This afternoon, Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) passed away at age 77. First elected in 1974, Congressman Murtha was Pennsylvania’s longest-serving representative and the first Vietnam War combat veteran elected to Congress.

On his passing today, President Obama said that following Murtha’s career in the Marines, “Jack’s tough-as-nails reputation carried over to Congress, where he became a respected voice on issues of national security. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife of nearly 55 years, Joyce, their three children, and the entire Murtha family.”

Chairman Tim Kaine issued the following statement:

“Today we mourn the loss of a great American figure who dedicated his life to serving his country both in the military and in the halls of Congress. Congressman Murtha had a storied 37-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps and in 1974 he became the first Vietnam War combat veteran elected to Congress.

“Just the other day, Congressman Murtha became the longest serving Pennsylvanian in the history of the House of Representatives. During his career, he worked hard to bring tens of thousands of middle class jobs to western Pennsylvania. His legacy as a fighter for his causes and his constituents will be remembered long after his passing.

“Our thoughts and prayers today are with the Congressman’s wife, his children and his grandchildren.”

It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.

Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.

Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues — despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right — but voters don’t care.

Does health care matter? Not as much as you’d think after this yearlong crusade. In the Post/ABC poll, the issue was second-tier — at 24 percent. Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.

Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.

It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering.

On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers. He has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately — and markedly after political disaster struck last week — but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.

The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows. This is at best a makeshift solution.

Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground. Obama must also reconnect. The former community organizer whose credit card was denied at the Hertz counter during the 2000 Democratic convention now spends too much time at the White House presiding over boardroom-table meetings and stiff initiative rollouts instead of engaging with Americans not dressed in business suits.

When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.

It’s become so easy to pin financial elitism on Democrats that the morning after Brown’s victory the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had the gall to accuse them of being the “one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies.” Never mind that the Bush White House gave us the bank (and A.I.G.) bailouts, or that the G.O.P. is even more in hock than Democrats to corporate patrons. The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.

Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.

The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.

Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”

Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.

Democrats enjoy some Christmas goodies at the Dec. 5 Holiday and Campaign Filing Party.

From Donkey Tales 01/10:

Welcome to the official website of the Johnson County, Texas, Democratic Party.

It seems like only yesterday that we moved into our new digs, got a new Party Chair and started work on the 2010 elections – actually it’s been two whole months — but here we are, already, in 2010.

The last few months of 2009 were exciting ones for Texas Democrats what with Tom Shaffer and Kinky Friedman getting out of the governor’s race, newcomer Karouk Shami getting in, Bill White switching from running for Senator to running for Governor (and immediately becoming the front runner), and Hank Gilbert moving from the Governor’s race to the Agriculture Commissioner’s.

Here in Johnson County, we have at least two Democratic candidates, including Burleson attorney John Greene, who’s running for the District 58 Texas House seat currently held by Republican Rob Orr. Of course, anybody would be better for the district than Orr. Greene,however, is an outstanding candidate with solid Democratic convictions. (Check out the story about him in the Cleburne Times-Review. And, while you’re at it, you might give a call to the Star Group and ask why its newspapers throughout the county refuse to cover anything having to do with Democrats.)

The annual Christmas party on Dec. 5, was a lot of fun and a bunch of us, including Greene and his wife Julie, had even more fun taking donations of canned goods to Operation Blessing in Cleburne and Harvest House in Burleson , the week before Christmas. The food will go to help needy families throughout the county. Both groups were very appreciative.

We’re happy to finally have a presence online. Hope you will continue to check us out and leave comments, questions, accolades, whatever. – Pam H.

“Yesterday’s ruling is a victory for all Americans who believe that every eligible citizen should have the right to vote and have their vote counted. It also represents a resounding repudiation of the Republican Party’s trumped up claims of voter fraud. Our great nation was founded on the principles of equality and freedom, and our founders envisioned the right to vote as central to our ideals. Yet for years, Republicans have engaged in deplorable practices that intimidate voters and make it more difficult for them to cast their ballot.

“This is wrong, and it is illegal. As the court made clear, these types of actions stand in the way of Americans’ fundamental rights under the Constitution of the United States. Republicans would be better served trying to engage minority and under-represented voters rather than trying to intimidate them. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that these types of practices still occur, that Republicans have engaged in them in recent elections and that without a consent decree barring such actions Republicans will continue to have an incentive to engage in them. That Republicans, who attempted to use foreclosure lists in the 2008 election to deny people the right to vote in Michigan, even asked the court to nullify this decree, shows just how eager they are to continue engaging in practices to suppress the rightful votes of thousands of American citizens.

“These are not the ideals that our country was founded on, and they should not be tolerated. We applaud yesterday’s decision and recommit ourselves to fighting to ensure that the right to vote is fully protected. And we encourage Republicans to work with us to reform our electoral system to remove any impediments to voting and to ensure our voting rights laws are enforced consistent with the law.”

Democrat Curt Hanson won a special election to replace former representative John Whitaker who was appointed to a role with the USDA. Iowa Democratic Party chair Michael Kiernan commented on the victory;

“I congratulate Curt Hanson on a successful campaign. His was a local campaign about local issues, and it is not surprising he was successful. Curt will make an excellent addition to the Democratic majority in the Iowa House. Congratulations to Speaker Murphy, Majority Leader McCarthy and the staff of the Iowa Democratic Party, for their outstanding effort and teamwork, and the victory that has followed.

“Democrats have been successful in the last two election cycles and tonight because we have recruited great candidates, followed through on the promises we’ve made and are governing the state responsibly.

“We will continue to build upon this strong organization and team approach as we prepare for statewide elections next fall. Tonight’s results don’t change our strategy for 2010. Tomorrow we will get back to work on candidate recruitment, fundraising and organizing. We have every reason to expect continued success.”

“About 26 percent of the district’s 67,950 eligible voters turned out for Saturday’s runoff, an increase from the 20 percent voter turnout in the Aug. 1 primary.”

Communications facilitates the DNC’s interaction with the press. Using traditional methods of communication (e.g. press releases and media events) in combination with new media tools (e.g. web ads and online components) communications works to promote President Obama’s agenda for change and provide support to our state parties and Organizing for America.  Through our rapid response, research efforts and regional press team, communications holds Republicans accountable, advance Democratic principles and help Democrats win elections.

The Finance department is responsible for all DNC fundraising activities including direct mail, telemarketing, internet fundraising, and fundraising events with principals and surrogates from the DNC and the White House. The finance department is focused on fundraising at all levels, from marketing, small donor grassroots events to high donor dinners.

The New Media department specializes in online organizing, advocacy, and fundraising, communicating directly with the DNC’s long-time subscribers as well as folks from the Obama campaign and newly-recruited members. By using the DNC’s and OFA’s own websites and email lists, as well as social media such as Facebook and Twitter, the New Media department is continuing to build on the Obama Campaign’s success to harness online interaction and participation to help pass the President’s agenda and elect Democratic candidates across the country.

The Office of the Secretary coordinates the planning of all National Committee, Executive Committee and Standing Committee meetings. This office also serves as the DNC’s liaison to the National Committee members. As the Party’s official record keeper, the Secretary’s Office maintains the DNC’s official membership lists and coordinates archival storage of the Party’s official records. It also compiles the list of National Convention delegates, oversees convention voting operations, and publishes the Official Proceedings of each convention.

The DNC Operations Department is responsible for management and monitoring of the committees day to day business and legal activities. The department ensures that the operations are efficient and effective and that the committee resources are managed in a way that allows for the implementation of the strategic plan as determined by the Executive Director.

Organizing for America is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering communities across the country to bring about our agenda of change. As a project of the DNC, OFA’s primary focuses are mobilizing and organizing our nationwide grassroots movement to support President’s Obama’s plans for healthcare, education, and energy.  While the national headquarters is housed within the DNC, OFA has staff in states throughout the country.

Party Affairs and Delegate Selection (PADS) oversees the institutional affairs of the Democratic National Committee: Party rules, the delegate selection, DNC and Convention standing committees, official appointments and nominations, and early preparations for the Convention.

Political develops and implements the coordinated campaign strategy on behalf of the DNC with Democratic candidates at federal, state and local levels. The Political department also coordinates the interaction between the Party, State Parties, and allied organizations.

The Research Department is responsible for both the long and short term needs of the DNC. In the short term they provide the necessary facts for the rapid response required when promoting or defending the administration, including health care and the economy. They also focus on long term research concerning potential political opponents and third party groups. In addition, they maintain a very large television archive which the DNC and Democratic allies use for rapid response.

The Voter Protection Department provides the DNC with guidance on voting rights and election administration issues. Recognizing that protecting the right to vote is fundamental to our democracy, the work of the department begins well in advance of Election Day. Working with Donna Brazile, DNC Vice Chair for Voter Registration and Participation, the department monitors developments in state and federal election law, and coordinates with the Party at the local and national level to promote laws and policies that advance the right to vote. Through the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute, the voter protection department seeks to engage and educate voters about their rights, update voters on recent developments in the law, and encourage their participation in the political process. Working with state counsel and individualized state-based coordinators, the department helps develop programs to ensure that all eligible voters are able to cast a ballot and that every vote is fairly and properly counted.