the Punk PatriotCoakley lost.
And she should have lost too.
She had absolutely no grasp of retail politics whatsoever. She seemed to be relying on the fact that the Massachusetts Democratic party is a 500 pound gorilla that wins everything ever, and that this fact alone would sweep her right into office, without any regard for campaigning.
Coakley overlooked a simple fact of politics. It's the
voters that put you into office. Your votes aren't granted to you, you have to EARN them.
This is a fact that the Democratic party seems incapable of learning, over and over and over again.
In fact, the Democratic party is SO adverse to learning this lesson, that they come up with excuses left and right to avoid facing this simple truth.
They are
so convinced that 51% of the votes are already theirs that when they run a terrible campaign and lose, they quickly scan the scene for somebody else to blame. They blame Nader. They blame the Green Party. They blame the weather. They even blame the voters. It's not the voters' fault that you lose elections. Its your own fault, for not earning their vote.
Now the talking heads are all saying that this race is going to change the results of the 2012 election, because if the healthcare bill fails, then Obama will be a failure, and the voters won't re-elect him.
WRONG. I've taken a course in statistical analysis, and the cardinal rule of statistical analysis is that "correlation does not determine cause and effect."
If Obama loses in 2012, it's not going to be because of this one race. This one race is maybe, possibly, perhaps, an indicator of the national political climate. Maybe. Or maybe it's just that Coakley was such a terrible candidate that Democrats couldn't stomach voting for her, and just stayed home.
Let's say that it
is an indicator though. Am I really supposed to be upset that the corporate give-away that is the current healthcare bill is going to fail? And why can't the Democrats pass a bill, when they have a larger majority in the Senate than the Republicans have had in the past 23 years?
Why was it that George W Bush was able to ram anything he asked for through congress? Was it because the Republicans had a marginal majority? Or was it because the majority of Democrats in Congress voted along with George W Bush? Was it because George W Bush was a more effective president? Or was it because the Democratic leadership offered absolutely
NO meaningful opposition?
Let's say that Obama
DOES lose in 2012. If he does indeed lose, he's likely going to lose not because of the healthcare bill passing or failing.
He's going to lose because the healthcare bill that came out of the Senate was a corrupt bill that forced consumers by Federal law to purchase a financial product from a private, for-profit enterprise or be subjected to thousands of dollars in fines.
He's going to lose because he spoke about ending the war, and not only continued the two we had, but started two more-- one in Pakistan, and one in Yemen.
He's going to lose because he promised healthcare reform, and allowed the Congress to give us corporate welfare for the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
He's going to fail, not because congress fails to pass a bill, but because he failed to spend the political capital he had after the 2008 election. He could have done as FDR did, and asked the voters, who had just swept him into office, and were ripe with enthusiasm, to give him a Congress that would create sweeping reform. Be he didn't. He's going to be a failure because he didn't ask congress for the sweeping kind of reform that the voters who put him into office wanted.
He must have been too busy picking out his new dog. You know, important stuff.
This all goes back to the lesson that the Democrats continually fail to learn. You have to EARN our votes. Maybe if your party could produce something that wasn't a compromised corporate give-away for once, if your party could stop complaining about Republican policies while voting for them, maybe, just maybe, you could earn the respect of the voters.
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