This Explains a Lot, But About What?

There’s a story getting buzz this morning that Michele Bachmann is subject to incapacitating migraines and that she takes a lot of medication to manage this condition. Which explains a lot, if true.

However, this story — which is heavy on innuendo — is coming from Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. Very interesting. Might this be the Republican establishment’s way of taking Bachmann down early? I’m sure the PTBs don’t want her to be the nominee, and they don’t want her around to take the air out of the real nominee’s campaign. Steve M. recalls that the Bush campaign tried something similar against McCain in 2000, putting out stories that suggested he was unstable because of his POW experience. Which, come to think of it, explains a lot.

Speaking for the Left

Joan Walsh tries to make two points in this column, and I say it’s partly on, partly off.

First, she comments on a talk between President Obama and some Boston college students. The President said that he was being derided both as a crazy left-wing Marxist (from the Right) and a right-wing tool of Wall Street (from the Left). These both can’t be true, he said. Then he brought up the Emancipation Proclamation. Walsh writes,

Obama explained that even though Lincoln opposed slavery, his Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in states that were fighting against the Union; it didn’t apply to slave states that were Union allies. Obama’s not pointing that out to call Lincoln a hypocrite or malign his commitment to eradicating slavery; he’s describing it as a savvy pragmatism, a leader understanding the limits of his time. “Here you’ve got a wartime president who’s making a compromise around probably the greatest moral issue that the country ever faced because he understood that `right now my job is to win the war and to maintain the union,'” Obama told the students.

I agree with his assessment of Lincoln’s values, and Lincoln’s cautious pragmatism. But then Obama went a little too far.

“Can you imagine how the Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, `Lincoln sells out slaves.'”

Walsh thinks Obama went too far because, in fact, many northern editorialists of Lincoln’s day did blast the Emancipation Proclamation as a betrayal and sellout of the Cause; and the Huffington Post isn’t really a mouthpiece of the Left, but a commercial website.

Walsh is right about the Huffington Post, and the President’s statement would have been more accurate if he had cited, for example, FireDogLake. But this does not negate the President’s larger point, which was that the abolitionist purists of Lincoln’s time hated the Emancipation Proclamation because it fell short of what they wanted. The Emancipation Proclamation was to abolitionists what the Affordable Care Act came to be for the firebaggers.

I don’t want to get sidetracked here about the political reasons the Proclamation was written the way it was written. Most of you know about that, anyway. I’ve brought up before that abolitionist leaders opposed Lincoln’s nomination for the 1860 presidential election, because he wasn’t “pure” enough on the slavery issue. Lincoln was willing to compromise and protect slavery in the slave states, in exchange for preserving the Union, and the abolitionists weren’t having it. I don’t recall if there was another candidate the abolitionists rallied behind, but if there was, he wasn’t Abraham Lincoln.

And the moral is, sometimes holding out for “perfect” is stupid. Sometimes you gotta go with what you can get. And sometimes, events take over and go in their own directions in ways that leaders didn’t anticipate. Emancipation finally happened, less because of but in spite of Lincoln’s plans when he entered office. A series of compromises and unforeseen events freed the slaves; Lincoln was just an instrument.

This is not to say that I think President Obama’s political and policy judgments are always right, but neither do I think his policy compromises represent the policies he wants and planned for all along, as some among us brainlessly rant.

So Walsh mostly misses on that one. But she’s right about her next point —

But there’s a deeper problem here: The fact that pundits and talking heads have become a stand-in for a politically engaged left. I watched GOP macher Grover Norquist on “Hardball” Monday; he was terrible. I realized I hadn’t seen much of Norquist on TV before, and he’s really not very good at it. But why should he care? By forcing his no new taxes pledge on Republicans, via Americans for Tax Reform, he’s become one of the most powerful men in the country. I’m trying to think of Democratic activists who have had a comparable impact their party, and I can’t. Instead, the relationship of the Democratic base, and progressives, to Obama and to his constituency is weirdly defined by talking heads, whether Huffington or Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews or the welcome new addition, perhaps temporary, of Rev. Al Sharpton to the MSNBC lineup.

Walsh is right that there is no progressive version of Grover Norquist who can somehow bend Congress to do his will. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it reflects the fundamental difference between those in the U.S. who call themselves “conservative” these days, but who are really reactionaries, and progressives. For all their blathering about “liberty,” the reactionaries are authoritarians, and the base is made up of blind, besotted followers.

The right-wing movement in the U.S. is being orchestrated by a few very powerful individuals in a way the American Left is not. Righties always whine about George Soros, but Soros is just a (somewhat erratic) source of funding. He’s not a grand initiator of movements, nor is he trying to manipulate the public and the government in the same way that Norquist, the Koch brothers, and the other elites of the Right do. So no, there is no progressive equivalent to Grover Norquist.

Progressivism doesn’t have leaders, exactly, and on the whole progressives make really bad followers. We may rally behind someone for a short time, but we rarely stick to anyone for more than a few weeks or months. There are some politicians and media celebrities — Bernie Sanders, Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman — that we continue to admire, but such people tend to appeal to our intellects; they aren’t necessarily forming us into a movement that is actually going anywhere.

So although it has its cracks and fissures, the Right is much better at working to a single, directed purpose than the Left, which makes it more effective. But I’m not sure there is any way to change that. Progressives just don’t do the queen bee-worker bee thing nearly as well.