What Tom Said

So why don’t Democrats modify their game and start long range fixes that will bring our country back on track? Instead of powder puff superficial half-measures, like shovel ready, ‘spruce-up’ stimulus projects, back room deals with pharmaceutical companies and insurance industry patronage instead of single payer—which a majority of the country wanted? Democrats need to get busy, stop the wishy washy ‘we’re doing the best we can’ and ‘we’re better than they are’ excuses: get tough, dig in, go after deep fundamental structural change. Getting rid of the Obama Wall Street cabal, Summers and Geithner would be a good start. Getting out of Afghanistan and reducing the defense department budget would be a logical next step. Changing tax policy so corporations actually pay tax instead of evading taxes. A corporation now can contribute more to a political candidate than an individual citizen! America needs to fix itself. Democrats need to reform themselves. Grow a set.

I’ve always voted Democrat, except when I voted Green. But…loyalty requires confidence something sorely lacking these days.

There’s a backstory to the terrier anecdote. It’s applicable to the current discussion. It’s from a 2000 Vanity Fair profile of then-governor George W. Bush:

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn’t lose. He’ll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. “If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15,” says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. “If he wasn’t winning, he would quit. He would just walk off…. It’s what we called Bush Effort: If I don’t like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that.” So why could George get away with it? “He was just too easygoing and too pleasant.”

Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. “There was only one problem — my side won the first set,” recalls Betts. “O.K., then we’re going two out of three,” Bush decreed. Bush’s side takes the next set. But Betts’s side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won’t let anybody quit. “He’s pissed. George runs his mouth constantly,” says Betts indulgently. “He’s making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you — he never shuts up!” They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.

There are two Bushes in that first paragraph. One, the guy who (like many progressives) when he can’t win takes his ball and goes home. And two, the guy who refuses to quit and will keep playing until he gets to win — by changing the rules, by default, maybe, simply because everyone else tires of playing and gives up first.

The second Bush reminded me of a Jack Russell terrier playing tug of war with a knotted rope. You can pick him up bodily off the floor and watch him hang by his teeth, his butt swinging around in circles in the air, but he won’t let go. Eventually, your arm gets tired and you let him have it. Who cares, right? It’s just a rope. Well, he cares. More than you. He wants to win more than you do. Winning is everything, and it doesn’t matter if the victory is meaningful or not. That’s why the terrier runs off with the rope and you walk away empty handed. As the high school football coach tells the team, “Boys, you gotta want it.”

If you want to beat such people, you have to be just as single-minded and relentless. If you get disappointed at setbacks and take your ball and go home, you hand a victory to your opponents. That happens too often with progressives.

Movement conservatism — and the movement conservatives behind the Tea Party — are like the second Bush. They refuse to lose. Even if they lose, they don’t lose. They’ll keep playing until you tire of the game and give up.

Unless progressives are willing to out-play such people, they will always lose, because their opponents will never give up.

In the Warren Beatty “Heaven Can Wait,” Leo Farnsworth (Beatty, a quarterback) asks a corporate board of directors, what do you do when you’re ahead? — You don’t make mistakes:

You don’t gamble unnecessarily.
You protect your lead.
You don’t pass from your own end.
You make sure nobody gets hurt.
You got to use these guys in the next game…
We’re not here for just one game.
We’re going all the way to the Super Bowl!

Are we?

@ Tom Sullivan

I don’t want to take the ball and go home, but I do want to fix those things that are broken. Alas, there is much in need of repair. Rejecting out of hand the valid arguments of voters who traditionally support Democratic candidates is a mistake. Inclusiveness, despite what Robert Gibbs says, of progressives might go a long way in solving some of Americas problems. Zeus knows following the paths and patterns of the past is getting us nowhere.

Good point, Diogenes.

Why isn’t the Democratic establishment trying to elect Elaine Marshall even right now?

Choi, this is for you. Where is the DSCC and Menendez?

You’ve got a GOP seat ripe for the picking, but the Democratic establishment is nowhere to be found.

And I love this quote from our Democratic establishment friend:

“If you brought a single payer bill up for a vote,”

They didn’t. That’s the problem. The foolish leadership brought up half-measures for vote without forcing votes (even if some lost) on what EVEN THE POLLS say voters wanted.

Incompetence doesn’t begin to describe the failure of leadership.

It’s fear mixed with collusion with a cherry of incompetence on top.

I’m done with my serving of it.