Interesting.  It really is primary season with selling to the base; and it could be also that they've almost given up on reaching beyond the base in advance of the general election since they've lost so much of the American public's confidence.  After all, if there's one issue on which they clearly lost and clearly alienated popular opinion from the start, it's social security.  It took them years to turn war into a negative. Leading with social security now sounds like political suicide, unless they mean to talk to their own crowd, which is happy to cheer cheap shots.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

8 people recommended this?

Or should I say, this!!!

The problem here unfortunately that a lot of people fail to recognize is that Democrat/Republican are basically two sides of the same coin, and if you look back, there's a lot of people that've changed parties like you change your socks in pursuit of the Bigger Payoff. I don't care what party politics you claim to subscribe to, the country's 9 trillion in the red and it didn't get that way without a little bipartisan 'help'. When you've got politicians that are in a position to indiscriminately help themselves to other peoples' wallets and buy favor with this or that special interest group through this faux generosity of 'regifting' tax reciepts, the basic recognition has to be reached that there's a fly in the ointment, bug in the soup, Big Problem, and it won't be effectively cured by replacing Jackass#1 with Jackass#2, but rather by full reforms, starting with a balanced budget mandate derived from passing a constitutional amendment to that effect, and having it passed and signed off on by a majority of both houses. Figure the odds, though, of passing such legislation under this administration. Public accountability is out the window, the books don't/can't balance, and blame who you please, it's the entitlement mentality that's brought it all this far, and until you fix THAT, all bets are off...

By the way, this is the same Dick Armey who in Fiasco (or one of the similar books such as the 1% doctrine) says that he was actually against the US going into Iraq in spite of the fact that he voted for (and, if I'm remembering correctly, introduced) the October 2002 resolution on Iraq.

Tom

Why do cscs' blogs, once promoted, stay on the front page for 2-3 weeks, while p.luksiak's blog of yesterday (with 22 recs) went away after less than one day?

Nothing against cscs; just curious.

sPh

So, Dick Armey's week at Time is up and he exposed himself as a true coward. He only engaged Joe Klein and ignored all commenters.

Here at TPM we've had some big hitters post for days at a time and though some of them have ignored comments, most of them (perhaps after being cajoled) have not. They either get right into the fray, the way Scott Winship did, or they at least create new posts to address what they consider the major issues, as Representative Blumenauer did.

Given the level of discourse around here, public figures who post and then engage with the commenters do take a real risk. A lot of people here could easily go toe to toe with a public figure in a public forum, if not in style, at least in substance.

Here at TPM the lesson was learned pretty early, I think -- by all means come and express yourself but ignore your readers at your own peril. Even people like current members of the Goldman Sachs board have been moved to engage both by the worth of the comments here and, I suspect, at the urgings of Josh Marshall and Andrew Golis.

Armey blogging at Time was a prime example of a public figure who just doesn't "get" the internet. So many of these people are used to lecturing at us and, at the very worst, having to deal with the occasional uncomfortable question that is brought up by some one who slips through a radio call screener. They jump into the web as a cheap and easy way of expressing themselves and they completely forget, or conveniently ignore, that they've entered an uncensored 2-way conversation for the first times in their lives.

For all Armey's bluster about rugged individualism, he dealt with the web, the most unthreatening medium of all for no-holds-bar argument (because even if some one says they're going to kick your ass, they usually can't even find you) in the mostlyu craven, cowardly manner.

All you can take from Dick Armey's time at Time is that he thinks that Joe Klein is allowed to ask him questions and to argue with him and that the rest of us are expected to keep our traps shut.

I've seen a real evolution at TPMCafe where the famous, powerful and influential come here and are actually starting to feel obliged to engage us. The bravest among them, like Jessica Valenti or Maggie Mahar, two name two randomly, even seem to enjoy it and they seem to value the comments, even when they disagree.

Armey is just so old school. He'll die in a gaited community without ever having engaged in real debate with average Americans. He won't know what he's missed out on, either. But a whole new generation is coming up that do understand.

We're at the beginning, I hope, of "Public Figure 2.0."

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com