The priorities are also opposite of the left. Where the left is more concerned with people and life, the right is only concerned with material wealth and power.

Where the left will defend and protect people. The right will only defend and protect their possessions and property.

C

Oh, and I'm not at all sure about all this vaunted Republican "discipline". The Republicans weren't so disciplined when they ran their ridiculous, massively losing presidential campaign last fall. Was it disciplined to nominate Sarah Palin and her traveling circus, and grossly miscalculate the percentage of Americans who are attracted by beauty pageant brains and trailer park morals? Were they disciplined when McCain was out preaching one message and Palin another, and the two camps were sniping at each other? Are the daily message crack-ups and conflicts of Limbaugh, Steele and David Frum disciplined? Give me a break.

Let's stop whining about Republicans, who haven't won anything yet, and are in fact losing. Republicans aren't more disciplined, but they are occasionally a little bit meaner and tougher. Some Democrats start crying about why they lost the battle they are actually winning when it isn't even halfway over. When Republicans lose, they just get pissed off and start plotting how they can win the next one.

Just wait - ha ha.

An undisciplined party and a weak non-progressive president without a clear agenda who believes that compromise, not principle, is the primary goal. Recall Obama's comments on DKos four years ago:

"…According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.
I think this perspective misreads the American people…."

You voted for him -- you live with him. Obama's popularity is sinking like a stone. A recent Rasmussen poll of likely voters found the president's approval rating dipping below 50% for the first time -- 46%. The Rasmussen approval index number is -11, with 41% of the country strongly disapproving while 30% strongly approve.

Just wait? For what? A reversal of current trends, the result of a newly principled Obama?

Good to see Don and AnnaA playing for the same team again.

(Re-post) (In response to a comment urging Obama and the Democrats to abandon the public option or else suffer at the polls):

"a doomed strategy into hell"

Oh, and you know this . . . how, exactly? You simply CAN'T know what impact President Obama would have on the debate should he decide to take a stand in favor of the public option. Neither does he, which appears to be the problem.

Without a public option, there will no grand experiment where the nation can determine what mix, if any, of the public and private sectors best delivers our health care. Delivers it most fairly and most efficiently. So that our small businesses and our ever more peripatetic citizenry aren't stunted by the crush of health care burdens. Without a public option, we will remain backwards in the world while we force ever more people to pay money to greedy insurance companies. Without the public option, this "reform" will be just another bill that fattens the pockets of the ultra-rich oligarchy that has run this country for the past 8 years at least. Without a public option, there can be no transformative change in American culture, away from the retrogression that has plagued us for 30 years, and into one where there is at least THE POSSIBILITY that we can move from a culture of selfishness and greed back towards one where people realize that, as Americans, as human beings, we are all in this together: that there are finite resources and we must be recognize the limitations we live within. That civilized freedom includes responsibility. That we must act as adults.

You say that the Democrats should take what they can get; that that will profit them in the near-term elections. I cannot agree. First, this is about as good as it gets for the Democrats, balance-of-power wise. It is highly unlikely that the Democrats will improve their power position in the mid-term elections. More importantly, once the president abandons the public option the battle may be won but the war is lost. He may get a "victory" but it will be pyrrhic public relations ploy. Everyone knows that the public option is what matters. The Republicans know it; the health care industrial complex knows it; the Democrats know it and so does Pres. Obama. That is exactly why the industry is fighting tooth and nail and buying every politician, commentator, and talking head in sight. Everybody knows what is at stake. Lots and lots of money.

And if Obama and the Democrats capitulate on health care -- if they abandon the public option -- it will be clear to all clearheaded people that neither Obama nor the Democratic party is worthy of support. They will have proven themselves to be as craven as the other party so, really, why bother.

Yes, this is a tough fight: we have been waiting for national health care for over one hundred years in this country; the health care industrial complex has had decades to gear up for this, to bribe and cajole politicians, to map strategies with unlimited funds and recent entree into the deepest halls of power. No doubt, the industry is prepared for any eventuality, is ready to do anything necessary to crush health care reform, to ensure its place at the trough.

Yes, it will be difficult. But refusing to try, declining to even risk failure is far worse than stumbling. It is a betrayal of all those who placed their deepest hopes in Pres. Obama, all those who believed that Obama could usher in a new era, that he would be transformative. You say that such people will be content with public relations instead of a public option. I think you are wrong. I think these people -- and I am one of them -- will desert Obama and will desert the Democratic party. We will think: there MUST be a better vehicle than the Democratic party if the Democratic party is so much in the pocket of the health care complex that it can't even provide the . . . CHOICE of a public . . . OPTION. Yours is a recipe for disaster for the Democrats.

As for President Obama: Great men can accomplish great things. But only if they try. Nobody will subscribe to a political party that will not fight for its principles. And no one will fight for a leader who neither fights nor leads. It's up to him, I suppose.

You want to know why the left has ideas and the right has discipline? Because people who like ideas and dislike authority tend to identify with the Democratic left, while people who feel threatened by new ideas and more comfortable in a disciplined and ordered world tend to identify with the Republican right.

I think that is a really bad a analysis whose only appeal is that it is self-congratulatory: look, we lost because we are so beautiful, sigh!

Leftists have proven time and again that they can have discipline and that they can win. In the last 100 years Leftists all over the world organized successful revolutions, built winning coalitions, reformed sclerotic governments, fought foreign wars and civil wars, proving that the left is more than capable of being both the party of ideas and intellect AND the party of disciplined struggle.

If your analysis had been true, no social progress based on leftist ideas would have ever happened.

The problem of the democratic party is not dislike of authority. It is, simply, dislike (or more accurately fear) of leftists ideas.

The leaders of the liberal left, and that include the Democrats in Congress, Obama, and the editors of TPM, Dailykos, and all the other liberal organs, do not work to win. They are paid to contain rather to enable their grassroots. That is why they invest more time in explaining defeat than in organizing for victory.

Not hard to figure out that Obama lost control of the healthcare debate when he gave up all of his power to Max Baucus and the gang of 6 nut cases. Obama needs to become a strong leader not a subcontractor who gives up his mandate to losers in Congress. LEAD.

These guys -- Rahm, Axelrod, Gibbs, etc. -- are campaign people. They can figure out how to get more votes in a state like North Carolina. They know which neighborhoods need to turn out. They know the right people in the cities and in the rural areas.

They have no idea how to pass major legislation. And, as a result, we'll be dealing with health care for years becaus I don't see the liberals caving on a public option and I don't see the Senate passing a plan with a public option.

Emanuel has been awful. If we cannot pass major comprehensive health care reform with a massive majority in the House and a 60-40 split in the Senate, we have some serioius problems.

What they don't understand is this: the constituents turn out every 2 years (or 6 years). The lobbyists for the insurers turn out every day. So, if you want to pass major legislation that may harm insurers, you better get to everyone who's going to vote every single day. You better have breakfast with them. You better take a smoke break with them. You better have a lunch with them, etc. Cocktail hour. Everyday. That's what the insurers are doing.

And, if you don't want to do it, get another job.

Republicans aren't disciplined, they are extremely undisciplined and shameless. They seem disciplined because their elites shout loudest (money = speech) and have agreed on a certain set of "vote-getting" political positions (anti-abortion, anti-gay) in order to protect their money from the progressive tax schemes of years past.

These elites spend money hand over fist to fund think tanks and politicians to get their extreme positions into the mainstream debate.

Individual Republicans tend to be self-centered and self-righteous, and don't care whether what they are saying or hearing is true, as long as it supports the cause they already believe in.

Stir in a little fear-mongering and anti-intellectualism and this all comes together to make a remarkably tough enemy full of bad ideas and little intellectual heft.

wyt - I agree with you. Discipline is not what you call it when someone stirs up an angry mob. That's just inciting an angry mob - not discipline.

You can make the conservatives angry over virtually nothing - that's not discipline.

Meanwhile, congressional Dems were so creative and undisciplined before the August recess they came up with a kaleidoscope of health-care plans.

I disagree. HR 3200 is the house plan, it melds the three committee plans into one bill, they were essentially the same to begin with. The HELP Committee plan isn't much different, only a few differences like 300% or 500% of poverty level qualifies you for Medicaid, tax hike for those making over $350,000 or $500,000 etc.

Where Dems did fall down is letting the President do all the heavy lifting on tv and townhalls. Why haven't Waxman, Andrews, Miller, Dodd and Pelosi been on my tv from every Sunday morning gab fest to CNN and MSNBC every afternoon and evening explaining what the bill actually does? They crafted the thing, they should be explaining it and selling it instead of conceding the tube the teabaggers and letting Chris Matthews, David Gregory and Wolf Blitzer ramble on about how "Obama is losing the debate".

But it means that the Democratic left's new ideas often fall victim to its own notorious lack of organization and to the right's highly-organized fear mongering.

I mean, ask yourself: what has really changed since the beginning of August? Well, the right-wing media managed to scare a bunch of easily scared people. And the White House has come to the (inevitable) conclusion that a bipartisan deal is unworkable. Aside from that, things are pretty much at the same point they were a month ago.

When all is said and done, the Dems will get a health-care reform bill passed, and I'm confident it'll be a good one. And the American people will see for themselves that the Republicans were lying all along.

Yeah Mr Reich, you lefties have lots of ideas, unfortunately they are always the same idea: big government and higher taxes. There is no problem that you believe can't be solved with a new government agency, billions in new spending, and lots of new taxes. We seen your ideas, and we don't like them. That's your real problem.

Seems to me that to that our new Democratic president is more interested in tactics (bipartisonship) than results (health care reform). There are people who like power and people who like to do something with power. The Democratic party has had a lack of the latter for about forty years.