In their defeat at last night`s sweep of the Home by the Tea Party-fueled G.O.P. progressives are assessing just how this happened.
"We should have been more bold," Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Lynn Woolsey told Pacifica Radio`s Mitch Jeserich last night. Woolsey suggested that if the Democrats had started out of the gate with a jobs bill in 2009, Democratic fortunes might not have fallen to their current lows.
Longtime labor activist Bill Fletcher, Jr. speaking on Free Speech TV, complained that leadership of the liberal coalition that elected President Barack Obama were sent activists "back to the barracks" once the election was won.
Van Jones, who was purged from the White House through a Fox News-orchestrated smear campaign, told a assembly of activists in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, that the day after Obama`s election, "you gave away your office" by receding to the sidelines or turn their aid to individual issues while neglecting the over-arching narrative.
While all of these assessments are true, they don`t say the whole story. The "enthusiasm gap" touted by pundits about this year`s elections is actually more of an infrastructure gap. As Thom Hartmann noted last night on The Big Show and on Free Speech TV, the Sovereign Court`s decision in in Citizens United - the type that colonized the burning question of whether money equals speech - allowed for such a torrent of corporate dollars into the campaign process that 2010 saw the first legal theft of an election since the transit of the 1906 Tillman Act, which limited the use of corporate money in elections.
But that still doesn`t get to the spirit of the matter, which is infrastructure. Even if the remaining had admission to the form of money that fuels the right, it would not be collected to use it as effectively. Just as the liberal coalition tends to burst apart into issue silos once Democrats are in power, its infrastructure also lacks the links and coordination that come on the right. So the head is, what do we contrive to do some that?
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