If the title of this piece seems a bit out of character for me, well, you'd be right: it is. It's the reason why I put it in quotations. I'll come back to the title in a bit, but first I have a few observations I'd like to share:Was it only me? It appears that President Obama and the Democrats were shocked that they didn't do better in the mid-term elections. We all know by now that the House lost so many seats to Republican and Tea Party candidates that the news media had to go back several decades to recall a similar drubbing delivered to a political party. And it didn't stop there: Democrats lost several seats in the Senate.
By all estimates, here was a political party and a president who had accomplished much--an extension of unemployment insurance for millions, a successful cash for clunkers program to keep our automobile industry from going under, "tax cuts for up to 3.5 million small businesses to help pay for employee health care coverage." But Democrats still lost heavily at the polls.
And what did they do in response?
Democrats did what the Republicans did when they lost miserably a few years back, right? Moved more in the direction of their ideological center, which for the Right is right, and the Left, left. I hate to break it to you: Democrats are doing no such thing--they're doubling down on their decision to hold fast to their failed tactic of appeasement, and compromise, with them as the only ones appeasing and compromising, as members of their base continue to flake away like so much old paint.
I won't belabor the point, and make you nauseous, by taking you back through the Left's misery brought on by watching Democrats cave again and again to Republicans to make their legislation as palatable to the Right's political taste buds as is humanly possible, hoping that Republicans will like the results enough to cast much-needed votes for passage, only to watch the Right spit out the mess they helped cook up, calling such legislation like health-care, and wall street reforms "vile," and "evil," promising to repeal the legislation, and replace it with their own confection, if anything at all.
Obama stated in essence that he and members of his party were so busy getting things done, that he and they didn't take time to properly inform the public of what it was that they had accomplished during the first two years of his administration.
Now, here is where the title of this blog entry comes in. That title is the name of an actual site. It's the site's URL. If you haven't seen it, here's a brief description: The site hopes to do what the president and the Democrat congress failed to do--beat the drum for the Democrats by enumerating their many accomplishments over the past two years.
On the site, I like the way the information is packaged. It's like being a visitor, a tourist, in a strange city out for a walk around town, not sure what you'll find, but excited about the possibility that just around a corner something interesting, something surprising, something unexpected, may leap out of the ordinary and the mundane, to give you something to remember and to talk about once you're back home, engaging the family, or a neighbor across a common fence or wall.
Here, take a walk through the town with the funny name, "What the fuck has Obama done so far?"
