Does Limbaugh Want Cheese With That Whine?

How fortunate for Barack Obama that Rush Limbaugh, big radio personality and leader of the instinctual far right, has yet to retire to a sunny island with his bottles of pills. At a moment when Republicans on Capitol Hill feel they must pretend to negotiate with the popular new president over spending to revive the economy, he blurted out what they really feel.

Speaking on his daily broadcast and later on Fox News Channel about the president’s prospects, Mr. Limbaugh said forthrightly: “I hope he fails.”

With those words, he turned his ample silhouette into the rhetorical target of choice for Mr. Obama, who warned the Republican leadership that they “can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh” and expect to accomplish anything useful. Hoping to preserve the spirit of bipartisan goodwill that attended his inauguration, the president is offering politicians on the other side of the aisle a stark choice. They can work with him, or they can join the radio extremist who wants him to fail—and could not care less about the consequences for America.

As always, Mr. Limbaugh articulates his opposition to the stimulus plan in the ideological jargon favored by his party. Evidently he fears that if the United States spends more money on highways, railroads and modernizing our electrical grid, we will shortly come to resemble the old Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China or even Cuba. Improving schools and expanding health coverage is just more “socialism”—and why would any right-thinking Republican hope for that to succeed?

But while he flatters himself as a “thinker,” the sad fact is that Mr. Limbaugh often sounds as if he’s motivated more by resentment than philosophy. During an interview with his soul mate Sean Hannity on Fox, he revealed that in this time of national distress, he is obsessing over an old grudge.

“I disagree fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, ‘Well, I hope [Obama] succeeds. We’ve got to give him a chance.’ Why? They didn’t give Bush a chance in 2000. Before he was inaugurated, the search-and-destroy mission had begun.”

In reality, the Democrats displayed little appetite for obstructing George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote but got his way on tax cuts in the summer of 2001. The Democratic Congressional leaders and the entire country rallied to the side of the president after 9/11—and the Democrats were rewarded with savage assaults on their patriotism in the following year’s midterm election.

Even now, Mr. Limbaugh remains deaf to the bipartisan appeals of the Obama White House, which has tried, perhaps too hard, to change the tone in Washington. “I never hear Democrats talking about walking across the aisle,” he complained to Mr. Hannity. “I never see any of them praise each other or brag about the fact that they do it. They brag about the Republicans that they destroy.”

What all this inane ranting proves is how remote Rush and his imitators are from the urgent concerns of the American public, including not only Democrats and independents but a growing number of Republicans, too.

According to current polling data, the Limbaugh line is potentially perilous for any politician outside a firmly right-leaning district.

As thousands of jobs disappear every week, as the security and aspirations of millions of families evaporate, most Americans hope fervently that the Obama stimulus plan will succeed. They hear nothing from the Republicans except demands for new tax breaks that will chiefly benefit the same privileged people who have made out so well during the past few decades—and who now take taxpayer money and spend millions on private jets and fancy office furniture.

When President Obama considers how much of his stimulus spending to apportion to tax cuts in a vain attempt to appease the opposition, he ought to remember how Mr. Limbaugh described the hidden attitude of Republican leaders. “I know what our [G.O.P.] strategy is. They’re hoping he fails, so that they can go back and say, ‘We wanted him to succeed. We gave it everything we got. We worked with him, but …’”

So perhaps the best course is not to worry too much about winning Republican votes in the Senate or about what they’re saying on talk radio, but to simply do what will work best for the country—and let the Limbaughs whine on, as they always do.

by Joe Conason

Democrats Vie to Take On Chambliss

They’re Back! Democrats Work to Solidify Base in North Fulton

By Liz Flowers / Reporter:  Roswell Beacon

Last week, cars lined the street of a quiet, up-scale suburban neighborhood, their drivers arriving early for a Saturday morning event in North Fulton. The affair drew a houseful of motivated area residents ready to take on the establishment and reclaim a position in the leadership of the state. That’s right. Georgia’s Democrats are back from the grave and ready to party. And there are more of them than you might think living in North Fulton. One might even be your next door neighbor (gasp!).

Jane Vandiver Kidd was the star attraction at the recent North Fulton event, which drew Democrats from Roswell, Sandy Springs, Milton and Johns Creek. The diminutive Kidd took the reigns of the Georgia Democratic Party in January promising a back-to-basics strategy, including a bottom-up grassroots organizational approach to politics. “We’re here, we’re back, we never really left,” Kidd said to loud applause.

Kidd is no political novice. A native of Lavonia, Ga., she is a cum laude graduate of the University of Georgia, a former city councilwoman, a former State House representative, manager of a successful congressional campaign, and has served on numerous commissions, boards and federal agencies. She is also the daughter of the late former Georgia Governor S. Ernest Vandiver and grandniece of the late U.S. Senator Richard B. Russell. Kidd grew up with a deep-rooted sense of commitment to community and public service. She is gracious and approachable, but Georgia politics runs deeply in her veins.

Losing the State Senate, the State House and then the Governor’s mansion after 130 years of control might have been the wake-up call Democrats needed to motivate the faithful and attract newcomers to the cause. There is always a political complacency that accompanies existing power. Democrats had run the state since Reconstruction. There’s something very motivational about being the underdog.

For most of its tenure, the Democratic Party of Georgia was a tool of the governor’s office – not an indictment, but simply a well-known fact in political circles. That’s just the way it was. DPG’s reputation for supporting local candidates wasn’t good and, therefore, provided little reason for grassroots support of the state party. Local Democratic candidates relied on their own fundraising strength or that of their local party – if there was one.

But there are other mitigating factors boosting Democratic causes these days, too. Georgia Dems, like their compatriots across the county, are getting a jumpstart in support from what many perceive as the missteps by the current occupant of the White House.  Widespread anti-war sentiment and frustration on what the future holds in Iraq is oozing from the cracks, regardless of political affiliation. Immigration policy has pitted Republican against Republican. And without a single presidential candidate to rally around, in a crowded primary, the GOP isn’t focused with its typical laser-like mantras. Senators Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss and Representative Tom Price, with normally tightly synced media messages, started unraveling under the pressures of immigration reform.

At the state level, there’s been chronic Republican infighting, while some leaders jockey for more power and set up for their own 2010 gubernatorial bids.  And the Fulton County Republican Party chairman’s seat is being challenged for internal voting irregularities.

Democrats, not historically known for having a fabulous game plan, are learning to take advantage of the opportunities. “Republicans have been very self-destructive,” Kidd said.

For now, Democrats have let Republicans fight it out, but Kidd said Democrats can’t and won’t sit on the sidelines forever. “We’re still new at being in the minority, but we have to emerge with solutions. We can’t just sit back and wait. We have to present new and fresh ideas. We need to develop spokespeople who are right for certain issues and [the party] has to work with elected officials,” Kidd said.

Kidd said one of the first things Democrats had to come to grips with is that Georgia was indeed a two-party state. “We were one of the last states to ‘go red,’ and we will be one of the last states to return [to blue]. I see us in the middle of that curve,” she said, talking about the blue/Democrat-red/Republican state-by-state political mapping. “But were are on the back side of that slope and that gives us real momentum for 2008 and 2010.”

Kidd said the party has to “mean something” in order to be relevant and connect with the average voter. The strong emphasis on television media during recent political campaigns is not the essence of the Democratic Party, she said. “We need to return to our roots, and build strong coalitions. We need to focus on the overlapping concerns of all our party members – the moderates, the conservatives and the liberals. We need to command economic efficiencies and prioritize our spending. We turned our back on business partnerships and we didn’t express ourselves very well [in that arena]. Our platform was not clear and we let the Republicans co-opt the language. We have to focus on access to education, access to health care and jobs.”

Kidd has a simple plan – win elections. She hopes to do that through candidate recruitment and training and restoring the state party as a meaningful resource to Democratic hopefuls. She also wants to increase the voice of local organizations by providing a greater role for out-of-state party members, moving away from the “Atlanta knows best” concept. And she has restructured the party’s leadership to include hands-on vice chairmen with specific outreach assignments. One of the vice chairs, Virgilio Perez Pasco, lives in neighboring south Forsyth’s Polo Fields.

Kidd brought Matt Weyandt, DPG’s brand new executive director, with her to North Fulton. Weyandt has been on the job for only a week, but he is working with Kidd to develop a statewide strategy. Also joining Kidd at the event were lieutenants from the Young Democrats. The YD’s are on a mission to revive Democratic outreach in schools. They recently registered 5,000 people to vote, with a goal to motivate 30,000 more people to go to the polls by 2010. And with a $250,000 challenge grant from the national Democratic Party, they may have a running start.

Kidd said she remembered the days when candidate stumping attracted crowds of 10,000 people. It was a family event, she said. Recognizing that loading the family into the Chevrolet may not be practical in this era, she said taking politics back to the people through door-to-door campaigning, blogs, e-mail and podcasts are viable campaign strategies.

But to make Georgia Democratic candidates viable again, says Kidd, the challenge for Democrats is to be competitive in every single race. “We are not doing our best work as a political organization unless we give every voter that choice,” Kidd said.

“2008 represents a turning point for Georgia Democrats. We can stop the Republican tide and begin winning races again. We can re-organize our party and turn it into the party that we want and deserve,” she said. “The first thing we have to do is throw out the tired concept of ‘winnable’ races. Most of the races that we write off are ‘unwinnable’ only because there hasn’t been a viable Democratic challenger in years. That’s our challenge.”

And it will be a challenge. North Fulton has a voting split of 60/40, favoring Republicans. But there are precinct pockets that strongly vote for Democrats, several of which carried John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. “It’s a tough, tough challenge, but even if we don’t win, we want to show [Republicans] we’re there,’ Kidd said.

The first test of the DPG’s new strategies comes this week. As the Beacon goes to press, a Tuesday special election is taking place in Georgia’s 10th Congressional District to fill the vacancy created by the death of Charlie Norwood. “It’s perceived to be the reddest of the red [areas],” said Kidd. But she said with more than 20,000 get-out-the-vote phone calls and three back-to-back weekend door-to-door canvasses, the party hasn’t left any stone unturned. “We’re not willing to write anything off.”  They’re praying for low voter turnout (which, in a crowded field, helps the Democrats) and fruitful returns.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Democrats in Georgia. Whether or not Kidd’s plan to turn around the lackluster DPG will work remains to be seen.

Paul Troop, a North Fultonite at the DPG event, said his biggest party concern is to avoid another bloodletting primary election, such as the one that took place in 2006 between Democratic gubernatorial candidates Mark Taylor and Cathy Cox. “We need strong top-of-the-ticket candidates that will appeal to Georgians,” Troop said. He added, “We must unite now.”

“Iraq is the biggest thing I hear about when I talk to friends at work about politics,” said Naomi Donaldson, a new member of the North Fulton Democrats. Donaldson said she wanted to become more involved in her community and made a decision late last year to get involved with the Democrats “Essentially, we all want the same things,” reflected Donaldson. “We have to be willing to listen to each other.”

“We want to reach out and bring back all those who feel like they didn’t have a [political] home,” said Steve Leeds, secretary for the DPG. “We want to bring everybody back.”

The Age Of Obama And The Rebirth Of US Liberalism

When in college, I flirted a bit with conservatism. I was mostly doing it to shock my father, and I quickly discovered that my heart really wasn’t in it. But it was a useful experience, because it spurred dear dad to initiate some conversations with me. In essence, what he impressed upon me was the need to see the world through eyes other than my own. Try to examine events from the perspectives of poor people or striking workers or what have you. If you emerge from this process a conservative, he suggested, that’s life. But at least understand that politics is a competition of interests, and that your self-interest as a relatively privileged young man may sometimes be outweighed by other interests.

Later, I understood that my father’s lesson was in fact a profound one of political philosophy, considered by thinkers from Rousseau to Mill to the American founding fathers, among others. At what point did one’s conception of a good society require a person to sublimate his own interests in support of a larger common interest? I was mulling all these matters during the age of Ronald Reagan’s ascendance, when they were decidedly unpopular. And I can see why. By 1980, many middle-class Americans had come to feel that liberal governance was demanding far too much sacrifice of them.

The part of the social compact that had broken down was this. Since the 1930s, Americans had been asked to pay higher taxes, submit to greater regulation and so on. But for three or four decades most felt it was worth the trade-off. These middle-class people (mostly white) were getting something out of it: an enviable standard of living, and a fundamentally stable society. By the 1970s, they were getting stagnant wages, high crime and myriad other maladies. At the same time, liberalism kept up the fight for rights for various aggrieved groups: a noble battle, but, shorn of its connection to any larger common interest, an uphill one.

It was easy for Reagan, Newt Gingrich and, eventually, the cretins on Fox News to caricature this. And this is the short version of the long story of US liberalism’s 40-year demise: from a creed that many Americans embraced because they saw that it served both their interests and a larger common good, to an ideology that many Americans rejected because it seemed to stand only for “regular” people paying ever higher taxes so that fornicators could have more rights and artists could insult America with taxpayer-funded grants.

Now we are in the age of Barack Obama. Now it’s conservatism that has broken down and contracted into a narrow ideology. And Obama’s project is nothing less than to revive this pre-1970s conception of liberalism as an ongoing civic project to which all contribute and from which all benefit. It was there in his inaugural speech when he spoke of “the price and the promise of citizenship”, and it’s present in his early proposals. The stimulus package that he began negotiating with congressional leaders last week is an audacious experiment along these lines. Let’s invest these billions together, he is saying, and in time the investments will bear fruit and benefit everyone.

The gamble is clear. The stimulus has to work. Whatever healthcare proposal he advances will have to be broadly seen as an improvement over what we have now. The energy proposals will entail new costs for businesses. There’s no avoiding that, and there’s no avoiding that some of those costs will be passed on to ratepayers. But if they produce good jobs, green jobs, a more modern policy in which most Americans see that slightly higher rates are worth it in terms of producing both a stronger economy and a healthier planet, they’ll be broadly endorsed.

The same is true in terms of foreign policy. For 28 years, the American right has said: America first. The appeal to average citizens was clear, especially when set against liberal arguments of the 60s and 70s that America should restrain its hegemonic urges. But in the last eight years people have seen that “America first” doesn’t always leave America in first place. Obama’s calls for a new multilateralism and a new relationship to the Muslim world will take a long time to show themselves and will be highly contentious here. But if they make us stronger and the world safer, most Americans will come to see the wisdom of sacrificing some power upfront.

The remarkable thing is that according to the polls, large majorities understand all this. We’re not a nation of amateur political philosophers debating Locke down at the bowling alley. What we are is a practical people, and after the wreckage left by Bush, the above seems practical. And if it works, Obama will make us a liberal country again, in which a mostly forgotten tradition of shared sacrifice for the common good will be reasserted. Dad would have been 84 if he’d lived to see Obama take the oath of office last week. He’d have been moved to tears at the sight – and as I learned from him all those years ago, he’d have understood precisely what the new president was up to.

Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America

President Obama: “Don’t Listen To Rush Limbaugh!”

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts.

“There are big things that unify Republicans and Democrats,” the official said. “We shouldn’t let partisan politics derail what are very important things that need to get done.”

February Meeting Recap: David Poythress, Candidate For Governor

General David Poythress, Democratic candidate for Governor, joins the North Fulton Democrats on February 10th at 7:15 PM.  at Startime Entertainment..

Poythress is a graduate of Emory at Oxford, and earned his degree and his commission as an Air Force officer at “big Emory” in Atlanta. David served four years on active duty in the U.S. Air Force as a judge advocate officer (JAG.) He volunteered for duty in Viet Nam, and served one year as defense counsel and Chief of Military Justice at DaNang Air Base, in the Republic of Viet Nam.

David’s civilian career has included public service, military service, and private law practice.

Upon returning to civilian life, David held several positions in Georgia state government, including Assistant Attorney General, Deputy State Revenue Commissioner, and Secretary of State. During the 80’s, David practiced law in Atlanta, with concentrations in taxation and public finance. In 1992 he was elected statewide to the office of State Labor Commissioner, and he was re-elected in 1994.

David resigned as State Labor Commissioner in 1998 and ran for Governor of Georgia.

After leaving active duty, David remained in the Air Force Reserve, and attained the rank of Brigadier General. In 1999, then Governor Barnes appointed David Adjutant General – the commander of the Georgia Army and Air National Guard – in the rank of Major General. He was reappointed by Governor Perdue, who also promoted him to the rank of Lieutenant General – the first Adjutant General in Georgia history to wear three stars!

Join the North Fulton Democrats for our February meeting, Feb. 10th and 7:15 PM and meet General Poythress, possibly the next Governor of Georgia!

What: The North Fulton Democrats February Meeting and Elections
When: Tuesday, Feb. 10, 7:15 PM
Where: Startime Comedy Club. Click here for directions.

State Senator Vincent Fort and The Future of Grady Hospital

Please welcome Georgia State Senator Vincent Fort to the next North Fulton Democrats Meeting Tuesday, January 13, 7:15 PM. Senator Fort has a long running commitment to working families and was the first author of Georgia’s predatory lending law. He’s also been at the forefront on legistlation concerning hate crimes, discrimination against citizens with disabilities, and collective bargaining for law enforcement officers. Most recently, he has been an activist for Grady Hospital, serving as co-chair of the Grady Coalition, protesting the move to privatize the hospital which could leave many low income people without healthcare options. Read more