Glenn Greenwald goes Beyond “Cable News Sloganeering”
November 8th, 2010 § 1 Comment
On Friday Salon’s Glenn Greenwald provided more insightful analysis on the US midterm elections during a debate with self-proclaimed “Socialist” Lawrence O’Donnell, a political analyst and show host for MSNBC. O’Donnell was more than a little upset about Greenwald’s criticism of him for blaming the Left and declaring Liberalism dead for the Democrat party’s current political shortcomings. According to Greenwald, O’Donnell’s conclusion ignores one significant point: “Half of the Blue Dog incumbents were defeated, and by themselves accounted for close to half of the Democratic losses.” Greenwald goes on to say:
Despite viewing last night’s Blue Dog losses with happiness, I wouldn’t point to this outcome as vindication for my argument, as there are many complex factors that account for last night’s crushing of Congressional Democrats: widespread economic suffering, anxiety over America’s obvious decline, the perception that Obama has done little to undermine destructive status quo forces and much to bolster them, etc.
The Blue Dog Coalition is of course comprised of mainly conservative Democrats who pushed for bipartisanship and compromise with the GOP, a party that has done close to nothing of the same. The membership includes multimillionaire Jane Harman who was directly involved in an Israel espionage scandal with an AIPAC agent. In Greenwald’s words:
Some of us have been arguing for quite some time that the Rahm-engineered dependence on Blue Dog power is one of the many factors that has made the Democratic Party so weak, blurry, indistinguishable from the GOP, and therefore so politically inept, and would thus be stronger and better without them — here’s a 2008 Salon article I wrote making that case.
Greenwald has also been saying for a long time that if the Obama Administration had spent less time “reaching across the table” to a party that has always been facing the other way and more time on pushing bills through while they still had support in congress, maybe the Democrats wouldn’t be being slaughtered right now. Unlike O’Donnell who rants throughout the show that he is a leftist (even if that were true, so what?), Greenwald does not water down his conclusions into simplistic soundbites that are easy to digest as well as misleading. Greenwald concedes that the Democrats are losing, but not because people no longer support “progressive” ideals. Rather, today’s average American is most concerned with how to secure a stable income to support their family and since the Democrats failed to ease their woes, they are now turning to the only other alternative there is.
Read Greenwald’s afterthoughts about the show here. As far as I can tell, O’Donnell hasn’t provided any follow up since Friday.
I found this video of Cenk Uygur (fmr. Democrat bulldog) & Greenwald even more cheering.
(Advocating a fightback if Obama tries to cut social security.)