Ivey had raised about $150,000 while Edwards had taken in about $230,000, according to the latest available numbers reported by the Baltimore Sun. Part of the fundraising fight centered on the contentious issue of American policy toward Israel.

Edwards has long been associated with J Street, and she has, for example, been much more critical of Jewish settlements in the West Bank than most members of Congress. In 2010, she raised money from a group, New Policy PAC, that is open to the idea of a “democratic secular state” in historic Palestine – in other words, a one-state solution. Edwards describes herself a strong supporter of a two-state solution to the conflict.

In the past few months, J Street raised more than $40,000 for Edwards, the group tells me. Federal election filings show that virtually all of the money J Street raised for Edwards came from outside of her district, from places like New York and California.

American activists who are more aligned with the hardline positions of the American Israel Public Affairs Council than with J Street have long opposed Edwards and sought to unseat her. Ivey first explored a primary challenge to Edwards in 2009 with the backing of right-wing activists on the issue, who were angered by Edwards’ “present” vote on a resolution supporting Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

This time around, Ivey was “rumored to have the backing of several wealthy members of the local Jewish community who live outside of Edwards’ district,” Washington Jewish Week reported in November.

A December invitation to an Ivey fundraiser, which I’ve posted in full below, focused almost exclusively on U.S. policy toward Israel.

“Glenn [Ivey] has made it clear that he is unwavering in his support for the State of Israel while his opponent’s voting record, public positions and comments on Israel related issues have been of major concern to the Jewish community,” writes Barbara Goldberg Goldman of Rockville in the invitation, adding in a follow-up:

“His opponent, Donna Edwards, has demonstrated by her absolute actions on multiple occasions that her ideas about Israel’s safety, security and right to defend herself, is vastly different from how we believe as a people and as a community. We now have an opportunity to make an important change and difference. It doesn’t matter whether or not you reside in Glenn’s district. Let’s do it!”

Checks for Ivey were to be sent to Michael Gelman, the chairman emeritus of the hardline Israel Project and chair of the Executive Committee of the Board of The Jewish Federations of North America.

The invitation also contained a lengthy and detailed Ivey position paper on Israel and Iran, in which Ivey pledges to support increased U.S. military aid for Israel, despite the deficit-cutting fever In Washington, and tightened sanctions on Iran.

In the end, though, the effort to raise money for Ivey apparently fell short. JStreetPAC President Jeremy Ben-Ami argues that Ivey’s decision not to pursue a challenge against Edwards says something significant about the current moment.

“For too long, the conventional political wisdom has been that the most hawkish within the Jewish community had the fundraising ability to defeat candidates whose views on what it means to be pro-Israel did not comport with their own,” he says. “The assumption was that because these voices were the loudest that they spoke for the majority. Donna Edward’s ability to raise nearly $50,000 from pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans tells a very different story.”

It’s also possible that AIPAC-oriented donors decided Ivey was a bad investment. An internal Edwards poll from November showed her with a wide lead over Ivey. In any case, Edwards is now expected to win easy reelection in the solidly Democratic district. And given the failure of hardline activists to unseat her for two cycles in a row, it seems unlikely that Edwards will retreat from her progressive position on the Mideast.

Here’s that full invitation, with some personal contact information deleted:

From: barbara goldberg goldman
Date: December 20, 2011 12:49:30 PM EST
To:
Subject: POSITION ON ISRAEL: GLENN IVEY

Friends,

We thought you might be interested in reading Glenn’s recent position paper outlining his stance on Israel. As we said in our earlier email/invitation to you, we strongly believe that Glenn will make a wonderful Member of Congress not just for the residents in his Maryland congressional district, but also for the entire Jewish community. We need to send him to the Hill.

We do hope you will agree with  and join us along with Michael Gelman, David Butler, Danny Abramowitz, Louis Mayberg, Paul Berger, Benham Dayanim, Ron Glancz Eric Kassoff, Danny and Jocelyn Krifcher, Andy Stern and John Verstandig, and many others in our efforts to get Glenn elected to Congress. His opponent, Donna Edwards, has demonstrated by her absolute actions on multiple occasions that her ideas about Israel’s safety, security and right to defend herself, is vastly different from how we believe as a people and as a community. We now have an opportunity to make an important change and difference. It doesn’t matter whether or not you reside in Glenn’s district. Let’s do it!

So, please attend our event on January 3, 2012. But, if you are unable to be with us in person, we ask that you make a donation. Below Glenn’s position paper, please find the original email. And attached please find the January 3rd invitation. In the invitation you will find the details.  And, feel free to forward the information to anyone who you believe would like to join us!

Checks, by the way should be sent to: Michael Gelman,  Chevy Chase, Md Attn: Ivey For Congress Event.   Again, we would like to receive the funds in time to meet theDecember 31st filing deadline. Think of it as a wonderful Chanukah gift to our entire community!

Thanks so much. We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you on January 3, 2012!

Have a healthy, happy, safe and fun Chanukah and New Year!

Cheers,

Barbara GG and Mike Goldman

GLENN’S POSITION ON ISRAEL

In Congress, I will continue to strongly support the vital and vibrant relationship between the United States and Israel.  Because Israel is America’s strongest and most reliable ally in the turbulent Middle East, it remains the centerpiece of America’s foreign policy in that region.

When I visited Israel in 2005, I quickly realized the challenges of living with the constant threat of terrorist attacks.   At the Hadassah Hospital, I saw first hand shrapnel from a bomb a former patient used to blow up the doctors and nurses who had treated him just days before.  In Jerusalem, I saw restaurants with armed guards and security gates, heavily armed soldiers, and checkpoints at nearly every turn.

At the same time, I saw a nation that had decided to risk its very own security by turning over the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority-even though that meant the forcible removal of more than 9,000 Israeli citizens who had lived there peacefully.   I saw the meticulous restoration of sacred religious sites that had been neglected for centuries.  Most importantly, I saw a people wrestling with the challenge of balancing the command of self-preservation with the ideal of an open, democratic society governed by the rule of law.

Military Support for Israel

A strong Israel bolsters American strength and security internationally, while creating new economic opportunities for American businesses and workers. Most of the U.S. funds supporting Israel are spent here in America buying military equipment that helps protect the Middle East – a joint goal of Israel and the United States. The United States should continue to work with Israel in its development of defensive weapons systems designed to protect against ballistic missile and rocket attacks from Iran, their terrorist proxies Hezbollah and Hamas as well as other potential attackers. Such weapons help both Israel and America alike. It is critical for Israel to maintain a significant military edge over enemies of Israel and the West.

As a Member of Congress, I would support the ten-year security agreement committing the United States to help Israel address growing and evolving threats to its existence.  Israel is America’s strongest and steadiest strategic ally in the Middle East.   Yet, Israel is also surrounded by threats including a potential for an Iran with nuclear capability, and increasing military capability by terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizballah. American military cooperation and aid bolsters Israel’s ability to defend itself in a dangerous region and sends a clear signal to these foes that our support for Israel is unwavering.  Moreover, helping Israel maintain a military advantage over potential adversaries serves as a deterrent to military conflicts and has enabled Israel to take risks for peace. Therefore, it is critical that America continue its support for Israel. Congress provided the full $3 billion in security aid to Israel for 2011. While it may be necessary to trim federal spending in many areas, including on foreign and security programs, I will fight for critical funding of our assistance to Israel, at the level of $3.075 billion for 2012, in accordance with the 10 year plan. Israel typically spends most of its aid money buying U.S.-made items.

Iran’s Nuclear Threat

Iran’s nuclear program and support of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are a threat not only to Israel, but to all who care about security and peace. According to U.S. Courts and other key sources, Iran has been behind bombings that killed many Americans. Iran poses an existential threat to the security of Israel and its citizens.  Led by  President  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has openly called for Israel to be “wiped of the map”, and an unelected cleric, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran is recklessly pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.  Clearly, Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.  The United States must be willing to enforce and expand a rigorous sanctions regime that deters Iran from its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and should not eliminate the possibility-however remote-of military action to eliminate the threat.  My specific plan for stopping the threat of Iran is to be clear that they cannot get access to nuclear weapons and must stop their state sponsorship of terror. We must:

1.     Put Serious Sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran

The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) conducts the bulk of Iran’s international transactions and is the key financial facilitator for Iran’s proliferation and terrorist activities. UNSCR 1929 notes the potential connection between Iran’s revenues derived from its energy sector and the funding of Iran’s proliferation-sensitive nuclear activities. To stop the flow of the petroleum commerce, the international community should pursue sanctions on the CBI as well as on oil companies, shipping firms, insurance providers and banks that are involved in such activity.

These sanctions will dramatically increase pressure on Iran’s leaders to change their course and end their illicit activities. Could such steps tighten the world’s supply of oil, putting pressure on the world economy? This is possible, although other suppliers could increase production to fill at least part of the shortfall. But the impact would certainly be tiny compared to the price we would all pay if Iran got nuclear weapons or if military action was ultimately used to stop them.

2.     Adopt more aggressive approach towards the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps

The Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are in charge of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and have been involved in serious human rights abuses. In recent years the IRGC has been playing an increasingly crucial role in Iran’s economy. Washington has already listed the IRGC as a “specially designated global terrorist” and Europe has taken some important measures too, but that is not nearly enough.

What is required now is a comprehensive campaign to map and sanction the hundreds of front companies and agents that operate on behalf of the IRGC. Multinationals who engage in commerce with the IRGC should be penalized, and travel bans and asset freezes should be applied to IRGC officials and members by all responsible members of the international community.

3.     Enact new sanctions legislation and eliminate loopholes

Nations around the world should take the lead from the U.S. Congress and increase pressure on Tehran by taking steps similar to those that recently were adopted unanimously by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The Iran Threat Reduction Act closes loopholes in energy and financial sanctions, including sanctioning parent companies for the activities of a foreign subsidiary that violates current US sanctions. The bill also targets the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps and senior Iranian regime officials.

Demonstrate commitment for human rights

Last month, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for human rights in Iran filed his first report, revealing a pattern of systemic violations of fundamental human rights.

All responsible members of the international community have a duty to show their support for universal human rights by imposing financial and travel sanctions on human rights abusers. Europe, while waving the banner of human rights, should not have anything to do with the Iranian regime, and governments must punish companies that provide goods, services, and technologies that enable the regime to oppress its people.

4.      Isolate Iran diplomatically

Senior Iranian leaders have enraged the international community with their fierce and hateful rhetoric towards Israel, the U.S. and the West, as well as their defiant stand on their country’s nuclear weapons program.  Iranian officials repeatedly have vowed to wipe Israel off the map and their country is considered by the U.S. State Department as “the most active state sponsor of terrorism.” Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly has questioned and denied the Holocaust.

The international community must make it clear that Iranian leaders are not welcome in their countries or in international forums, and world leaders should not visit Tehran. Clearly, the U.S. cannot enforce this step on other nations, but we can lead by example in ostracizing Iranian officials around the world.  It is abundantly evident that the regime in Iran has no interest in unclenching its fist in response to the President’s offer of an open hand; the door to productive engagement has been slammed shut by Tehran.

The Peace Process

There is no doubt that over time, a two-state solution with both a homeland for the Palestinians and a homeland for the Jewish people and all Israeli citizens should become a part of the landscape of the Middle East. It is critical to have a with a secure Israel living side by side a democratic state of Palestine.  However, this must not come at the expense of the security of Israel and can only occur when the Palestinian Authority represents all of the Palestinian territories and is able to negotiate towards a lasting two-state solution.  The ability of the Palestinian Authority to negotiate is conditioned on its acceptance of the right of Israel to exist, an acceptance of the Jewish character of Israel, and a rejection of violence against the citizens of Israel.

As we work towards peace, leaders must incorporate a bottom-up, grass-roots approach as the “Arab street” has immense power. U.S. policy should focus on mutual respect and recognition between the Israeli and Palestinian people, and between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Confronting the conflict’s fundamental issues – mutual recognition and respect, ideology, dignity – requires working with people on both sides and presenting each side’s narratives and wishes to the other.

The culture of hate being taught in Arab textbooks, public television and other culture must stop. This work must also entail such fundamental activities as rewriting textbooks, eliminating hate-filled speech and television programs, and developing civil societies among both peoples that prepare them to accept the other’s humanity. Any group getting US foreign or military aid should work towards hope and not hate, jobs and not jihad. This includes both Egypt and the Palestinians.

ORIGINAL EMAIL LETTER:

Dear Friends,

It is very exciting when a friend who shares your values and priorities runs for Congress. Such is our case with

GLENN IVEY,  former State’s Attorney for Prince George’s County. He is emminently qualified to be a real leader in Congress as the Representative in Maryland’s recently reconfigured 4th Congressional District. GLENN is challenging incumbent Donna Edwards in a Democratic primary election scheduled for April 3, 2012. And, as you can imagine, we have no time to lose. ( (http://iveyforcongress.com/about-the-candidate/).

While primary races are not normally the focus of excitement and concentrated fundraising activity, this race presents a special circumstance. Quite simply, there is no comparison between the two candidates. Here in Maryland as elsewhere throughout the Country, we are very concerned about the myriad of issues facing our elected officials, and their abilities to address constituent services.  Of course, one important issue to all of us is Israel’s safety, security and lasting peace with her neighbors. GLENN has made it clear that he is unwavering in his support for the State of Israel while his opponent’s voting record, public positions and comments on Israel related issues have been of major concern to the Jewish community. His record as State’s Attorney demonstrates his absolute commitment to the safety, concern and responsiveness to his constituents. We now have a real, strong possibility of helping a true friend of Israel get elected to the United States Congress.

GLENN IVEY is an intelligent, personable and  a very popular figure in Prince George’s County. He has a distinguished public service record dating back to the time after his college (Princeton) and law school (Harvard) graduations.  He has strong connections with the political leadership of Prince George’s County, and with most state and federal officials in Maryland. He has a track record of working well with his colleagues as he builds strong coalitions.  And, he has strong ties to our community — having visited Israel on a JCRC mission several years ago, and maintaining close relationships with many leaders within our community here in Maryland.

Our fundraiser for GLENN IVEY will be held at 6:00pm on Tuesday, January 3, 2012 in downtown Washington, DC.  Attached is your invitation. We so hope you will be able to attend.  But whether or not you are able to join us on January 3, we hope you will join us by contributing to our fundraising effort.  And, because a report must be filed by December 30, 2011,  we would like to show additional resources by then.

We sincerely believe that this is the most important primary race for the pro-Israel community in the greater Washington area as well as our broader Jewish community.  Please join us, and please do what you can to support this effort.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Seriously…if you are unable to attend, we would so appreciate your making a contribution to GLENN’s campaign. This would mean a great deal to Glenn’s campaign as well as to us.

Information on where to send your donation is in the attachment. But, if you would rather do it on line, please let me know asap.  We are confident that you will agree with us that GLENN IVEY is a very formidable candidate who will make us proud as a United States Member of Congress

Thanking you in advance, and Most Sincerely,

Barbara GG and Mike Goldman

Barbara Goldberg Goldman

 

First, let’s take in the list of Obama’s accomplishments as Chait describes them. They’re considerable:

His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

We could, and I do, quibble about details in each of Chait’s examples, but his overall point is important: Even if every measure he lists has its flaws, the list itself is impressive. That President Obama took office in the middle of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and with a nominal Democratic majority in both houses, helps explain why some people still expected more, but we should still stop more often and acknowledge what’s been accomplished in the last three years.

Having conceded that, I think Chait’s piece suffers from big definitional problems. First, how do we define liberals? Polls show self-described liberal Democrats are happy with Obama – in Gallup’s weekly tracking polls upward of 75 percent approve of the job he’s doing (and the same was true for Clinton), and that’s been true since he took office. There’s no crisis of liberal support for the president.

Also, Chait’s roster of unreasonable “liberals” includes MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. That’s silly: Schultz, cited along with New York Times centrist Thomas Friedman, rails against politicians who refuse to cut the deficit by trimming so-called entitlements and raising taxes. But that’s exactly what Obama tried to do with his proposed debt-ceiling “grand bargain”; Republicans wouldn’t cooperate. Those guys aren’t liberals; Friedman is a formerly liberal, formerly smart writer who got rich and stopped paying attention. (You’d think he could at least pay someone to pay attention for him, so he’d stop asking Obama to do what Obama has already done.)

What about actual liberals, people to the left of Schultz and Friedman – people like Rachel Maddow and, OK, sure, me. Yes, some of us have demanded more from Obama – on the economy, on Wall Street regulation, on gay rights, on civil liberties. But you know what? That’s our job. And when Chait goes down the list of the ways liberals have been disappointed with Democratic presidents going all the way back to FDR, I found myself thinking, Good job, liberals! Because we were usually right, and the country’s a better place for our pushing.

While liberals lionize JFK today, Chait notes, during his presidency (cut short 48 years ago Tuesday) they criticized him for not moving faster on civil rights. Yes, they did. Kennedy was trying to find a way to hold his party together and postpone the departure of the Dixiecrats, and he needed pushing. Should Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have said, “OK, Mr. President, we’ll skip the March on Washington, we know you’re doing what you can.” Liberals were right to push Kennedy. (I am not trying to say that Obama is compromising on anything equivalent to the basic human rights of African Americans, just that on the social justice issues of their day, presidents need pushing.)

Similarly, while FDR gets more historic veneration from liberals (mainly because there’s almost no one here with us who actually lived through his presidency as an adult), his New Deal only came about because of left-wing agitation (and corporate desperation) in the first place. And liberals were right to criticize some of Roosevelt’s compromises: leaving most African-Americans out of the Social Security program (again to mollify Dixiecrats) and easing up on government spending in 1937 (to mollify conservatives and business leaders), which reversed some of the progress he’d made getting us beyond the Great Depression. Japanese internment was a shame that more liberals should have criticized.

In my adulthood, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton got elected with liberal support but wound up disappointing the left, particularly on the economy. Sadly, both men accepted the Republican premise that the economic problems and social disorder of the late ’60s and early ’70s required that Democrats trim back on government and make nice with business. Chait himself admits that while we all love the outspoken human rights defending, “Habitat for Humanity” supporting ex-president we know today, we didn’t love Carter during his term, and for good reason:

The truth is that Carter’s domestic agenda carried only small bits of liberalism, and those small bits (a consumer-protection agency, tax reform) met with total failure in the Democratic Congress. Carter’s policy accomplishments tilted right of center—he deregulated the airline and trucking industries and cut the capital-gains tax. Most infuriatingly to liberals, Carter refused to push for comprehensive health-care reform. A Carter adviser later recalled that the president “did not see health care as every citizen’s right, nor did he think the government has an obligation to provide it.”

When it comes to Clinton, I think many liberals are frustrated with Obama not because of some supposed great contrast with his supposedly liberal predecessor, but because of similarities between the two. Both of these liberal presidents spent considerable political capital trying to compromise with Republicans, and they failed. That’s been a particular problem for Obama because he didn’t have the strong economy that made Clinton’s inability to wrest concessions from the GOP less painful.

It was precisely because Clinton failed to neutralize the critique of Democrats as the “big government” party that I objected to Obama’s effort to do the same thing in a time of economic crisis. Before it all fell apart, the president defended the idea of his deficit-cutting grand bargain to progressives. “Get this problem off the table,” he argued, “and then with some firm footing, with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future.” But Clinton already tried that, balancing the budget and endorsing a welfare reform plan largely crafted by Republicans. He believed that getting the issue of bloated government “off the table” would set the table for a progressive agenda. Of course, it didn’t work.

Before writing his New York magazine piece, Chait got a lot of attention for a scathing retort to Drew Westen’s left-wing critique of Obama that ran in the New York Times in August. Chait made a lot of good points; some of the things the left blames on Obama either didn’t happen, or couldn’t have happened otherwise given the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. But he made one point I wanted to answer at the time, and didn’t. He accused Westen and other lefty Obama critics of romanticizing the power of the bully pulpit and the presidential speech:

Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

I think that’s a caricature of liberals’ criticism. I have an actual model of what I wish the president had done, and it doesn’t come from Bill Clinton or JFK or FDR, it comes from Barack Obama. Look at the way he tried to sell the deficit-cutting grand bargain, to settle the 2011 debt-ceiling stalemate, even though in the end, the GOP didn’t bite — and probably, predictably, never was going to. That let the president tell voters he was the one who really wanted to cut the deficit, but Republicans wouldn’t let him. He railed, he ranted, he ordered both parties’ leaders to work night and day on a deal. He told the American public to call their congressional leaders and demand compromise — and sure enough, they tied up the phone lines in Congress for a while. In the process, he accepted the Republican premise that deficit-reduction was more important than job creation, a hallmark of the Clintonian “third way” politics he’d supposedly rejected, but even critics had to admit it was a bold political move, and he worked hard and risked a lot for it.

Now, imagine the new president had told a comparably bold story about the recession in early 2009: that he was the one who knew how to use government to fix the economy — but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats wouldn’t let him do all that was needed, so he was probably going to have to compromise to do what was possible. Obama failed to give voters a vision of the kind of government role that would be required to fix the economy — his advisors were telling him it would take at least $1.2 trillion in stimulus — even if he had to compromise and settle for less. And let’s be clear: He did have to settle for less. Since the Senate barely passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, even though 40 percent of it went to tax cuts, it’s hard to imagine the president getting more than that.

But what if the president laid out bigger, bolder plans for the Recovery Act? What if he’d gone on television every few days, as he did during the debt-ceiling crisis, and demanded the American people lobby Congress? Then, when the compromise stimulus worked as well as it did — and it did work, keeping the country out of a Depression and reversing the steep trend of job losses that began under Bush — but its effects trailed off, he’d have been in a much stronger position to push Congress to do more. But Obama never made that case. That was a missed opportunity that wound up hurting the president politically, and hurting the country.

One last thing about the debt-ceiling debacle: Obama’s approval numbers fell as he pushed for compromise with the GOP, and they have climbed since he’s begun pushing for a jobs bill he knows has no chance of getting Republican support. I think Obama’s liberal critics weren’t just right morally, they were right politically. But I’ll also give the president credit for what now looks like shrewd bargaining: He got the debt ceiling raised without cutting Social Security or Medicare, reckoning he could offer whatever he felt like knowing the GOP would never agree to raise taxes.

I think Chait’s right that liberals are less inclined than conservatives to close ranks around their president, right or wrong. Conservatives tend to defer to authority, by definition; our side, not so much. I think he’s right to remind liberals how much Obama has done. I’m grateful to Obama for a lot of those things, but mostly, I’m grateful to be a member of a party that fights openly about what’s right. When the president got heckled by some Occupy Wall Street protesters Tuesday in New Hampshire, he modeled that tolerance, listening to them; he didn’t have them pepper-sprayed. I guess I’m grateful for that too — but I wish I didn’t have to be.

Here’s our “Hardball” debate. Have a great Thanksgiving.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I bet Crossroads is super embarrassed about this awful mistake, right? Of course they are:

Nate Hodson of Crossroads said in defense of the pulled ad, “It was a very small cable system. The four largest broadcast stations in Montana reviewed the facts supporting the ad and will continue airing it.”

He said later, “We are communicating with the cable system and expect that the ad will be back up and running on cable soon.”

At least the ad pitting Bill Clinton against Obama while falsely claiming that Obama wants to raise everyone’s taxes right now is based on deceptively edited quotes! This is just based on fantasy.

The dishonest Crossroads ad attacking Virginia Senate candidate Tim Kaine has a similarly weird blatant lie, claiming Virginia under Kaine ran a “big deficit,” which is not the case. (Virginia slashed spending after the recession made revenues plummet, a move Republicans and deficit hawks everywhere support.)

But because Elizabeth Warren, running for Senate in Massachusetts, represents the greatest threat both to a sitting Republican senator and to the conservative economic message in general, Rove and Crossroads are sparing no expense smearing her. Warren took credit for inspiring the national conversation about economic injustice that led to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Or, in Crossroads’ words, she “sides with extreme left-wing protests” while … ignoring “jobs.” Elizabeth Warren supported protesters doing drugs, even though millions of Americans are out of work! For shame.

Warren, unfazed, launched her campaign with an ad attacking Wall Street, because Americans seriously don’t like Wall Street, but Crossroads spent $560,000 on the “radical redistribution of wealth” ad and plans to spend $150 million altogether defeating Warren.

Rove has, it seems, realized that you don’t even need to base your attack ad on something that actually happened. You don’t need to take something out of context. You can just make up whatever attack you want! Jon Tester voted for spending taxpayer dollars on Magnolia cupcakes for pedophiles. Elizabeth Warren was a member of the Organizing Committee for the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

And the only checks on their lies are mealy-mouthed newspaper fact-checkers and, apparently, cable companies. Otherwise there are no serious downsides or risks to running anonymously funded hundred-million-dollar misinformation campaigns. There are no consequences, no fear of any sort of future professional repercussions for any of the people involved in producing and airing the ads, and really no compelling reason not to lie to destroy a couple of political opponents.

This should be something of a lesson to Democrats, too: You cannot prevent Rove and his allies from accusing you of being a wealth-redistributing tax-hiking Communist radical no matter how “centrist” or “moderate” your voting record, so you may as well vote to redistribute wealth, right?

Where this story goes wrong is in its ideological suppositions about the cities — and specifically, about Democratic cities. Sure, two or three decades ago, there may have been some truth to the notion that the American city is a union-driven bastion of populist progressive economics. But today, while cities may still largely vote Democratic, they are increasingly embracing the economics of corporatism. The result is that urban areas are a driving force behind the widening intra-party rift between the corporatist, pro-privatization Wall Street Democrats and the traditional labor-progressive “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”

Start with a look at Chicago, the metropolis most identifiably (and inaccurately) branded as a hotbed of labor power and liberal economics.

In recent years, the Windy City has become “the most aggressive city in the United States in the privatization of public infrastructure,” according to the Public Interest Research Group. Citing the city’s budget crisis, officials have sold off highways and parking meters at cut-rate prices — all to pad the profits of corporate investors (the schemes are now being explored by other Democratic cities including Pittsburgh and Los Angeles). Despite this, during its once-in-a-generation contested mayoral election in 2010, the city’s voters chose investment banker Rahm Emanuel over other far more economically progressive candidates, and Emanuel quickly filled his administration with corporate consultants eager to accelerate the privatization already under way. Now, Emanuel has declared war on organized labor, with the Associated Press’s headline blaring “Even in Chicago, Mayor Goes After Labor Unions.”

A similar trend is happening in my home city of Denver.

As in Chicago, lazy reporters and pundits equate the Mile High City’s votes for Democratic candidates as proof of the city’s alleged affinity for liberal economics. But Denver is today embracing right-wing economic ideology — and that ideology’s politician-promoters — with the zeal of Colorado Springs.

A few years ago, the city saw one of right-wing billionaire Phil Anschutz’s corporate takeover specialists, Michael Bennet, appointed school superintendent and then use his power to thrust the public schools’ finances into the hands of his friends on Wall Street. The move effectively forced Denver taxpayers to use money for public schools to subsidize the profits at financial behemoths like JP Morgan. Nonetheless, when Bennet turned around and ran for Senate on huge campaign contributions from the very financial sector that he helped fleece Denver taxpayers, the city rewarded him, first by giving him higher-than-expected vote totals to defeat a progressive primary challenge, and later by delivering him the general-election margin of victory.

In the last year, Denver has moved even farther to the economic right. In early 2011, it elected Michael Hancock, the most economically conservative mayoral candidate in a large field of choices — a man who, as mayor, has made headlines by effusively complimenting George W. Bush; appointing a top Republican who previously headed a corporate front group as his chief of staff; pressing for so-called education “reforms” specifically aimed at undermining the teachers union; and starring in television ads railing against a progressive ballot measure that would mandate employers allow workers to accrue paid sick days.

Seeing that conservative political trend, record-setting amounts of corporate money subsequently flowed into the city’s major elections this fall. The result? A city which just a few years ago voted to raise taxes to support public services voted down a progressive state ballot measure to better fund education in a state that — compared to others — disproportionately underfunds its schools. It also succumbed to a massive corporate-financed campaign and rejected the paid sick days initiative (which had initially polled well). Additionally, it preserved a school board majority that has already aggressively worked to undermine traditional public education.

Similar examples are everywhere.

On education, the Democratic-voting city of Washington, D.C., was the place that launched the political career of Michelle Rhee, the face of the right-wing effort to siphon public school money into private schools; Democratic Los Angeles has seen a successful Wal-Mart-funded effort to encroach on traditional public education, with more privately administered “public” schools than any district in the country; and Democratic New Orleans has seen a wholesale charter-ization of its schools.

On economic justice issues, the Democratic-voting city of Philadelphia saw its popular mayor veto paid sick days legislation (it ultimately passed over his objections) while Democratic-voting cities like Oakland, Boston and Denver have led the way in deploying their police forces on peaceful Occupy Wall Street protestors.

On spending issues, Democratic-voting cities across the country have simultaneously slashed social services while offering up huge taxpayer subsidies for stadiums, corporate office buildings and other private, for-profit projects.

And on tax issues, Democratic-voting New York City has seen its billionaire mayor become the national champion of regressive tax cuts for the wealthy.

Though Bloomberg is officially an independent, his brand of politics perfectly epitomizes the radical shift in urban economic ideology from one of labor/progressive traditions to a now-familiar greed-is-good crony conservatism — all under the veneer of liberalism. Like now-standard Democratic Party corporatism that puts a velvet glove of equal rights rhetoric over the brass knuckles of Big Business cash, his formula relies on a larger realignment of liberal orthodoxy away from economics and toward social issues. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi put it:

[Bloomberg] is a billionaire Wall Street creature with an extreme deregulatory bent who has quietly advanced some nastily regressive police policies… but has won over upper-middle-class liberals with his stances on choice and gay marriage and other social issues.

Bloomberg’s main attraction as a politician has been his ability to stick closely to a holy trinity of basic PR principles: bang heavily on black crime, embrace social issues dear to white progressives, and in the remaining working hours give your pals on Wall Street (who can raise any money you need, if you somehow run out of your own) whatever they want.

He understands that as long as you keep muggers and pimps out of the prime shopping areas in the Upper West Side, and make sure to sound the right notes on abortion, stem-cell research, global warming, and the like, you can believably play the role of the wisecracking, good-guy-billionaire Belle of the Ball…

Though Taibbi was writing about Bloomberg specifically, his words aptly sum up what the American cityscape has become — yet more scorched earth in the successful assault of Limousine Liberals and Crony Corporatists on Lunch-Pail Liberals and Progressive Populists. In political terms, it represents the broader success of the transpartisan moneyed class in fully redefining “liberal” exclusively as “social-issue liberal” — without regard for economic agenda.

To be sure, most cities may never vote for openly declared Republicans (though it’s worth noting that New York City did see a longtime Democratic congressional district go to the GOP a few months back). But official partisan complexion is far less significant in the day-to-day lives of most citizens than the rightward shift of public policy in America’s biggest population centers.

This truism, which the red-versus-blue fetishists in our media and political arenas refuse to acknowledge, is well understood by movement conservatives (as just one example, here in Denver, it was major GOP donors that underwrote the nominally Democratic candidates who promised to preserve the corporate takeover of the city’s school board). They get that, at the policy level, it doesn’t really matter if cities votes for candidates who call themselves Democrats, independents or liberals, and it doesn’t matter if reporters keep misrepresenting cities as enclaves of ultra-liberal economics — as long as this breed of politicians continue getting urban areas to play their new role pressing the conservative economic agenda.

Senator Nelson, you have never been a “positive force” during your time in office thus far, and it seems unlikely that you will become one at any point in the next six years.

Please, retire quietly, or even with an alternately self-righteous and self-pitying editorial about the death of “bipartisanship” and “civility” and “Senate decorum.” Promise to devote yourself to good deeds outside of office and then get rich lobbying for the corporate interests that currently sponsor you, I don’t care. Just get out of office, because you are horrible. You’re a miserable excuse for a senator. You have made millions of people’s lives worse in real and tangible ways, and you will continue to do so as long as you remain in the United States Senate.

You opposed capping ATM fees because you are so old and rich and stupid that you have never used an ATM. “I know about the holograms,” you said in your defense, because you’re a useless fool.

You joined the cadre of “centrist” Democrats who attempted to sabotage every major legislative priority of the Democratic Congressional majority, and you went back and forth on the public option before definitively coming out against it and the hugely popular “Medicare buy-in” compromise. Then you won a sweetheart Medicaid funding deal solely for Nebraska that almost killed the entire healthcare reform bill and led to everyone in the country calling you venal and corrupt.

And you opposed a measure to stop federally subsidizing usurious private student loan providers — calling a money-saving anti-corporate welfare proposal “a government takeover of student lending” — because you think representing the interests of usurious lending institutions that donate millions to your campaigns is actually an example “being constructive” and “finding solutions.”

You supported the Stupak Amendment, voted for the anti-gay marriage amendment, and supported the Iraq war. You supported both horrible, wasteful Bush tax cuts.

You have no major legislative accomplishments, either. Not one! I can’t name a single important bill you ever sponsored or co-sponsored and I suspect most other longtime Senate observers could, either. You are a failure as a Senator with no legacy to speak of beyond trolling your own party, repeatedly.

Consider this an official endorsement of your retirement from politics. Please go crawl into a hole.

Yours,
Alex