| You can see the actual results here. The first thing to say is that it was a good day for President Obama, as Michael Bennet won with a commanding 54.2% of the vote. It was also a bad day for Spunky, as Handel seems to have lost to Deal in Georgia. The Handel campaign is making noise about the absentee ballots, so that may go on for a while. The DCW community nailed 3 out of 4 in our polling, picking Bennet, Buck, McMahon and Lamont. Surprising to me was the Minnesota Democratic gubernatorial outcome. With 1% of the vote in, Mark Dayton was well ahead. By 3%, the lead had gone to Margaret Kelliher, who was still leading at around 10:30 p.m. (ET) when Oreo took over the DCW posting, and about half the vote was in. In the end, Dayton won over Kelliher, who had received the state party endorsement. Posting returns is interesting in that you see it bit-by-bit, minute-by-minute, which is sometimes a different experience from catching up every half hour or so. The big winner yesterday was Steven Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who was hit in the head by a passenger just before the flight left, had words with her after the plane landed, and then deployed the emergency chute, took a bid, slid out, and drove home. He was arrested and is never going to be paid to fly again, but to many polite, stressed frequent flyers and attendants, he's a hero. For an interesting take on the situation, and a chance to submit your own take-this-job-and-shove-it moment, click here. The biggest losers are Moscovites. While this has flown under the radar, about 700 people a day are dying from heat and smog; a combination of weather and fire. This is double the number of people who normally die per day. Hey Inhoff, repeat again that there is no global warming. Also yesterday came the fallout over Robert Gibbs' remarks about the "professional left". He made disparaging remarks about all of us left wing progressive Democrats who worked so hard to get Obama elected, and are now incredibly disappointed by his corporatism. “I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.” The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”
Jane Hamsher is dead on when she writes about the contrast between candidate Obama and President Obama: Spiro Agnew — sorry, Robert Gibbs — says “the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.” Well, the Obama in the White House is not representative of the Obama who organized, campaigned, raised money and ran for office, so I guess it’s a wash. Gibbs does the only thing you can do when trying to defend a record of corporatist capitulation: triangulate against your critics as extremists. But the fact is, the positions Obama has abandoned aren’t the exclusive territory of Dennis Kucinich. Standing up to the banks and the insurance companies, reducing the political influence of corporate money, defending Social Security and ending the wars are issues that are broadly popular with the American public. That’s why Obama campaigned on them in order to pave his way to the White House.
Abandoning one's base is never a good idea in the long run. Will it affect you? |
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