What Digby Said

Well, actually one of Digby's running buddies over at Hullabaloo, but still:

...
For a young voter or voter of color, voting for Democrats isn't a matter of hope for a better future. It's basically a defensive crouch to prevent the insane sociopaths from taking over. To provide real hope, Democrats would have to start pushing for a $15 minimum wage, for basic universal income, for single-payer healthcare, for a green jobs Apollo Program, for student loan forgiveness, and similar policies.

As it is, there's no real reason for an infrequent Democratic voter to come to the polls. Sure, it's important to stop the likes of Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney from sitting in the White House, and appointing decent judges to the Supreme Court is nice.

But there's no way Democrats are going to solve their midterm problem without providing a real, positive vision for the country. If even hardcore activists like me see voting as a defensive rather than an offensive weapon, it's no surprise that many more apolitical people can scarcely be bothered to care.

Back in 2010 after the last midterm drubbing the Democrats took, I wrote a piece about how they had been crushed as a direct result of "buying into the core Centrist delusion that if Democrats (and only Democrats) would just compromise with the batshit Right...and then compromise some more...and then compromise a little more....and then compromise just a weeee bit more....the Randite Supermen could be appeased sufficiently to hold off nuking the global economy for a little while longer". I sided with a few other, radical, America-hating Liberals who suggested that if the Democrats want to actually win, then Barack Obama must resign from Cult of Centrism, quit trying to find common ground with people who want to destroy him --

Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefor, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.

-- and do the hardest thing of all:

 ...he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.

If the Obama Administration can find ways of sanctioning Vladimir Putin's banker and chief of staff without putting American troops on the ground in Ukraine, surely the clever people up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can come up with a few creative ways of publicly cockpunching the Party of Louis Gohmert and Jim Inhofe.