"The president of the United States could've come down here, he could've been involved with the families of these 11 people" who died on the offshore rig, (James) Carville said. "He could've demanded a plan in anticipation of this."

"It just looks like he's not involved in this," an angry Carville said on "GMA." "Man, you got to get down here and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving. We're about to die down here."

They gave me a sense of how this spill is moving.  It is now about nine miles off the coast of southeastern Louisiana.  And by the way, we had the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as well as parish presidents who were taking part in this meeting, because we want to emphasize the importance of coordinating between local, state, and federal officials throughout this process.

Now, I think the American people are now aware, certainly the folks down in the Gulf are aware, that we're dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.  The oil that is still leaking from the well could seriously damage the economy and the environment of our Gulf states and it could extend for a long time.  It could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who call this place home. 

And that's why the federal government has launched and coordinated an all-hands-on-deck, relentless response to this crisis from Day One.  After the explosion on the drilling rig, it began with an aggressive search-and-rescue effort to evacuate 115 people, including three badly injured.  And my thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the 11 workers who have not yet -- who have not been found. 

With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious players on the planet, somehow "had their act together" with regard to worst-case scenarios.

These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by some fanciful honor system. These are greedy merchant armies drilling blindly at depths a mile and more beneath the seas while at the same time doing all they can to stifle the government oversight that is necessary to protect human lives and preserve the integrity of the environment.

President Obama knows that. He knows -- or should know -- that the biggest, most powerful companies do not have the best interests of the American people in mind when they are closing in on the kinds of profits that ancient kingdoms could only envy. BP's profits are counted in the billions annually. They are like stacks and stacks of gold glittering beneath a brilliant sun. You don't want to know what people will do for that kind of money.

President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was "moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again." Well, he can't ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.

The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.

There are many things at which the president is extraordinarily gifted. Emoting isn't one of them.

Thursday, in the opening remarks of his press conference, the president said: "Every day I see this leak continue I am angry and frustrated."

I wasn't feeling it.

At the end of the piece, he even gets kinda personal with the president:

Mr. President, I know that you have a self-professed aversion to appearing angry, but in this case you have every right to be angry and to openly empathize with the anger of others. Otherwise, by running from one label, you risk earning another -- incompetent. You feel me? 

Of course, I have read many, many things from conservatives who have derided Obama for being "detached," too "cool and unemotional," too "remote," too "unfeeling," not to mention the fact that everybody seems to think that he's, basically, not been doing anything--including Carville, although I would like to make the point that this is, basically, NOT TRUE:

Fox & Friends guest hosts falsely suggested that there was a "lack of cleanup going on" in the Gulf Coast oil spill and falsely suggested Louisiana's barrier plan had been ignored. In fact, cleanup of the oil spill has been ongoing for more than a month, and the Army Corps of Engineers responded to the barrier plan -- the effectiveness of which is being questioned -- and raised concerns that it would push oil into the Mississippi.

Be that as it may, it seems that we the people seem to think that what is needed at a time like this is for a great moving display of--well, here, let's let the stirring words speak for themselves. 

They were spoken just after another terrible national disaster had occurred, by another president, and afterward, all the pundits and talking-heads and op-ed writers on both sides of the aisle felt that this president had shown great leadership, and his poll numbers went up, and everybody felt greatly comforted and encouraged and hopeful.  It was a wonderful moment and a beautiful speech.  Here is part of it.  I want you to feel as inspired as I did, and then, afterward, I'll explain where and when so you can read the whole thing for yourself:

Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew -- and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and we will not start now.

These trials have also reminded us that we are often stronger than we know with the help of grace and one another. They remind us of a hope beyond all pain and death -- a God who welcomes the lost to a house not made with hands.

And they remind us that we are tied together in this life, in this nation and that the despair of any touches us all.

I know that when you sit on the steps of a porch where a home once stood or sleep on a cot in a crowded shelter, it is hard to imagine a bright future. But that future will come.

"How wonderful to return to a free country, I thought as I stepped off the plane from Beijing at Washington Dulles. No more censorship, no more official lies, no more kowtowing to high officials who gained power by their mindless repetition of party dogma...

"Then alas I opened my browser and read the dump-on-Manzi comments on NRO's The Corner. Manzi had deviated from the One Correct Way of Mark Levin Thought, and all his former colleagues had been summoned together to Denounce and Struggle Against Him.

"Not one stood up to be counted in Manzi's defense, not even colleagues whom Manzi might have had reason to regard as close personal friends...

"As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush's policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.

"Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute... Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI "scholars" on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

"It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn't already."

"Finally, we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them. On that April 19, the second anniversary of the assault of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, deeply alienated and disconnected Americans decided murder was a blow for liberty.

"Americans have more freedom and broader rights than citizens of almost any other nation in the world, including the capacity to criticize their government and their elected officials. But we do not have the right to resort to violence -- or the threat of violence -- when we don't get our way. Our founders constructed a system of government so that reason could prevail over fear. Oklahoma City proved once again that without the law there is no freedom."

Yes, that is the KEY.

President Obama is not a TYRANT.  He was ELECTED president by 69 MILLION PEOPLE.

When disgruntled losers--meaning, Republicans and Tea Partiers (who are Republicans) whose candidates lost--throw rallies in which they carry guns and threatening signs, and when elected members of congress receive death threats for casting votes they disagree with--THAT is tyranny!

They are THREATENING my freedom when they threaten my elected representatives with violence because they are not getting their way. 

It is mob rule.

You can't tell me a single "founding father" ever postulated such a thing.

Clinton writes:

"Criticism is part of the lifeblood of democracy. No one is right all the time. But we should remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws.

"We are again dealing with difficulties in a contentious, partisan time. We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.

"Civic virtue can include harsh criticism, protest, even civil disobedience. But not violence or its advocacy. That is the bright line that protects our freedom. It has held for a long time, since President George Washington called out 13,000 troops in response to the Whiskey Rebellion.

"Fifteen years ago, the line was crossed in Oklahoma City. In the current climate, with so many threats against the president, members of Congress and other public servants, we owe it to the victims of Oklahoma City, and those who survived and responded so bravely, not to cross it again."

Yes.  Oklahoma City, where 168 empty chairs stand to commemorate lost souls who will never sit in them again.  At night, those chairs glow like stars, up to the heavens.

Do we really want to turn back that clock?

Understand, as liberals and progressives, we are not immune to hate talk and paranoia.  I hear it all the time in comment sections on blogs and Facebook.  As a Marine mom from a military family, you would not believe what I sometimes hear from dedicated "peace activists" who call my son (who is no longer active duty) a murderer and worse.

The hate-rhetoric can cut both ways, and it needs to be toned down, because all it takes is one John Hinkley, one Tim McVeigh, one lonely irrational seething hater to be provoked, to be VALIDATED by what he hears on the blogosphere and on talk-radio and TV.

But I gotta say, it's worse on the right-wing, and what frustrates me the most is that so many of them refuse to take responsibility for it.

However, I would be remiss and unfair if I refused to give a nod to those who DO. 

In his piece, "Tone Down the Hatefulness in Politics," Michael Gerson  called out Sarah Palin, Gov. Bob McDonnell, and others, as well as some liberals who were hard on Bush (to be fair)--but I like what he says here:

"The most basic test of democracy is not what people do when they win; it is what people do when they lose. Citizens bring their deepest passions to a public debate -- convictions they regard as morally self-evident. Yet a war goes on. Abortion remains legal. A feared health-reform law passes. Democracy means the possibility of failure. While no democratic judgment is final -- and citizens should continue to work to advance their ideals -- respecting the temporary outcome of a democratic process is the definition of political maturity.

"The opposite -- questioning the legitimacy of a democratic outcome; abusing, demeaning and attempting to silence one's opponents -- is a sign of democratic decline. From the late Roman republic to Weimar Germany, these attitudes have been the prelude to thuggery. Thugs can come with clubs, with bullhorns, with Internet access.

He mentioned, too, how Sen. Tom Coburn has been attacked by conservatives for saying that Nancy Pelosi was a nice lady.  And added, "I don't hate President Barack Obama.  There.  I've said it."

In the second column she wrote after winning the Pulitzer Prize, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker zeroed in on, "What Americans Can Do to Discourage Future McVeighs."

Like Gerson, she, too, took issue with Sarah Palin's gunsights over Democratic congresspeople's districts and the language of "reloading."

"Words matter," she says, and she knows whereof she speaks.  During the '08 campaign, she wrote a column in which she dared to say that Sarah Palin was not qualified to be vice-president, much less president.  In return, she was flooded with some 12,000 e-mails, most of them hate-filled vitriol, and not a few death threats--all from conservatives--which unnerved her to such an extent that she wrote, "Dixie Chicks, I hear ya."

In fact, she quotes the following e-mail she received recently:

"Sorry, honey, but we don't need the squishy middle right now. We need the hyper patriots, the combat vets ready to defend the constitution with arms if necessary."

--and goes on to add:

"The distance between such thinking and recent examples of overt hostility seems too little. In this space, the unthinkable becomes plausible. "

She lays out the responsibility of the press, as she sees it, at such times:

"The challenge for all, but especially the media, is to find a balance between vigilance and restraint. How do we expose the unhinged without emboldening them with attention? Inevitably, the lone operator hears his own name summoned from the crowd.

"The only palatable answer is what conservatives say they love best: self-control and personal responsibility. When someone spews obscenities, shout them down. When politicians and pundits use inflammatory language, condemn them.

"When you choose to remain silent, consider yourself complicit in whatever transpires."

These voices of reason--more of whom speak out almost daily on the left--need to keep speaking out, and we need to continue the drumbeat here at home, to our family and our friends. 

When we get viral e-mails spewing hatred from a right-wing family member or friend, it would be wise to refrain from a screaming match in return.  Rather, simply snopes.com it and send them the refutation.  Just let them see that it is inaccurate or misinformation.  It will simply deflate their angry red balloon.  They won't always admit it or get back to you, but they will see, in time, that somebody, somewhere is making fools of them by continuing to send this garbage to them, just to provoke.

Answering the hatred, rage, and paranoia with more of your own only fans the flames and gives them more of what they seem to want, which is provocation.

And even when we agree with each other, we should be careful with our speech, I think.  It's not necessary to use some of the words of violence that I sometimes encounter even among people I consider peace-loving.

We need to all sit back, take a deep breath, and remember April 19, 1995.

Because there is nothing we have to say that is worth that.

They can't. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven't had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

Several recent polls, conducted after the House vote Sunday night, show that public support for Obama's efforts on reform have jumped, and that he has re-endeared himself to his Democratic base.

A USA Today/Gallup poll released yesterday showed that the public thought that Obama did the best job when it came health care reform. Forty-six percent of respondents to the poll said he did an "excellent or good job" on reform over the past year. That was significantly higher than either the Democrats in Congress (32% said they did an excellent/good job) or the GOP on Capitol Hill (26%).

All these things combined create an atmosphere that is very favorable to Democrats.  Put in simplistic terms, Americans like gutsy moves.  They like people who stand up for their principles.  They like winners.

And, frankly, they like the individual components of this health care reform package.  As time passes, they will come to like it more and more, and they will come to see, more and more, that the heated rhetoric comes nowhere near to fitting the reality, at which time the Republicans will look worse and worse, especially as they move closer and closer to embracing their Tea Party lunatic fringe and further and further away from the moderate (read: sane) center.

So, how do we make the Honeymoon of last week last?

First of all, the Bridegroom himself is key, as was pointed out so beautifully in the British-run publication, the Financial Times, in a piece by Edward Luce, "America: The Recovery Position."

He pointed out that, to foreign governments, Obama already looks more powerful, just by achieving this difficult victory here at home.  In fact, in other articles as well, it's been pointed out that Russian president Medvedev thought for a while there that he could push Obama around on the arms control treaty they were negotiating, and tested his boundaries with the new American president--and found to his surprise that that was not the case.  It is perhaps no surprise to foreign observers that the final deal was struck after Obama signed the health care reform bill in the United States.

To his own party, as well, Obama seemed to reach his stride in this battle, after seeming to drift for some months.  Some thought he left too much to congress and the senate, some thought he tried too hard for bipartisanship.  Some thought he needed the wake-up call of the Scott Brown takeover of Senator Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts.  Whatever the catalyst, the man came out fighting, and cannot be faulted for either his tireless efforts behind the scenes (Robert Gibbs says he personally phoned 94 senators or congresspeople), or his crisscrossing stemwinding speeches to the country, or his smackdown to Republicans on-camera and in their faces.

But there's another way to look at this.

In another piece for Financial Times (subscription necessary, but free), "Obama Throws Out the Political Rules," by Clive Cook, he points out that since the Republicans won the PR battle through fear, misinformation, and hate-mongering (okay, I added that last part; he just said they won the PR part), then the health care reform package was politically unpopular at the time it was passed:

A year ago there were two scenarios for healthcare reform. One was that the Democrats would carry a willing public with them and pass a comprehensive bill. Another was that opinion would cool, forcing the Democrats to settle for less. What happened was extraordinarily unlikely: the public turned against the Democrats' proposal and the party went ahead and did it anyway.

In Europe, rule by a political class that tells voters what is good for them is an idea so familiar that it is quite taken for granted. In the United States it is novel, and not instantly welcome.

Between now and November, Democrats must persuade the country that they acted in its best interests when they overrode the public's doubts. If they succeed and retain their majorities in Congress they will have a green light to advance their wider aims, which include tax reform, labour relations, energy and industrial policies. They will conclude that Clintonism, with its submission to centrist opinion, was an error: they will have learned that they can capture and move centrist opinion. But if voters punish their arrogance, their momentum will be stopped. US policy will be set on a very different course.

He goes on to say that the vile rhetoric of the Republicans is a mistake, because centrist Independents don't like it, and that furthermore, all this talk about repeal merely sounds like so much whining unless they've got a solid health care reform package of their own to replace it with--and we all know they don't.

However--and this would come second to the Bridegroom (call it the work-part of marriage)--he says that Dems need to take care and not get too carried away with the celebrations. 

We've still got to implement this thing, and as Jonathan Cohn points out, that is going to be the hard part.

If we can start getting the putting-into-place right, we WILL start looking like geniuses.

And we have to not just "deliver the deliverables, as Cohn puts it, but we have to EDUCATE THE PUBLIC that the deliverables are out there to be delivered.  Some benefits drop into place in three months, some in six.  Some right away.  Some not for four years.  As Democrats, we need to educate ourselves to these basics and make sure our family and friends--especially those opposed to this plan--know what they are.

They might find themselves less opposed than they thought.

For instance, I was able to send this article to everybody in my family who has served or knows anyone who has, from Stars and Stripes, (completely trusted source to conservatives) that reassures active-duty military and veterans that their health care benefits will not be affected by the health care reform bill.

My brother, a conservative Republican and evangelical Christian who teaches at a private Christian school and who is a retired Chief Warrant Officer from the army, wrote to thank me.

There are other reasons Democrats have to be optimistic in 2010.

As Dylan Loewe writes, it's not just that the GOP is self-destructing, it is that there are things working in our favor. 

Even so, right now, there are some things over which nobody--not even Barack Obama--has any control.

The economy.  Jobs.

However, new job loss hemorrhaging seems to have stopped.  It has not yet turned around, but it has stopped.  There are signs of recovery in the economy but they are small and most people don't feel them yet in their pocketbooks.  People are still frightened and the Republicans smell that blood in the water and love nothing better than to throw red meat in and call the sharks to heighten the fear level to panic.

The ugly anger of the Tea Partiers is the flip-side of that panic, since many of the Tea Partiers themselves have been laid off and--irony of ironies--draw unemployment, social security, or veteran's benefits while they go to the protests and scream about government programs and demand lower taxes and FEWER government programs; and that health insurance reform (designed to help just those people who ARE laid off) be "killed"--is egged on and fueled by the GOP rhetoric in hopes of drawing their money and votes.

But as Loewe points out in his piece, the unintended consequences of this may be the "Ross Perot effect"--Tea Partiers drawing votes to the rightest-right-winger and away from the regular Republican candidate, thus throwing the election to the Democratic opponent.

"The convention's first speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado said that people who voted for Barack Obama could not pass a basic civics literacy test. "People who would not even spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House...named Barack Hussein Obama," he said.

"Yes, that's right. The president is a socialist, his supporters illiterate.

"Today, Tancredo stood by his comments. "These people didn't have the slightest idea about what America is all about, about the Constitution," he said. "And they went and voted!"

"The leader of the Tea Party convention, Judson Phillips, had no problem with it, either. "I think what Tom Tancredo was saying, he thinks a lot of people really didn't understand what they were voting for when they voted for Barack Obama," adding, "He did a fantastic job, didn't he?"

"Tancredo went even further about voters saying, "I think it should be exactly the same test that we give immigrants coming into the country. And if you can't pass a test about American civics that an immigrant has to pass in order to be here, then I don't think you should be able to vote."

Oh, I see.

Is THAT all?

Just a little civics test, to make sure you know what you're voting for, so that all those Meskins who can't speak English can't be bamboozled into voting for the colored guy, and all those ignernt ghetto thugs can't be railroaded into the voting booths to vote for the Negro.

THAT WAY we wouldn't wind up with a BLACK GUY in the White House!

I get it.

Really. 

I do.

Although, just to enlighten things a TAD bit.

First of all, I might mention, just as an aside, that it is actually EDUCATED people who are the most drawn to Barack Obama, according to the latest Gallup Poll:

"Gallup has a new poll out. What does it indicate? That smart people like Barack Obama the most...What it says is that educated people with advanced degrees tend to be Obama's most loyal supporters."

Just to clear that little point up.

And, just so we're clear on what LITERACY TESTS really are.

The Raw Story goes into a wee bit more detail:

"Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters prior to Johnson-era civil rights laws.

"Prior to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965, Southern (and some Western) states maintained elaborate voter registration procedures whose primary purpose was to deny the vote to those who were not white," a website for civil rights veterans explains. "In the South, this process was often called the 'literacy test.' In fact, it was much more than a simple test, it was an entire complex system devoted to denying African-Americans (and in some regions, Latinos) the right to vote."

"Because the Freedom Movement was running "Citizenship Schools" to help people learn how to fill out the forms and pass the test, Alabama changed the test 4 times in less than two years (1964-1965)," the site adds. "At the time of the Selma Voting Rights campaign there were actually 100 different tests in use across the state. In theory, each applicant was supposed to be given one at random from a big loose-leaf binder. In real life, some individual tests were easier than others and the registrar made sure that Black applicants got the hardest ones."

"White applicants could be approved even if they didn't pass the test.

"Your application was then reviewed by the three-member Board of Registrars -- often in secret at a later date," the site continues. "They voted on whether or not you passed. It was entirely up to the judgment of the Board whether you passed or failed. If you were white and missed every single question they could still pass you if -- in their sole judgment -- you were 'qualified.' If you were Black and got every one correct, they could still flunk you if they considered you 'unqualified.'"

Yeah.

THAT "literacy test."

And make no mistake about it.  THAT was the literacy test Tancredo had in mind.

Now, when I first read that, I was so horrified I literally shouted in my chair, at my computer, so loud that my husband came running to make sure I was all right.  I copied the entire Raw Story article--which I encourage you all to read--into the body of an e-mail and sent it to everybody on my list.  I put it up on my FaceBook page.

Then I opened up the Washington Post and read THEIR version of the opening day of the convention.  Tancredo's session was given three short paragraphs at the end of an article entitled, "The Tea Party is Still Taking Shape," and was written by  Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker.

And here are those three paragraphs, in their entirety:

"On Thursday night, giving the opening address, former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination as an anti-immigration candidate, railed against Obama and "the cult of multiculturalism." Americans could be "boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state," he said. "People who couldn't even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House."

"When Tancredo said, "His name is Barack Hussein Obama," the audience booed loudly.

"The race for America is on," Tancredo said. "The president and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it. So put your running shoes on."

In other words, "the cult of multiculturalism" was the only mention made of Tancredo's loathsome call for literacy tests.

Now, according to ABC News, Tancredo's remarks brought bursts of applause, and furthermore, convention organizers defended the remarks.

And yet the Washington Post's political writers didn't even notice, or find reason to mention, them at all.

Back when I was writing and publishing suspense thrillers, I was often a keynote speaker at writer's conferences around the country, and it was not unusual for me to address hotel ballrooms packed full of hundreds of people, so I know how these kinds of conventions go. 

The keynote speaker is there to inspire and fire up the convention-goers.

But the opening speaker, the welcoming speaker--they set the tone for the entire event.

Tom Tancredo's remarks basically stated that the purpose for the Tea Party movement is to ensure that we don't see any more people of color in the White House, among other complaints.

Even one convention attendee commented to a reporter that it hurt the movement that pretty much everybody there was white and middle-aged or older and said, "We need more diversity."

Yeah well, that boat done sailed, buddy.  It left the dock about the time one of your organizers sent out a fund-raising e-mail showing our president dressed as a witch-doctor.

When the New York Times covered the opening day of the convention, it didn't even mention Tancredo's remarks at all, which is why I'm not bothering to go dig up a link to it.

What I'm saying here is that, if a major political paper like the Washington Post finds it necessary to tone down such a blatant expression of racism in their coverage of a political event, to the extent that they don't even bother to MENTION the literacy tests he clearly emphasized in his remarks, and the New York Times doesn't even refer to them at all, then what that does is, it makes those remarks palatable, acceptable.

Part of the problem, (Congressional expert Norm) Ornstein says, is that Democrats don't have a vast propaganda machine.

"When an issue emerges--how to pound away at it? You don't need to [conspire]...Republicans just kind of know how to do that," Ornstein says. "It becomes an echo chamber that once its out there for a bit, bleeds over to the rest of the press. If it doesn't, then those entities [Rush Limbaugh, etc.] pound away at the Times, the Post and the Sunday talk shows for ignoring a big story."

That echo chamber goes hand in glove with a separate advantage Republicans have: a willingness that Democrats lack to tell huge whoppers about their opponents.

"Republicans are wiling to take rhetoric that goes way beyond reality--continuing to talk about the health care plan as a government takeover. It doesn't matter much if you can take the fact and say it's not true." Once it's out there, it's out for good.

Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver doesn't think things have to be that drastic.  He says all the Dems need to do is start paying attention to a couple of things, like, the fact that MOST Americans don't live in Washington, D.C, and live and breathe politics:

We've repeatedly highlighted Kaiser's health care polling, which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats' bill, such as coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew poll this week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster -- and only 32 percent know that Senate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats' health care plan. And a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that the Democrats have cut taxes for "95% of working families", a fact which is probably true.

I don't particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics "fans" probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million out of a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and have better things to do than to follow politics all the time. They pay quite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I would argue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that, most people aren't watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or logging onto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They're developing impressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisan news sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell them anything but the truth.

He faults the Dems for allowing three long months to lapse while they--and their cable-TV supporters--fought bitterly amongst themselves about the public option, which hijacked the entire health care reform debate and enabled the Republicans to sneak in and basically thieve the issue right out from under them, which has now imperiled the entire thing, because what happened was that the vast majority of people don't pay enough attention and were not aware that the term "government-run health care" was ITSELF a lie, and that the Dems didn't even explain THAT, they didn't even highlight the term OPTION properly.  They let the whole thing degenerate into a fight over details that could have been worked out later, frankly.  The public option was not the entire bill, but by making it seem as if it was, they lost the message war.

He stresses the importance of repetition.

He stresses the importance of repetition.

He stresses the importance of repetition: 

And all Democrats need to realize, meanwhile, that sometimes the message isn't going to sink in until the sixth or seventh time that you repeat it. Before Tuesday's State of the Union, for instance, the White House had almost literally never mentioned that the stimulus contained a huge tax cut -- they shouldn't expect the public to believe it any more than Warner Brothers should expect a ton of people to go out and see their new movie if they only begin advertising it 48 hours beforehand.

Rather, the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now. You want to run on Republican obstructionism? Well then, don't neglect the golden opportunities that the Republicans are providing you with today, such as when they voted unanimously in the Senate against re-imposing pay-go rules or unanimously in the House against a very centrist financial regulation package. How many people know that House Republicans voted 174-0 against a jobs bill? It's probably not even 20 percent or 30 percent -- more like 2 or 3 percent, at best. The DNC, DCCC, DSCC, and sympathetic groups like unions should be blasting out advertisements whenever the Republicans cast a vote like this.

He also mentions what I think should have been done all along, which is more crowing needs to be done about successes.  We all hated the strutting and arrogance and boasting of the Bush administration every damn time they crossed a T or dotted an i properly, or just did their damn jobs without tripping over their own dumbass feet, but I'd like to see a lot more bragging from this White House, and I think we're starting to.  Silver says:

But if it were me, I would err a little bit less on the side of caution in highlighting numbers like, for instance, the 5.7 percent GDP growth that the country experienced in the 4Q. It's not that I expect these messages to be winners now; rather, it's that you want to plant the seed with the public for the fall. Otherwise, it may feel like too little too late when the employment numbers turn positive too, and the public may believe that the recovery occurred in spite of, not because of, the stimulus.

What he's saying is, it's all about framing future messages, not so much worrying about how it looks now, but taking risks that things will improve enough in the future that you can ride the wave of how they look now.  And if they look worse in the future...well, like Scarlett O'Hara, we'll worry about that tomorrow.

What Silver is saying about how most Americans really don't pay enough attention to realize lies when they are hearing them was brought crashingly home to me by another piece right here at TPM, that, while it was based on a Republican poll taken for the National Review--so you have to take it with a grain of salt--the results basically say that even though most Americans know very little about the Tea Party movement, they like what they THINK the movement is about.

It's kinda like thinkin' Sarah Palin would be a good president because she's "one of us."

It doesn't take a great deal of thought.  And let's face it--so many Americans don't put a whole lot of thought into current events unless it's right up close to a big national election.  This is how they get bamboozled and hornswoggled by the bait-and-switch artists of the world.

But something happened on the way to the State of the Union.

Just when I thought we were going down for the count, my Republican husband was right again.

(Psst--please don't tell him I said that.  He's just so insufferable when he hears it.)

In a previous post, AGGIE POLITICS, I wrote about how my husband, a moderate Republican but strong Obama supporter, told me that no matter how bleak things may look at the moment for Dems, we should not give up on our President, because he's always pretty much been the smartest man in the room, and we should not count him out yet, and that, never fear, when it comes to Republicans, they always go too far.

He also said, "This Massachusetts loss may be the best thing that happened to your party and Obama, because it will be a wake-up call.  You can re-organize, re-group, come out with a new plan.  It might actually be a good thing."

I thought about this a few days later, during the president's speech.

When I heard the State of the Union address, I heard a very, VERY smart reach-out to Independent voters.  I heard a COMPLETE re-framing of the Democratic message.

I've seen a few op-ed writers who seem to have caught on to that but none of them have come right out and said it, so I will, because I spotted it immediately.  In fact, I shouted and fist-pumped when I heard the paragraphs in question, simply because of the CHOICE OF WORDS.

See, I'm a writer by trade.  I make my living, such as it is, by language.  And choice of words is CRUCIAL in just about everything in this world.  It's crucial in diplomacy.  It's crucial in politics.  It's crucial in, say, job-hunting or resume-writing.  It's crucial in, oh, say, marriage proposals.

Language matters.

And no one knows this better than this president, as he has proven time and time again.

Now, this past year, the language of governing has been robbed by the Republicans.  They stole it pretty much during the campaign and they continued the rhetoric throughout the Inauguration and all through the entire first year of Obama's presidency.  And he was just plain working too damn hard to care, I think.

But the losses in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts--combined with the threat of the loss of health care reform--gave him what my husband had predicted would be a "wake-up call."

The White House had seen the same poll numbers the rest of us saw--that we were losing Independents to the Republicans.  And it wasn't "populist anger" that is the ongoing conservative-driven meme in the media.

It was the message.

So they reframed it.

Consider this passage:

From the day I took office, I've been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be too contentious. I've been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while.

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?

You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse. Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations -- they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.

As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as the debates may become, it's time to get serious about fixing the problems that are hampering our growth.

COMPETITION.

This is Mom and apple pie to Americans everywhere, and is just the kind of thing that appeals to Independents and (closeted) moderate Republicans.  It's very Kennedyesque.

Here's another fist-pumper moment:

I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But here's the thing -- even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future -- because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation

In that way, he framed it not as a question over the science, or over the environment, but over JOBS and over America as a LEADER in the world--again, We're Number One rah-rah!

This is a re-framing of a message that moves the Dems away from Al Gore and more toward whoever your favorite sports team is.  We want to be winners.  And we want our economy to thrive.  If, in so doing, we can also save the planet, hey, it's all good, right?

I'm not going to isolate every incidence, although there were many, because my blogposts are notoriously long anyway, but I encourage you to read the full transcripts--this is the copy I was working off of, from the New York Times.  I prefer it over the Whitehouse.gov version because this is the one he actually presented, with applause and laughter typed in, and video included.

Along with the subtle reframing of the White House message is also a more aggressive push-back against right-wing rhetoric.  I had noticed that they'd been given such a free rein for so long that even congresspeople and senators had taken to spouting the latest FAUX-news talking-points as graven facts before the TV cameras without so much as a peep of protest, but those days are over.

Today, for example, Robert Gibbs AND Attorney General Eric Holder each presented point-by-point pushback memos against comments made by Republican Senator Susan Collins and House minority leader Mitch McConnell about the White House response to the Christmas Day bombing attempt.  They aggressively pointed out that the policies they followed were put in place by and followed by the Bush administration--facts well-known by the Republican talking-heads.

It's still responding to lies, but I did see this on the evening network news, which means that even so-called "Joe (and Josephine) Sixpack" is getting the message that his handy Republican spokesperson spokeslied or at the very least, spokesforgot.

The reframing of message is deeper and clearer than most have picked up on, although E.J. Dionne, who interviewed Joe Biden today, got it loud and clear:

Biden, more self-aware than people give him credit for, realized what he had just done. "I've sort of gotten off the Recovery Act," he said with a rueful smile.

Yet by the end of the interview, I realized he had bumped into the hidden political issue of the 2010 elections. Beneath the predictable back-and-forth between Obama and his Republican adversaries over government spending lies a substantively important difference over how the United States can maintain its global leadership.

For Republicans, American power is rooted largely in military might and showing a tough and resolute face to the world. They would rely on tax cuts as the one and only spur to economic growth.

Obama, Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe that American power depends ultimately on the American economy, and that government has an essential role to play in fostering the next generation of growth.

Notice that when Obama spoke about keeping America in first place, he said not a word about the military. He referred instead to the efforts of our competitors in the public sphere of the economy, and of our past complacency.

"Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse," Obama said. "Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations aren't standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs."

Suddenly, Obama's approach is not about old-fashioned Democratic spending. It's about patriotism, competing successfully, investing to maintain American economic leadership. John F. Kennedy provided a slogan for such an effort 50 years ago: "Let's get America moving again."

(emphasis mine)

The purpose of the interview had been for Biden to point out instances of the success of the stimulus program, but this turn of topic turned out to show him to be crazy like, well, a FOX.

Biden's insistence on "pushing back" against unfounded criticisms of the program was clearly part of Obama's post-Scott Brown offensive, and it's bracing that the administration has finally seen the wisdom of a Napoleon axiom that is a favorite of Karl Rove's: "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack."

Transforming a listless national argument about the stimulus and health care into a larger debate over how to maintain American preeminence is both audacious and useful. Off-message, Biden found the right message.

Perhaps the Dems have been "tangled up in Blue" ever since, well, the days of what I call the Clinton Crucifixion, when the sheer gall and power of the opposition's noise and nastiness overwhelmed them.  They've been like that plastic clown punching-bag ever since, bouncing back with every blow.

But this president is different.  It's not that he's smarter than President Clinton.  I'm not going to compare the two men, because they have different strengths as well as weaknesses.

But one difference that does seem to count right now is Obama's quickness in learning from, and adapting to, the opposition--outfoxing them--if you will.

He has not given in to them.  He is still fighting for health care reform, clean energy legislation, education reform, and other things he believes in and campaigned on.

But what he has done is reframed the message in such a way that makes it much more appealing to the middle-earth voters, so to speak, those who were being frightened off by the scare tactics of the far right.

It's the same message.  Different words.

And he's presenting those words differently, in a fiestier fashion.  What the surly commentators on FOX called "arrogant," most Americans took as a fighting spirit, and by a margin of 83%, they liked it.

As Democrats, it is important that we not get so "tangled up in Blue" that we forget that, as Americans, most of us, as the song lyrics say, "feel the same" about most things.  This is the beauty and the brilliance of Barack Obama. 

He's not pretending this to get votes.  He is UNDERSTANDING this.

We want to take care of our families, find decent work we can halfway enjoy, and have some sort of retirement with dignity.  When we get sick, we don't want to die because we couldn't afford medical care.  And, we care about our planet and our environment and don't want it choked with pollution and grime.  We want a place for our children to play safely.

We pretty much all feel this way.

The Blues feel as if the Reds tried it their way, for the most part, since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.  They had a pretty good run of it, and from 1994 until 2006, they pretty much ran the country into the ground.

Now it's the Blue's turn.

But we can't forget all those people out there who aren't paying that much attention--at least not until they get screamed at or frightened into it.  We have to take care not to fight so much amongst ourselves that we forget all about them and they turn away from us. 

They're not "an illusion" to us now.  We have to concern ourselves with "what they're doing with their lives."

We have to talk to them.  Reach out to them.

Show them a better way.

"The new CQ study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades ago. And that was in a year where Obama tackled how to deal with Afghanistan, Iraq, an expanding terrorist threat, the economic crisis and battles over health care."

His success rating, the study goes on to say, was 96.7%.

Think about that for a minute and contrast it with all the news stories, op-eds, and blogposts about what a failure this president's first year has been.

A success rate made possible by the votes he had available to him by a Democratic majority, I might add, even so-called "centrist" Democrats, that liberal Dems seem to think need to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. 

(Or at least, given a purity test???)

*Here's another great piece, this one from Daily Kos.

It's a list--just a list--of NINETY accomplishments--President Obama has had in his first year in office.

Read them through.  It will knock your socks off.

*Also, in a quick graph, the Washington Post put up a list of 25 campaign promises Obama had made, and of these, 21 of them had either been completed or were in progress IN THE FIRST YEAR.  This is a phenomenal record.

Again, made possible because the DNC decided, after a dozen years in the wilderness, to reach out to the center, to moderates and disgruntled Republicans to run for congress and the senate, and they nominated in 2008 a candidate who, while a progressive at heart, was a pragmatist at his core, and he knew how to get things done.

Give him time, ladies and gentlemen, because he has only just begun to fight.

Yes, right now the GOP is licking its chops, certain that the "populist rage" it thinks it has captured is going to carry it into a majority and then the White House--maybe on Scott Brown's handsome naked shoulders!!!--but an essay by Charles M. Blow in the NY Times nails why it is really not a serious political movement when you try to harness the energy of a bunch of pissed-off paranoids.

The nightmare that the first "Tea Party Convention" has turned into, of hucksterism, profiteering, and inner-tea-party feuding--not to mention the fact that they can't give away tickets to see their keynote speaker, Sarah Palin, who has demanded more than $100,000 for a speaking fee--is just a glimpse of how ephemeral FOX-ed up, trumped-up rage can be as a serious political movement.

Not that the GOP has learned anything from that.  They voted down a measure to create a commission on deficit reduction, even though at least seven who voted against it had earlier actually CRAFTED the legislation, and, among other things they voted against--they actually voted against Pay As You Go legislation that requires congress to pass only deficit-neutral legislation that is paid-for upfront, which is the way congress had balanced the budget and left a surplus under President Clinton, a Democrat, before President Bush, a Republican, took office and the Republicans took over congress and squandered the surplus.

I'm not arguing the merits for or against each individual piece of legislation mentioned in the previous paragraph, but what I'm saying is that, as in the State of the Union speech, when even after the president spoke of tax cuts for small businesses, and the entire Republican block sat like stone statues rather than muster up a smattering of applause for their OWN policy--they risk looking like the obstructionist dumb-asses they are.

And he knows it, as he so brilliantly showed when he spoke--on live TV--before the Republican Caucus last night.

In fact, so rope-a-dope perfect was Obama's performance at the Caucus that, as Sam Stein pointed out in a great blogpost for Huffington, FOX news cut the whole thing off 20 minutes early.

The GOP has, in fact succeeded in boxing itself into a pretty small corner since it first took over congress in the 90's and "The Hammer" and Newt Gingrich proceeded to run off some of the best Republican congresspeople and senators they'd ever had because they were moderates and had a record of working across the aisle with Democrats on landmark legislation.

Since that time, especially after their own re-districting fiasco that narrowed a candidate's area into even more partisan zones than ever, their party has bottlenecked its focus so badly that this "Tea Party" thing is their only hope of a pretense of "populism." 

It's not real, though, not on a large scale.

It could be, though, if we think, over on our side of the aisle, that the only way to combat them is to follow their lead and, as our own Progressive Caucus recently stated, demand party purity of our own.

I've heard people insist that Obama act more like Bush, ignoring the vast majority of Independent and disgruntled Republican voters who helped to put him in office and only adhere to his "base" of progressive party purists, by "ramming through" his agenda while "he's got the chance."

I've heard people complain that the Democrats don't act more like Republicans, marching in lock-step like Stepford legislators, repeating cult-like mantras of party loyalty.

(Recently, even Sarah Palin was soundly criticized on Glenn Beck's program...why?  Because she had backed Sen. John McCain in a difficult primary against the Tea Party opponent.  McCain, it seems, wasn't "pure" enough for Beck's listeners.  The fact that Palin wouldn't even EXIST, politically speaking, WITHOUT McCain was lost on him and his viewers, and any semblance of decent human loyalty was completely tossed in the name of party purity.  THIS is what we want?)

But our own president has said that the reason he keeps reaching out across the aisle is because he wants the things that are passed in his term to LAST for GENERATIONS--not just until the next Republican administration comes in and, with the stroke of a pen, overturns everything he has done--which is pretty much what he has been doing to the bullshit Bush put in place himself when he was busy "ramming through" legislation.

And his patience, and willingness to listen and to reach out--while frustrating to his base, maybe--is working.  According to polls taken following the State of the Union address, he is beginning to win over the Independents who had been frightened away by GOP scare tactics this summer.

The Independents are the key.

So what can we do, as supporters and as either Democrats or Independents who do not want a GOP/Tea Party takeover in 2010 to rival 1994?  Not to mention a President Palin in 2012?

I suggest we follow Steven Benen's advice.  Admittedly, it was aimed more toward the Dems in congress and the Dems in the partisan media than toward you and me but those of us who do blog or volunteer or even just speak up at the dinner table or stand chatting by the shopping cart at the grocery store, let's scream bloody murder:

Just pretend that the Democrats have pulled every stunt pulled by the Republicans in the past year, such as voting against funding for the troops, in order to obstruct the president, or trying to woo a segment of the party who would actually send out a fund-raising letter that depicts the president dressed as a pimp--and imagine the howls of outrage that would dominate the FOX airwaves and everyplace else Republicans gather.

Benen thinks that the reason the Republicans continue to dominate the message and the messaging is because they do the loudest screaming.

We don't have a screamer for a president, thank goodness, and I'm not advocating same, but I'm saying that the Republicans have allowed the screamers to take over their message, to their detriment.

At the very least, we need to be ready with the fact-checking and the righteous outrage whenever these stunts are pulled, to remind voters that what the GOP stands for, right now, isn't even very Republican.

And it won't be, until they let go of the party purity tests and reach out across the aisle, first of all, to a popular president, and then, to the rest of the country.