| User Blox 4 |
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Barack Obama  |
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Rob Kailey is a working schmuck with no ties or affiliations to any governmental or political organizations, save those of sympathy.
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Tue Feb 16, 2010 at 06:59:54 AM MST
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| Traditional media types love the notion of a "centrist," whatever that is.
Take Evan Bayh's sudden gut shot to the Democratic party and president Obama. Read Charles Lane's analysis:
Millions of Americans long to tell their bosses "take this job and shove it." Hardly any have the power and money to do so, especially in these recessionary times. Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana, however, is the exception. His stunning retirement from the Senate is essentially a loud and emphatic "screw you" to President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For months now, Bayh has been screaming at the top of his voice that the party needs to reorient toward a more popular, centrist agenda -- one that emphasizes jobs and fiscal responsibility over health care and cap and trade. Neither the White House nor the Senate leadership has given him the response he wanted. Their bungling of what should have been a routine bipartisan jobs bill last week seems to have been the last straw....
Quitting the Senate was a no-lose move for the presidentially ambitious Bayh, since he can now crawl away from the political wreckage for a couple of years, plausibly alleging that he tried to steer the party in a different direction -- and then be perfectly positioned to mount a centrist primary challenge to Obama in 2012, depending on circumstances.
For Lane, Bayh's sudden departure was a noble, gutsy maneuver that should propel him into the middle of a primary challenge of Obama, as if he's become a "centrist" rebel. Daniel Larison picks that notion apart, nothing that party voters tend to eschew losers like Bayh who quit the team and over issues they actually like. But even if Bayh, say, chose to run as an independent, he'd probably run into the problems that NYC mayor Bloomberg did when he put out feelers in '08:
Centrists" do not run insurgent campaigns very well....There are no passionate, vocal groups of voters eagerly demanding that government be more solicitous of corporate interests and more willing to start wars overseas. There are not many large voting blocs requesting the offshoring of whole industries. To be a "centrist" is necessarily to champion the interests of concentrated power and wealth and to ignore and deride as "populist" insanity anything that stands in the way of those interests. Who has ever heard of an explicitly anti-populist political insurgency? Insurgents always set themselves up as the independent outsiders who will stand up for the people against the establishment. Just imagine Bayh trying to sell himself as the establishmentarian who wants to tone down the "radicalism" of Obama's Rubinite economics and his Clintonian hawkish foreign policy. What Lane proposes is that an old DLC-type Democrat will be positioned to win over a party that is increasingly disgusted by the overrepresentation of DLC-type Democrats in the current administration. This misreads the mood of the party and the substance of administration policy very badly.
Good bye, Bayh. Don't let the door hit you in the *ss on the way out. |
| Jay Stevens :: Nobody loves a centrist |
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| Poll |
| Purely Hypothetical, of course, but - The best candidate for the Republicans for US Senate is: |
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