Democrats

The provided link is a story that was in the Politico today. It includes the southern districts the GOP is going to go after for 2010. Although the Dems are digging themselves in the whole, many are still drinking the Obama Kool-Aid.... Let's get to work! http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27715.html

Democrats say they'll "go it alone on a health bill", which sounds all mavericky and bold and makes progressives quiver with excitement.

Given hardening Republican opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of the minority’s cooperation in approving any overhaul, and are increasingly focused on drawing support for a final plan from within their own ranks.

But let me translate that into practical, electoral terms:

Given hardening [voter] opposition to Congressional health care proposals, Democrats now say they see little chance of [winning many seats in 2010 if they pass a controversial bill], and are increasingly focused on drawing support for a final plan from within their own ranks [that allows Democrats to vote whichever way is most likely to get them reelected].

"Go it alone" = optimizing their chances for re-election.  Remember, you don't win elections by winning a legislative fight.  Winners don't need to turn out again; they already won.  You win elections by convincing your base that you are in a fight and victory is just around the corner...if we win this election.

This is how it will likely shake out:

• YES: Blue District Democrats will vote for the Exciting Progressive Health Care Plan, and then go home and tell everybody how principled they were.
• POLLING: Swing District Democrats will take a principled stand one way or the other just as soon as their internal polling is finished.
• NO: Red District Democrats will vote against the unfortunate bill that just isn't right for America but if you reelect me I'll vote for Free Health Care and Unicorns For Everybody.
• ATTACK: Democratic challengers, unencumbered by actual votes or responsibility, will be free to attack their opponents on whichever grounds seems most useful, and (like Red District Democrats) will promise lower costs, more coverage and a pony.

Nate Silver shows that Arlen Specter firmly believes in whatever position will get him elected.  Specter certainly has principles; and if you don't like them, he has others.

During the August recess, Republicans will ramp up the Tea Parties and other protests in an effort to influence conservative Democrats not to vote for the Democratic health care legislation.

If the grassroots really want to influence the swing votes on health care, they should be organizing behind conservative Democratic primary opponents.

   After that, all hell breaks loose as on the morning of July 23rd, over 200 federal agents swept across New York and New Jersey to round up 44 miscreants who were fire inspectors, city planning officials, utilities officials, real estate developers, political operatives, philanthropists, rabbi’s, assemblymen, mayor’s and gubernatorial cabinet officials.

Years of criminal investigation culminated in the discovery of a tangled web of corruption that included the laundering of tens of millions of dollars through Jewish charities controlled by rabbis in Brooklyn, N.Y. and Deal, N.J., the trafficking of kidneys and fake Gucci handbags and tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to public officials that were meant to get approvals for buildings and other projects in New Jersey.

The key to the arrests was Solomon Dwek, a 36-year-old religious-school head and philanthropist from Monmouth County, N.J., who became a cooperating witness after being charged with defrauding PNC Bank by writing a bad check for $25 million in 2006.

From that point on Dwek was wired, videotaped and followed by F.B.I. agents in a plot straight out of The Soprano’s. On those F.B.I. recordings are such gems as Mr. Dwek stating to one money-launderer that he had “at least $100,000 a month coming from money I ’schnookied’ from banks for bad loans.” In another tape Dwek is seen giving another coconspirator a box of Apple Jacks cereal stuffed with $97,000 cash for a few political favors in return.

Some of the most high profile thugs rounded up were the New Jersey mayors of Ridgefield, Secaucus and Hoboken, Jersey City’s deputy mayor and two state assemblymen.

A former state senate leader and now member of New Jersey Governor Corzine’s cabinet was also implicated and forced to resign after F.B.I officials searched his home in connection to the still unfolding scandal.

All but one of the officeholders are Democrats. The lone Republican is Dan Van Pelt, a double dipping, dual office holder who serves as the mayor of Ocean Township, NJ. and an assemblyman in the state legislature. Republicans throughout the state called for his immediate resignation from both public offices. A call to his office for a reaction was answered by a woman who calmly said “Mr. Van Pelt was arrested today and is out of the office.”

Now that’s New Jersey!

The most conspicuous of all to have been rounded up so far is the Democrat mayor of Hoboken, Peter Cammarano.

Cammarano just took office on July 1st after winning a cantankerous runoff election and despite the efforts of those officials in Hoboken who have not been arrested, Cammarano refuses to resign. After all he just got the job.

On tape, Mr. Cammarano was caught accepting $25,000 in cash bribes from Solomon Dwek in exchange for expediting zoning changes and pushing through approval of building plans. After the money exchanges hands he tells Dwek “you can put your faith in me” and that “I promise you…you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be treated like a friend.” But along the way other embarrassing statements are overheard. At one point, while talking about his chances of winning what, at the time, was his upcoming mayoral race, Cammarano’s cocky bravado compelled him to declare “right now, the Italians, the Hispanics, the seniors are locked down. Nothing can change that now. . . . I could be, uh, indicted, and I’m still gonna win 85 to 95 percent of those populations”. In another very Mafioso-like moment, Cammarano is caught talking about payback for those who were not with him in the election.

None of this is helping Governor Corzine or the image of Democrats who lined up behind the new Hoboken mayor as he was sworn into office. There, U.S. Senators Frank Lautenberg and Bob Menendez as well as Governor Corzine proudly embraced the 32 year old rising Democrat star with warm embraces and glowing praise.

The whole situation has produced an incredibly embarrassing state of affairs for Corzine who ran New Jersey into the ground after taking office almost four years ago and, among other things, promised to quash corruption. After seeing more than 130 public officials plead guilty or get convicted of corruption since 2001, the arrest of 43 Democrats and 1 Republican, at one time, has proven that Corzine did little to achieve that goal.

Like everything else he promised, including getting the state budget under control, Corzine has been a disastrous failure and this monumental size corruption spectacle just hammers that point harder than ever.

But aside from the increased sour impressions that this newest saga creates, is has disabled a a good portion of the Hudson County Democratic political machine and severely handicapped Corzine‘s chances to win reelection with his major campaign theme which consists of repeating Barack Obama’s name and reminding people that he belongs to the same party that the President belongs to.

Hoboken is one of the largest cities in Hudson Country and Corzine’s home town . Hudson County is one of the most heavily Democrat counties in the state and is the crown jewel of the Governor’s base of support and source of the political engine that runs Corzine’s Get-Out-The-Vote operation.

In this recent historic corruption sweep, 19 of those rounded up were Hudson County officials and operatives. All of which were gearing up to pump out the vote for Corzine in November.

Now they are otherwise occupied in criminal court.

One of these 19 is Jack Shaw, a professional politician that has strong ties and influence with unions on Corzine‘s behalf. Another arrested member of the Corzine cabal is Joseph Cardwell, an operative famous for his coordination of African-American voters, a vote so crucial to Corzine‘s reelection that, without success, he begged the new rising political star, Cory Booker, an African-American mayor of New Jersey‘s largest city, to be his Lieutenant Governor.

All of this has placed the decapitated head of a horse on the pillow of Corzine’s deathbed reelection effort that signifies things to come.

The Governor is already running about ten percent behind his chief rival, Republican Chris Christie, and the prevalent political corruption that has been flourishing among Corzine’s political network is neatly countered by the fact that as the state’s former U.S. Attorney, Chris Christie is the most high profile and successful crime buster that New Jersey’s has ever seen. This naturally compensating aspect of Chris Christie’s candidacy is just another nail in Corzine’s political coffin. That and the fact that you have key Corzine campaigners handcuffed, record high unemployment, a decimated business environment and the highest tax burden in the nation, all adds up to his defeat in November.

That is the good news.

The bad news is that the 44 recent and dramatic malfeasances that were linked together and exposed on just one sunny, summer, New Jersey morning, have officially made New Jersey the most politically corrupt state in the nation. It has also made it very clear that New Jerseyans can not trust anyone in government who asks for their support or whom they seek assistance from or discuss issues with. And to make matters worse, this criminal investigation is still ongoing. I fully expect Governor Corzine to, at some point, be implicated himself, for tampering with the case and trying to have the arrests delayed until after the election when news of the scandal could not effect his chances for reelection.

The whole ugly, unfolding, situation is simply a travesty and cry for change. Not just in New Jersey but in politics and public service in general. It makes it quite obvious that something has to give here and it can’t be the voters. They have already given too much in freedom, taxes, patience and quality of life.

But that assessment begs the question, what must give? What must and can we do? It also leads one to wonder if the systemic corruption that exists in public service is simply a byproduct of politics or is it beyond politics and just a part of human nature?

Three years ago, Markos Moulitsas floated the idea of an emerging brand of "libertarian Democrats."   At Cato Unbound, Kos argued that the Democratic Party was "growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility, and—most important of all—individual freedoms are paramount."

And in fact, libertarians did swing from voting overwhelmingly from Bush in 2000 to overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008.

Recently, though, the people Kos once sympathetically and invitingly described as "traditionally Republican voters [who] simply want to live their lives in peace, without undue meddling..." have been protesting policies and politicians, both Republicans and Democrats.  The Democratic response to this widespread public concern has been...ridicule.  Thanks for the votes, now get lost.

The Democratic/libertarian alliance won't last long.

The annual Personal Democracy Forum was Monday and Tuesday in New York, and it was very good.  As always. You can read more about it at TechPresident.

Naturally, there was a great deal of conversation about the imbalance between the Left and Right online.  The general consensus is that Republicans are behind on the internet, though there is a great deal of debate over how and why.  The least convincing answer was offered by a PDF audience member, and it basically boiled down to "Republicans suck. Democrats are cool.  So we're better at the internet."

Yeah, well, those who forget history...

Democrats race to catch up to GOP online

The Democratic National Committee relaunched its Web site Friday and appointed its first technology adviser in an effort to match the Republican party's success in using the Internet to build its constituency. [...] "We realized that the Republicans were ironically peddling their Stone Age ideas with modern-day technology tools, and we were just not at their level in our dedication to technology," Buck said.Insiders say it's widely acknowledged that the Republican committee has done a better job than the Democrats' committee in creating an online strategy.  The Republican committee "is far and away ahead in securing a large constituent of online activists and does a better job of using the medium to move their message," said Pam Fielding of E-advocates, an Internet advocacy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.

That was 2002.

What changed?  Again, that's the subject of a great deal of debate, but I would argue that it was two things:

1. Republicans got comfortable.
2. Democrats got entrepreneurial.

In 2016, there's no doubt that the online landscape will be very different.  The Right will be much more effective.  The only question is how they will do it.  The balance of power on the Right will depend, in large part, on who the new entrepreneurs are and how they build the infrastructure.

Crossposted from Sunlight Foundation

Reps. Baird and Culberson introduced legislation today that would shine more sunlight on the most fundamental work of Congress. Their bill, H. Res. 554, would require that all non-emergency legislation be posted online, in its final form, 72 hours before consideration. The bill is not a panacea for all that ails Congress, but if enacted, it will stave off many congressionally created debacles before they become law.

Most citizens, for example, would have supported amending the economic stimulus bill to remove the provision allowing AIG executives to receive retroactive bonuses. The average person probably would have preferred to let the judicial system work rather than have Congress give immunity from lawsuits to telecommunications companies that participated in a controversial wiretapping scheme. Workers hoping to retire on their 401(k) investments might have liked to have some serious analysis of whether credit default swaps ought to be regulated. And just about everyone benefit from a check on questionable and wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars.

While it now appears that people around Obama are happy with the choice of Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State, there were reservations over this at first. Huffington Post has an excerpt about the appointment from Renegade: The Making of a President.  While I had reservations about her being appointed to this position, I reluctantly supported the decision thinking that Clinton would do less harm in such a post than in the Senate, especially as this would keep her away from health care reform. It turns out that Senate Democrats were also happy to see her out of the Senate:

Obama was under no illusion about the legacy of the long primary season. During one transition meeting, Obama said he wanted to offer Clinton the diplomatic job. “I’m really interested in pursuing this, but I know she has some hard feelings coming out of this campaign.” Emanuel and John Podesta, the former Clinton official who ran the transition, assured Obama that she was over those hard feelings now. Obama smiled and said, “Believe me. She’s not over it yet.”

His decision to offer her the job of secretary of state came surprisingly early. Well before the end of the primaries, when his staff and friends still felt hostile to her, Obama decided that Clinton possessed the qualities to carry his diplomacy to the rest of the world. “We actually thought during the primary, when we were pretty sure we were going to win, that she could end up being a very effective secretary of state,” he told me later. “I felt that she was disciplined, that she was precise, that she was smart as a whip, and that she would present a really strong image to the world…I had that mapped out.”

Recruiting and managing a team of rivals would not be easy, and Clinton came with her own set of issues. Chief among them was her campaign debt, which she wanted eliminated before she took the job of secretary of state. Would the president-elect go out and help her to do so? “I’m not begging her to take this job,” Obama told his senior aides. “If she wants it, I could help. But I’m not willing to go out in these difficult economic times to do a flashy fundraiser in California.” As it happened, plenty of people in the Senate were begging Obama to offer Clinton the job. Obama’s aides believed that many Senate Democrats thought Clinton had extended her presidential campaign far beyond the point where she had lost the election. Her negative advertising wasted Democratic money, threatened to undermine the party’s nominee, and suggested that she was disloyal to the party. They were unwilling to offer the junior New York senator a position ahead of her lowly rank, and she stood little chance of becoming majority leader. “There was a lot of encouragement from inside the Senate to get her into this job,” said one senior Obama aide. “They wanted her out of there.” …

As for controlling the uncontrollable Bill Clinton, Obama’s aides drew up a series of checks on his fundraising for both Clinton Global Initiative and his work on HIV/AIDS across the world. But they really counted on Hillary to be the ultimate safeguard - against both her husband and her own ambition. “It’s in her interests to keep him in line,” warned one senior Obama aide. Others in Obama’s inner circle said the president-elect believed Clinton needed to demonstrate that she was a team player and to shape her own career and legacy. “There are plenty who don’t trust her and think she still harbors something,” said another senior adviser. “It’s still potentially problematic down the road. Barack’s thinking on this is that it’s not in her interests to mess with us. She can’t win that fight internally and she’s smart enough that she won’t want that fight publicly.”

I realize I'm inviting much ridicule from my friends on the left, but I'm going to write this post anyway, and I'm going to leave the title intact - Why Twitter Matters & The Left Should Be Nervous. It's no doubt going to generate some giggles among the online intelligentsia in the Democratic Party. That's ok with me.

I have, for several months now, seen a string of posts and tweets from these same lefty friends that are either mocking or dismissive of the Conservatives nascent efforts on Twitter. Here's one example courtesy of TechPresident's own Micah Sifry.

It's positively quaint to listen to Republicans murmur optimistically about their "dominance" on Twitter. #polc09, #tcot, #p2

The very first time I saw one, it reminded me immediately of comments I had seen and heard before. They were the openly dismissive comments directed by complacent and cocky Republicans at the Democrats efforts online.

I specifically remember more than a few people, myself included, who watched the rise of the online left with initial derision. As late as 2004 and 2005, I heard things like, "The Democrats and their blogs. How's that working out for them? All that effort and how many wins has it resulted in?"

Beginning with Conrad Burns and George Allen, we began to quickly see the results of "those blogs". It's a lesson we failed to heed early on, and it contributed greatly to our demise.

What we failed to recognize was the infancy of an effort to use new technology to mobilize. It was an effort to build a new network and the infrastructure to disseminate a coherent message.

I have argued that the reason the Democrats never mastered talk radio was very simple - they never had to. In modern politics, the insurgent party will adapt to the most interactive (and the most real-time) technology available at the time. In 1992, having lost the White House, House and Senate, the GOP gravitated toward talk radio. Despite it being a broadcast medium, it was the most interactive medium available. It was adapted to facilitate the conversation about the direction of the party and the country.

The Democrats, rising out of the loss in 2000, had to coallesce around a platform. Talk radio, had the Internet not been available, would likely have become the staging area and the rise of the left on talk radio would have been a near certainty. But a funny thing happened on the march toward the AM dial.

With the Internet, blogs and Meetup became the new polis for the exiled Democrats.

Now you could argue that two data points is hardly enough to qualify my central thesis - the adaption of interactive forums by the out party. But keep in mind that Americans detachment from one another and from in-person communities really didn't explode until about this same time. Prior to that, most people who were politically active simply turned to their party and its structures. It's just the last 20 years that have split us from our parties and each other, so we can only look at the data available.

That brings us back to the present day and the Republicans.

Now that we are the out party, we are turning to the Internet to discuss, debate and strategize the party's future. It is no longer, however, simple enough to label "The Internet" as a monolithic thing the way we did with the Democratic use of the medium. The Internet is no longer about websites as it was with blogs and Meetup. The Internet, as it exists today, is more a generic platform for advanced communication services - whether they are site based, text messages, cellular applications, or anything else.

In the world of converging technologies, Twitter represents the single most interactive, most real-time, tool available. Twitter is mobile. Twitter is rapid. Twitter facilitates deep content (via linking) and fast action (via retweets and viral distribution).

For the Democrats that dismiss Republican testing of many and various models of activism on Twitter, you should watch very closely what's going on, rather than simply mocking it. Complacency and satisfaction with your status quo is a slippery slope and it's very easy to fall into the "yes, but what has it gotten them" mindset.

It is likely, I would even say certain, that Twitter, or some next generation concept that builds upon Twitter's framework, will be a central component of the GOP resurgence. It most certainly won't happen overnight. However, I guarantee you will - when you find yourself out of power again - be able to trace the roots of your downfall to this earliest of efforts.

Until then, to my friends on the left, let me say two things. First, we'll keep using Twitter, and you can keep cracking jokes. Second, as long as you do, we'll see you on the other side, soon enough.

Update: Based on further conversation (via Twitter) about this post, I need to clarify a point.  I'm not claiming the GOP is currently "dominant" on Twitter.  That was Micah's reference.  I'm simply looking at the tendency for conservatives to adapt to Twitter faster and easier than they have other online venues.

The left's attitude (represented by Micah's comment) seems to me to be that the GOP is putting all its eggs in the Twitter basket without doing all the other things that the left did to be successful.  My argument is that's a false assumption.  It requires that the GOP mimic the left to advance online.  Just as the left bypassed the right's use of talk radio and went straight on to a different model, I think the right may be able to skip directly past the duplication of the left's infrastructure by simply making use of what are currently the most advanced communications and mobilization tools. I see evidence that many in the right are developing new models in an effort to do just that.

Those new models have not yet become "dominant". My central premise is, however, that many on the left  and right seem to believe we must embrace the left's status quo.  I, on the other hand, believe our salvation will not come in duplicating their model, but in creating a new paradigm for our own activism.

Or Free Republic, for that matter?  Well, Linda Sanchez (D) thinks it might be a good idea.

(a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

So, let me see if I understand this.  If I go onto Daily Kos and start accusing the posters of being godless communists bent on destroying the USA, using withering inflammatory insults ("severe" and "hostile"), and I do so in a "repeated" manner, then according to Sanchez I should be thrown in jail.

Of course the intention is to stop 'cyber-bullying' among kids.  But here is a pretty obvious case where the proposed action upon the intention will have significant unintended consequences that threaten everyone's liberty.

H/T: Corner, Volokh