“Anyone who is concerned with deficit spending should be pleased with this improved bill. Cost containment, reigning in insurance companies’ abusive practices, stabilizing Missouri families’ health care costs, and deficit reduction are all accomplished in this bill. It won’t happen overnight, but it puts us on a course to controlling our deficit. Reducing our deficit by a trillion and a half dollars over 20 years is huge.” –Claire McCaskill, December 19, 2009
Yesterday, right after the news broke that Reid had secured sixty cloture votes and the Manager’s Amendment was being read, I sent an email to a friend who happens to be a staffer in Senator McCaskill’s office and asked him to call me at his convenience (that’s just courtesy, people…staffers work hard and I don’t care if you do have their phone numbers. You don’t use them on a Saturday morning after a week like they just had. Email or text first.) Anyway, he called me back a few minutes later, and we had a long chat about the process of getting where we are.
We agreed that it has been an exhausting, heartbreaking, infuriating, wonderful, terrible, brutal process and while imperfect, the end product is a good start. At the end of our conversation I asked him to please be sure to email me when Claire issued a statement, and late yesterday evening he did so.
Here is the thing I keep thinking about…Twice before we have walked away with no loaf instead of half. And isn’t one definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting a different result?Remember, Teddy Kennedy went to his grave regretting he didn’t take the deal Nixon offered him nearly forty years ago. He turned it down thinking he could come back and get more a bit later. Oops.
I give Claire a hard time when I don’t think that she is progressive enough or liberal enough. But she doesn’t just run in KC and StL. The outstate folks who are all about god and guns get a say in who represents us in the Senate, too. They are the ones who abandoned the Democrats for Reagan, and we haven’t gotten them back yet. The only Democratic Congressman we have from outstate is Ike Skelton, and he is no liberal. A Sanders or Feingold type candidate for Senate that tickled our fancy over here in the People’s Republic of Kansas City would lose by thirty points in November, and deep down inside we all know it. A true liberal can’t get elected to the Senate in Missouri. Period. In other words…you know how we in these parts are so fond of that thing Molly said about dancin’ with them what brung ya? Well guess what? We don’t always get to lead, or even call the tune.
Crossposted from They Gave Us a Republic
True that … but we sure won’t ever get to lead if we’re willing to be led.
As for the guns and god crowd – they are busy holding tea parties and we shouldn’t expect to see them again and good riddance I say. What’s more; they are fighting among themselves which gives progressives some leeway to start making demands on their side of the fence.
It’s not really clear that Kennedy wished he would have compromised more in negotiations with Nixon. He regretted not being able to come to an agreement, but that’s not the same thing as wishing he had given away the public option in 1970 in order to pass reform. (And he still insisted on a public option up until the day he died, as well.)
http://theplumline.whorunsgov….
As a Dem who lives in the second reddest county in Missouri, I know what Claire faces out here in East Bumfuck. I realize she can’t be a Fiengold or Boxer or Schumer given how red this state really is.
But…
She can be a fuckload lot better than she is, which is currently a Ben Nelson/Mary Landrieu clone. She’s timid, she’s wishy washy, she’s not even a good back-bencher in the traditional sense of the term because on EVERY core Dem issue she’s voted on that involves political risk back home, she always asks herself What Would Jim Talent Do and votes like Jim Talent.
She didn’t run on a progressive platform, she ran on , a “I’m Not Jim Talent” platform. I sure as shit wouldn’t know most of the time since she was sworn in.
Her timidity, Repup Lite attitude pisses off rurl Dems, all 13.67 of us. Why? We wanted a Senator who wasn’t afraid. Claire is very afraid, it shows all the time.
And the kicker here is that she needs us rurl Dems to reelect her. We are the ones who will sit at home on our asses and not vote for her and not because of the reasons she thinks. We wanted somebody firm, somebody not afraid to stand up and say “this is a core value and this is why I’m voting for it.” Instead, she plays to conservatives who will never vote for her EVER.
So, while I don’t expect her to vote for core Dem values each and every time, I do expect her to vote for core Dem values a helluva lot more than Ben Nelson does. And to date, she’s failed every time.
This vote on health care cloture, while nice, didn’t involve any political risk and given the bill’s controversy among the left, it’s not as if she adhered to core Dem values in making this vote.
When I was an intel officer at the Pentagon, we had a saying: “one aw shit wipes out ten attaboys.” With Claire, her one lukewarm attaboy (health care cloture) doesn’t wip out her numerous aw shits.
I agree with grog that Claire acts as if she’s afraid of what the opposition will do to her when she opens her mouth or casts a vote. (Actually, given the angry mob she faced in Hillsboro in August, I can see why she’s scared.) But she’s no different than the average Democrat in this country right now. We’re constantly looking over our shoulder to see what crazy lies the Repugs are blastly over the air waves about us. And we give up the fight before it starts. We conceded on single payer instead of fighting for it. We wanted to play nice even though we knew in our heart of hearts that the Repugs would roll over us and rub our noses in their lies. Why is that? What are we afraid of? Why do we concede “rural MO” to the “god and guns” crowd? As the demographics change, we should be ready to greet and educate them about our core values and good ideas for the future health and security of Missouri citizens. We DO have good ideas and we honestly DO want what’s best for the majority (unlike the opposition who want only to enrich themselves and their friends.)
If the state and national Dem leaders can’t put together a think tank to churn out snappy, convincing messages, we may have to do it ourselves. With all the talent contributing to this blog, that task should be a piece of cake. Why let the Repugs monopolize the public discourse just because they are better at using pithy, powerful language? We’ve all read Lakoff, we know what “framing” is, so why don’t we use some of that knowledge to change the discourse?
Let’s start by changing the media’s obsession with Obama’s weaknesses and their constant questions about how many seats the Dems will lose next year. New converation: what’s the matter with Repugs that they think it’s okay to deny health care to millions of Americans for their personal political goals? Joe Wilson shouted “You LIE” to President Obama while Mitch McConnell and his puppets yell “You DIE” to millions of Americans.
They really don’t give a damn about the majority of us. Why do we let them convince folks otherwise?
That is an angle that I have heard very little about. If it is a problem why not talk about it? Why not level with the people and say listen,this is a problem we need to solve before we can talk about single payer.I wonder if any attention is given to this problem in the current bill?