Like we pointed out yesterday, of the 34 conservative Democrats who voted with every House Republican against the Affordable Care Act, 31 were subsequently defeated or forced out of politics, many in the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse that decimated that Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Only 3 of the anti-Obamacare Democrats are still in the House-- Blue Dogs Collin Peterson (MN) and Dan Lipinksi (IL) and confused ConservaDem Stephen Lynch (MA)-- and Democrats have pretty much united around the efficacy of Obamacare as a step towards comprehensive health care in America.
But that isn't stopping the GOP. John Oliver, on his Last Week Tonight HBO show, documented just how wrong the GOP and their propaganda arms-- from Fox News to Dick Morris-- have been about the demise of Obamacare, which is now accepted by most Americans. Most Americans, in fact, tell pollsters that Republicans should just suck it up and move on. But their hate-filled, Foxified base isn't ready to move on from the Confederate flag, let alone from the idea of the neediest families among us getting subsidized health insurance. It feeds into the glorious grievance mentality of backward Southern racists-- on top of their flag problem and gays getting married and people taking climate change seriously... just about anything from the 21st century.
Enjoy Oliver's video up top-- and Stephen Colbert's celebration of marriage equality here:
The problem is: vote out 31 DINOs and 62 immediately sprout up on primary ballots.
ReplyDeleteThe Dems are, essentially, as efficient as the reich-wing in generating breathtakingly shitty candidates.
John Puma
PS .... the valiant efforts of Act Blue + DWT, not withstanding
We'd be truly lost without you
In re the 31 of 34 and what anon says above: these were obviously most of them rotten candidates and incumbents for the DCCC to spend so much money on; Parker Griffith, the DCCC's Multimillion Dollar Man who switched parties and got his ass kicked in a GOP primary is emblematic for me. But could the Democratic Party have done better in these districts? In other words, is there a statistical way to demonstrate that each of these candidates and their collectivity was not the best we could have done? Some, like Heath Shuler, strike me as having been much less good than we could have done in his district before redistricting, while, say Frank Kratovil may have been as far left as we could have gone, given how crazy the Eastern Shore of Maryland has become. As poor a Democrat as John Barrow was, I doubt his district would have supported anyone better. So - any feel for whether these Republican Lites lost because real Democrats didn't care enough to support them or if they were about the best we could have done and how to calculate that?
ReplyDelete5 to 4 are pretty good odds when you're playing jiggery-pokery.
ReplyDeleteekstase