Watching the Big Dog at work

I'm PO'd but not so much because Hillary lost anymore. That's water under the bridge. She's my true hero, working furiously to save what's left of the progressive agenda in Congress.
No, what's pissing me off is now everyone is starting to come out of their Obama induced trance, looking at the electoral map, looking at the potential damage to Congressional Democrats and saying "Oh S%^&! What's happening? It's all the fault of those damn Clinton holdouts." I am seriously sick of that. We predicted this would happen. We tried to warn them. Republicans are crack at this election stuff and they know us better than we know ourselves. But would they listen? No. It was just so damn important to feed on that testosterone poisoning and crush Hillary and Bill. That rush was so much more important than the most critical election of our lifetime.
How do we mitigate the damage now? I'm beginning to think it would be better for the holdouts to endorse McCain Palin and scare the f%&( out of the electorate enough that they will fight tooth and nail for downticket Dems. Let's see the Obamaphiles actually work for the things they say they believe in and get behind floudering congressional and Senate candidates and abandon Barry to his fate.
I'm not there yet. But I'm getting close.
Come together at The Confluence

It doesn't matter whether a candidate has a mandate in reality; it matters whether the candidate thinks in his head that he has a mandate, and Obama hasn't shown any signs of humbling here.

The rush to Mommy and Daddy Clinton isn't the teenager finally realizing that the 'rents were right all along, it's 'oh crap, I really f*cked up and they're the only ones who can get me out of this mess'. Obama hasn't had an epiphany and realized that hey, being a Democrat is a good thing, or that he actually has some responsibility for himself and his campaign; his stump shtick isn't changing; he's just grabbing for any tool in the toolbox.

We've already seen what a make-believe mandate can do, from back in 2000.

The Democrats are (predictably, sigh) disorganized and defensive; the difference between now and the primaries/summer is that the disorganization extends to the Blame Game. Rather than focusing all the blame for their entitlement-denied at Clinton/her supporters, they're pointing fingers all over the place. But the game hasn't stopped; the entitlement is still there, they just can't figure out where to put, I mean point, their fingers.

If Obama wins, the Brazile 'New Coalition' still has control of the party. The Dems are poor enough at self-reflection when they lose, a win makes them abysmal. At this point, only fighting like hell for downticket non Blue Dogs is the only way left to send a message, and trying to influence 'the narrative' (ugh, how I'm growing to hate that word) to get the message across that a loss is because the Democrats weren't Democratic enough.

The real danger of Palin, by the way, is less her extreme conservative views (I mean the real ones, not the hyperbolic versions), it's the fact that her dramatic popularity masks the lesson the Democrats should have learned this year that fighting the good fight was both the right thing to do and would have been the winning thing to do. Now if they lose they can blame her, and they will, as if she's a force of nature they couldn't have anticipated. But McCain was pulling even in the polls before the Democratic convention, while the postpartisan riff was still being played.

He has lost my trust. I will never in a million years vote for him. If his movement falls apart, may it happen before the election. I'm not advocating for McCain but if he happens to win, it could be the best thing that happened to the party in years.
FWIW, I don't think Obama has a prayer of winning. The Republicans haven't even touched him yet. He's brought all of the recent stuff on himself by handling the race exactly as a neophyte politican with a recklessly aggressive campaign organization would do. Republican are known for pinpoint accuracy. They're going to get him yet. Just wait.
Come together at The Confluence

Sure, 9/11 gave Bush cover to impose a mandate. But he wasn't exactly reaching out despite his close "win" in Florida. And in 2004, though he won the pop. vote by a good margin, it was still close. And we saw him declare he had political capital that he intended to use.

Flash forward to 2008. Obama gets less popular votes than Hillary and any reasonable analysis of the caucuses suggests that Obama's delegate lead is a sham. Did that stop Obama from declaring a mandate? Nope, not at all. He wanted to humiliate Hillary and even made his own Baracopolis. That's hardly the sign of someone who feels humbled at all. Its this Bush-like behavior that worries me about Obama more than anything McCain can do with a resistant Congress.

By all accounts Bush should have toned himself down after the 2004 election. He didn't. It's almost as if he felt slighted for not winning as big as an incumbent war time president should have. Its the same in 2008. Rather than show some humility after the convention and the alienation of women (and some men) that resulted, he chose the same track going after Palin. Is that really the type of person you think will be humbled by a close win in November?

I've said it before, but I can understand voting for the Republican nominee out of pure protest. What I do not understand is this need to try and spin it as a teaching moment for the Obama campaign and the DNC, because it's pure spin. Obama would not more learn from a loss than he'd learn from a win. We are wasting our time if we believe ourselves capable of teaching people that don't want to learn. At least in my book, baring some miraculous epiphany(ies), the O'Movement and the Donkey Leadership are lost causes, for the time being.

the party. They're determined to bury the Clintons once and for all regardless of the consequences, and now that the party machinery is in their hands, they'll do just that.

"You'd better get this straight. Wise up before it's too late." -- Sister Sledge

I had a big argument about this election with my son a few days ago. (He's voting for Obama, but not mindless of the problems.) And we discussed the very issue of "sending a message". I expressed frustration at not being able to send a message in elections past or in this one. (I'm sending their letters asking for money back with explanations why I'm not giving, but I feel futile doing so.)

His response was something I've often said to him in other contexts, which is "you can't change people," i.e. you can't make them do what you want them to do or think what you want them to think. Well, yeah.

So my only useful choice is to work to get different people in charge.

If Obama loses, there will be many people who suddenly never really believed he could win at all, with a variety of excuses why they endorsed him anyway.

The folks who waited until after the end of the primaries will have the Unity Pony as cover (although the Pony may want to gain a bit of weight, it's a lot of people).

The people who did it coincident with receiving money from Obama but not Clinton will have to backpedal a bit harder, but they'll come up with something. These are mostly the folks who saw the Obamabonanza in February as the future; money money money flowing everywhere. If he loses, no money and without money, no loyalty.

Demconwatch linked to all the SD endorsement statements they could find, and reading them last spring I seemed to remember a lot of them were profoundly CYA. Most pols run to the side where their bread is buttered, and put aside past interpersonal crap rather easily the next time it's to their advantage