United We Stand?

There's been some frustration upon the Masasachssetts election with some in the blogosphere, like John Cole, endeavoring to find enough unity in the Party to get an accomplishment, any accomplishment, with this super majority before it succumbs to a demise of its own making in November. In so doing Cole lashes out at liberals who insist on getting their way. Kos responds that Democrats in Washington have failed to fulfill the destiny we gave them and therefore have created a larger than usual base problem noted in this recent polling data:

In the 2010 Congressional elections will you definitely vote, probably vote, not likely vote, or definitely will not vote?

Def/Prob Not Likely/Won't

Dem 54 43
GOP 82 17

White 67 32
Black 26 55
Latino 38 51
18-29 38 53

As you can see, our base is demoralized and tuned out, and plan on sitting out the 2010 elections at rates that will absolutely fuck us if they don't improve by November. But again, African Americans, Latinos, and young voters aren't tuning out because we failed to build bipartisan concensus with Olympia Snowe. Making such claims is patently absurd. They're tuning out because we wasted 2009 "negotiating" with bad faith actors like Snowe and Mike Enzi. The tools were available to quickly pass a health care bill, yet Democrats were too incompetent to do so. And on issue after issue, they've proven completely ineffective.

THAT's why the base is sitting things out. They don't need blogs or MSNBC to tell them that Democrats can't govern. They already knew that Republicans don't want to govern, but the Democrats were supposed to be different. And they are, they want to govern, but they can't. And the voters that worked their asses off to give Democrats the White House and super majorities in Congress are now realizing that it was all for nothing. That all that talk about hope and change was cynical bullshit designed to motivate them. It worked once, but that crowd is learning the art of political cynicism, and it ain't pretty.

Cole may want to lash out at prominent progressives who have tried to prod our Democratic majorities in the right direction, and they certainly offer a tempting and easy target. But the reality is that voters demanded accomplishments, and on the big items, the Democrats have mostly failed. They weren't hired to tinker around the edges. They were hired to enact transformative "change". And while Cole and others like him might wish that progressives banded together to cheer along bullshit negotiations with Snowe and Enzi and repeated capitulations to an irrelevant minority and its corporatist allies in the Democratic Party, fact is, voters aren't that stupid. All the neocon cheerleading in the world didn't prevent Americans from realizing that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been completely botched. Canned cheering for this health care bill wouldn't have saved it from similar sentiment.

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, Cole is trying to attain the objective of accomplishment rather than scuttle all the work on HCR up to this point. If so, it should turn those numbers right around. On the other hand, Kos is correct that all this sucking up to corporate interests and their Republican lackeys at the expense of Democratic populism has tuned the base right out and they'll be sitting on their hands next November. In any event, Minnick and Allred better be looking for ways to turn this base problem around at the state level, cause in a state where Republicans enjoy a superior identity, they'll need every Democrat to show up if they wanna win in November. Discuss.