What Do *You* Think: Why Do The Dems Cave In And Sell Out?

[ihavenobias]

The video clip and quotes from the article below really got me thinking about this issue which I think is incredibly important. I know people tend to tune out more than a few short paragraphs, so I'll respond with my thoughts later:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x88039

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/memo-to-senate-democrats_b_83192.html

"...There are two schools of thought on this. The first is that they make money from the same lobbyists, so they don't want to upset their paymasters. They don't want to rock the boat because they are collaborators in the same corrupt system. In other words, they are paid to be the Washington Generals to the Republican Globetrotters.

That is such a miserably sad scenario, that I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and say we should consider the second option instead. The second possibility is that they are the only people left in the country who still think that anyone gives a shit what George Bush has to say....

If we are to be kind and assume that the Democratic leadership is not deceitful and complicit, then we are left with the unfortunate alternative that they are hopelessly dense. How low does Bush's approval rating have to be before you realize it is to your political advantage to oppose him rather than to bend to his will?

How blind do you have to be to not see that helping Bush makes you look pathetically weak? I don't feel good speaking to our elected leaders this way. I would like to have some respect for these positions. But they make it impossible to respect them. What's really sad is that they have no idea how much people would love them if they just fought back a little bit. They're too busy trying to get the Republicans, Fox News Channel and the Washington elite to love them. Turn around, your electorate is dying to support you.

Give them a chance and they would back you a 100%. But you make that impossible when you keep supporting the one man everyone else realizes is the least trustworthy person in the country -- George W. Bush."

[TwilightGardener]

1. All pigs, feeding from the same trough.

[acmavm]

2. I could NOT have said it better!

[mike_c]

4. ding ding ding-- we have a winner....

Exactly so.

[RufusTFirefly]

3. There's a third option

Would you say no to the Corleone family?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

5. The whole system is corrupt. They all answer to the bosses who put them in office.

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Totally stupid over obviously corrupt?

The torrent of corporate money pouring into Washington is simply a fact. The federal government is drowing in a tsunami of corruption and we are wondering why our side is swallowing water? Are they mouth breathers perhaps? Did they not learn how to swim?

It is not just the United States. Across the planet governments are run by and for the global corporate elites. We have a crisis of planetary human civilization.

[RufusTFirefly]

11. If you try to hold back corporations, they will attempt to destroy you

Marginalizing you is the quickest most civilized way of doing it. Bringing to light scandals or fabricated scandals that reflect poorly on you is another way. It goes on from there and gets increasingly ugly.

Is it any wonder that most of them simply take the money and shut up?

"Some people argue that we’re going to sit at a table with these people and they’re going to voluntarily give their power away. I think it is a complete fantasy; it will never happen." -- John Edwards

[havocmom]

7. Mostly? $$ and the fact that wiretaps & illegal surveillance ain't about terrorists

Black mail is SUCH an ugly word, but it works.

[DJ13]

8. Blackmail by the Bush Administration

We know that they love illegal wiretapping and onsite searches.

We also know they arent above turning the DOJ into a political arm of the administration.

Now put those things together............


By the way, this is also the reason the GOP led Congress went along with everything Bush wanted, even though it was pretty obvious that they were cutting their own throats for the 2006 election.

[Perry Logan]

9. False premise. For some reason, Democrats like to believe they've been sold out.

[ihavenobias]

13. Care to explain?

You should elaborate, and or re-frame the discussion in terms that *you* agree with. Otherwise that response is incredibly unsatisfying. :)

[Perry Logan]

16. The Democrats in Congress showed the highest Democratic unity score in 51 years.

If they showed the highest unity score in over 50 years, it won't do to say they always cave in. It's contrary to fact.

"President Bush's success rating in the Democratic-controlled House has fallen this year to a half-century low, and he prevailed on only 14 percent of the 76 roll call votes on which he took a clear position.

"So far this year, Democrats have backed the majority position of their caucus 91 percent of the time on average on such votes. That marks the highest Democratic unity score in 51 years."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1728952&mesg_id=1728952
http://public.cq.com/docs/cqt/news110-000002576765.html

Don't let the media rhetoric fool you. The Democrats have acquitted themselves quite well--especially given their bare majority in both houses, and a relentlessly obstructionist Republican minority.

[ihavenobias]

18. I absolutely refuse to be an apologist for this weak bunch

Look, we're talking among ourselves here at DU. This might be a different conversation if I were talking to a group of republicans or even uninformed moderates.

I understand that the Dems have been in the minority (and now hold only a slim majority), but you're leaving out an incredibly important point:

Has being in the minority prevented the *Republicans* from getting their way most of the time?

Why is Kucinich the only one brave enough to actually try to get impeachment rolling? Why is Dodd the only one brave enough to stand up and filibuster this insane retroactive immunity for the Telecoms?

I don't want to hear any BS about 60 votes. Do you EVER hear the *Republicans* espousing the "woe is me, we need 60 votes" nonsense? Nope. And when Reid has TWO options, one which gives retroactive immunity and one that doesn't, WHY in the world does he even bring up the Republican version for a vote?! THAT is the very definition of selling out, both his party and his country! And it has NOTHING to do with a slim majority in the Senate...nothing at all.

[TahitiNut]

30. Unfortunately, that "majority position" seems to have been bent over with cheeks spread.

:shrug:

Lemmings cascading off the cliff are "unified." Whoopee!

[ihavenobias]

10. Some Of My Thoughts

Obviously, for the record, it's not like ALL democrats cave in and sell out. There are *some* fighters, like Kucinich, Feingold, Dodd, etc (don't be mad if I left out your favorite, I can't think of them all!).

But clearly, overall, they ARE horrible sellouts. Or, as suggested in the video/article, maybe some of them are just dumb? I'm sure most of them are plenty educated, so maybe dumb really means naive or *politically* ignorant. Honestly, I think it's a combination of those things, along with the general corruption from special interests, which has also made the economic difference between democrats and republicans much, much smaller over the last 30 years (I wrote about that at length before).

Consider that before Regan took office, there were less than 50 registered lobbyists. Today there are over 35,000!

Will publicly funded elections clean up this woeful bunch? I'd like to think so. Reducing the special interest influence HAS to have a major impact. I wonder how many of these politicians would just jump ship if there was sweeping reform to bring about publicly funded elections? Or who knows, maybe they would actually start to represent their constituents.

But does any of this explain why *this* bunch of democrats has been so pathetic in particular? I mean, even from a purely political perspective, I think they'd be MUCH better off standing up to the most unpopular president in our history. Who will they anger, the 25-30% that hates them anyway? Which again, makes me think they really are dumb (and subject to varying special interests).

If you think about why the republicans have continued to be tough (and ignore compromise, cram their agendas through despite low public support, etc.), it also goes back to special interests IMO. After all, large, corporate interests have a history with the republican party in particular, so if the repubs "cave" to this pressure it's not like their push for tax cuts and deregulation contradict their mission statement to begin with!

[orleans]

33. jonathan turley explains it all (i posted this dec. 1)

Wednesday November 28th (interview begins 35 minutes into the show, transcript begins 42 minutes into show)

Randi: you made the greatest point last night about why it is that the republicans and the democrats sort of looked at each other and they made a pact: we will not impeach this president and we will spend our whole time doing it--we won’t be able to do anything else--it will distract apparently from elections or whatever. And so they don’t WANT to have these hearings because why? What would they find?

Turley: that’s the problem with the fix being in. the democrats want to keep the controversy alive but they want to stop--not all democrats but some of the democratic leadership--want to stop just short of any event that would confirm the illegality of the domestic surveillance law or the president ordering torture because those two facts--if it was ever confirmed by a court--would virtually trigger an impeachment inquiry. And they have already promised the white house--I’m talking about the democrats--that they will not have any impeachment inquiry for the rest of his term.

And so, one of the reasons you don’t see the democrats tackling these issues and the reason they’re thinking about immunity for telecoms is that they can’t afford to have a court actually render a verdict. Because if they do then there is going to be very difficult questions: if the president did order illegal acts--acts that are defined as federal crimes--what are you gonna do about it? And the fact is that they don’t want to do anything.

Randi: that was the piece of the puzzle that was not making any sense to me. I understood they were asking for immunity--retroactive immunity for telecoms--and while the house has passed their version of that and it does not include immunity for telecoms, the senate is still kind of chewing on it--maybe we will, maybe we won’t. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out WHY. Why wouldn’t they want to see what the whistle blower Mark Klein has showed them in schematics and engineering diagrams--they were copying everything that went over the fiber optic system of at&t and any other telecom as well. Some didn’t even know at&t was able to grab their stuff and copy it and provide a complete copy to the government.

Why would the democrats and the republicans who seem to like less government not want to know what went on when whistle blowers are saying: I’m telling you this was for permanent storage--this was a “country tap” he called it, not a wiretap but a “country tap“--why wouldn’t they want that to stop? And things went through my mind, maybe they’re being blackmailed, maybe they’re being wiretapped, I don’t know.

Turley: it’s the same reason the democrats rescued the president from the torture debacle. You could almost hear democratic senators hyperventilating when there was a demand for mukasey to answer the question on torture. And I could tell you the alarms went all over capitol hill. If he had answered that question, if they held the line and forced him to say that water boarding is torture it would have been a disaster for these members because it would have confirmed that the president ordered not just crime but a war crime as defined by u.s. courts.

Randi: the torture thing I sort of understood but now it’s all wrapped up in a nice, understandable package for everybody to know: that this congress is so terrified that if they investigate or if they don’t give retroactive immunity that there will be a showing that the president ordered or asked for and that the telecoms were told that they should help do crimes at the behest of the president and if a court has a finding that the president committed any criminal act--a war crime in the torture instance and in this instance just the criminal activity of eavesdropping on his own citizenry--then congress would have no choice but to move ahead with an impeachment inquiry. They’d have to start it because there’d be a finding of criminality in a court.

Turley: that’s right.

Randi: and they don’t want it because it’s an election year. They want everybody to just focus on the future; they don’t want anybody to look at the bad old past, and meanwhile, it’s the present. This is still going on, all of it. The torture is going on, the rendition’s going on, the wiretaps are still going on and they just want to sit there and say: we’ll deal with it in ‘09.

So let me ask you this: if, if in ‘09 we get a president with a conscience who says “I know what’s been going on” what do you think might happen in ‘09?

Turley: well, it’s possible for civil liberties to be restored but it’s just very rare.

Randi: but will anybody--in your best guesstimate--be held accountable?

Turley: well, that is very doubtful. I’m willing to bet you that the democratic senate will not allow any effort, for example, to prosecute people who tortured for the american government. I mean, there are people out there who have been trained to torture people and have tortured people in the name of the u.s. government. And I can promise you this: the democrats will never allow those people to be identified and prosecuted and they will not pursue the president even once he’s out of office.

That’s part of the whole beltway mystique--is that they protect their own and parties mean very, very little. They’re all denizens in the same city and it’s about power. And principle has very little role in the city and I hate to say that and it may seem cynical but these are not principled people in this city and many of them are really bad people. Not all of them, but many of them are bad people. They don’t really believe in principle. They believe in power and once they get power I don’t think they’re going to be pursuing principle.

Randi: … power must be so cool…’cause nobody wants to let go of it

Turley: it’s intoxicating. The other fascinating thing is that all of these self-inflicted wounds of the bush administration, and of the democrats, are really due to this intoxicating effect of power. They get so detached they can’t even remember why they went into politics. When you sit down and talk to these people they can vaguely remember what motivated them and they can certainly speak of principle but they really are something different than as they started. I think the problem is that it’s a gradual bleeding that happens in this city.

http://www.whiterosesociety.org/Rhodes.html
november 28, 2007

i respect jonathan turley so much--and i was blown away by this--to me it is disheartening, disgusting, discouraging and infuriating.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2382566

[Individualist]

12. DLC

"This is why the DLC is dangerous. For all their claims of supposedly wanting to help Democrats, they employ people like Marshall Wittman who specifically try to undermine the Democratic Party, even if it means he has to publicly defecate out the most rank and easily-debunkable lies. They reguarly give credence to the right wing's agenda and its worst, most unsupportable lies. They are the real force that tries to make sure this country is a one party state and that Democrats never really challenge the Republicans in a serious way." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/why-the-dlc-is-so-dangero_b_13640.html

[Fridays Child]

14. 100% publicly-financed elections would fix some of this.

[sojourner]

15. how is your second premise any less "miserably sad"?

face it........either they are complete morons, which i don't believe for a second, or they are corrupt/bought out and owned by big money. that is far more likely IMO

[ihavenobias]

19. 2 Things

1)-*I* didn't create that premise. Did you click either link provided in the original post?

2)-I think his point is that it's slightly less sad because it's not intentional corruption. The end result might be the same, but the motives are different. Sort of like 1st degree murder vs involuntary manslaughter.

[sojourner]

26. i see the point. still miserable.

[ihavenobias]

27. Like I said, the *end result* is the same (miserable)

[sandrakae]

17. Because there is so much corruption in the Republican Party they feel they can't beat that.

[Marr]

20. Because they win by "losing". It's kabuki theater.

Reid's performance yesterday is a perfect example of it. He publicly states over and over that he supports the "no telcom immunity" bill, then does everything in his power to pave the way for immunity, while obstructing the bill he professes to support with procedural rules.

Then he blames the whole thing on Republicans, who can trumpet it as a victory. This is why they never put up real opposition to the Bush regime when they were in the minority as well. It's why they were so willing to accept "defeat", and so anxious to tell us all how powerless they were.

The game is just more transparent now that they have a majority, and it actually takes some clever maneuvering to "lose".

[TwilightGardener]

21. Yep--spot on. I watched that charade on Thursday--it was disgusting.

[ihavenobias]

24. Harry Reid

I agree 100%: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teivM2FRg4o&eurl

[western mass]

22. Because liberals will vote for them no matter what they do.

If you're willing to vote for corporate shills and republican collaborators because any "D" is better than nothing, then this is what you get. You get a choice between right-wing and far-right wing government. Nothing will ever change.

[KG]

32. very succint analysis.

[VotesForWomen]

37. better not say that here..... nt

[Greyhound]

23. Because they are only the other face of the same coin. There is only one power in this country,

trans-national corporations. The party only exists to give the illusion of choice to the sheeple.

So, if you look at it from this perspective, They are neither caving nor selling out, but doing exactly what they are directed to do, by the only people that matter.

[Orsino]

25. Because we let them.

Because we've allowed money so much influence in politics, it's possible to sell out. Money, in turn, has bought itself even more influence, to the point where almost no one can say no to it.

Ban the money, and they won't be able to sell out. This was always in our power, and still is.

[pitohui]

28. do you really want to know why? because it ain't pretty

i think it's simple math, the average IQ is around 100, and if you know some folks with 100 IQ then they're pretty damn stupid, a large majority of the population (of any country) is stupid either by dint of natural brains (ain't got none), inexperience (they might be very bright but don't yet have the experience to make good decisions, you often find the young libertarians in this group, because it "sounds" logical and it takes experience to realize why laissez faire can't work), or age-related mental decline (let's face it, a lot of us lose some edge as we get older)

at the end of the day, the smart people at the top of their game are going to be a minority of voters

so the democrats (and frankly ALL leaders of ANY party ANYWHERE) feel that they have to spend a lot of time catering to the majority who are, if we're honest with ourselves, pretty much fuckwits

tim leary used to spend a lot of time talking about "intelligence increase" and honestly if we don't find a way to accomplish this in time, democracy is probably a lost cause, maybe the planet itself a lost cause

thru a sad twist of fate, while intelligent compared to say your average warthog, the human race isn't quite intelligent enough

that's why i don't spend much time berating the democrats, i think it's a systemic problem, i'm sure the republicans mutter just as much about how much time they have to spend pandering to their fuckwits

[warren pease]

29. Genius move: they're going after the spineless vote with a message of treachery and cowardice...

Political strategists have to justify their lofty consulting fees and, since not one of them's had a fresh idea since Machiavelli, their DNC employers were getting a little pissed off until a maverick pollster saved the entire consulting industry by discovering a significant disconnect in a particular demographic that everybody else had just written off as GOP country.

Seems that there's a huge number of swaggering, rugged individualist wannabes living a lie: despite the carefully crafted image, they spend most of their waking time pooping their pants over the expectation that the dark forces of unspeakable evil are all lined up and just waiting for the right moment to murder them painfully and horribly in their beds.

So when the most astute, savvy strategic advisers heard about that -- even as they were learning that test messages pointing out Democrats' strength, intelligence, courage, new directions, integrity and the like had failed to generate a single positive comment at dozens of focus groups... had, in fact, spawned waves of uncontrolled laughter at most of these events -- they decided to abandon the conventional efforts to position candidates in alignment with the electorate's more noble attributes and instead leverage the fine work congressional democrats had been doing and go after votes by targeting the most unsavory, degenerate aspects of the American character.

Long story short: history proclaimed them geniuses. The great closeted rugged individualist wannabe demographic finally had candidates they could enthusiastically support and turned out in huge numbers to vote for the latest pack inept, rudderless, co-opted, ineffectual, conniving, back-stabbing, lying, enabling, complicit cowards who feed at the slimy corporate trough right next to the feral GOP pigs.

November 2008 raised the curtain on a brand new era in American politics as the parties finally learned what it takes to get elected in this country. It's a simple formula and it doesn't even cost that much: just play up the wimp factor and keep the focus on nerds and dweebs. All Americans identify closely with dipshits and dorks and treacherous little Iagos, so it's a pretty easy sell.

And that's how the congressional democrats rode their 12 percent approval rating right into a super-majority in both houses and a four-year hitch in the white house, too.


wp

[Dark]

31. Maybe because they're courting the moderate vote?

Maybe because they're looking to get things passed that the moderates and liberals agree upon?

[stravu9]

34. People in charge of the Democrats are of the same "Ruling Class".as Republicans.

They disagree on certain Social issues from their Republican cousins, but no one goes hungry at their house if the Republicans win!
The "populist" "kitchen table " interests are not "SEXY" or appealing to them, because they have no personal frame of reference for it. Money has never been much of an issue to them. Look on TV . EVERYONE is rich on TV. "Roseanne" was what life around my neighborhood resembles. Lower middle working class trying to keep the bills paid and the car running!
Is there a show on now that shows that? I can't think of any. Even on the soaps the doctors are the poor people!

[pat_k]

35. Group think: Collective denial and shared delusion is a powerful thing. . .

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=337814

[LWolf]

36. Because they don't work for us, they work for

their big money donors.

The corruption is rampant enough to ensure that, in larger elections, we won't see people on the ballot that aren't already owned by corporate america.

[xchrom]

38. i honestly believe that it's a combination of the two.

i can't say that money has no influence and i can't say they aren't dense.

they make some brilliant moves -- then bam! -- you're hit with the bankruptcy bill or iwr.

you have to also admit there has been some withering from republick party assaults over the years.
what would the difference have been if dems had united when during the reagan years -- dems had solidified around the word ''liberal'' etc?