This is sort of a follow up to yesterday’s post as well as a cartoon I did last month, but Atrios has been making some great points lately about another key reason Democrats are totally screwed in November.
The irony of Gibbs’ moronic “professional left” comment the other week is that there actually is a “professional left” and they’re really important in helping Democrats get elected. The problem is, when there are less of them being professional, they have less time to be left.
I’ll try to say that in a less cutesy way now, and using real-life experience: I worked for two separate left-leaning organizations for over four years. I left DC in 2008 before Obama was elected, and after the election, even in the terrible economy, it appears to have been a good move, job-wise. Why? Because once Obama won the election, people stopped caring about supporting left-leaning organizations. Donations dropped. Campaigns dwindled. People assumed they had done their job and were ready to harvest the fruits of their labors. That… yeah, that didn’t turn out exactly as they hoped. This is where the “sensible” people start explaining how everything these hundreds of thousands of people think is merely an illusion and a conspiracy launched by angry bloggers because that is both helpful and will change everything. But I digress.
Now, combine this with the fact that jobs are in the toilet right now (the major point Atrios keeps making) and you have a perfect storm of why this isn’t 2008 anymore. The people who would normally be out there pushing hard for Democrats to win are 1. unmotivated simply to work hard for a campaign and 2. far more interested in getting a damn job. The right used to joke all the time that anti-war activists and Obama supporters were just “lazy kids with trust funds” and “stupid college students on their parents’ money” and well, guess what, that’s a lot of the base and now they’re not out there volunteering and campaigning because what they really need is rent money.
There is no type of email nor any measurable level of yelling that can be made to the so-called “professional left” to convince them to clap harder. I’m at the point where I truly think the Obama team honestly had no idea the economy was going to collapse like this, and they had absolutely no plan (or motivation) to deal with the Tea Party and the total Republican opposition in the Senate. Their strategy was, quite literally, to hope that the 90-year-old and the dude with terminal brain cancer didn’t die for two years.
And that is not just disappointing to the “professional left” but outright insulting, because I can see how many of them feel like they tried harder two years ago then the effing president is doing right now.