…remember where things were a year ago. The Democrats had 59 seats in the Senate, which meant a filibuster-based shutdown of everything. If Martha Chokely does what’s expected of her, then the Democrats will find themselves with…59 seats. Plus some actual accomplishments made in the face of complete opposition, which is kind of impressive given how everything went.
This is the part where I point out that I called it. To be precise, I called it on September 7, 2008, at precisely 8:17 PM Pacific Daylight Time. It’s not that I really am just that good – well, I am, or at least I used to be – but it should have been obvious to anybody who paid attention for the last twenty years how this stuff would go. Lockstep obstruction from the Republicans, sanctimonious dithering from conservative Democrats, a White House unwilling to grab people by the balls and twist, and a press too fucking stupid to handle any issue more complex than who’s going to be on NBC at 11:35.
And right now, nothing pisses me off more than the wailing weeping hysterical liberals who have decided that Obama is just like Bush, that the whole health care package should be trashed, and that scrapping everything and starting over now will force everything to the left. The correct response is: fuck you, hippie – this is how it works. You fight like hell to get what you can, and you be grateful that the stars aligned long enough to break the worst Senate minority obstruction in the history of the body, and you take your half a loaf and come back tomorrow and start fighting again. And if you’re too pious and good and principled to accept that, well, I think the term of art is know your role and shut your hole.
Too many people think that there’s an end point, that at some point the victory is won and the sky fills with rainbows and the lion lies down with the lamb and the music swells and the credits roll and you’re finished. Maybe that happens when you die, but it doesn’t happen in the real world of politics. It’s a race uphill, in a driving storm, through an ocean of tar, with no finish line.
I can’t say it enough: politics is the art of the POSSIBLE. If you want dreams, go major in theatre.