Time Marches On Bill Maher

A little over a week ago, unfunny comedian and ignorant but opinionated HBO star Bill Maher offered his assessment of the November 2 rejection of the Democratic Party. His conclusion? He concluded that since blue dog Democrats lost and leftists Democrats won, the answer to why the Democrats lost big time is that they didn't move far enough to the left fast enough.

"What does this [the huge loss] tell you?" asked Maher rhetorically. "You know, it tells me that this election was lost when Obama didn't back the public option [on health care]. To me, that was the one key thing that said to the people--You know what? This is no different than the Al Gore Democrats, the old Al Gore playbook. 'Let's run from our achievements. And let's not stand for what we believe in.'"

Somewhat surprisingly, Maher was challenged by the editor-at-large of Time Magazine, Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria was one of Maher's guests on his HBO show Real Time. Well, Time got real. Using the same sarcastic tone for which his host is famous, Zakaria retorted with: "It's difficult to imagine independents saying 'I'm gonna vote for extremely right-wing Republicans because Obama wasn't left-wing enough'--I think it's more plausible to say that they perceived, rightly or wrongly, that Obama had moved too far left. Fundamentally, 85% of the country has healthcare and worries about costs. 15% doesn't and worries about access. What Obama did was, he dealt with the issue of the 15% before he dealt with the issue of the 85%."

Although Zakaria characterized conservatives as "far right wing" and used the weasel-words "rightly or wrongly," this editor of a very liberal magazine laid Maher out. And that was while neglecting to mention that the concerns of the 85% were exacerbated by the passage of Obamacare, while the needs of the 15% were left largely untouched. In other words, Zakaria, a man of the left, analyzed Maher's conclusion from Maher's right. And his assessment made Maher's look very foolish. Zakaria was not willing to think that Democrats were choosing suicide by electing Republicans, including Tea Party candidates. They were simply saying, "we reject socialism."

Many Democrats love socialism, but as many do not. Much of the Democratic base is union labor. Even though the union bosses took their dues to promote socialism in very expensive campaign ads, nearly half of union workers voted to stop the march of Marx by voting for the other party. "Labor" is not nearly as leftist as "Big Labor Bosses."

Andrew Stern, the longtime leader of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and former bedmate at Barack Obama's White House, may spout "worker's of the world unite," but most plain union workers think Marx was a jerk, and vote on bread and butter issues rather than social philosophy. This time, nearly half thought that they were likely to run out of both bread and butter if the marching Obamists were not stopped in their tracks.

Zakaria, unlike Maher, picked up on all of this. He is able to distinguish between his own personal opinions and those of the elections he is analyzing. I don't think for one minute that Zakaria wanted the Democrats to lose. But he was able to do what Maher wasn't--step back, suppress his personal feelings, and look at what the real meaning of the Republican surge meant. And he concluded that moderate-conservative Democrats along with independents joined conservative Republicans in saying plainly: "Obama, the House and the Senate, are too far left." Poor Bill Maher still doesn't get it.