Earlier today I tweeted the following:

blogdiva: DUDE! Deeds hurt Deeds. The moron ran as ANTI-Obama! RT @DavidAll: RT @POStqia: Shhh —Don’t Tell Anyone, But Obama Hurt Deeds in Virginia (24 minutes ago from TwitterGadget)

It was a quick quip about how I don't believe Obama hurts Democrats in the way Republicans want everybody to believe. I threw that out there and Michael Turk hit back with the following:

	Name: Michael Turk Location: Wherever it's 5 o'clock Description: He's just this guy, y'know? Cooler than most, less cool than some. URL: www.kungfuquip.com Followers: 2662 MichaelTurk: @blogdiva This was the Deeds campaign's GOTV mailer, it barely has his name n it: http://is.gd/4RQsH (10 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to blogdiva)@blogdiva This was the Deeds campaign's GOTV mailer, it barely has his name n it: http://is.gd/4RQsH
	Name: Michael Turk Location: Wherever it's 5 o'clock Description: He's just this guy, y'know? Cooler than most, less cool than some. URL: www.kungfuquip.com Followers: 2662 MichaelTurk: @blogdiva This notion that he tried to distance himself from Obama is bullshit. (21 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to blogdiva)@blogdiva This notion that he tried to distance himself from Obama is bullshit.
	Name: Michael Turk Location: Wherever it's 5 o'clock Description: He's just this guy, y'know? Cooler than most, less cool than some. URL: www.kungfuquip.com Followers: 2662 MichaelTurk: @blogdiva You are smoking crack! Deeds tethered his entire campaign to Obama. I know, I sat through the commercials. (21 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to blogdiva)

I was going to twitter back a response but I think it merits a quick blog post with a WHAT IF: What if the problem with Obama is NOT that he is a bad politician or a so-so President? What if the problem with Obama is that he won because he sold himself as a third-party candidate? What if the problem with Obama is that he won't be able to be a truly outstanding President unless he stops playing by the Democrats rules? What if the Democratic Party and anybody who has been a willing player can't win with the "Obama Change" formula because they are the "more of the same" that needs to be wiped clean for real change to happen?
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As we noted before, 64 Democrats voted against women's right to health insurance funded abortion procedures. Many of these Democrats have claimed the ultimate fallacy: That proponents of forced pregnancy shouldn't "pay with their tax money" for abortions because it infringes on their civil liberties. As if anti-war activists and pacifists could claim the same when it comes to funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and any other wars they oppose.

Yet I'd like to focus on the "hispanics" that voted against women's rights. Long-time readers now that even though I am a proud  Puerto Rican and blatina, I've never been one to shy away from writing about the ugliness and even atrocities perpetrated by Latin Americans. It should come as no surprise my willingness to call out these so-called Hispanics and Latinos of dubiosity. Particularly since in Latin America and the US Latino community we have to still wrangle with the social and political consequences of the machismo and marianismo myths that permeate the cultures of Latin America.

Am listing all seven members of the Congressional Hispanics Caucus for a variety of reasons: If you are not looking closely, some of these votes do not make sense given the previous voting record of people like Costa ad Rodriguez. After all, wasn't Ciro Rodriguez a darling of the netroots? And yet when you look closely at their lists of donors, their votes actually become not just sinister but cynical as well (as in the case of John Salazar). So we can't just blame it on the fact that all of these guys happen to be Roman Catholics or members of the Blue Dog Coalition. It's those donors lists for 2008 and 2010 that really paint a clearer picture of their "conservatism".

Last but not least, compared to the Congressional Black Caucus, the CHC delegation voted atrociously : Artur Davis was the lone member of the CBC who voted for Stupak. Why couldn't the CHC conjure such discipline when voting a measure that would basically kill women's right to an abortion? Or are their votes exactly correlated to the 2007 "whore" scandal that rocked the CHC thanks to John Baca's leadership in disrespecting the women of the caucus?

Let's take a quick look at the faces of Los Siete Infames (the infamous 7) :
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UPDATE! 2010 HEALTH CARE REFORM VOTE

Another roll call for tonight's vote on "PelosiCare" or the HR3962: Affordable Health Care for America Act. 39 Democrats voted against the measure. Many of these same people voted for the Stupak amedment; which blocks insurance companies from offering coverage for any abortion medical procedures.

I've bolded the names of the double negative voters for your convenience:

Adler
Altmire
Baird
Barrow
Boccieri
Boren
Boucher
Boyd
Bright
Chandler
Childers
Davis (AL)
Davis (TN)
Edwards (TX)
Gordon (TN)
Griffith
Holden
Kissell
Kosmas
Kratovil
Kucinich
Markey (CO)
Marshall
Massa
Matheson
McIntyre
McMahon
Melancon
Minnick
Murphy (NY)
Nye
Peterson
Ross
Shuler
Skelton
Tanner
Taylor
Teague

Hot off the Congressional record, here are the names of the 65 democrats who thought it made sense to throw women under the proverbial Health Care Reform bus for the sake of getting the bill into conference.

These Democrats voted for the Stupak-Pitts amendment which would:

• Prohibit individuals who receive the affordability tax credits from purchasing a private insurance plan that covers abortion, despite the fact that a majority of health insurance plans currently cover abortion.
• Result in a de facto ban on private insurance companies providing abortion coverage in the health insurance exchange, since the vast majority of participants would receive affordability tax credits.
• Prohibit the public option from providing abortion care, despite the fact that it would be funded through private premium dollars.

The names of these champions of women's rights are found after the jump:
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First of all, congratulation to John Liu for becoming the first Chinese-American to be elected to city-wide office in New York City. That's a huge slap on the face for the New York Democratic Party establishment; an establishment that's never been too keen on grassroots movements unless they can co-opt to solidify their status-quo.

The other big grassroots story of the night was Bill de Blasio. He walloped Mark Green, one of the darlings of the New York political elite, in a run-off election and breezed into the Political Advocate's office with 76.9% of the vote.

For a political establishment that doesn't support grassroots movements unless it's ready to line their pockets --remember of all the so-called grassroots progressives and Democrats defecting to the Bloomberg campaign?-- these two wins are a wake-up call for the NY Dems political establishment.

We'll have to see how these two fare for or against the status quo in the next four years.

1. Obama is not the Democratic Party.
Virginia is the best example of this phenomenon: Even though Obama carried the state, voters repudiated the slim pickings pushed on them by the local Democratic party. Creigh Deeds, the genius Democrat who lost the election, ran as an anti-Obama Democrat. In a state that Obama basically swept during the general elections.

WHAT KIND OF STRATEGY IS THAT? Oh right, the strategy of a Democrat who rightfully doesn't look at Obama as representing him.

The biggest mistake for the Democratic Party was to sucker themselves into thinking that whatever genius political strategy Plouffe and Axelrod were able to use in getting Obama elected was going to absolve them of their state and local sins of nepotism, cronyism, corruption but most importantly utter ineptitude.

Last night was a big wake-up call for Democrats who think they'll be able to coast on the coattails of Obama for the next 3-7 years.

Which takes me to the big story of the day: Bill Owens will for New York's Congressional District #23. What's the moral of that story?

2. Carpetbaggers better not fuck with upstaters.
The sleepy corner of upper New York state became an ideological battle ground for the extreme right of the Republican party with a non-Palin-looking Dede Scozzafava being muscled out of the election by the GlennBeckian non-resident of the district Doug Hoffman. Yet in the process of eating their own, out-of-state extremists revealed the awful truth about the New York State Democratic Party: They suck.

Democrats in New York state are rarely differentiated from their Republican counterparts. Abortion is not a political lightning rod for New York politicians. On the contrary, NYC boasts a rather disturbing amount of African American and Latino right-to-lifers on their Democratic Party rolls. What separates Republicans from Democrats is the amount of money they're willing to put at the feet of the political establishment in both Albany and Washington DC.

NY23 happened to be one of those districts that NY Dems didn't look as particularly profitable for them until the teabaggers came into town. And that's basically their modus operandi: Many districts in the state are marked as losses from the get go. NY23 proved what a dangerous strategy that is --especially in a year when one more Democrat in Congress could make a huge difference in Health Care and Immigration legislation.

The challenge for true progressives in New York state will be to not only get rid of anti-gay, misogynist, immigrant hating Republicans. The challenge will be to find progressives to run against Democrats with similar political views, from local all the way up to Congressional, regardless of whether it is a "red district" or not.

3. Michael Turk put it best, Can we now agree that 2008 was a referendum on Bush and GOP arrogance, and not a vote for radical liberalism?
This bears repeating over and over and over again. Obama wasn't a choice for radical liberalism. Obama wasn't even a choice for the Democratic Party. Obama didn't even win because he was a centrist. Obama won because he successfully sold himself as an outsider from the political establishment who had a vision of a United States that could be better without partisan politics.

In other words: Obama won because he was the ANTI-IDEOLOGICAL, ANTI-PARTISAN candidate. He didn't win because people believed he could change the swamp of Capitol Hill or the rats' nest of the Democratic Party. He won because he not only wasn't part of the swamp or the rats but because he aspired to transcend all of that with his presidency.

Michael Turk's comment was directed to Republicans but you might as well use it to bash into the heads of Democrats why they can't rest on Obama's laurels. 90% of the Democratic Party does not represent "Change We Can Believe In" and that's what got played out in all of lat night's electoral losses.

4. All the money int he world is not going to win you a mandate
The race was called in favor of Bloomberg when he was winning by 3%. He ended up tallying a 4.58% win. That means that the Boss Bloomberg plunked down $21,834,061.1 per each point in his margin of win. That's an obscene amount of bribe money; yet it proves that if New York City had a true political grassroots movement represented in the Democratic Party, Thompson would have squeaked in a victory.

5. New York City is ready for a grassroots renaissance
Thompson didn't win because he was one of the ultimate insiders just like his losing predecessor, Freddy Ferrer. It's not just that Freddy was Puerto Rican and Bill was black. It was really the fact that these two have been part of the political establishment of New York City for far too long. Every single Democratic mayoral loser since Dinkins has been part of the party establishment.

Yet look at the massive margins that got both de Blasio and Liu elected. If any of these two guys want to become mayor the lesson is very simple: FIGHT MICHAEL BLOOMBERG FOR THE NEXT 4 YEARS.

You can't raise $100 million to buy yourself the local and national media? Fine. Then fight the man every single step of the way for the next 4 years. Govern like you were still campaigning. Amass grassroots support and boost the numbers of your independent allies. Most importantly though, KEEP YOUR FACE IN THE LOCAL MEDIA. That means every single week, every single month, you gotta get yourself out there in front of the cameras, on the newspapers and most importantly on the blogs to move your message over and over and over again.

Michael Bloomberg doesn't have a mandate. Liu, de Blasio and every single Democrat who wants to become the next mayor needs to keep that in mind until 2013.

Which gets me to my favorite peeve:
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Besides making a point about the state of healthcare in the US today, my friends and I created the video above as a form of “digital storytelling”, using new tools to share an age-old content delivery system. Do you think facts and figures have worked better?

I’ve been hearing a lot more about storytelling these days. For example, in a recent NPR segment about storytelling at the Edinburgh festival, an audience member said in her Scottish burr, “We’ve been so clever about computers and pushed entertainment as far as we can, we’re going back to the original art form”.

This might help explain the increased buzz around great user-generated events like the Moth StorySlam and Mortified and radio shows like This American Life and now the Moth Radio Hour. There is something old-fashioned, comforting and even primal about storytelling.

While this supposedly new-found interest in storytelling coincides with increased interest in digital social media, I don't see it necessarily as a denunciation of technology.
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