Through The Wringer

This Sunday, senior White House adviser David Plouffe had a bit of a message for the Pundits Of Perpetual Disappointment and the ex-Clintonite Crew that has never seen fit to support Barack Obama:  Shut it.

But the Obama team isn’t fazed. On “Fox News Sunday,” Plouffe argued that Carville and his chorus of Democrats are wrong.

“Those other Democrats are not paying attention to what the president is saying,” Plouffe told host Chris Wallace. “Which is every day, not just in what he says but what he does, he understands our economy is not as strong as it needs to be, that this didn’t happen overnight, it’s going to take us a long time to recover, there’s a lot of people out there hurting. So we are making progress and we need to make a lot more.”

Plouffe’s retort did exactly what the critics warn the campaign not to do: focus on the president’s economic record for his first term, rather than what he would do in a second term.

On “Meet The Press,” Plouffe denied that Democrats were panicking after a few rough weeks and poor economic news. But he called on Democrats to quit the “hand wringing” and focus on winning the election. What Democrats and any other supporters of the president need to do, Plouffe said, “is work like heck to win this election. That’s where we need our energy focused. Not on kind of some of the hand wringing that sometimes occurs in our party.”

Gosh, pretty much everyone here has been making the various cases on that strategy for months now, relentlessly pointing out the differences between the President at Mittens, at nearly every aspect of policy:  women’s rights, civil rights, economic inequality, foreign policy, marriage equality, job creation, the preservation of the safety net, infrastructure repair, food and drug safety, collective bargaining rights, and much, much more.

And at every turn we’ve said “knock off the self-flagellation and get with it.”  Look, effective dissent is not binary by any means.  VOTING FOR PRESIDENT EFFECTIVELY IS.  Your President is either going to be Mitt Romney or Barack Obama.  You get to choose, and it’s clear that for some Democrats, this is a hard choice.  Those of us that keep laying down the evidence here of what Mitt ROmney would do like to note that in every instance of policy that progressives care about, Mitt Romney will make things worse.

He will not magically stand up to the Teabillies.  He will not develop spinal fortitude.  He will not make things better.  Like Bush before him, he will be a nothing more than a puppet of all the awful influences in the country:  obscenly rich mega-billionaires and massive corporate giants who will continue to strip mine the middle class into non-existence.  Unions are all but gone.  The middle class is trapped with no upward mobility.  We’re in the new gilded age, with anything close to centrist policy, let alone progressive, relentlessly blocked by the GOP time and time again.

Barack Obama has done a hell of a lot.  He has not solved these massive structural problems.  For that, we’d have to give him a true progressive majority.  Instead he’s been forced to work within the structure itself, as rotten as it is.  We gave him that structure in 2010, electing 62 more Republican assholes to the House and seven more to the Senate, and then we have folks who wonder why things haven’t improved in the last 18 months, why jobs bills and legislation hasn’t passed, and why President Obama has been forced to turn to less-effective executive branch measures to give only temporary justice to the people, rather than through more permanent legislative means.

And when he did have decent majority power, it was limited by time and Republicans blocking Al Franken’s seat for nearly a year, and then Ted Kennedy’s death brought us Scott Brown.  Our brilliant plan in 2010?  Teach Barack Obama a lesson.  The lesson:  Democrats are afraid of the hard road.  Much easier to abdicate your responsibilities as a voter and not vote, right?  Then you can say “all this isn’t my fault, he wasn’t good enough to earn my vote.”  Then you can remain above the fray and wait for things to get so bad, we have no choice but to join you in your revolution, because you were right all along.

Meanwhile, the massive damage that the rest of us take from GOP policies and the fact you’re okay with the Teabillies controlling everything in the meantime?  That doesn’t matter in the face of your piousness. So sorry.  Plouffe understands, he’s playing to win.  We have to play to win too.  Those of us who say the only path to winning is through total defeat?

Shut it.