Future Majority has a really good post on how the recession has hit younger American especially hard, and what they're doing about it.
It's painfully clear that the people the Democratic Party represents are in peril. Jacob Hacker calls it the Great Risk Shift. Jared Bernstein calls it the Middle Class Squeeze. Labor unions and organizations representing women and minorities have been trying to draw attention to the severity of the problem for a while now.
It is simple. This is America's middle class. We've hacked at it and chipped at it and pulled on it for 30 years now. And now there's no more to do. Either we fix this problem going forward or the game really is over.
Yet too many elected Democrats are still whistling past the potential Middle Class graveyard. If we don't start aiming for what is necessary, instead of what is convenient, we will fail. On this, there is no Third Way. Differing on the sequence of action is legitimate and can be a healthy thing. But it's clear where we must go, and it's going to take bold action to get there. At this point, it would be borderline delusional to deny that.
The politics of this are more straightforward that they've been made out to be. A winning coalition can be mobilized, as long as elected Democrats resist the urge to cower. Either we go big and dedicate ourselves to strengthening the Middle Class, or we'll be losers in every sense of the word.
Related: Ann Friedman's smart take on the Dem coalition.
President Obama's Q&A with Senate Democrats showed that the disconnect between the mindset of elected Democrats in general and what needs to happen over the few months is still far too wide. Thanks in large part to a handful of fundamentally lame Senators, the caucus as a whole has been seriously undermined. There are a lot of words that could be used to describe what the Senate has done over the last year, but "leadership" -- a word that was used Wednesday-- isn't one of them.
This is a preliminary post in a series about the Obama presidency.
The most important point I believe I can make about a winning Democratic coalition is that in many ways, we already have one -- as long as we're willing to do the necessary work to continue to build and mobilize it, and the party's leaders do their part.
There are good reasons to be bullish about the future. But it would be a big mistake to forget that while numbers are on our side, conservatives have powerful special interests on their side. We still need to be proactive about strengthening our coalition; we can't wait for things to come to us.
Many progressive Democrats are extremely frustrated right now. A lack of backbone and competence in our party's leadership has left us with health insurance legislation instead of health care reform. Some progressives are asking themselves why they should continue to identify as a Democrat. In the wake of recent events, their anger is certainly justified. But I believe that grassroots Democrats should continue to lead through example.
This is a Lazy Comment Diary, with reference to some points that have recently been discussed in various watering holes around the progressive interwebs.
I'm feeling a bit essayed out at the moment, but coming home after evening class on a day that I get up around 6am to be in school sometime 7:30am to 8am before 8:30am-12:30pm class, then come home to hang out before going to school around 5pm for the 6pm to 10pm class, I was groggy enough to be easily provoke-able, so firing up the Twitter machine and seeing someone with a link to a dKos meta controversy, I too a peak over and, yeah, I got provoked.
Especially when its a fracking rhetorical question. God rhetorical question cheese me off sometimes. Why is that? I dunno, they just do.
Daily Kos has been taken over by the other side provoked, of course, the usual fight between Administration critics and Obama loyalists, including this steaming pile of organic fertilizer (NB: note that what is contained in the blockquote is an ASSERTION that I have just insulted - any kossack that believes they are immune to the general human tendency to say bullshit now and again and are therefore insulted to learn that someone thinks something they said was bullshit is, of course, welcome to feel insulted, because they are in the very best case too naive to be allowed at in the Internets without supervision):
NB:Recommended by: Ray Radlein, askew, burrow owl, TLS66, walthamricke49, Iberian, Urizen, jaywillie, GN1927, blueyedace2, leftynyc, SocioSam, xanthippe2, edwardssl, Triscula, happy camper, GoldnI, lordcopper, Patricia Bruner, luckylizard, A Man Called Gloom, MKSinSA, Bull Schmitt, Otherday, stegro, iRobert, nickrud, indubitably, Reetz, Jane Lew, soothsayer99, notwisconsin, I said GOOD DAY sir, randomfacts, James Robinson, wolfie1818
the distinct banner of all Democrats, whether we agree with it or not, let's not fudge the truth with your distortion. This is specifically re iterated currently as NOT a progressive site.
... and I will pull one strand of the follow-up to where I jumped in.
Right above this is the first post in a series about the Obama presidency. I wrote some of this in early November, but I wanted to read David Plouffe's book and think through some counter - arguments before posting it.
Five initial posts give context to points I make in the series:
The Republican Party
The 2010 Midterms
The Winning Coalition
Public Opinion
The Edwards Campaign
The series itself has four parts:
"The First Year" looks at different evaluations of President Obama's performance so far.
"Audacity and Urgency" responds to Plouffe's book.
"Crossing the Rubi(n)con" focuses on the Administration's approach to economic issues.
"Vital Support, Vital Criticism" makes the case for the role I believe grassroots Democrats should play.
