Ranting On...the Democratic Party

Okay people, I'm back and in front of a computer.  This week has not been one of my best team, I'm going to admit it.  Do you ever have those weeks where everything is daunting and no one seems to want to pitch in and help or quite frankly even seems to care?  I'm guessing you have, and so we're on the same wavelength.  For me, it's been all about due dates and expectations I have on myself and personal life-one of those spirals where you take a look at your To Do lists, both immediate (I feel like every day there's more things to clean in my apartment, regardless of what I cleaned yesterday) and long-term (playing the "why am I still single" game on a Friday night is about as anti-solution oriented as you can get, especially regarding that particular problem).  But, I'm a trooper (or at least horribly Type-A and don't get kicked down easily), so I'm going to start in on something that has been enormously big on my To Do list: getting back to regular blogging, which has taken a hit this week.  Hopefully you'll enjoy what I'm planning on being a robust week on the blog, and if you're also overwhelmed with your To Do lists or your crazy expectations for yourself, head on down to the comments and get to ranting.

I had a number of topics that I could discuss for this week's rant (in fact, that opening paragraph could fill up a page, but ranting about myself for an entire post seems wildly narcissistic).  Therefore, I'm going to instead go into a tough subject for me this week: the Democratic Party.

One of the reasons that I'm positive I would make a great football fan is that I love cheering for my team.  I oftentimes get asked about whether I love movies or politics better, and if I had to truly pick one, it'd be the cinema.  However, if you ask which night I get the most excited for when I win, it's easily Election Night.  Take, for example last year's elections and last February's Oscars.  As you know if you read the 2012 OVP (please get excited-2009 is coming in a matter of days!), my team didn't really win-while I was lukewarm on Argo taking the trophy, I was most excited to see Jessica Chastain and Joaquin Phoenix take home the gold.  However, I didn't get that-Daniel Day-Lewis and Jennifer Lawrence both prevailed, and while I wasn't cheering for them, I'm fine with it.  They're both really good actors and gave strong performances.  The reality is that it's rare for a film to beat the movie I'm cheering for and for me to viscerally, genuinely be angry and frustrated about it.  Even if the worst performances in those two categories (Hugh Jackman and Naomi Watts) had won, I would have gotten over it fairly quickly-Watts is a talented (albeit sporadically) actress and Jackman seems like a genuinely nice guy.  I can count on one hand the number of times that an Oscar victory has made me truly frustrated and mad, and only two times in recent memory (for the record, Hilary Swank over Bening/Staunton/Winslet, though I've gotten pretty much over my intense dislike of Swank as a result, and Crash beating Brokeback, a victory that is still like punching me in the stomach).

Election Night, however, I celebrate much harder with the wins and feel the losses.  I'm a Yellow Dog Democrat through-and-through: it doesn't matter if it's a liberal like Elizabeth Warren scoring a huge goal in Massachusetts or a conservative Dem like Mike McIntyre eking out a recount in North Carolina.  I know the big picture, I know that I'm not just electing a person to represent me, I'm also voting for someone who will elect Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as my national congressional leaders, and will allow issues that I find important to come to the table and be heard, even if my representative doesn't always agree with me on those issues.  Therefore, I pay attention to every race in the same way that a football fan pays attention to every game and every player-I don't just want to win, I want to win big and I want as much victory as possible.

So it was rough this week watching the Democrats, who have been oddly unified over the past few years (Republicans, prior to the Tea Party, were far better at keeping their act together), tear each other to shreds, and in particular, blow through the healthcare law.  The rollout of the ACA has been well-documented on this site in the past few weeks, and the fact that the president's promise that people could "keep their insurance" (even if that insurance may be shoddy, worthless, and not as practical in the long haul as genuine health insurance) was so clearly not true is a fact that so easily could have been finessed earlier on and had no business being a very repeatable campaign slogan that not only the president used, but also dozens of other Democrats.

One of my chief complaints against the President has been with this team member mentality.  Bill Clinton has become famous in the past few years for his ability to campaign for dozens and dozens of Democrats across the country.  One of the two times I've seen Clinton was when he was in Minnesota in the last election campaigning for Jim Graves.  Clinton has always been very much about party growth for the Democrats.  One of the more popular comparisons that (particularly Republicans) have made to the presidency is comparing it to being a CEO, but the big difference between the President and a CEO is that the President doesn't get to pick the 535 coworkers that he has to work with.

George W. Bush also got this-he regularly made a point of campaigning in red states in 2002 and 2004.  That 2004 should stick out to people-despite having a tough reelection against John Kerry, Bush still found the time to go out and campaign and use his political machine to amp up the fortunes of people like Richard Burr, Jim DeMint, and Mel Martinez.

It's not like the President didn't have coattails in 2008 and 2012, I'll admit, but that had little to do with his active campaigning for Democrats, and a lot of tight races in both years got left on the floor as a result of him not spreading the wealth.  On the rare occasions where the President does campaign for a candidate (recently he did this for Ed Markey and Terry McAuliffe), it always pales in comparison to that of what Bill Clinton or George W. Bush does on the stump-it never gets to that personal touch, that personal plea not just for his own ideals, but for the actual person he's campaigning for to win.

It might be because the President has never had the relationship with leaders of Congress that the past two presidents do.  Barack Obama doesn't enjoy the relationship that, say, bitter foes politically but personally friendly George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi have (I seriously doubt that Barack Obama will be sending John Boehner or Mitch McConnell a birthday card in a few years).  It's a great disparity between even some of the leading 2016 contenders: Hillary Clinton and John McCain have long had a strong relationship personally, as have Cory Booker and Chris Christie and Joe Biden and the entire Senate Republican caucus.  Obama rarely operates as part of the Democratic Party-sure he supports their ideals and of course he votes for them when he gets in the ballot box, but he never seems to take the time to help out the party in a big and obvious way.  I see all of the headlines about how he is finally doing some DSCC and DCCC fundraisers and again, compare him to Bush who made this a top priority (which paid off royally in 2002, winning him House and Senate seats in a midterm, and in the latter case, winning back the chamber).  Had President Obama taken more time on the campaign trail and done a better job for the party and for getting his coalition out for down-ballot candidates, it's hard to see a Senate without Shelley Berkley, Joe Sestak, and Alexi Giannoulias, nor a Gov. Rick Scott in Florida or a Gov. John Kasich in Ohio.  These may sound like small potatoes, but a 58-42 Senate would be huge (particularly considering the red state incumbents we have up in 2014 and the backlog of judicial appointments we have on-deck) and the impact that Scott and Kasich had on gerrymandering.

This ended up being a retread of some past issues I've had with the president, but I want to end this article not with a rebuke against the Democrats who voted on the Upton Bill (if you are mad, open up your checkbooks for Ann Kirkpatrick, who took a big risk by not voting for it), but instead I'll show one of the other ways that I was mad at the Democrats this past week-that of Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, and the Virginia Attorney General's election.  In one of the few upsides of this past week's bad news, the Democrats took the lead in the Virginia Attorney General's race thanks to the great work of Dave Wasserman (who realized a number of ballots hadn't been counted yet).  Maddow covered this interesting story (election results rarely change after election night to favor the guy who is behind-recounts usually just solidify, rather than change the result), but she also couldn't help getting a dig about how the election process had been conducted by Ken Cuccinelli's office and how it was "interesting" (you can picture Maddow, whom I generally enjoy, and the inflection she would have put into this piece) that these missing Democratic ballots happened under a Republican.  The reality is, though, that there was no indication that Cuccinelli's office was remotely involved in a cover-up and it seemed like just an error (one which was thankfully corrected).  MSNBC has become a great counterweight to the Republicans' FOX News, but it doesn't need to emulate Roger Ailes' abandonment of true facts and journalism in favor of talking points and baseless allegations.  Maddow is smarter than that, MSNBC should be better than that, and no one needs a Democratic FOX News if that's all the channel is going to devolve into in the future.

Those are my rants this Sunday morning (pretty meandering, I'll admit)-what are yours?  Do you wish the President would show stronger leadership with getting Democrats elected and helping to use his campaign operation to get Democrats other than himself elected?  If he does, which Democrats do you think could benefit the most from his campaign (obvious choices like Mike Michaud and Pat Quinn should go without saying, but I personally think he could be the key to a Sen. Michelle Nunn)?  What are your thoughts on the Upton vote?  And were you also disappointed with Maddow's lackluster reporting?