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Heh. So much for our accurate political prognostication. The problem isn’t so much the cats, it’s the herders:
Herding Cats – Barack Obama 2.0 (January 14, 2009)
Obama on the rope line after his speech in Columbia, Missouri on October 30, 2008
(immediately below the outstretched arm holding a digital camera in the center of the image).Retooling Obama’s campaign machine for the long haul
…As Barack Obama builds his administration and prepares to take office next week, his political team is quietly planning for a nationwide hiring binge that would marshal an army of full-time organizers to press the new president’s agenda and lay the foundation for his reelection.
The organization, known internally as “Barack Obama 2.0,” is being designed to sustain a grass-roots network of millions that was mobilized last year to elect Obama and now is widely considered the country’s most potent political machine…
Boy, did I get that one wrong. I wasn’t alone.
You can’t win any battles if you don’t bring your army:
Why is Obama leaving the grass roots on the sidelines?
By Sam Graham-Felsen
Friday, December 17, 2010In the wake of President Obama’s deal to extend the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, pundits have focused on how Obama has alienated the left. But the issue isn’t the left – it’s the list.
Obama entered the White House with more than a landslide victory over Sen. John McCain. He brought with him a vast network of supporters, instantly reachable through an unprecedented e-mail list of 13 million people. These supporters were not just left-wing activists but a broad coalition that included the young, African Americans, independents and even Republicans – and they were ready to be mobilized…..
….Obama has made it clear that, for the most part, his administration isn’t seriously interested in deploying this massive grass-roots list….
Because we’re all barbarians and the inside the beltway cocktail weenie circuit is afraid of us? They needn’t worry.
And the lunatic right wingnut fringe (now, the republican mainstream):
Dec 15, 2010
They’ll Just Get Madder
by paradox….I vividly remember 2004 and the crushing loss to that Sarah Palin clone, George Bush, how liberals and progressives had every reason to pack it and quit but manifestly, resolutely did not with an adamancy that still surprises me. Even with this abominable deal in 2010, even if Obama should lose 2012, passionate liberal and progressive junkies will dive into politics to loudly promote the liberal agenda, it’s what patriots and junkies do.
Then the Right and Republicans will loathe us even more and get more berserk against liberals, for as Digby so wisely knows, Teabaggers and Republicans are authoritarians to the bone, they do not seek to accommodate liberals in any sense, they seek to destroy and totally silence. When we won’t shut up and keeping scoring small wins it enrages them even more than liberal policy.
Win or lose, they just keep getting madder. Something to keep firmly in mind in the future as we reach for whatever liberal goals are available to us.
[emphasis added]
Goals? What goals?
Just imagine all of the upscale holiday gag t-shirt gifts which will be opened and proudly worn by millionaires and billionaires for a few hours at the end of this next week: “69,456,897 chumps voted for ‘change’ and all I got was the renewal of my Paris Hilton tax break, no more inheritance taxes, and another successful assault on Social Security…”