UPDATE BELOW
I have been very critical of Barack Obama’s performance as President thus far. I think his less than impressive record on visible issues has much to do with the failure of Democrats to hold onto their 60th Senate seat. In my view, Drew Westen has done an extraordinarily good analysis on this issue.
But Carl Pope of the Sierra Club argues that Obama has also done very good things for us and the environment, which has been largely ignored by our over paid media ‘personalities.’ It’s important to keep a balance here, for no existing Republican would have done even a little bit as well.
UPDATE
A new and very valuable poll has come out, one that asked WHY Massachusetts voters voted as they did, or did not vote at all. The answers are important.
On balance, voters in Massachusetts who shifted from voting Democratic n 2008 to not voting or voting Republican did so because they believed the Democratic Party was NOT pushing for the changes it had promised.
In short, I and others who have been warning the Party that they were courting disaster by being “bipartisan” and stiffing the promises they had made in order to chummy up with Wall Street and the insurance industries were completely on target, and the “realists” who argued otherwise have been shown to be both wrong and incompetent.
That such as Coakley could be nominated is evidence that the leadership no longer cared about the rank and file, and her defeat is probably the best thing to happen to the Democratic Party since the 2008 election – if their leaders retain the intelligence and judgment to learn from it and keep their word to their voters.
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