by @zizii2
Barack Obama has decided to put himself on the Democratic “ballot” in 2016. You heard that right. He’s running again. Why not? The entire Republican Party is running against him anyway, so why not get himself on the “ballot”? Give ‘em and their corporate stenographers something to REALLY talk about. POTUS is going to be everywhere front and center, on the trail, in the media, in your backyard cookout.
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He’s not going to campaign FOR the Democratic party’s candidates, he’s going to set and drive the Democratic Party agenda, which Dem pols may choose to join, not the other way around. Why? Because the Democratic Party needs to be shaken from its death throes.
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A party that had everything going for it with the advent of Barack Obama, the organizing energy of his coalition, resources, cutting edge technology, simply gave up on itself after victory in 2008. It got a dead cat bounce during the 2012 re-election, then promptly went right back into willful stupor.
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With a party leadership so cross-eyed, doddering around on two left feet, unwilling to embrace its own legislative successes, running away from Barack Obama, and even more zombified after the 2014 electoral losses, it is a miracle that there is barely any sign of life left to whip up for the 2016 cycle. However, strolling from cycle to cycle hitching ourselves to time-limited election campaigns will not do much to resuscitate the dried out soul of the party. We’ve needed a MOVEMENT larger than the Democratic Party itself.
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A MOVEMENT comprising CITIZENS who are passionate about CAUSES like the literal survival of the 99% and the CORE VALUES of fairness of this country; who match the zeal of the billionaire vampires sucking our blood, who doggedly mobilize, cajole, trek the “streets” real or virtual, persuade persuade persuade fellow citizens to join, and never suck on purity binkies or descend into hissy fits. In short, a movement made up of CITIZENS who really have no more fcks to give.
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That’s what my tea leaves say Barack Obama is cooking with 2016 elections penciled in as item one. And his coalition best gird up to run with him. The coalition is slightly expanded now. He’s invited “responsible gun owners” and Americans simply fed up with the incessant gun violence that has brought grief to so many families of diverse political stripes, to join us the usual motley crew who’ve hung with him since forever. Together he’ll lead the charge to put politicians in Washington who are ANSWERABLE to US the PEOPLE, while firmly telling especially fork-tongued Democrats: “Uh uh, it’s either us or the NRA. No compromise.”
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Just as he sparked off his 2012 re-election bid with the famous Income Inequality speech in Osawatomie, Kansas in December 2011 much to the utter confusion of the beltway and media lackeys, plus the usual centrist bedwetters gnashing teeth about Barack Obama veering too far left, so too his mission on gun safety is meant to drive the 2016 agenda. It is a natural fit with the demographic make up of his expanding coalition. The energy is there. Prez Obama lit the torch this week.
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Barack Obama knows a thing or two about building movements from the ground up. Sure, it successfully propelled him to electoral victory; a detour into that little something called saving us from a recession, saving an auto industry, drawing us out of two wars, building the foundation for alternative energy, preventing us from needlessly dying from a macabre healthcare system, repairing our image abroad, righting historical wrongs against Native American populations, redressing disparities in a broken criminal justice system, presiding over record job growth, and many more “detours”.
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Yet MOVEMENT has always remained at the heart of POTUS’ core belief in citizenship. It’s why OFA stayed alive while he ran that obstacle course called Washington DC, and now he’s revving up to give his movement a new mandate. Are y’all ready? All aboard
Much handwringing over the Democratic party’s electoral fortunes has taken place this past week. Teabaggers are ecstatic. The most loathesome wingnuts are going to make our lives even more miserable than we have already endured. Some young people justify young voter apathy by saying Democrats did not give them what they wanted, as shown below in the Carl Gibson piece titled:
And Democratic Party leaders will probably learn the wrong lessons and move further repub-lite.
I think differently about what happened. I believe what we are seeing is the brick wall that Coalition Politics slams into when the regular institutions of Democracy have been irreparably subverted and perverted by oligarchs and their political minions who have convinced many Americans that nihilism is their birthright. What do I mean?
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Normally, in a democracy, aspiring politicians and party platforms woo voters with promises of what they will DO for said voters, and the campaigns go full steam ahead in competition. And whoever wins tries to maintain voter approval and possible reelection based on their ability to account to the voter. Otherwise how do you win power again, right?
Wrong. Voters? What voters? GOP-Oligarchs’ answer to electoral imperatives and demographic change, is to shrink the electorate till they could “drown it in a bathtub”!
The results of Tuesday’s “earth shattering” election are quite revelatory, but not for the reasons bruited about by your average MSNBC/Fox/CNN vacuous pundit.
Although President Obama won’t use the word—and bless him for it—it was a “shellacking” which the voters meted out to the Democratic Party. But let’s examine this “mandate” a bit further.
The turnout for the midterm election stands at 36%, a low not seen since the 1940s. That’s 36% of registered voters. Voter registration in its turn doesn’t encompass all eligible voters. This Al Jazeera article has this telling paragraph:
Election turnout is often cited as an indicator of the strength of the mandate of winning candidates, but it can be a misleading statistic: Turnout is usually measured as a proportion of registered voters rather than of those eligible to vote — and census numbers show that more than 70 million U.S. citizens of voting age are not registered voters.
Get that? 70 million Americans who are eligible to vote aren’t even registered. What does this mean? That the number of registered voters is at best a bare majority of eligible voters. And then that the voters who turned out were a minority of that number. And then that the GOP “landslide” depended on a further minority of registered voters, which in turn doesn’t account for all eligible voters.
This opens up a veritable cornucopia of delicious dysfunction.
Obama White House.gov WH Tumblr The People’s View Steve Benen
The Obama Diary 
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