate. There are a total of 34 Senate races this cycle compared the to the 435 House seats that will be contested. If there is a real protest vote or a lack of turn out by Democrats the numbers say that there will be far more damage in the House than the Senate.

This matters because the House Democrats have been working for change. The watering down of everything from the stimulus to HCR to financial reform has come in the Senate not the House. If the Republicans can take control of the House then the starting point for the Senates watering down will be that much further to the right.

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