Daily Archives: January 19, 2010

Sorry, Ted

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Paul Krugman wrote this afternoon:

It sounds as if House Democrats — or at least their leadership — are prepared to pass the Senate bill if, as expected, they lose today’s special election.

That’s a shame: the House was in the process of making the bill better. But as Ezra Klein says, they should do what’s necessary — not as a matter of political advantage, although it’s probably better for them even in that sense, but because it’s the right thing to do. Imperfect as it is, the Senate bill would save tens of thousands of lives, save many Americans from financial catastrophe, and partially redeem us from the shame of being the only advanced nation without some kind of universal care.

I hope all the leftie activists who think punishing Dems at polls will push them to the left are paying attention.

Hanging by a Hair

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Nate Silver is saying Coakley has only a 25 percent chance of winning the Massachusetts senate election today, which, he reminds us, is not the same as zero. But I’m telling myself not to hope.

Meanwhile, the Peking Duck writes the post I had planned to write today, which saves me a lot of time. See also Bob Cesca and John Cole.

Update: See also Kevin Drum:

The striking thing to me, though, is how fast the left has turned on [Obama]. Conservatives gave Bush five or six years before they really turned on him, and even then they revolted more against the Republican establishment than against Bush himself. But the left? It took about ten months. And the depth of the revolt against Obama has been striking too. As near as I can tell, there’s a small but significant minority who are so enraged that they’d be perfectly happy to see his presidency destroyed as a kind of warning to future Democrats. It’s extraordinarily self-destructive behavior — and typically liberal, unfortunately. Just ask LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. And then ask them whether liberal revolt, in the end, strengthened liberalism or conservatism.

That last sentence is a point I keep trying to make. Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s better than others, but the rage from the left against Obama and the Dems is so much like the rage from the left against LBJ and then the Dems and then party politics generally that went on back then, and the eventual result — beyond electing Richard Nixon twice — was to give the nation over to Ronald Reagan and lock progressivism into a dungeon, from which it has not yet entirely emerged.