Andrew Sullivan revisits the Deal with Christianists.

In May of 2006, Andrew Sullivan coined the term and concept of "christianist" in his Time Magazine article "My Problem with Christianism." (read it here.)

Since then, it has been a topic he has revisited in his own column, The Dish.

Since The Democrat Deal started in February of 2010, we have written extensively on the subject, frequently bringing Mr. Sullivan's lucid observations with us into the fray.

With Rick Perry's entrance into the GOP fray, yesterday, The Dish catches us up to speed.

The Deal would only venture to add that while the Christianist movement has had an impact on the whole of the country, the only "takeover" accorded it is within the ranks of the Tea Party-controlled GOP. This political marriage (with the Tea Party/Christianists forming the male figure and the rest of the GOP playing the subservient wife) is, at best, a rocky one. The Tea Party is feuding among it's own. The GOP is increasingly transparent in it's declining valuation of the radical right. The upcoming election is already being seen as one where losses are expected among it's ranks.

But - there is still plenty of political fuel to be fired. For that, there is no one better than the Gov. of Texas. It is an obvious career choice. Rick Perry should be able to suck all the air out of Bachmann and Palin while sweeping the floor with Romney, succeeding whether he wins or loses. (take it easy, he will surely lose the general, should he get there.)

Perry will, undoubtedly, succeed at increasing his own number of zealots, sheep, and career options for a former Gov of Texas. It is a tough job to follow. Ask anyone.

The Christianist Takeover
by Andrew Sullivan
c/o The Dish

It now appears to be complete. When I wrote "The Conservative Soul," David Brooks was underwhelmed by its core argument: that an accelerating shift was taking place in American conservatism that was transforming the small government secular temperament into a fundamentalist religious mindset that sought its refuge not in doubting humankind's capacity for good, but in believing in God's ability to heal all things, including politics.

David argued that the religious and fundamentalist shift in the GOP was over-rated, and that there was no conflict between evangelicalism and mainstream American values.

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

Well, a few years later, examine the candidacies of the two front-runners for the GOP. One launched his campaign in a revival meeting calling for God to solve our economic problems (having previously led mass prayers for the end of the Texas drought); the other emerges entirely out of Dominionist theology and built her entire career in the Christianist world of home-schooling, and anti-gay demonization. One reason Mitt Romney is not a shoo-in? Sectarianism, and his own previous deviations from binding orthodoxy. And it is this fundamentalist mindset - in which nothing doctrinal can be questioned, and the real world must be bent to the shape of a rigid theo-ideology - that defines these two candidates.

Hence Bachmann's belief that the entire deficit can be ended in short shrift solely by massive cuts in spending. This "spending alone" principle cannot be compromised, since taxation in and of itself is a way in which the liberal elites control people's lives. It doesn't matter what economists say about the consequence of wilful default or of austerity too sharply imposed. It only matters what God says. And God is bound up with a radical American theology in which slavery was more benign than the Great Society, and that the Founders were abolitionists. That American theology creates the justification for the use of American military power across the globe, especially in protecting and advancing Greater Israel, Bachmann's and Perry's fundamentalist cause of causes.

This is what this party now is: a religious movement clothed in anti-government radicalism. It has nothing to do with the conservative temperament, conservative political thought or conservative ideas. It is hostile to most existing institutions, especially government, contemptuous of the courts, and seized of an ideology as rigid as any far-left liberalism, as utopian as any wide-eyed socialist, as fanatical as anything the left spawned in the 1960s.

And it has hijacked an entire political party; and recently held to ransom an entire country. I knew it would get worse before it gets better. But this bad?

[Yes, Mr. Sullivan "this bad." The phoenix must burn to ash before it can take to the skies. ed.]

For the original article, go here.

What's the deal with democrat zietgiest? The incomparible Ms. Dowd knows das Geschäft.

"He doesn’t like the bully pulpit, just the professor’s lectern," states our friend and colleague at the NYT, as usual, simply, cogently, putting context to a dominant perplexing national conundrum. In stark contrast to the candidate Obama many of us (myself, very much included) were pied pipers and delighted to be part of such an exciting, promising moment in our national history.

Three years later, little remains of either the enthusiasm or promise. The only "change" President Obama has materialized is the change in his direction and our expectations. The Chicago pol who referred to himself as a "fierce advocate" during he campaign has yet to show a hint of either fierceness or advocacy. What his increasingly hard-pressed cheerleaders like Plouffe and Axelrod point to as crowing achievements to his administration are most often times the President has stepped out of the way and not been an impediment to legislation (though not beyond accepting credit, post-facto, i.e. healthcare "reform" and repealing of DADT and DOMA.) Another great example and defining metaphor to his leadership (or lack, thereof), can be found surrounding those infamous robber-baron Bush (née Obama) era tax cuts Candidate Obama aggressively built a consensus and candidacy around. Since taking office, he has, without a sideways glance, voted to extend these cuts amidst intense economic argument against such action and, then, seamlessly extoll their inherent injustice on the perpetual campaign for re-election.

Ahh, the capacity of the political animal. But is Obama truly a political animal? Not in a Clinton, "against all odds and challenges who sucks the air out of any room he enters" kind of way. Not in the Johnson, hard-assed "comin' up to the hill to cajoll or strong-arm members to his view" kind of way. And Certainly not in the FDR "we are better than our obstacles, here's our historic plans to deal with historic challenges" kind of way.

Obama has a perfectly brilliant American narrative, to be sure. Political strategists wait their whole career for such an engaging backdrop to a campaign. Yet, his lack of application, his reluctance to expend his (once) political capital, his absence in any significant consensus-building or public initiative leadership to date cannot but highlight the fact that this compelling human narrative may be little more than that - a narrative that captures our collective imagination, our "hope," but does not then translate into any evidence for the capacity to manifest "change" or even produce the most meager of "back-stops" against a Congress where the culture of intransigency has sunk to parody as the Teabag tail wags the GOP dog.

To the realists of the left, this dynamic has been dismally clear for some time. To all but the most ardent and centrist of the president's flock, the maintenance of denial is visibly crumbling day by day.
For Plouffe and Axelrod, this isn't an issue. Primarily, because it is one they cannot effect. They cannot pull Candidate Obama out of the closet and replace the defining national political disappointment of a generation with the hopeful and uplifting Chicagoan of pre-2009. All his advisor's need to do (in their relatively public opinion) is wait for the coming Perry/Romney battle where Perry holds the odds to carry the primary but also provide the face to the final heydays of a tea-party that will burn itself down from the inside by the general, allowing for four more years of the more moderate republican Obama administration.

The question of import now is - since the candidate of "yes, we can," is the president of "but, we won't try," where do we stand as a party and a country? More importantly, where do we go from here? What, and for whom, must we fight for?

Ms. Dowd, illuminates, c/o NYT:

Withholder in Chief
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 9, 2011

Even the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair is not enough to sweeten the mood.

Three years ago, Barack Obama’s unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans — young, old and in-between — who saw in the fresh-faced, silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose, rancorous Bush years into a modern, competitive future where we once more had luster in the world.

“We are choosing hope over fear,” Senator Obama told a delirious crowd of 3,000 here the night he won the Iowa caucuses.

But fear has garroted hope, as America reels from the latest humiliating blows on the economy and in Afghanistan. The politician who came across as a redeemer in 2008 is now in need of redemption himself.

Faced with a country keening for reassurance and reinvention, Obama seems at a loss. Regarding his political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can’t learn from his mistakes and adapt.

Many of his Democratic supporters here, who once waited hours in line just to catch a glimpse of The One, are disillusioned.

“We just wish he’d be more of a fighter,” said one influential Democrat with a grimace. Another agreed: “You can’t blame him for everything. I just wish he would come across more forceful at times, but that is not the dude’s style. Detached hurts you when things are sour. You need some of Clinton’s ‘I feel your pain’ compassion.”

The president has been so spectacularly unable to fill the leadership void in Washington that the high-spirited Michele Bachmann feels free to purloin Obama’s old mantra.

“The power behind our campaign is hope and a future,” she chirped to a sparse crowd Monday in Atlantic, Iowa. “That’s all I believe in.” That and making America safe for old-fashioned light bulbs and not those weird curly ones.

Obama’s response on Monday to Friday’s Standard & Poor’s downgrade and to the 22 Navy Seal commandos and 8 other soldiers killed by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan was once more too little, too late. It was just like his belated, ineffectual response on the BP oil spill and his reaction to the would-be Christmas Day bomber; it took him three days on vacation in Hawaii to speak about the terrorist incident when the country was scared about national security, and then he spent the next week callously shuttling from the podium to the golf course.

Bachmann has been riding around Iowa in her bus, with Elvis music and her name emblazoned 25 times on the outside, mocking Obama for going to Camp David last weekend and burrowing in, while the country was roiling.


His inability to grab a microphone and spontaneously assuage Americans’ fears is strange. If the American servicemen had died on a Monday, he wouldn’t have waited until Wednesday to talk about it. He doesn’t like the bully pulpit, just the professor’s lectern.

After failing to interrupt his Camp David weekend to buck up the country on one of its worst days in history, he tacked on his condolences for the soldiers’ families to his economic pep talk, in what had to be the most inept oratorical segue of his presidency.

He long ago should have gone out into the country to talk to Americans in person and come up with a concrete plan that people could print out from the White House Web site and study. Hasn’t he learned how dangerous it is to delegate to Congress? His withholding and reactive nature has made him seem strangely irrelevant in Washington, trapped by his own temperament. He doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led.

Speaking from the State Dining Room of the White House, he advised America it was still “a triple-A country” like some cerebral soccer coach urging the kids to win one for the London Interbank Offered Rate.

With traders hearing nothing new, just boilerplate about “common sense and compromise” on deficit reduction, the Dow Jones industrial average, which had already fallen 410 points, fell 20 more points while the president was talking around 2 o’clock. By the 4 p.m. close, the Dow was 634 points lower.
Obama has spent a lifetime creating his persona — superior, wise, above all parties and interests, all-seeing, calm, unflappable.

But as Drew Westen, a liberal psychology professor at Emory University wrote in The Times on Sunday, puzzling about what has happened to his former hero’s passion, the president never identifies the villains who cause our epic problems.

It’s unclear, Westen wrote, whether that reflects his aversion to conflict or a fear of offending donors, or both.

Obama’s assumption that you can rise above ascribing villainous motives has caused him to waste huge chunks of his first term seeking bipartisanship from Republicans who were playing him for a dupe. And it has led to Americans regarding the nation’s capital as a place of all villains and no heroes.

for the orginal article go here.

The Deal with Russ Feingold's new advocacy arm of Progressives United (Run, Russ, Run)

Our favorite potential candidate to run against the President in the 2012 Democratic Presidential Primary continues to do the peoples' work. And do so very effectively. What we like most about this new advocacy group is the way the former Senator from Wisconsin is going to manage the reporting. This type of organization, a 501(c)(4), can spend and raise an unlimited amounts of money and do so without disclosing the identities of the individuals and/or organizations who donate. This is not the Russ way. He will walk the talk. The tight disclosure standards he has put in place will set contribution limits and allow for public access to the identities of all funds raised and spent.

Transparency of money in politics. There's a concept.

The following article comes to us c/o The Huffington Post. It closes by stating Feingold and his people will be deciding on whether to run for the open WI Senate seat left by Sen. Herb Kohl by the end of the Labor Day weekend holiday.

The Democrat Deal was made aware earlier this month that this is not precisely case. The former Senator was a great Senator and would undoubtedly serve with equal distinction if re-elected. However, there are different dynamics afoot.

Democrats are more and more vocal about their displeasure with the Presidents performance. The recent sell-out to the Tea Party controlled Congress is a palpable case in point. It is no longer just the progressives and party activists who are clamoring for an alternative to the President in the 2012 Democratic Primary. Presently, the majority of all Democrats want a primary challenger. Among the field of viable men and women who could step into history and reclaim the Democrat Party and reclaim America for working families and the middle class, - one name has been gathering the most buzz: Russ Feingold.

To the people of Wisconsin, we agree, Russ would be a stellar choice for the Senate. But we ask you, for the sake of our country, help us send your prodigal son to the White House. It is time for a democrat in the White House, it is time for Russ Feingold for President.

for the original Huffington Post article go here.
for the unofficial Russ Feingold for President 2012 website go here.

Russ Feingold Expands Progressives United, Launches Advocacy Operation
by Amanda Terkel
WASHINGTON -- Former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold is expanding his Progressives United operation, launching a 501(c)(4) and a new website on Monday morning. The organization will now consist of a political action committee for political work and a nonprofit for advocacy efforts. And although a 501(c)(4) is allowed to spend and raise unlimited amounts of undisclosed money, Feingold is promising to practice what he preaches by setting up strict disclosure requirements and contribution limits for his group.

Feingold launched Progressives United in February. Since then, it has raised more than $2 million. The organization was designed to support progressive candidates at the local, state and national levels, as well as hold the media and elected officials accountable on combating corporate influence in politics.

The PAC has raised more than $200,000 for the Democratic candidates in the Wisconsin state senate recall elections, and it organized a campaign calling on President Obama to fire General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt as the head of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The new nonprofit arm will allow the group to do more advocacy work, allowing the PAC to concentrate on political work. The PAC will be posting new endorsement criteria for candidates and asking supporters to nominate possible individuals they would like to see Progressives United endorse.

"It's clear people are fed up with the way corporations are running our politics and our government. Progressives United is taking the next step to fight back," said Progressives United Executive Director Cole Leystra.

Feingold has been one of the Democratic Party's most vocal critics on the issue of whether to accept corporate contributions.

Speaking at the annual Netroots Nation conference for progressive bloggers and activists in June, Feingold said the Democratic Party was "in danger of losing its soul" if it did not adopt stricter regulations on campaign contributions. He singled out Priorities USA, a new Democratic independent expenditure group, or super PAC, that is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of corporate cash for political purposes.
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The nonprofit that Feingold is forming, known as a 501(c)(4) in the U.S. tax code, is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of undisclosed money as long as its primary focus is not politics.

But Feingold is placing extra restrictions on his new organization. It will disclose 100 percent of its income and will not knowingly accept any money from corporations, national banks, labor unions, federal contractors or federal or state lobbyists. It is also swearing off independent expenditures, electioneering and the "issue ads" that are popular with outside groups. No contributions above $10,000 per individual per year will be accepted.

The group says it is also putting up firewalls between Progressives United Inc., the nonprofit, and the Progressives United PAC. While they will share resources and staff, they will be financed and fundraised for separately, and they will engage in distinct activities. On Aug. 1 of congressional and presidential election years, all non-administrative operations will be conducted and financed through the PAC.

On Monday, Progressives United supporters will receive an email announcing the launch of the new website.

"With elections coming up in Wisconsin next week and around the country soon -- and with corporate money already flowing into politics through shadowy front groups like Karl Rove's Crossroads -- we had to launch our new website right now to get these important grassroots tools into activists' hands as soon as possible," reads the message.

Feingold has said that he will decide by Labor Day whether he will run for retiring Sen. Herb Kohl's (D-Wis.) open U.S. Senate seat in the 2012 elections. Progressives United staff insisted that the new announcement is an extension of the senator's long fight for campaign finance reform, not any indication about his political future.