Daily Archives: November 21, 2011

The Permanent Counterculture

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Be sure to read Jonathan Chait’s “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?” about how liberals began to dump President Obama even before he took office. But then after you’ve read that, read the Booman:

In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the liberal left was the intellectual soul of Democratic Party. It had to cobble together an uneasy coalition of socialists and Jim Crow Democrats and city bosses and ward heelers. But liberals were in charge of the big things, like implementing the New Deal, creating the United Nations, and setting up the Bretton Woods system. …

… But then came Vietnam. That stupid war destroyed the liberal consensus. It created a counterculture. And that counterculture is where liberal legitimacy went to die. You cannot be a governing philosophy at the same time that you are countercultural movement. A countercultural movement is set up to oppose power. It is a critique of a country, not a platform for governing a country. And that’s where the left has been stuck since about 1968. This is something distinct from Will Rogers’s old saw about “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat!” This isn’t just about herding cats. It’s a fundamental flaw in the progressive predisposition.

Yes. Governing is about enacting what is possible. Franklin Roosevelt made very un-liberal deals with southern segregationists to get his legislation passed. Today’s Left went ballistic when Obama invited Evangelical pastor Rick Warren to speak at his inauguration.

I keep saying this, but President is the most progressive president since LBJ. What he’s enacted so far is much more liberal than anything the Clinton or Carter administrations even attempted. Chait documents this. Yet in liberal circles one is not allowed to point this out. It’s like everyone had an anti-Obama microchip planted in their brains.

Relating this to the OWS movement — one of my frustrations with the OWSers is that it is trying to be a popular-democratic movement and a counterculture at the same time, and I don’t think it can be both. I just read this on Salon:

The image of huge crowds of everyday people confronting legions of cops protecting the conclaves of the rich and powerful who run the world is more powerful than any words. It would draw the battle lines between the 99% and the 1% in the streets. And it is ultimately in the streets, not in meetings or conferences, where the political struggle will be played out as they have been from the French Revolution more than two centuries ago to the Egyptian Revolution today. Holding public space is key.

That’s fine, but I don’t think this lady, for example, is all that “everyday.”

You want the guy watching on television from Dubuque, Iowa, who is worried about his job and his debt load and doesn’t like his daughter’s boyfriend and goes to the Shiloh Baptist Church every Sunday to be able to relate to what you are doing. Maybe he has a lot of conservative social views, but he might still relate to economic injustice issues, if someone could make the effort to relate to him a little bit.

The counterculture should have been left in the 1960s.

Update: A writer in the Economist suggests that liberals are disappointed in Obama only because his campaign rhetoric set their expectations too high. That’s some of it, maybe, but it doesn’t account for the degree of Obama-hating on the Left. There is something much more pathological going on.

Let’s Play Analogies!

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“Democratic pollsters” Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen are once again patiently explaining to readers of the Wall Street Journal why President Obama should surrender the White House without a fight.

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president’s accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.

Some things do snark themselves, don’t they?

One year ago in these pages, we warned that if President Obama continued down his overly partisan road, the nation would be “guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it.”

You cannot make this up. Well, I couldn’t, anyway. Caddell and Schoen can, though.

If President Obama were to withdraw, he would put great pressure on the Republicans to come to the table and negotiate—especially if the president singularly focused in the way we have suggested on the economy, job creation, and debt and deficit reduction.

To Caddell and Schoen, for Republicans to “come to the table and negotiate” translates into “accepting the Democrats’ unconditional surrender.”

By going down the re-election road and into partisan mode, the president has effectively guaranteed that the remainder of his term will be marred by the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity, common purpose, and most of all, our economic strength.

But of course, if Hillary Clinton were president, all Washington would join hands and sing kum-bye-yah. Because the Republicans would never wage a propaganda war smearing Mrs. Clinton every time she breathed. Oh, wait …

Anyway … Caddell and Schoen are one-time “Democratic pollsters” who have carved out a career for themselves writing nonsense like this. And I wonder if even Republicans are demented enough to believe it, although they certainly seem to enjoy reading it. I’ve been trying to think of an analogy for them — Caddell and Schoen are to the GOP what Tokyo Rose was to Japan. Something like that. But perhaps one of you could do better.