Admonishing his own party, President Barack Obama says it would be "inexcusable" and "irresponsible" for unenthusiastic Democratic voters to sit out the midterm elections, warning that the consequences could be a squandered agenda for years.
Dude, no. This isn't how it works.
"People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up," Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday.
It's your fucking job (or the job of your PR people, who seem to have abandoned your administration the second you took office) to get people to "shake off this lethargy". You don't guilt people into voting for you by treating them like bratty little kids. You earn people's votes by virtue of the job you do.
The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and "if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."
Oh god. The stupid. It burns. This is exactly the problem, brainiac. When you make people believe that your policies will place a unicorn in every garage, and instead a few years after you take office most people don't even have the garage anymore let alone the unicorn in it, people start to think that maybe this whole hopey-changy thing was somewhat of a farce, you know, that you guys weren't that serious in the first place, so why the hell skip "Dancing with the Stars" to vote for your asses again?
I'm just amazed at how tone-deaf this strategy is, especially considering who it's coming from. Did these guys really forget what won them the election? He has to have some basic level of understanding about what worked for his campaign. Yet he takes it as an affront that he has to actually appeal to these voters again. How does he go from the candidate that spoke for millions of Americans, who felt they finally found a voice in his election, to talking down to these supporters like they are spoiled little children?
This is a huge disconnect here. It's like he wants to pass every complaint against him off as unreasonable, when in reality, he's dealing with a pretty understanding crowd (the professional left still has yet to parade around Washington carrying guns and talking about overthrowing the government). Look dude, I understand that Jane Hamsher can be annoying most of the time. But that doesn't instantly turn every left-leaning person into some sort of extremist. Wanting better health care is not unreasonable. Wanting to repeal DADT is not unreasonable. Wanting you to stand up to Republicans when they are deliberately clogging the works is not unreasonable. Wanting to do away with tax cuts for the rich is not unreasonable. Wanting to put people to work is not unreasonable. Time and time again, no matter how well it actually polls in this country, this administration feels it has to put a firm wall between what they are doing and what liberals might like them to do, and the absurdity is almost to the point where I think that's the whole goal. It really doesn't matter if it's the most common-sense solution imaginable (*cough* bigger stimulus), if it makes even one conservative sad, they'll drop it like it's hot. Time and time again, no matter how many times it's been shown that the "professional left" was actually right in their criticisms, they still need to get the gold star of approval from the Republican crowd that has, mind you, been wrong, very wrong, about pretty much everything, last week, last year, last decade. This makes no sense, unless we take a grander view of the whole picture, that the system is rigged, and assume they want too these policies that seem to fail the majority of Americans in favor of the few and privileged, and are just feeding everyone a line. And if that is the case, you sure as hell don't get to guilt the supporters that longed for something different.
We could take the hippie punching if it got results. It doesn't. We could take the appeal to the right-wingers, if there was any chance he could win a few over in this political climate. He can't. We'd understand there are fights they can't win, if they didn't seem to run scared from all of them at the first mention. They do. We could take the compromise, if he didn't sell the farm off at the first bid and offer up the barn and tractor for nothing. He does.
Obviously it would be stupid to stay home and let some of these crazies march into office. And I suppose on some level I can understand a guilt trip that people have to vote for them because the opposition is fucking crazy. But with Obama trotting out this "irresponsible" crap and Biden running around saying liberal supporters are all "whiners" because gosh, some might not buy into the idea that they are owed these votes? This is not the way to reach people. Shit, there's times I won't even do the dishes merely because I sense that my husband is trying to guilt me into doing them. And that's the fucking dishes. This strategy is a horrible, horrible idea. There are so many better ways to handle this.
Which I should probably get into at some point, instead of just snarking and bitching all the time on here.
(via Echidne)
No comments:
Post a Comment