Just to pick out the high points:
>(1) Nathan, go back to your own posts when the House passed the bankruptcy
bill.
>You didn't bray about
>the progressive amendments the Senate would pass.
>You said the Dems would pull out all the stops to stop it. You
>specifically said that the veto-proof majority by which the bill was
>approved in the House would not >hold up in the Senate. When your
>prediction turned out so disastrously wrong, you clammed up for awhile.
>Now, short months later, you've rewritten shameful capitulation as
>demi-victory. Post hoc, anything short of >the worst imaginable becomes a
>credit to the Dems. Keep moving the goalposts like that and the Dems will
>always come out on top.
We didn't jump back on the issue for a while, since it got stuck in committee. Yep, I was wrong on predicting that the bill would not pass by veto-proof majorities, although it didn't when Clinton was threatening one last year, so that shows a difference in how people vote with a different President in office - a lot of strategies change. As people note at the personal level, how one votes changes rather radically based on one's evaluation of its likelihood to change the result. Without the possibility of a veto, any opposition was largely symbolic. A basic rule of politics is that the vote on final passage is far less telling than votes on amendments, where divisions are often much clearer. There were much closer votes on a host of amendments, some of which passed and some of which didn't, but there were plenty of very real partisan differences in those votes.
And the bill that did pass was improved due to the Senate amendments. Still a bad bill and I never said it was a victory, just that having Dems controlling the conference committee from the Senate side would lead to a better bill than without.
In any case, the bankruptcy bill is far less significant than the tax bill which the Dem leadership in both houses fought tooth-and-nail and which 80% of Dems opposed even on final passage, with nearly 100% of Dems supporting far better alternatives in amendments leading up to the final vote.
>What you call "wallowing in . . . irrelevance" I call recognizing the very
>long odds against my side. No one here is going to argue against
organizing
>among community activists and unions, among others, but the history of
>"progressives" casting aside THAT kind of power as soon as Dems invite them
>to the table and give them a polite hearing is too common to ignore and too
>depressing to dwell upon.
Well, those progressives are dumb. I support strategic involvement in the Dems based on strategy and power concerns, but for the same reason I would never see why someone would abandon the basis for power that got access to the table in the first place. There are two things bottom-line that give access to power politically- the ability to deliver money and the ability to deliver votes. Progressives rarely have the first, so unless they keep the second, they are irrelevant.
I posted the story about the MA Dem Party losing a big donar specifically to note the dillemma faced by Dem party brokers when they have to choose between votes and money- and they sometimes have to choose votes, which is the point of power from the grassroots.
-- Nathan Newman