Confidential to President Obama and aides: Did you notice what happened when Alan Grayson stood up for his principles?

Does the Idea of Obama know that Actual Obama's White House thinks we lefties are just a bunch of pajama-clad whiners? Does Actual Obama care what the Idea of Obama thinks? (Don't forget to click on the strip to enlarge it.)

by Ken

Back in March, a post on the Tampa Bay Times's political blog The Buzz noted a Rothenberg Political Report that in Orlando-area FL-08, the normally Republican congressional district wrested from tarnished incumbent Ric Keller in 2008 by unabashed liberal Alan Grayson, "There is little doubt they’ll compete" in 2010. The report, citing as possible GOP candidates former state House Speaker Dan Webster and Orange County Mayor Rich Crotty, drew some interesting comments, including one signed "An observer," which argued that Republicans disaffected with Keller had allowed him to go down in 2008, knowing that year's election was going to be a Republican rout, clearing the path for a new candidate in 2010. "Grayson is nothing more than a place-holder," the commenter continued, "albeit a Huffington Post, Dailykos.com delusional place-holder, but a place-holder none the less. Dan Webster will beat Grayson by larger than a 10 point margin."

Until recently, with freshman Rep. Grayson taking his place as perhaps the House's most outspoken (and effective?) progressive, the "Just Say No" Republicans thought FL-08 was practically back in their column. All they had to do was keep hammering away at the president and making their maximum effort of obstruction with every utterance and he made, while hammering away at the "extreme" liberal congressman.

So when Grayson made his now-famous declaration that the Republican health care plan consisted of advising people not to get sick, and if you do, to die quickly, the Just Say Naysayers were licking their chops. The Great Right-Wing Noise Machine went instantly into high-screech mode, pounding Grayson day and night. The all-important Conventional Wisdom was that all the Republicans had to do was pencil in a candidate, and the seat was won.

Grayson, however, surprised the Noisemakers, and maybe some of us as well, by standing his ground. And an amazing thing happened. Of course to us lefties he became the man of the hour, the progressive hero who stood up to the bullies and lying obstructionists. Meanwhile Republicans found their prospective candidates turning uncharacteristically media-shy. Not only were you not hearing fancy talk about a larger-than-10-point margin of victory, you began to wonder if they were going to be able to come up with a candidate.

DOESN'T ANYBODY WANT THIS NOMINATION?

Already on October 2, a Friday, the Orlando Sentinel ran a story, "GOP quiet on who might face Alan Grayson in 2010," in which reporter David Damron noted that "it was hard to find a politician Thursday willing to take [Grayson] on." According to Damron, "Orange County GOP Chairman Lew Oliver, the man who 'guaranteed' Grayson's defeat, acknowledged Thursday that it was time for Republicans to muster a serious candidate," and the reporter quoted senior Grayson campaign adviser Julie Tagen:

The reason that no one has joined the race against Congressman Grayson is because they know the Democratic Party will beat them to a pulp. In other words, they're scared.

Crotty withdrew last week, even though he was confident he would have beaten Grayson "handily," "saying his low-key style 'was just not a good fit' with Washington's rancorous tone. In the end, he said, 'I would have won a prize I'm not sure I wanted.'" (It seems Crotty also has some dirty laundry he may not be eager to have aired.)

Yesterday Sentinel political reporter Mike Thomas posted this blog item:

I just got off the phone with Dan Webster, who still says he is undecided on running for Congress.

Here is my take on the conversation: Dan has no intention of running. He is a big family man and his family, including five grandkids, is here. He would be a commuter congressman, and we saw how well that worked with Mel Martinez. I get the impression his family isn't keen on him running. He says his wife told him: "The problem is you might win.''

A better fit for Dan would the mayoral race and he is interested. Instead of taking on a strong incumbent like Grayson, he would be entering a wide-open race with no favorite. But he has to act soon.

As for the congressional race, Dan says he "would like" to announce it today.

What???? Even while we waited, all tingly, for the big announcement, the spin was already in motion for Gramps to opt out of the race on the ground that he might win and then have to leave the grandkids behind for the forced march to D.C. Um, right.

Today the big announcement came -- with our Dan's "Nuh-uh, I don't think so" buried in a cloud of gibberish opaque even by the unexalted standards of a provincial right-wing hack. Dara Kam reports on the Palm Beach Post's Post on Politics blog:

Webster, a Christian conservative who served nearly three decades in the Florida legislature and served as House Speaker, said in a statement that despite encouragement from supporters he was prompted to “follow a principle that has always served me well: ‘When in doubt, don’t.’”

“I do firmly believe that in every public office there needs to be a resurgence of the basic principles on which this Republic was founded, and a return to our original standards of integrity and character,” he said.

And then theOrlando Sentinel's David Damron reported that 68-year-old restaurant-supply company owner Jerry Pierce had just "suddenly" withdrawn from consideration, "just hours after pledging to put a large sum of his personal fortune into the race," in exchange for which he would receive the party endorsement. Why the change of heart? It seems our Jerry can't bring himself to put his family through it, a consideration that apparently hadn't occurred to him before, including the time when he was bartering for the party nod.

"I can take this, but they can't," Pierce said.

With the recent exit of former state Sen. Dan Webster, R-Winter Garden, from the roster of GOP hopefuls, that leaves a pair of Tea Party activists -- Patricia Sullivan from Eustis and Dan Fanelli of Orlando -- and recent Orlando resident Armando Gutierrez Jr., as likely Grayson foes, so far.

FYI: Last week Pierce told Damron that "he would run with or without the party's support by tapping the veterans and pro-growth groups he has worked closely with for years."

THE POLITICS OF BELIEVING IN SOMETHING

It does seem that Grayson is showing that if you stake out your principles clearly and stand by them, it's possible to get at least some of your voters to: (a) begin focusing on those issues rather than all the deafening political noise and/or (b) at least respect you for believing in something -- a lesson that has served loudmouthed hard-right-wing pols with their cartoonlike, nuance-free visions of the world for decades.

And then there's that crew in the White House, scared of pretty much everything and everyone, it seems, except us lefty whiners. When it comes to us, they feel gloriously empowered. While the president himself periodically makes a pretty speech -- and there's no doubt, he can make as pretty a speech as you're going to hear today -- making it sound as if he shares our concerns and indeed will pursue an agenda that realizes our fondest hopes, the trolls back in the White House, under the command of Trollmaster Rahm Emanuel, laugh at us and spit at us and keep watch for any passing bus they can throw us under.

Of course, like any bullies, they're only brave with people they're persuaded are weaker than them -- and we seem to be pretty much it. Despite the pitiful estate to which the entire Republican Party has sunk, the Rahmites are fraidy scared of them, who in the administration's view have to be respected, appeased, and wherever possible accommodated, even when they themselves show no sign of willingness to make the slightest accommodation in return. They're even scareder of right-wing and so-called "moderate" Democrats, to whose satisfaction the administration is apparently willing to water down any proposal on the table.

As an online colleague observed, the Obama administration seems built on fear, but not in the way that the Bush regime was, which was to make all players in the process fear the regime. No, the present administration seems afraid of everyone else. (Everyone but us, that is.) It operates as if from a position of the most abject weakness.

Never mind the 365-173 electoral-vote shellacking that put the president in office. Never mind the commanding Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Never mind the solid-to-overwhelming public approval indicated in polls -- which was, granted, a lot more overwhelming when more of those people being polled still believed that the president actually believed in something. Never mind the cartoon status to which the opposition "party" has been reduced: a bottom-feeding assortment of unreconstructed Confederates, Crap Christian demagogues, Far Right zealots, and sweaty-palmed corporate predators.

TAKE OFF YOUR PAJAMAS, BLOGGERS!

Sunday night we got confirmation of a sort that the White House sees itself engaged in the most delicate of balancing acts. As you've surely heard -- Howie has already linked to Digby's report -- on NBC's Nightly News CNBC (and NYT) correspondent John Harwood answered a question from Lester Holt about resistance to Obama administration policy from the left with this eye-popper: "For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn't take this opposition, one adviser told me today those bloggers need to take off their pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult."

This produced an online firestorm a firm-sounding White House denial from senior communications adviser Dan Pfeiffer: “That sentiment does not reflect White House thinking at all, we’ve held easily a dozen calls with the progressive online community because we believe the online communities can often keep the focus on how policy will affect the American people rather than just the political back-and-forth.”

(One delicious speculation that I've heard speculated, is that the anonymous source being officially repudiated was Pfeiffer himself. This makes such wonderful sense that I'm sorry there appears to be no factual backup for the speculation.)

Now Digby makes the interesting point that, as she has pointed out repeatedly, such a dismissive view of the liberal netroots is one that Harwood himself has voiced -- in his own voice, that is -- on-air more occasions than can be readily enumerated. Still, I don't see any possibility that he simply made this up, and while "adviser" can be an ambiguous term, I don't think Harwood's use of it was meant at all ambiguously; I think he meant someone in a policy role inside the White House. It's possible, of course, that it represents a dissident view within the WH, but Harwood sure doesn't think so, and since the speaker had to expect his/her words were going to be made public, do you think there's any chance that he/she would have said something that might have gotten him/her in trouble with his/her superiors?

And besides, and above all, in what way is this statement the tiniest bit inconsistent with the established working methods of this adminstration? Lip service is available on selected occasions for those of us in what I would call the mainstream of Democratic Party issues, but how much consideration of those views is ever given in the inner sanctum? When it comes to LGBT issues, which many people mistakenly assumed was the exclusive subject of Harwood's comment, again the president made one of his patented fancy speeches at the HRC dinner Saturday night, but with no commitment to anything of an actual follow-through nature except a plea to watch and see.

Whereas when the mangiest Blue Dog has an itch, Master Rahm and his team are on the job. On a host of controversial pieces of legislation, most obviously health care reform but not limited to it, the White House has seemed to place a higher value on Republican votes it was never going to get than on the votes of Democrats who were thereby put in the position of voting for legislation the believed to be seriously compromised. As a number of people skilled in the principles of negotiation have pointed out, this adminstration begins "compromising" before the other side even announces a position, apparently simply in anticipation of objections before they've even been made -- and again by people who have no earthly intention of voting for the "compromise" package.

With regard to health care reform, we've heard often enough that the administration's brain trust has as its sole priority passage of "a bill," and never mind whether the bill actually brings us closer to achieving the kind of reform that's needed. There is the ever-increasing suspicion that "a bill" may perfectly well include one that functions mainly as a bonanza for the insurance industry, one that large numbers of Americans are going to punish the Democrats for when they discover how much they are forced to pay either in premiums for super-crap covers-nothing insurance or for the penalty for not buying insurance.

This of course suggests that the brain trust isn't even very good at the politics of its machinations, since there's a good chance that what it considers a politically successful outcome will make an already restive electorate outright angry and defiant. But then the politics of Master Rahm always seem to take as their constituency, not the electorate but his corporate patrons.

"SHOW ME THE MONEY"

If in the end very little of this is about enlightened policy as much as it is a game of "Show me the money" -- as a lot of Howie's writing in recent months as tended to suggest -- then it may well be that the administration is succeeding admirably in the "complicated and difficult" task of "governing a closely divided country. If it's about achieving any of the policy goals announced so eloquently by candidate and then President Obama, it's not only lousy policy but probably even lousy politics. At the moment the administration has precious little to show the country by way of actual accomplishment.

The Democrats have gotten plenty of mileage out of the Republicans' self-destruction. Master Rahm clearly believed in the 2006 and 2008 elections that it wasn't necessary for the Democrats to be seen as believing in anything to beat them, that in fact being caught believing in something would cost them more votes than it would gain. That struck some of us as a dangerously, even tragically misguided notion. This administration came into power with a mandate for change, and with the election results had an opportunity to remake the political landscape.

(Of course there is again the quite different consideration that what we consider the bind we're in now is exactly the situation Master Rahm wanted to engineer. As Howie documented in his coverage of the 2004, 2006, and 2008 congressional races, the DCCC -- directly controlled by Rahm in the first two, less directly last time -- devoted more urgent attention to fighting progressive Democrats than to fighting Republicans. Hell, an alarming number of is anointed candidates were Republicans until they heard "the call." We always wondered just what kind of House majority the Master was trying to create. Or perhaps I should say we were always afraid that it would be the kind we've wound up with.)

I don't want to conclude that that opportunity has been squandered. I would rather think that Alan Grayson has been showing us how some of candidate Obama's agenda -- "the idea of Obama," that is, as opposed to "actual Obama" -- might yet be salvaged.

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