Somewhere between 500 and 1000 people turned out and took over The Strip with the help of LV Metro PD for more than two hours. Enjoy.

You want what now?

But then someone suggested, ‘Well, if you support them and don’t think they have a goal, help them find one.’

Fair enough, I’ll play along. Just so long as we get one thing clear first:

This is not my protest. I didn’t organize it, I didn’t call for it and I’m not even in New York. 

Therefore, I can only tell you what it looks like from the outside, not what it’s actually like on the ground.

Likewise, I offer the following as the suggestions of someone who isn’t there, so please take them for what they’re worth.

1. Fix the Message

Those in NYC may not know what this protest looks like to the outside world, but that is one thing I can tell you with certainty.

It looks like a bunch of jobless hippies who’ve got nothing better to do than yell at buildings.

Now, I am 99.99% certain that’s not what’s going on. But that’s how it’s being portrayed. And it’s not a grand conspiracy why.

I watched the daily video on OccupyWallSt.org today and I still have explanation for what this protest is supposed to be about.

Last night on MSNBC, Michael Moore was interviewed from NYC and was asked flat out what the goal of this whole thing was. At which point he said he couldn’t speak for other people and then meandered on for three minutes eventually settling on a list he would only call his own.

Wrong answer.

The reason the rest of the country is getting the message that Occupy Wall Street is nothing more than unemployed slackers with nothing better to do is because Occupy Wall Street hasn’t given the world its own message. As such, corporate America is just making one up on the fly.

If you never tell anybody what you stand for, someone will write your message for you and most of the time you won’t like the results.

How do you fix that?

Well, posting a manifesto online this morning was a good start.

The problem with it is that most Americans have no idea what Glass-Steagall was and why it mattered. And you’re never going to educate anybody about it if their eyes glaze over and they think you’re talking gibberish.

That is not a commentary on the goal, it’s a commentary on the message.

There’s an amazing video that went up today of Wall Streeters looking down on the Occupy Wall Street protests while literally sipping champagne.

Meanwhile the protesters are chanting, “We are the other 99! We are the other 99!”

And?

You’re reminding the upper crust that they’re rich and you’ve been left out in the cold? My guess is they already know that.

Imagine that scene if the chant was “Jobs Now!” or “Tax the banks!”

Suddenly the contrast is stark, and people immediately get what’s going on. The privileged continue to bask in their riches while the rest of us just want a job and a fair shake. Those greedy bastards.

You need a better message and you need it now. This isn’t just me talking either, it’s all over. @Osborneink had some good suggestions here, but let me sum some up for you:

Tax the Banks
Regulate Wall Street
Arrest them not us
Corporations Aren’t People
Jobs Now

Pick one.

Or two.

Then make sure every single person on the street knows what it is—and why it’s important. Because at some point someone with a camera is going to ask one of you what this whole thing is about. And if that person responds as if they’ve just come off a six hour PlayStation bender and a bong hit, all your efforts take a step back.

Keep repeating your message over and over and over until every news report about what you’re doing says things like:

’10,000 people are still camped out in lower Manhattan tonight, demanding action from Congress on jobs and taxing the rich.’ 

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You say you’re leaderless, that’s fine, but why should you also be message-less? It’s your occupation, why are you letting others control the story?

This morning you outlined some specific goals, that’s fantastic. Now you have to generate enough pressure on Congress to get what you want, the easiest way to do that is to give as many people as possible something simple to get behind.

2. It’s time to organize

These guys look like they mean business.

Again, you can be leaderless, but you can’t be pointless. Not unless you are comfortable being ignored.

Create a Wish List, the vast majority of Americans agree with what you’re doing and many will offer help if they know what you’re doing, why, and how they can assist you.

You want water, pizza, better signs delivered to the nearest FedEx Office (please for the love of God, get better signs)?

Ask for it. Have a way for people to contribute to the effort.

Then go find every news camera you can. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Today Show, MTV, ESPN, if there’s a camera rolling in Manhattan somebody with a clear “Jobs Now” sign should be in the background.

That takes organizing, finding the locations and dispatching people accordingly.

Reach out to the unions.

Again, Wall Street screwed almost everybody in the country. You have friends everywhere. You got a boost in publicity when the pilots union showed up yesterday. Do you think they’re the only ones willing to help?

And not just unions, creatives. Where are the No Billionaire Left Behind folks from the Bush era? Where’s Improv Everywhere?

Maybe they’re there, but from the outside looking in I can tell you that we’re not seeing them.

3. Yes, some people are probably going to get arrested.

But that doesn’t mean you should TRY to get arrested. That’s potentially the worst thing you can do. One of the biggest boons to those in Tahrir Square was when Wael Ghonim was arrested. But that was because he was essentially just a guy with a Facebook page. That’s what made it so powerful.

Provoking cops to get arrested makes you look like you were asking for it, at which point Fox News calls you a “union thug” or suggests you’re a member of the Black Panthers and then it all goes downhill.

Look, far be it for me to tell anybody how to dress, but it’s bad enough that this whole thing looks a lot like a G8 protest. Mostly because all those G8 protests end with canisters of tear gas and absolutely nothing accomplished outside of bruises and broken windows.

The fact is, civil disobedience wins. Being stupid loses. Let rogue cops be the dumb ones, not you.

Finally, as I feel like I’ve said a number of times, the majority of Americans agree with the idea of the rich paying their fair share and those on Wall Street who destroyed the economy facing jail time—or at least the regulations that can keep them from repeating the process.

As such, I would argue that most Americans want Occupy Wall Street to succeed, especially if they knew how they’d benefit from the return of Glass-Steagall and the overturning of Citizens United. And don’t get me wrong, in America just getting a ton of people out into the street is a huge success.

But you’re never going to get any of what you now say you want if you don’t organize all that energy and focus your demands.

Because if this goes on long enough, and enough people do turn out, eventually someone is going to come out from behind their desk or someone is going to come up from Washington to see what it’s going to take to end this.

At that point, the clearer your answer and the more unified everyone is behind you, the more you’re going to get not just for your effort, but for the country.

Again, take all of that for what it’s worth. I wish you the best of luck.

"Dammit, I earned that pony!"

When politics are done right, everyone who deserves a voice in the debate gets a seat at the table. There’s discussion and disagreement, but the climate is inclusive, even empowering.

However, when politics are at their worst the landscape is darker. It’s divisive, derisive, exclusionary. Not only are voices kept from being heard, they’re shouted down, sometimes even locked out entirely.

This is how you know things are bad politically right now. Not just in Washington, but all across the country because the conversation is a mess. It’s visible on both sides of the aisle, but amongst liberals and Democrats it’s particularly easy to spot.

The American Jobs Act is arguably exactly what our struggling economy needs right now. Economists say it will likely prevent another recession. Yet depending on the day, the arguments that get the most traction across the progressive spectrum are those about who’s criticizing the president, who’s being racist—or not, who’s being ‘progressive’ enough—or not, and on and on.

It’s mostly just one circular firing squad after the next and nobody ever wins no matter who gets voted off the island. If I worked for the re-election campaign I probably couldn’t say the following to you, but since I don’t work for anybody right now, I can.

Nobody cares if, how, or why you’re disappointed in President Obama.

I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s the truth. It just is. And if you’re still participating in the pity party about how the president has yet to live up to the vision of him you created three years go, it’s time to let that go.

Why? Because the country needs you.

I wish I was kidding, but I’m not.

On Monday, Rev. Al Sharpton ran a clip of Karl Rove from back in June. He only ran the last 10 seconds or so of this clip, but watch the whole thing, it’s short. I’ll be here when you get back, I promise.

-

Now, file the first 60 seconds of that clip away for a moment, focus instead on the final 10 and this quote:

“If, for example, African-American turnout in North Carolina is one point less than it was last time around, his margin is cut two and a half times over.” – Karl Rove (6/24/11)

Notice how Juan Williams interjects and says “he [President Obama] loses”? Yet, rather than simply agree with Williams, Rove chooses to stress the margin. Why? What’s the difference?

The difference is that the margin is what gets you re-elected or puts you out on the street.

In 2012, the margins will be where the average voter matters most—it will be where you matter most.

A QUICK TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE FOR SOME CONTEXT

In 2004 Karl Rove was credited with an innovative strategy that won President George W. Bush a second term. (No, not stealing the vote in Ohio, although that is a good guess.)

Iowa 2000 presidential results by county.

It’s called the Base Strategy.

The Bush team looked back over multiple elections and concluded that the value of ‘swing voters’ was overrated. And since the 2000 race was so close, if they could simply up the numbers of base voters (think: mostly evangelical voters who’d stayed home for whatever reason in 2000), Bush could hold all the states he took in 2000 and win re-election in 2004.

In short, they needed to persuade and attract new voters less far than they needed to make sure they got their definite supporters out to vote. So forget about swing voters and independents, just turn out the base by all means necessary.

This made sense, since there 12 states in 2000 were decided by less than 5% of the vote and another 10 were decided by less than 10%.

Let’s use Iowa as a quick example of how this worked.

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As you can see, Vice President Gore won Iowa, but barely.

Of Iowa’s 99 counties, Gore only carried 30 of them. Meanwhile, although Gov. Bush lost Iowa he did so by a whisker. Barely 4,000 votes separated him from winning the state despite losing Iowa’s major population centers.

This meant all Karl Rove and company needed to do was average another 100 Bush voters in the same counties Bush already won in 2000 and they could take Iowa in 2004 without even courting independent voters or talking much to Democrats.

Those extra 100 people in each county? That’s the margin.

Now fast forward four years when statewide turnout in Iowa jumped from just over 63% in 2000 to nearly 70% in 2004 and what happened?

John Kerry won 31 Iowa counties, more than Al Gore in 2000, but George W. Bush won the state by over 10,000 votes.

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Before you play the Nader card and write off the swing to Bush of nearly 15,000 votes from 2000 to 2004, take a quick look deeper into the state.

To be fair, let’s take three counties rather than just one.

The three Republican leaning counties that form an ‘L’ around the city of Des Moines are Dallas, Madison and Warren Counties. (Yes, that Madison County.)

Now look at the difference from 2000 to 2004 just in those three counties.

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The improved statewide turnout added roughly 100,000 overall votes to the totals of both Bush and Kerry versus the year 2000. But the shift in the third party/Nader votes was largly nominal, and the percentage of Democratic votes remained roughly the same in the major counties. It was the spike in GOP votes in GOP counties that was significant. Bush increased the margins.

This was the base strategy and it worked—and not just in Iowa.

In 2004 the GOP took two of the closest states in 2000 away from Democrats (Iowa and New Mexico) which offset losing New Hampshire—and they increased their margins of victory in Missouri and Florida. (full list)

Then they pretended their win was a mandate and we all know how that turned out.

OK, BACK TO THE PRESENT

What does any of this have to do with you seven years later? And if the base is so important, shouldn’t that back up all the bitching about why President Obama isn’t being a good enough boyfriend to those he should hold most dear?

A lot. And, no.

"I'm entitled to 'the' math."

Go back to the clip of Karl Rove.

Before he talks about how the GOP can win North Carolina if African-American voters just stay home, Rove ticks off a list of problems President Obama ostensibly has with other groups. Seniors, young people, three-toed sloths that need help to cross the road. Everybody in the president’s base has a problem with him, right?

That’s what you’d believe if you listened to the media right now, even if the numbers don’t exactly support the claim.

What’s going on here is the base strategy playing defense.

When the base strategy is on offense it is generating enthusiasm and making sure those base voters get to the polls, but when it’s on defense it seeks to do exactly the opposite to the other party.

Divide. Disillusion. Suppress.

So while Rove’s political action committees continue to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars to turn out the conservative base, Republicans are also working to keep as many likely Democratic voters away from the polls as possible.

Thanks to their historic gains in state legislatures nationwide in 2010, Republicans in 40 states are now seeking ways to diminish access to the voting booth.

The plan is punishingly simple, and I mean that literally.

All of these Republican proposals focus on one apparent goal: restrict ballot access and shrink the electorate — often in ways that would decrease Democratic votes. – DLCC (5/15/11)

They’re trying to shrink the margins and if they succeed it nets them full control of Congress (removing President Obama would just be a bonus).

Next year there are 17 seats in the U.S. Senate currently occupied by Democrats up for grabs and every seat in the U.S. House is up for re-election again. Right now Congress has historically low approval ratings, only 12% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing and 54% of Americans would vote out every member of Congress if they could.

The Karl Roves of the world know that if they can get enough Democrats and independents to cross their arms and stay home like they did in 2010, a ton of money will be spent making sure the GOP vote is maximized.

Go back to 2004;  Iowa, Wisconsin and New Hampshire were all decided by roughly 10,000 votes, New Mexico was decided by less than 6,000 votes. And that was for president, races for Congress almost always get fewer total voters.

In 2004 there were multiple recounts for the U.S. House because votes were so close and that was with only 41% nationwide turnout.

It seems almost impossible to believe that 100 votes here or there could change the fate of national elections, but it happens in every election. Those spare 100 votes are the margin. They are the election.

The difference between a progressive Congress, a Congress that refuses to govern, and a Congress that goes which ever way the money tells them to go lies in the margins. And a unified Congress can make a president of the opposite party nearly impotent if they want to.

Remember, campaigns run on numbers. Numbers dictate where campaigns will spend money, where they’ll put resources, and where they’ll send candidates.

This is why Rove is preoccupied with the margins—because there are far more Democrats and Independents in this country than Republicans.

Karl Rove is worried about the margins because Karl Rove is worried about you.

You don’t like health care reform, you think it needs to be improved? It’s Congress that will improve it, go win the margins.

You think we need more regulation of Wall Street and better protection from banks, credit card companies and predatory lenders? That legislation will come from Congress, go win the margins.

You want to protect a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body? That’s going to be argued in the Supreme Court and while those nominations come from the president, confirmation comes from Congress. So go win the margins and, by the way, remember that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is currently 78 and will almost certainly retire within the next four years.

You want the DREAM Act passed? You want the DISCLOSE Act passed … are you starting to see a pattern here?

Is it any clearer why the disappointment with one person borders on irrelevant when compared to the impact we can have on the makeup of another 435 other individuals who actually write and pass our laws?

It doesn’t matter if you’re mad at President Obama, it matters if you’re mad enough to take back Congress.

The momentum that swept Democrats into office in 2008 produced the passage of health care reform, Wall Street regulation, and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—but it didn’t start in the summer of 2008. It started in 2007 and it started with people just as frustrated and disappointed as so many are now, except those folks decided to do something about it.

The choice now is whether to build on that progress or let it be torn down.

The margins are where elections are won, if they’re big enough you don’t even need to worry about the election being stolen. And while those margins may be numbers to some, the reality is those margins are made up of people like you and me.

At their best, politics can give everybody a seat at the table. But for those of us who aren’t rich and powerful the price of that seat isn’t money, it’s work.

Luckily for us over three hundred of those seats will be available next year. This means that we can either work for them or, well, they don’t call it being marginalized for nothing.

Now, personally I think I’m pretty likable. So, I prefer to believe that if I were standing in front of these folks they wouldn’t blithely nod and say, “Oh yeah, him too.” But conceptually I’m definitely on their list.

I learned this last Monday night when CNN jumped in bed with a Political Action Committee (the Tea Party Express PAC) to host a Republican primary debate in Florida.

Were you understandably watching Monday Night Football instead, the moment of truth you missed came when Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul of Texas a relatively simple question about health care.

What should happen, Blitzer mused hypothetically, if a healthy 30 year-old who could afford insurance instead chose not to buy it, but then became catastrophically ill and needed intensive care for six months?

At first, Rep. Paul tried to dodge the question a bit, saying we should all take responsibility for ourselves. But Blitzer pressed the point, stressing this 30 year-old’s inability to pay for the care he needed and ultimately asking:

“But, Congressman, are you saying society should just let him die?” – Wolf Blitzer, CNN (9/12/11)

Before Paul could answer, shouts of “YEAH!” sprang forth from the audience.

The moment was somewhat jawdropping. More so for some perhaps because the death being cheered for wasn’t an abstraction. That audience may have thought they were cheering for some hypothetical death far away, but from my standpoint that question was all too real and almost nothing about it was hypothetical.

In my case, Blitzer’s example isn’t exact, but I would argue that I’m a better real world case study than the one he chose.

Not dying, it ain't cheap.

Early this year my health insurance company decided to cancel all their individual policies statewide come January. To celebrate this, they then decided to jack up my rates by around 40% for the final few months of this year.

Since I’d never once seen a doctor while on their plan, I assumed this isn’t personal and that they were gouging all their individual policy holders in the state to take one more bite out of the money apple before they kicked us out the door.

Health insurance companies are nothing if not classy.

But for me the rate increase was significant enough that I had to question if I could afford health insurance in the near future. The honest answer was no.

For much of this year I’ve been one of America’s “underemployed.” This means that I’ve worked, but sporadically, certainly not enough to save money, sometimes not even enough get ahead of my monthly bills.

Think of it as someone needing to work 40 or more hours a week to make ends meet, but only being able to work 25 or 30. That adds up pretty quick.

I’m not embarrassed to be underemployed, nor is it something I look at as my fault. The unemployment crisis in this country is exactly that and until we fix it there will be millions of Americans like me out there who are skilled, valuable assets but for whom jobs just do not exist.

Being underemployed is not all bad, however it means you don’t exactly make enough to afford the cost of, well, the cost of being an American.

Fact is, we pay a price to be an American today and it’s not one measured in political slogans that make for good soundbites. It’s a price that is measured in dollars.

Perhaps it’s always been this way, but I’d argue Americans feel that cost more than ever because the bill that comes every month just keeps going up.

You feel it in the cell phone contract that locks you in for two years then jumps in price, or in the cost of Internet access that’s bundled with your cable TV so it’s kind of a deal in one way, but more than you want to spend in another.

This is before you even get to the rising price of essentials like gas and groceries, which may not be as dramatic as your health care insurance company trying to shake you down for fun, but the increase is consistent, relentless—and by the time you get to the various insurance policies;  car, home, health, etc., your head can start to spin.

To give you a sense of what this feels like, imagine being on the dock of a pier, standing next to one of those those massive cruise ships. Now imagine that ship has begun to slowly pull away from you out to sea.

That giant boat, the one with all the booze and dancing and shuffleboard or whatever they have on those things, that’s not just prosperity, it’s the country.

You might know people on that ship, you might have even been on it yourself before you got laid off, before a family member got sick and you ended up drowning in an ocean of debt, or before you simply got stuck back on shore with the rest of us.

But while the promise of America may be metaphorically slipping further and further from your reach, practically this means some tough choices.

How much more debt can I realistically take on? How deep of a hole is too deep to crawl out of? What essential services can I afford to do without?

For many Americans and their families, cutting health insurance can be a savings of anywhere from a few hundred dollars to over a thousand dollars a month. But these savings come with a downside, and don’t for a second think we don’t know what it is.

To live without health insurance is to live every single day under the threat of bankruptcy at best and death at worst.

And believe me, there isn’t a day that goes by that you don’t worry that this could be the day. Move the wrong way, sneeze a couple of times in a row, and suddenly that wave of worry washes over you and you think, ‘please, not now.’

If that sounds like hyperbole consider that last week a 24 year-old father in Cincinnati died from what started as a toothache.

X-rays cost money.

He died because he didn’t have health insurance and thus couldn’t afford to see a doctor. His choice came down to being able to afford either antibiotics or pain killers, but not both. Choosing the latter cost him his life.

These are the choices Americans are making right now. So trust me when I tell you we get it—and by ‘we’ I mean millions of us.

Right now one in four Texans do not have health care coverage. One in five Californians don’t have health care insurance either. So when GOP voters in Florida cheer for our deaths it resonates from coast to coast.

Yet, as odd as this may sound, that applause doesn’t bother me.

Because those Republican voters are not the majority of Americans.

They’re not even the majority of American voters.

There are far more registered Democrats in America than Republicans—far more. And even if you go to a place like Liberty University, a conservative Christian college founded by Jerry Falwell, they believe calling for my head to be un-Christian.

Thus the problem isn’t bloodlust on the part of some Republicans, it’s not even ignorance on the part of their supporters, candidates or the press, the problem is that the rest of us have lost control of the conversation.

The problem is that Americans don’t vote.

This week Michael Moore went on The View to drop a lead balloon saying, “I went into the polls, I voted for the black guy and what we got was the white guy.” The racism of the statement aside, what he should have said was:

‘I voted for Barack Obama and all I got was Barack Obama.’ - A Smarter Version of Michael Moore

Because that’s what happened. You voted for Barack Obama, he won, and then you did… what?

Even if you also voted for all the other Democrats on the ballot in 2008, what did you do next?

In 2008 61% of registered Americans voted, a historic number of whom voted for Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress—and Democrats won handily. But in 2010 only 41% of Americans voted, and essentially every agent of change America sent to D.C. in 2008 not named Barack Obama was shipped right back out.

Just this week the city of Hollywood, Florida, voted on whether or not to cut city pensions and when they did only 13% of the electorate showed up.

No matter what party you align yourself with, no matter whether you care about the results of an election about pensions or not, does anybody win when only 13% of an electorate speaks?

Should 41% really be the new American majority?

Despite crushingly high unemployment in this country, the amazing thing about the situation millions like me are in is that hope still exists.

There are problems which don’t have an easy answer, but mine isn’t one of them. For me and the millions of Americans like me, the solution is simple. It’s called a job.

A job may not immediately lower some of the costs of living or even provide health insurance, but at least full time employment at a living wage gives you the ability to afford the costs of being an American rather than sinking deeper into debt or hoping some mythical relative you’ve never heard of suddenly wills you enough money so you can afford to see a doctor like so-called ‘average’ Americans.

And then, as if on cue, President Obama proposed a jobs bill—and at almost any other moment in time politically the American Jobs Act wouldn’t be remotely controversial.

• 280,000 teaching jobs saved
• 35,000 schools modernized
• $1,500 tax cut to the typical American family
• tax credits for hiring veterans
• tax credits for hiring those who’ve been out of work for more than six months
• $50 billion in immediate investement in our crumbling roads & bridges

All of which is paid for and adds nothing to the country’s long-term debt.

The argument has been made that the American Jobs Act will have a faster and larger impact than the 2009 stimulus which created somewhere between 1 million and 2.9 million new jobs. So what’s the problem?

The reason this hasn’t passed already, and the only reason it may never pass is because in 2010 too many Americans sat on their hands, only 41% of registered Americans voted, total. So now the GOP controls the House of Representatives and they don’t want to “give Obama a win” lest it help Democrats a year from this November.

That’s what they would call it if Americans went back to work, Obama winning. So Republicans must stand in the way of that just as they have either blocked action on or voted against:

• Medicare
• Medicaid
• Social Security
• Unemployment Insurance (multiple times)
• Student loans
• Pell Grants
• Food safety (multiple times)
• Equal pay for women
• Clean air
• Clean water
• Giving immigrants who attend school here or serve in the armed forces a path to becoming U.S. citizens

And most recently disaster relief. Yes, disaster relief—and those are all just to name a few.

Yet all this does is make the choice that much clearer.

There is a political party in this country that has, for three years now, been solely dedicated and focused on denying funding, blocking votes and repealing laws—doing as much destructive damage as possible.

The message clearly is that only certain Americans are American enough to belong on the boat. Trust me, they’ve said it enough and in so many ways that I know how they feel about the likes of me. But sadly some have begun to believe this line.

Madison Avenue was recently told to give up advertising to those who make less than $200,000 a year. Proctor & Gamble is beginning to abandon those who make between $40,000 and $140,000, advertising instead to strictly higher and lower end income brackets because “That’s frankly where a lot of the growth is happening.”

Meanwhile the rest of us, those of us who make just enough to be able to feed ourselves but not quite enough to be able to see a doctor, we’re being left on the dock.

Yet we’re the majority, of both the country and the electorate.

If we put enough pressure on Congress they’ll have no choice but to pass this bill. If we organize for progressives candidates, or better—get involved by registering voters, running for school boards, running for city council—we’ll make up what we’ve lost and be better able to hold onto the gains we’ve already made.

We can do it, we did it in 2008. We just have to participate in building a country rather than allowing a small dedicated minority of corporations, politicians and their supporters tear down the one we’ve got.

We just have to quit standing on the sidelines waiting, hoping someone will do it for us.

I mean, some of them want us dead for crying out loud, how much more motivation do we need?

___________________

To email all of your members of Congress from one place & support the American Jobs Act, click here.

Phone numbers for all members of  Congress can be found here.

The media—perennially on the verge of losing their minds— always tries to qualify it in some way, but sadly that usually goes something like:

‘Yes, all politics are local, BUT DID YOU SEE WHAT JUST HAPPENED?! OMGZZZ! WE HAVE TO GO COMPLETELY CRAZY BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THIS SITUATION CALLS FOR!!”

Um, yeah. Here’s some friendly advice:  Relax.

Remember, when Republican Bob McDonnell grabbed the governor’s seat in Virginia back in 2009 you were supposed to read that as the GOP dispelling “any notion of President Obama’s electoral invincibility.” Because it sent “a clear signal that voters have had enough of the president’s liberal agenda,” don’t cha know.

After that, Republican Scott Brown‘s upset win over Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, “put Dems on notice.” Oooh, scary stuff.

Obviously the tea leaves were saying the Dems were done for—and barely a year into Obama’s presidency, too. If only he weren’t so black or something. Oh, but wait a minute …

Defying recent voting trends …. David W. Marsden (D-Fairfax) narrowly won a special election Tuesday night to represent a broad swath of southwestern Fairfax County. 

Say what? That’s right, barely a year after the McDonnell election, there was another upset, this time in the Democrats’ favor, back where this whole trend started, in Virginia.

This was followed by the upset in New York where Democrat Kathy Hochul conquered a congressional district that’s only elected three Democrats since 1857. This was seen as “an ominous sign” for the GOP.

So now we fast forward to last night where Republicans held onto a Congressional seat in a conservative Nevada district that has never in its history elected a Democrat. And the GOP picked up the Congressional seat in Rep. Anthony Weiner’s old district in New York.

Oh and by the way, this district in New York will likely be eliminated through redistricting, meaning it won’t even be there a year from now. But somehow this was a “referendum on President Barack Obama’s economic policies“?

Ahem, let me politely characterize my reaction as:

Here’s a little tip, last night wasn’t a referendum. Or a rebuke. Or God coming down from on high to turn a burning bush into a ballot box to tell us anything more than what elections like these always tell us.

Special elections tell us about a specific area at a specific moment in time, no more, no less.

In fact, it’s almost always the same message you would get from the same race during a presidential year—except that during presidential years no one is paying attention down the ticket so they never read that story.

Martha Coakley lost in Massachusetts to Scott Brown because she was a terrible campaigner and she ran a lazy campaign.

Bob McDonnell won in Virginia in large part because Creigh Deeds came off as soft.

Kathy Hocul won in upstate New York because her opponent, Jane Corwin, first came out supporting Paul Ryan’s plan to kill Medicare, then flip-flopped and tried to save her skin. In an older, conservative district you couldn’t have picked a better fight.

If this sounds like it’s discounting local elections, it’s not. It’s actually the opposite. Local elections are the best indication of how that district feels, but usually only on a single issue.

But the important things to look at are:

1. What’s the main issue in the race?
2. What is turnout like?

Last night in New York it seems the main issue was Israel.  Also, it seems like turnout was relatively low.

What does that mean?

Turnout tells you who’s getting excited to vote. Obviously the higher the turnout, the more people there are generally, regardless of party, who want to have their voices heard.

In this case it seems that by and large the people who cared the most about Israel were the ones that came out to vote, and they voted for the guy who got the endorsement of former New York City mayor Ed Koch along with local Jewish leaders.

Mystery solved, Scooby.

Yes, that’s oversimplifying it. But special elections are usually place-holders until the next election. They’re generally not that deep.

Sure, they can give you hints on how to win (or lose) in the current climate. They can also give you an indication of how things are in that one part of one state, but that’s about it because the climate always changes by the next general election.

So to call special elections some kind of national referendum is almost always wishful thinking and a concoction of a media that overhypes political races as if they were horse races. It’s done for ratings and pageviews—and that those have nothing to do with reality let alone governing, well, that’s not generally not as high a priority in covering these things.

You won't buy this for the articles.

Statistically speaking, the chances of you reading everything I’m about to say aren’t very high.

That’s not a commentary on me, I could be the second-coming of Shakespeare and the chances would be just as low. The reason is, particularly online, the more words you put on the page the less of them people read.

But this simply underscores the larger point:
Messaging matters.

The quicker you can give someone the message you’re trying to convey, the better your chances are that they’ll remember what you want them to remember.

This is why twitter works so well. It’s why companies require employees to memorize an elevator pitch. Because you get straight to the point.

In politics messaging matters so much because many Americans tend to be low-information voters. That is, they grasp top-line themes, but don’t take the time to understand the specifics.

This means if you don’t give someone something to associate you with, they will either not remember you at all or they’ll characterize you in ways ranging from benignly inaccurate to deliberately misrepresentative.

Or, to put it another way:

Your message creates a perception.

That perception shapes the narrative.

The narrative produces an action.

An example:  Calcium is a major factor in strong bones. Your body needs calcium for healthy bones. You should go buy some milk because it contains a lot of calcium and you want healthy bones.

A lot of political policy is derived in the same way (think: ‘There should be a law for that!’). Of course, many times the policy is a response to the perception of the problem, not necessarily the problem itself (i.e., Did we really need a law for that or were we simply responding to a small, loud minority that wouldn’t stop complaining about a minor problem?)

Here’s how this ends up impacting both politicians and every day Americans:

Your message creates perception, that perception shapes the narrative.

During the 2004 presidential race, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth released a book entitled Unfit for Command. The world eventually found out that this group was funded by the largest GOP donor in Texas and the book was nothing more than an orchestrated campaign of lies aimed at discrediting Sen. John Kerry. Unfortunately the key word here is ‘eventually.’

When the book’s allegations emerged, the Kerry campaign barely bothered to respond. It seemed so laughable, Sen. Kerry was not only famous for serving in Vietnam but for his opposition to the war once he returned home. He coined the phrase, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?“

Yep, that happened.

Whatever anyone thought of Sen. Kerry’s politics, to question whether or not he was a war hero was ridiculous. He didn’t dodge the draft, he enlisted, and while in Vietnam he earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. To this day Sen. Kerry still has shrapnel in his leg from the war.

The problem? By 2004 Kerry’s service happened nearly two generations ago. For low-information voters the Swift Boat information was all new information and for many Americans it was the first information they’d heard about Sen. Kerry’s military service at all.

Thus, by the time the Kerry campaign eventually fought back it was too late. The narrative had already calcified to the point that Republicans openly mocked Kerry by wearing Purple Heart band-aids at the GOP convention in New York.

Two months later, America would pass over the combat veteran for someone who could barely be bothered to show up for the Alabama National Guard—all while we were still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is why the Obama campaign fought back so quickly against smears in 2008. His campaign understood that to most voters Sen. Obama was an unknown with dark skin and funny name. If they let other Democrats paint him as extreme or a closeted Muslim, he’d never even make it to the larger, more insidious smears of the general election.

That’s right, in the beginning, Sen. Obama was more worried about Democrats than Republicans, and for good reason.

Your friends have more power to hurt your narrative than your opponents.

Forget poltics for a second and imagine this scenario:

The CEO of Whirlpool comes out and says, “Man, GE makes a lot of good products, but they can’t make a refrigerator to save their life.”

Normally you would assume this CEO’s voice would carry a lot of weight, especially when he’s speaking about his own industry. But a statement like this? Nobody is going to take that seriously. Of course the CEO of Whirlpool is going to tell you not to buy a refrigerator made by General Electric, he wants you to buy a Whirlpool.

Official photo: 112th U.S. Congress

Now, instead imagine a mid-level GE parts distributor somewhere in Ohio or wherever jumps on twitter one day and says “Man, GE makes a lot of good products, but we can’t make a refrigerator to save our life.”

It’s the same statement, but since the latter is from someone who’s ostensibly ‘on the team,’ it has more credibility because, at least theoretically, this distributor has no incentive to lie.

Most people will never question the motives of the distributor like they would the CEO, or even bother to put his statement in context. They don’t need to, they got the message from a source they’re comfortable with, and now they’ll move on.

The same thing applies in politics.

The only people who can turn President Obama into Jimmy Carter version 2.0 are Democrats.

The only people who can cast him as a weak or a chronic capitulator are those who say they’re on his side but who either refuse to correct the record or insist on promoting the memes and narratives of President Obama’s opponents.

Republicans can only pitch that idea, it’s Democrats who have to buy it.

Failing to message has real world consequences.

Despite the fact that a straight line can be drawn from messaging to policy, many look at messaging as optional. Some might even say that once President Obama moved into the White House his messaging department never made it out of the moving van.

However, refusing to engage in messaging isn’t like refusing to advertise, it’s worse. Because the consequences are more than just financial. In politics, if people don’t believe your message they either don’t vote for you or they stay home. Both of which are costly, but not as costly as turning a win into a loss.

Ugh. This happened too.

Ten years from if you ask any Democrat who was part of the 111th Congress last year what their greatest career accomplishment was, my guess is that they’ll say it was passing health care reform.

Major health care reform in this country has been a Democratic Party priority for decades, but as significant an achievement as passing the Affordable Care Act was, the reality is Americans know less about it today than they did when it was passed.

Today, just 49% of Americans think the health care overhaul will make things better for the uninsured. Meanwhile, immediately after it became law last April, 67% of Americans believed it would help the uninsured.

Fewer people now know the bill gives financial aid to people who have to buy their own insurance, fewer people know all insurance plans are now required to offer a basic level of benefits.

In fact, 98% of the money allotted to help uninsured Americans with pre-existing conditions afford coverage has yet to be spent —simply because not enough people have applied for it.

There is money out there, right now, to help many Americans so they don’t have to wait to see a doctor, but those people don’t even know that money exists. Why?

Because they never got the message.

Likewise when Sen. Jon Kyl lies on the floor of Congress about Planned Parenthood, or when states like Indiana, Kansas, and Texas specifically target Planned Parenthood, rich people don’t pay for that. That limits access to medical care and increases the cost of seeing a doctor for working women.

Also, when we can’t convince Vice President to strap himself into his favorite muscle-tee and have him stand under delapidated bridges in Pennyslvania and Ohio to make the long-overdue case for infrastructure spending just before he shotguns a Keystone Light¹, costs go up across the board.

The failure to message kills you at every turn, it leaves pressing needs with no narrative and therefore no momentum to generate policy and it can turn your biggest wins into losses—which may not even be the worst part.

If you don’t control your message, someone else will.

Last friday, Mitt Romney said something remarkable. Both because it was a flat-out lie and because no one bothered to correct him.

On Friday Romney said:

“Three years ago, candidate Obama promised to address the problems of illegal immigration in America. He failed. The truth is, he didn’t even try.” (9/2/11)

Even by the simplest of measures, the number of people deported, this claim is demonstrably false. The Obama administration has deported a record number undocumented immigrants since 2009. Add to that, his continued support for the DREAM Act and the only possible way to say this administration and Democrats in Congress aren’t trying on immigration is to lie through your teeth.

Also, let’s not forget that the DREAM Act was originally sponsored by Republican Senators Orin Hatch and John McCain, yet today not a single Republican supports it—including Hatch and McCain.

The DREAM Act allows those who go college in the U.S. or serve in the Armed Forces a path to become a U.S. Citizen. In not supporting it, essentially the GOP is saying that if even if you go to school in America, even if you are willing to die for America, you’re still not good enough to be an American.

But it’s President Obama who’s not trying?

Meanwhile the argument can also be made that President Obama is the largest tax cutter in American history. Honestly. Yet who’s pushing that message?

The truth is, in politics, unless you tell people about your accomplishments, voters won’t look them up on their own. And if you don’t controll your message, someone will gladly do it for you.

The most mind-numbing example of this is that the number of Americans who believe President Obama is a Muslim was higher in last year than it was in 2008.

Why? Because Fox News is a 24 hour conservative message machine and for every single hour of progressive talk radio there are ten of conservative talk.

Messaging works. Advertising works. Repetition works.

It’s already been uncovered that PR firms have been hired to infiltrate progressive forums and sow the seeds of dissent. Just last year conservatives were caught gaming Digg, one of the top social news sites on the Internet, to bury stories that were positive to progressives and promote conservative content.

Conservatives don’t need to fight with progressives when they can game the system and pay marketing firms to make progressives fight each other.

Not to mention, if we know this is happing now we can be utterly certain it will only increase is we move into 2012. This means giving voters a clear message from a trustworthy source will be all the more essential.

All of which isn’t to say messaging is the end all, be all. Messaging will never take the place of genuine voter engagement, door-to-door organizing, or sadly even vast sums of lobbying loot.

But whereas advertising can be as expensive as you want to make it, messaging itself is cheap.

It’s only the cost of not messaging that eventually comes with a heavy price.

In a related story, President Obama will unveil his proposal to create jobs to a join session of Congress this Thursday night.

__________________

¹ I just naturally assume that when Vice President Biden shotguns a beer, that beer is a Keystone Light. However, I have no empirical data to back this up.

The truth, however, was that I was bored with my job and frustrated by over a decade of dysfunctional politics. Yes, I wanted to contribute, but I was nowhere near ready to admit that and I had no idea how to make that happen.

But during that first weekend, perhaps the single smartest volunteer integration idea the Obama campaign had early on was the way in which we were asked to define why we were there. The idea wasn’t to put it in terms of ‘why’ so much as it was to put in terms of ‘who.’

Which is to say, you want to change things in the country? That’s great, but for whom?

My background is pretty heavily based in advertising and marketing so I could go on about how tactically smart I found this to be, but the point was to get you to answer the question. Because if you could come up with the who, the how is almost a formality. And for me, the answer was my mother.

My mother has worked under the threat of being downsized every day for over a decade now as the moment her boss decides to retire is the moment her job ends. Until 2007 I hadn’t given her situation much more thought than that, but eventually I realized that if my mom lost her job before she was 65, she wouldn’t be eligible for Medicare—and even though I was making decent money at the time, there would be no way I could help with her medical bills.

It’s funny how willing you are to tolerate the status quo right until you realize it might drive you into bankruptcy overnight.

Now, the thought of my mom wasn’t what kept me coming into the office day after day, but what might befall both her and I financially if the fight was lost was certainly one of the things that kept me going at two in the morning when all you really want to do was sleep for more than a few hours for the first time in days.

Recently, the memories of this have come back so vividly because it’s now been four years since I first thought of becoming politically active and here we are again, watching candidates jockey for position. Only this time it’s on the Republican side of the aisle and the results are remarkably different and sadly predictable.

In three GOP debates so far, there’ hasn’t been a single mention of the middle class by any candidate. Not one, in five and a half hours combined.

Meanwhile, out on the stump, the top tier Republican candidates generally talk about themselves, our socialist-maxist dictator of a president who probably hates America, or they yelp about how ‘the taxes are too damn high!’

This despite the fact that taxes are at their lowest rates in 60 years. Not to mention the fact that Republicans in Congress have refused to close tax loopholes that would force corporations to pay their fair share of our debt all while admittedly holding the economy hostage just to win political points.

The contrast is particularly fascinating when you compare that to what’s going on in the daily lives of those out there who are not knee-deep in politics.

Yesterday I spent some time talking to a general contractor who’s working up the street. (The old campaign habit of talking to anyone and everyone about the challenges they face on a daily basis dies hard, especially if you never tried to kill it off.)

In 2007, when I was first dipping my toe into the pool of politics, this contractor—let’s call him George—had 22 men working for him and was pulling in $2000 a week. Today he’s got a bushy mustache and the tan of someone who’s spent far too much time working in the sun, but what he doesn’t have any more are those employees—any of them. In fact, until he landed the job up the street, he’d been living in his truck for three weeks.

Yet what concerned George most wasn’t that he was living in a truck—in Las Vegas, in August.

“I have an 11 year old daughter, she lives with her mom,” he said. “I’m 60 now, and I can kinda find a way to make $1000 last a month. But what about her? How much is it going to cost her to live for a month—or even a week—when she gets out of school?”

Here was someone with decades of experience in his trade, who admits to barely scratching by, and his biggest concern wasn’t how he ended up where he did or even how he might find a bed for the night, but how his daughter would to get by in a decade or more if things are this bad now.

Which is another way of phrasing the question. Many of us want America to change, but for whom?

Michele Bachmann seems to talk mostly about herself and speak only in Tea Party talking points. Mitt Romney believes, quite matter-of-factly, that corporations are people. Tim Pawlenty has since dropped out of the running, but when he first announced he’d be running for president he literally couldn’t come up with an answer as to why he wanted to run. Or there’s Rick Perry who, as the story goes, looked out at the current field of GOP candidates and sniffed something to the effect of, ‘Well, I can beat them.’

Contrast any of them with any one of President Obama’s town halls from this week and see if you can’t spot the difference.

Still, the larger point here is that nobody knows who’s going to be the Republican nominee for president six months from now any more than I know if I’ll get a call tomorrow saying, ‘Hey, come to Chicago, we’re in the middle of getting the band back together and we need what you can do.’

But if you just listen to how they say what they say, everybody who has any skin in the game will tell you who they’re fighting for and if they have any intention of trying to fix the very real problems we face.

Because that you can’t walk a block any more without running into someone like George, someone who wants to work, who has the skills to work, yet who can’t find a job and suddenly ends up living in a van in the desert losing hope by the day, is a problem.

That there are still health insurance companies finding ways to raise rates by nearly 50% and cancel plans all together even if you’ve never seen a doctor the entire time you’ve been on their plan is a problem. I know because it’s happening to me and others like me right now, and it’s a problem.

Oh, and lest we forget, that there are still nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan alone, and that is a problem.

So, yes, it’s nice that the political hyperventilating makes for good TV and helps to increase campaign war chests. And, yes, it’s funny to watch Sarah Palin grift her way across the country, despite the fact that she feels the need to do it mainly on the backs of those who can probably least afford to waste $20 on a book she didn’t write.

But when you can literally walk out into the street and bump into someone who damn near breaks down to a total stranger because he’s given up on a future for himself openly wonders if there will even be one for his daughter, something is wrong.

If that doesn’t remind you that everything everyone worked so hard for in 2008 is nowhere close to over I’m not sure what does.

And if that doesn’t remind us all who we need to be fighting for I’m not sure what will.

Wasn’t it just yesterday when I compiled a cheat sheet for those who wanted to tune out politics for the summer? Only now, the longer this summer goes on, the more I wish I’d have taken my own advice.

Somehow it’s as if the nationwide heatwave slowly melted the political conversation into essentially two puddles. Either you blame the president for everything—which is a shockingly bi-partisan group, by the way—or you supported, worked for, and believe in the president and now feel that if you don’t step up defend him nobody will.

Yet most of the defenses I continue to see sound like apologies: ‘He would have done this, but …’ ‘Yes, it’s a bad deal, but …’

If ever there were a way to lose the future, this would be it. Because all this does is let everybody else off the hook.

What do I mean?

First, when did the Executive Branch become responsible for writing all our laws?

Last week there was an article from The Onion that got passed around about how we were going to air-drop a bunch of 8th grade civics teachers into D.C. to help solve the debt ceiling crisis. It was funny, but it was also a poignant reminder that a frightening number of Americans have completely lost their grasp on grade school civics—if they were ever taught them in the first place.

It’s the Legislative Branch of government writes the laws. That’s Congress, not the White House (see: Schoolhouse Rock).

So if you have a problem with the laws you’re getting (or not getting), you can look at the Oval Office all you want, but where you should be looking is Capitol Hill.

Oh, and before you start in with vetoes and how bad the Democrats in Congress are (and, yes, some of them are a problem), you may want to remember a couple of things.

The Democratic controlled congress of 2009 passed a health care bill with a public option. They also passed a jobs bill, a $174 billion jobs bill to be exact.

The reality is, under Democratic control, the 111th Congress was one of the most productive in history.

Meanwhile, at a time when we need it most, the 112th Congress is comparatively sitting on its hands. (e.g., that graph ———–> )

Right now, we’re either just out of or just about to go back into the worst recession since the Great Depression and Congress is doing as little about it as humanly possible. They’re on vacation for the entire month of August.

Who’s apologizing for that?

Who of the 63 new House Republicans is standing up and saying:

“I know I said I wanted to go to Washington to help with our staggering unemployment rate, but it turns out the idea of regulating a woman’s uterus was too darn tempting to pass up. Sorry.”

Or how about those who voted for any of these new Republicans, why aren’t they jumping to their feet and saying:

“You know what, I sent that nitwit to Congress. I’m not quite sure what I was thinking. My bad.”

If they’re not going to apologize for that, why on earth should I apologize for President Obama?

Second, did Barack Obama neglect infrastructure spending in this country for the last 60 years? 

We haven’t had a major spend on infrastructure since the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 which started building Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System in the 1960s. And as we all know, in the 1960s, Barack Obama was out forging birth certificates as an over-achieving infant.

Or something like that.

But if there was one place Obama wasn’t in the 1960s, it was in elected federal office. He wasn’t even in kindergarten yet.

Meanwhile, American spending on infrastructure has been cut consistently.

For generation after generation, we’ve had both Republican and Democratic officials at every level of government. Where are their massive repair projects?

Where was their investment to the power grid, to rail, to bridges, all of which is now long overdue.

More than that, where are these guys now coming out and saying:

“You know, when I was president/governor/a senator/in Congress, I really should have fought harder for jobs to fix the bridges and roads on the verge of collapse in our cities. I kicked the can down the road on that and I’m really sorry.”

If they’re not interested in taking responsibility for neglecting the country for fifty years, why on earth should I apologize for President Obama taking less than three years to get to the problem they left behind?

Third, did Barack Obama force the GOP to get exponentially more conservative?

As luck would have it, I was in Salt Lake City last year when Sen. Bob Bennett was thrown out of the Senate. One of the most conservative members sitting in the U.S. Senate and Utah Republicans sent the guy home without even putting him on the primary ballot. Then they cheered.

When it happened, Sen. Orrin Hatch was in the room and didn’t seem all that shaken. But he didn’t seem all that comfortable either. At the time, I wrote this off as him having to give the same kind of rah-rah speech he’s probably given a thousand times and his next election being two years away.

Pthpt, Mike Lee, who's that? Oh, right.

But in retrospect it looks much different.

Sen. Hatch didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, he’s been in the Senate since 1977. So what he was probably thinking in that moment was, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

And go he just might.

The corporate-backed Tea Party group FreedomWorks made Sen. Hatch their first official target for removal in 2012.

Realize that Sen. Hatch is someone who’s suggested drug testing the unemployed, thinks that the poor should do more to help with the nation’s debt problem instead of the rich, and has introduced legislation to fight any efforts to combat climate change as recently as this year.

But he still isn’t conservative enough for the Republican base nationally right now.

Tea Party activists scare Republicans like Hatch to death, and they may dislike President Obama because he’s too liberal or too progressive—some of them may even dislike him because he’s just too damn black. But what they’re loudest about isn’t Obama, it’s that their current elected officials and candidates aren’t conservative enough.

Where are the apologies for this?

Where are the sensible Republicans, the socially moderate conservatives who could care less who you marry and don’t want the government in your doctor’s office let alone your bedroom?

I don’t see any of them owning this, saying they were asleep at the switch when the Concord Project came into town or admitting that they let a bunch of economic illiterates hijack a major American political party.

If reasonable Republicans are going completely shirk personal responsibility when they leave the keys to their party in the car for the Tea Party to take, why should I apologize for Barack Obama? What did he have to do with that?

Fourth, who’s fault is it that Barack Obama didn’t live up to the expectations you created for him?

Over the weekend there was a long piece in the New York Times that got a lot of attention. It’s a 3,000 word essay on the very important topic of what ‘happened’ to Barack Obama.

Of the things that stood out most to me in this—other than that I’m amazed at how much every writer out there, no matter what they say about the man, really wants to write for Barack Obama. All of them. Every one. Yes, including me.

But other than that what jumped out at me was how there’s this residual angst many people have that President Obama won’t govern like the vision they had of Sen. Obama back in 2008. It’s so deep for some that they have to keep asking what ‘happened’ to the Obama they once knew. As if they knew him personally.

Which, of course, they did.

Except that what they knew was a vision. One they created in their mind as we all do with a candidate.

I'm sorry, did you say 'a pony'?

In candidates, we see the reflection we want to see, picking pieces from their narrative which support the manifestation we prefer.

The foundation for this vision varies from ‘firm’ to ‘non-existent,’ but now that he’s actually doing the job, we all have to accept the difference between the image we created over the course of a few months, and the man as he actually is.

The added bonus of that is getting to wade through the occasional ten page piece of catharsis which basically boils down to, ‘I fell in love with the guy who I thought would buy me a pony. Only it’s now over two years later and I don’t have a pony and he doesn’t seem to care.’

Now, at the outset of all this I said I wouldn’t apologize for President Obama and I still won’t. Because if your expectations were unrealistic about the powers the president—any president—has, and you won’t admit it, whose problem is that?

Likewise, if you didn’t understand the makeup of Congress—or worse, if you didn’t do anything to change that makeup in 2010, why should I or anybody apologize for Barack Obama?

‘Oh,’ but people sigh, softly putting their hand on their forehead. ‘But he had a majority in Congress, he should have done more with it.’

One, did you ignore the chart above? Two, that argument has already been chronicled and pretty much invalidated entirely.

Still, to me that seems to detract from what’s most important.

As the debt fight clearly demonstrated, one political party in our country is now under the control of a faction that is willing to burn down the economy to get their way. On the other side of that stands Barack Obama and a number of Congressional Democrats whose eyes are the size of saucers because they can’t believe what they’re seeing.

Why should I apologize for standing with the side that is actually trying to do something and that contains the only adult in the room?

Last, you realize GOP tactics are winning, right?

In 2009, Republicans came to Capitol Hill in the minority and with an agenda to block everything. It was a novel, borderline crazy approach in the midst of a horrible recession. But if the president was for it, Republicans would be against it. This has continued on to the point ridiculousness, with Republicans eventually voting against Food Safety Laws multiple times.

2010 U.S House election results

But from 2009 into 2010, Republicans used the filibuster a historic number of times. They blocked legislation, they blocked judges, they blocked everything. And what did their efforts to stifle any progress, no matter what the cost, net them?

They won historic victories in both the U.S. House of Representatives and in states nationwide during the midterm elections of 2010.

They’ve since used those wins to go from simply blocking action to actively promoting ways that would handcuff the government or kneecap the economy.

What do you think is going to happen next?

Do you think the last week of the stock market running for the hills has taught hardline Republicans anything?

Just yesterday, after the market plunged to end last week and before it would plummet another 6.6% yesterday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah said of defaulting on the nation’s debt:

“We weren’t kidding around, either. We would have taken it down.”
[emphasis his]

Go look at Wisconsin where stripping union rights and vote suppression sanctioned by the state have become the norm.

Go look at Michigan where they’ve literally declared Financial Marshall Law in multiple parts of the state.

Go look at the FAA which was shutdown basically because Delta Airlines wants to bust unions.

We’re a year removed from the largest oil spill in U.S. history and a GOP candidate for president has guaranteed she will ‘lock the doors and turn out the lights‘ at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Republican leader in the Senate has promised to duplicate the efforts the GOP used to take the economy hostage over the debt ceiling fight and replicate the process.

It goes on and on and on …

So what’s next?

Imagine for a second that you’re a corporation with a lot of money, and your only motivation is profit. Recent Republican efforts have all but guaranteed slow or non-existent job growth into next year. This ensures a receptive audience to the notion of ‘throwing the bums out’ of Washington.

Now imagine you know that putting more Republicans in office on both the national and state level will result in things like eliminating the EPA, rolling back the Food & Drug Administration, reducing regulation, and busting unions—all things that would increase your profit. What would stop you from investing a few million dollars (anonymously, of course) to pay people to reinforce false memes about Democrats and the president?

You could hire 1000 people at $10 an hour, work them five hours a day for an entire month. They could work phone banks, calling up their ‘neighbors’ as Bob who lives one county over. Or you could have them sign up on Internet forums and have them bombard twitter. Or both.

$10 x 5 hours = $50 per day, per person

$50 a person x 1000 people = $50,000 per day

$50,000 x 30 days = $1.5 million

Or you could pay them less and hire more of them.

But every day you could have a thousand people tell your story about how Barack Obama is really Jimmy Carter, or a muslim terrorist, or just some Harvard-educated, know-nothing, empty suit who’s failed to control sky-rocketing unemployment and the certain spike in gas prices that will happen next fall.

If you knew what it would buy, how much would that be worth to your billion dollar company?

Maybe if you got other companies in your industry together with you, perhaps the Chamber of Commerce could help you get in touch with them, maybe then you could bundle even more resources to the cause.

Thus, at the risk of stating the obvious, the problem here is not Barack Obama.

Our problems are real, not imagined and they have solutions. What we’re lacking is the political will or skill to legislate them into existence.

Let the Bush Tax Cuts expire and make sure the Affordable Care Act gets fully funded. Get the Infrastructure Bank that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) introduced up and running. (Its name is too on-the-nose and boring, but what it would do is link private contractors to public works projects. It used to have bi-partisan support until Barack Obama was for it.)

Then pick any number of infrastructure projects from a list of 100 that need to be done in the country (yes, we have a top 100 projects in need). Pick the ones in key states that desperately need the money and then see if Republicans from those states will really vote against jobs for their own constituents in an election year.

Suddenly the debt won’t be as scary and jobs end up on the rise.

There are good ideas out there, there are jobs bills on the table, and there are smart people who want to be involved in fixing the country.

There are  hundreds of things to do, thousands of them. In cites, counties, and states all across the country.

But of all the things there are still to do from now until election day, I promise you that apologizing for Barack Obama isn’t one of them.

The GOP negotiates raising the debt ceiling.

Don’t misunderstand me, I cared very much about the GOP taking the country’s economy hostage. That was ridiculous, petulant, and petty.

But the issue itself essentially boiled down to: Do we want to borrow money so that we’ll have more time to pay our bills, or do we want to blow up our credit in a way that we may never recover from—oh, and by the way, send the national and international economy into a recession/depression in the process.

Well, would you like a plate of poorly cooked brussel sprouts with that or a bowl of glass shards we found in an alley behind the methadone clinic?

Things like raising the debt ceiling are routine, or have been. And I don’t think I’m an atypical American for thinking Congress should dispatch with housekeeping items quickly so that they can get to the real issues that help Americans prosper.

Instead, we just wasted two entire months doing something routine.

Ugh.

A week or so ago I feel like I shared this clip from the Rachel Maddow show. It’s from April and although it talks about how Democrats could (and should) use Republicans’ insistence on trying to kill Medicare as a way to win politically, it begins with a story about how everybody tends to agree the FAA is our friend. That’s because the FAA helps keep airplanes from disintegrating in mid-flight.

This goes to the larger point of the segment, that there’s a way to both win the argument and win an election. Which is also to say, there’s a way for Democrats to win both an issue and an argument simultaneously, they just don’t do it very often.

Think of the current impasse with the FAA—a story I’ve personally been transfixed by for about two weeks because I think it succinctly sums up what so many hate about Washington.

The short version is this: The FAA originally ran out of funding in 2007. Since then Congress has kept them operating through a series of short-term extension bills—twenty short term extensions to be exact. But this time the Republicans in the House have decided to hold up the FAA’s funding because they want to get something for it.

The FAA collects revenue. It creates both public and private sector jobs. But what the GOP wants here isn’t about money (they only asked for $16 million in cuts out of a total budget of $16 billion). What the GOP wants is to strip union rights and their efforts define what’s dysfunctional in D.C.

You see, Delta Airlines doesn’t want its employees to abide by new voting rules that have been passed by the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board). So Delta voices its displeasure through its corporate personhood, spending over a million dollars in lobbying money in just the first two quarters of this year alone.

Suddenly, the GOP says that the FAA must adopt Delta’s position for all airlines, unions be dammed, or the FAA won’t be funded. The Democrats in Congress resist, rightly saying this is text book union busting. The GOP then throws up their hands, says ‘not our problem,’ and the FAA is shutdown.

Oh, and now Congress is in recess until after Labor Day, five weeks from now.

This shutdown has furloughed 4,000 FAA workers and put the jobs of another 70,000 private contractors on hold, effectively laying them off too. The shutdown has already gone on almost two weeks and is costing taxpayers $200 million a week. If it runs all the way until September—and right now there’s no reason to think it won’t since Congress won’t even be in session until then—it will cost American taxpayers around $1.2 billion.

That’s right, for no other reason than the GOP is going after union rights, over 70,000 Americans are out of work and taxpayers may be stuck with a bill for $1.2 billion.

Oh, and until they were publicly shamed into giving the money back, Delta was taking advantage of all this by raising ticket prices and pocketing the money that should have been going to federal taxes. Classy.

In fairness, the Democrats in Congress tried multiple times to do something about this before the recess. Most recently, Senate Democrats offered up a last-ditch, temporary bill to fund the department. That was blocked by Senate Republicans.

Which goes to the larger point here, that there is a way to both win the argument and the issue.

President Obama should call Congress back to Washington to fix this.

That Congress has had most of this week off after their manufactured debt crisis isn’t great, but now they’re going to be on vacation—paid vacation—for another four weeks while over 70,000 Americans sit out of work simply because the GOP wants to make a point? That’s disgusting.

"You're taking how many weeks off?"

Congress seems to only function any more when they have a deadline, so tell them to come back next week and that they can adjourn back to their vacation just as soon as they put these Americans back to work.

It’s not passing a jobs bill, but at least it’s not just letting Congress put Americans out of work to make a political point for corporate cash.

If the GOP says no and doesn’t want to come back, that’s fine. The Senate can pass something and leave it on the doorstep of the House to fester and rot in August sun. And every day Democrats can issue press releases or go on TV and talk about how Republicans would rather go to barbecues and have umbrella drinks than put Americans back to work.

Standing up for construction workers and literally putting people back on the job, you can’t manufacture winning issues better than that—although that’s just what the GOP done for Democrats, if Democrats are inclined to accept the challenge.

Congress currently has a 14% approval rating. The reason is because of issues like this.

Meanwhile, people complain about the president not leading. Well, let him call Congress back. If they say no or can’t get it done it will simply underscore the notion of change that many of us have been pitching for some time.

Because if Congress wants to put Americans out of work, the truth is, American voters have all the power in the world to return the favor.

(While we wait for Congress to act, here’s a list of the private companies whose employees are sitting idle and the contracts they’re losing out on thanks to the GOP and their efforts to ‘create’  jobs, jobs, jobs.)

His view is that what the GOP stands for is simple. It’s so simple, in fact, that you can put it on a bumper sticker: Cut taxes, cut spending. (Which shouldn’t be confused with, ‘Me Tarzan. You Jane.’ or ‘Fire Bad. Woman Good.’)

Insofar as what Republicans stand for, it’s tough to disagree. The GOP has painted a pretty clear picture of what they are about. And although I might sum it up differently than Robinson, the message the party would like Americans to walk away with does seem to be: Lower taxes, less spending, less government.

(Also, Fire, bad. Woman, good—just so long as she’s makin’ babies or sammiches an’ not doin’ anything crazy like voting or exercising her right to choose.)

However I disagree with Robinson about progressives not having a Big Idea. At least, about Democrats not having a Big Idea.

Granted, he has a Pulitzer Prize and I have one of those cards that knocks seventy-five cents of a bag of Doritos at the grocery store, but I still think he’s wrong.

Democrats do have a Big Idea. It’s a good one, and it would fit on a bumper sticker were they so inclined. It’s entitled: Rebuild America.

If you step back and look at the larger picture painted by the accomplishments of the Obama administration, this is the story writ large.

The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. health care reform) was designed to help lower costs and get health insurance for more Americans. With the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country coming from medical bills, the more Americans in debt, the less our economy can grow.

Revamping the student loan program, student loan forgiveness, and the new GI Bill, all were designed to give more Americans access to college and ease student debt.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help with equality in the work place;  raising emissions standards and Cash for Clunkers to stimulate the American auto industry and clean up our air;  rescinding Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to strengthen our military—the list goes on, but more specifically, there has been an ongoing push to literally rebuild America.

Just ask Alice Rivlin. The first chair of the CBO and member of President Clinton’s cabinet. She says we should have been pushing even more infrastructure spending since the moment President Obama took office.

Or ask Paul Krugman who repeatedly said the stimulus was too small.

Or ask former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell who reiterated our need to fix our crumbling country just last night.

The problem isn’t that liberals don’t have big ideas, it’s that you can’t govern in bumper stickers. Because slogans aren’t legislation.

Not to mention, whether any side of the aisle likes it or not, the bottom line is that you can’t govern alone.

Before President Obama came into office, our national spending on infrastructure was near historic lows.

Thanks to years of neglect and coffer-raiding, our nation’s infrastructure most recent grade is a D. That’s down from the D+ we received in 2001 and 2003 and the C we got in 1988.

Our full report card:

(source for both graphs)

The current shorthand for our infrastructure policy is Patch & Pray. And that $2.2 trillion price tag will only go up. Meanwhile our crumbling infrastructure is costing every single American household $700 a year right now. Think of it as a Failure To Act Tax.

According to a new report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, that failure to act  will translate into roughly a $3.1 trillion suppression of the GDP before the decade is out.

These are investments in our country that are long overdue. Not only that, these are American manufacturing and labor jobs just waiting to happen, yet every time you turn around you see headlines like these:

• House budget for the rest of 2011 has deep cuts for transportation
• Rick Scott refuses federal funds for high-speed railway
• House GOP budget/Mica proposal would cut 140,000 public transportation jobs, Democrats say
• Rural Michigan roads turned back to gravel

Even now, as the GOP wastes the country’s time by holding the economy hostage, the entire discussion is focused on what more we can cut, not how we can reinvest.

You simply can’t govern this country alone.

So you can say that Democrats and progressives don’t message their ideas well. That they don’t send out stimulus checks that say Stimulus Payment on them so everybody thinks the government is doing something no matter how ineffective.

You can say that Democrats and progressives readily concede the debate and have no real answer to the propaganda on Fox News.

You can even say that Democrats and progressives fold the best hand at the table and let good ideas remain on the shelf because they’re afraid of confrontation and won’t fight for what they believe in.

Or you could say any number of things about Republicans.

But one thing I don’t think you can say is that Democrats don’t have a Big Idea.