Progressive Push-Back

I started this blogpost soon after the Merkin election, but then got too busy for a long, linkful post.

While I was mightily depressed over the results, I was looking for silver linings. And I found a few.

Traditionally (somewhat) more progressive places like Illinois, New York, and California stayed Democratic.

In the Illinois governor's race, the Democrat beat the Teabagger after trailing badly for weeks in the polls. On election morning, did the good/sane people of Illinois wake up and say 'Holy crap! What were we thinking?'

In Colorado, where, despite its nutbars' obsession with the Humpty-Dumpty Initiative, the rest of the people are really quite sane. Not only did they thumpingly reject yet another attempt to give 'personhood' to fertilzed eggs, they crushed the ambition of another Teabagger, much credit going to the women.

Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, says Ken Buck lost his Senate races because independent women voters flocked to Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) on Election Day.

“Ads attacking Buck on abortion and rape and all those issues were targeted to unaffiliated women and it worked, Buck became unacceptable and they voted for Bennet,” Wadhams said in an interview.

(This is the jerk who, as district attorney, referred to a woman's rape as 'buyer's remorse'.)

New York stayed Democratic too.

And in California, after one of the most vitriolic campaigns against an incumbent I've ever seen, the Dem won.

Yet in spite of her perennially weak approval ratings, a political climate that favored Republicans and what she called the "toughest and roughest campaign" of her lifetime, Boxer pulled out yet another victory, trouncing former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina 52% to 42.6%, with some ballots still to be counted.

Carly Fucking Fiorina is anti-choice, natch.

In the governor's race, millionaire businesswoman Meg Whitman went down to defeat at the hands of Jerry 'Moonbeam' Brown, after reportedly spending $175 million of her own dough. This time, credit the Latinos after Whitman got 'tough on illegals'.

So, where the Dems had the wit to actively campaign against the nuttier notions of the Douchebaggers, the sane people woke up.

And I think -- and this guy too thinks -- that the extreme anti-abortion position acted as the clarion call.

While almost nothing went right for Democratic candidates this fall, one issue turned out to be a winner in some of the closest Senate races in the nation: abortion.

By branding Republican challengers as outside the cultural mainstream on the issue, Democrats managed to hold on to at least a slice of the political center by courting and winning over moderate women in a handful of key states.

The strategy ran counter to the one that enabled the party to broaden the political map in 2006 and 2008, when Democrats thrived by running candidates whose positions on abortion were closely attuned to the socially conservative areas where they sought office.

This year, however, Democrats adopted almost the opposite approach late in the 2010 campaign. As many of the anti-abortion Democrats elected over the last four years were going down in defeat, the party made abortion a central concern in a handful of battleground Senate races — and they ended up in the Democratic column as a result.

I think the boyos in the 'war rooms' underestimate the (sometimes) slumbering giant of women's rights as an issue.

Over Motherhood Steve's totally hypocritical Maternal Health Initiative, I was encouraging the fucking Liberals to use abortion rights as a wedge issue.

But, of course, being fucking Liberals, they fucked it up.

Maybe this US election will show our progressives how to do it right.

Call the shitheads out. Show them to be the extremists they are. Fight back!