Sorry I’m a little uncommunicative. Today my feline roomie Miss Lucy had another mastectomy. We recently passed the one-year anniversary of her first mastectomy with no sign of recurring cancer, but then I felt some tiny little lumps, so I took her to the vet yesterday. The vet called awhile ago to say the surgery went well.
Anyway, I’ve been sitting here most of the afternoon trying to compose a post and not getting anywhere. I think I need a break.
You might have noticed the orange animated ad in the left-hand column — “honor Kos for speaking truth to power.” This Thursday night Markos Moulitsas (along with Wynton Marsalis and Anna Burger) is being honored by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy in New York City. Read more from Jane Hamsher, here.
I realize there’s some ambivalence about Kos among leftie bloggers. See, for example, Nick Bourbaki’s posts at Wampum, here and here. And yesterday I ran across some snarking at Kos in a comment thread at Unclaimed Territory discussing Ned Lamont’s challenge of Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat. This guy, for example,
I hope that your laudible support for electoral challenges to centrist/conservative Democrats extends also to *third-party* challenges of centrist/conservative Democrats. At the moment, progressive third-party voices are being generally shut out of most of the so-called “progressive netroots”… most egregiously at the site of your friend and colleague, Markos.
Unless there’s a D after the name of the candidate in question, Markos would greatly contest what you yourself have just written above: that few things are more constructive than a democratic election where pro-war views get openly debated and then resolved by voters.
The writer goes on to say that he’d been banned from posting at Daily Kos merely for advocating third-party candidates. Maybe, but I know from my own experiences that people who claim they were banned from a site for expressing perfectly reasonable and temperate opinions are usually, um, not telling the whole story. As a blogger who makes robust use of twit filters herself, I support any blogger’s decision to ban anyone from his or her site for whatever reason. And, yes, this includes rightie bloggers who ban lefties. A blog is the blogger’s creation, not a public utility, and bloggers have a right to exercise editorial discretion whether I like it or not.
IMO the commenter quoted above exemplifies the “let’s-keep-shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot” faction of progressivism. Consider: We are up against a big, well-funded, and well-organized extremist right-wing faction that has taken over the White House and Congress and is well on the way toward taking over the judiciary. This faction spouts rhetoric about “freedom” and “democracy” but in fact supports radical theories about the Constitution that have put this nation on the road to totalitarianism. The regime in power has gotten us into one pointless and ruinous war and appears to be preparing to get us into another one. They are threatening the health of the planet by ignoring global warming, and the point at which it will be too late to act is fast approaching. They have strengthened their grip on power by corrupting elections and appropriating news media so that citizens can’t learn the truth. They are strangling our economy with profligate spending combined with irresponsible tax cuts, and every second that passes we are deeper and deeper in debt to other nations, like China.
The house is on fire, in other words. Some of us think our first priority is to put the fire out any way we can. We can argue about what wallpaper pattern would look best in the master bedroom some other time.
If the Democrats can win back a majority in the House this November — or, even better, the entire Congress — the Dems will have some power with which to fight the Right. That doesn’t mean they will, of course; I expect we will need to apply pressure on a future Dem majority to be sure they use their subpoena power (which they don’t have as a minority) and conduct meaningful investigations to expose the Bushies and the extremist Right for the danger to America that they are. But a Democratic majority in even one house will curtail much of the Bush regime’s ability to steamroll over American rights and values any time it pleases.
I want to be clear that I support Democratic candidates in the November elections (most of ’em, anyway) not because I believe they are always right or because I think a Democratic majority in the House will fix all our political problems. I admit that many Dems running for election in November are less progressive than I wish they were. And even If we succeed in taking at least part of Congress away from the Republicans there will still be a long, hard fight ahead to restore America to anything approximating political health.
But a Dem majority would give us a better position from which to fight and a lot more ammunition to fight with. If we don’t take back part of Congress in November, it means two more years of having no power in Washington at all.
The Bushies can do a lot of damage in two years, folks.
Looking beyond the midterm elections — if we succeed, our next goal as netroots activists should be to increase our influence among the Dems. We must deliver the message to the Democratic Party establishment that it’s time to stop dancing the Clinton triangulation two-step. We must sell progressive policies to the public and pressure Dems in Washington to enact those policies. If we can topple Joe Lieberman, the most egregious of the DINO Bush bootlickers, this would send a clear signal to the Dems that they must reckon with us, and that they can’t take our loyalty for granted. This is essentially the argument made by Kos and Jerome Armstrong in Crashing the Gate.
There’s a lot more to be done to make America safe for progressivism again, such as reform media so that our messages reach the public without being twisted by the rightie noise machine. Election reform, real campaign reform — all vital goals, and none will be easy to achieve.
But if the Dems don’t succeed in the 2006 midterms, prepare to kiss it all off. That’s reality. And another reality is that until we change the way we conduct elections — allow instant runoff elections, for example — third party candidates will not only lose, they will split the progressive vote and hand elections to Republicans. This has been happening in America since the first political parties emerged, which was while the ink was still drying on the Constitution. I do believe a pattern has been established.
Where does Kos fit into this? IMO Kos is more of an organizer than a blogger, but that’s OK. The netroots are a cornucopia of great bloggers, but great organizers are harder to come by. I don’t always agree with Kos, but I admire his ability to get in the faces of politicians and media and demand attention. The YearlyKos convention — which was fabulous, IMO, and if they have another one next year I’m already there — was a major step toward giving netroots progressivism real power in the flesh. I couldn’t have done it. I suspect most of us couldn’t have done it. But Kos did it, and he deserves the credit. So, I congratulate Kos for being honored by the Drum Major Institute. I wish him continued success, and I hope more bloggers step out from behind their monitors and follow his lead.
And if we keep fighting, the day will come when progressive goals will be achievable. Goals like providing health care for all Americans and a genuine commitment to reducing global warming will no longer be kept dangling out of our reach by the power of the Right.
Last January I caught some flames with this post, in which I said that too much of the Left was “stuck in a 1970s time warp of identity politics and street theater projects and handing out fliers for the next cause du jour rally.” But for at least forty years — since I was old enough to pay attention to politics — I’ve watched earnest and dedicated liberals stand outside the gates of power and hand out essentially the same fliers for the same causes, year after year, decade after decade. And in most cases we’re no closer to achieving real change than we were forty years ago. On many issues we’ve lost ground. Yet too many lefties (like the commenter above) care more about ideological purity than about accomplishment.
If in-fighting over ideological purity is getting in the way of having the power to enact progressive policies, then the hell with ideological purity. Speaking truth to power is grand, but let’s not forget the ultimate goal is to be power. I believe one of the reasons we have been rendered into a minority is that too many lefties act and think like a minority; we’re perpetually out of power because that’s how we envision ourselves. So even though an overwhelming majority of the American public now agrees with us on Iraq, for example, somehow we’re the extremists, and the hawks — who dominate government and media — paint themselves as mainstream. Righties, on the other hand, maintain total faith that the majority of Americans are with them, even if poll after poll says otherwise. And that faith has empowered them.
We are the mainstream. We are the majority. But to take our rightful place in American politics and government we must start thinking like a majority and acting like a majority. It’s way past time to stop standing outside the gates of power handing out fliers. It’s time to crash the gate.
This morning while cruising the blogosphere I stumbled on a comment in which a fellow declared he sided with conservatives on the immigration issue. He is, he said, against illegal immigration. I inferred he thinks liberals are for illegal immigration.
Not that I’d noticed. There may be some immigration activists promoting open U.S. borders, but liberals on the whole are more focused on globalization and the exploitation of workers worldwide, and loosening U.S. border restrictions won’t have an impact on that problem, I don’t believe. In our current political climate, and at a time when U.S. manufacturing jobs are dwindling, flooding the U.S. job market with undocumented (and cheap, and exploitable) workers could erode pay and working conditions for native-born workers. This is not where American liberals want to go.
I suspect lots of righties assume liberals are “for” illegal immigration, or at least aren’t as against it as they are. IMO this is symptomatic of the dumbing down of American political discourse; it’s assumed that every issue has only two opposing and absolute sides, and if conservatives claim one side, liberals will take the other side out of sheer perversity. This is one of the many reasons we can’t talk to righties.
Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are in favor of securing the borders and reducing, if not eliminating, the number of people entering America illegally. The disagreements are over how best to do that, and what to do about the undocumented immigrants already here (amnesty, deportation, or other).
One way to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants is to take away their incentive to immigrate here. And the incentive for most is the promise of a job. Yet Spencer S. Hsu and Kari Lydersen tell us in today’s Washington Post that the Bush Administration hasn’t been all that vigilant about cracking down on hiring undocumented workers.
The Bush administration, which is vowing to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal workers, virtually abandoned such employer sanctions before it began pushing to overhaul U.S. immigration laws last year, government statistics show.
Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.
In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.
I’m not even going to start on how national security might be compromised if undocumented people from anywhere can show up here and get work.
The government’s steady retreat from workplace enforcement in the 20 years since it became illegal to hire undocumented workers is the result of fierce political pressure from business lobbies, immigrant rights groups and members of Congress, according to law enforcement veterans. Punishing employers also was de-emphasized as the government recognized that it lacks the tools to do the job well, and as the Department of Homeland Security shifted resources to combat terrorism.
OK, so maybe I will say something about compromising national security. Isn’t border security an important part of national security? Oh, wait, I forgot … we’ve got to put all of our resources into Iraq because we started a war there for no logical reason. Never mind.
The administration says it is learning from past failures,
Yeah, and I’m Long John Silver.
and switching to a strategy of building more criminal cases, instead of relying on ineffective administrative fines or pinprick raids against individual businesses by outnumbered agents. …
This is droll —
Still, in light of the government’s record, experts on all sides of the debate are skeptical that the administration will be able to remove the job magnet that attracts illegal immigrants.
Translation: This is the Bush Administration we’re talkin’ about, folks, so don’t expect them to do anything competent.
“The claims of this administration and its commitment to interior enforcement of immigration laws are laughable,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group that favors tougher workplace enforcement, among other measures. “The administration only discovered immigration enforcement over the past few months, five years into its existence, and only then because they realized that a pro-enforcement pose was necessary to get their amnesty plan approved.”
Hsu and Lydersen note that while the Bushies and congressional Republicans talk about getting tough at the borders, “about 40 percent of the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States entered the country legally on visas and simply stayed.” They also describe Clinton administration crackdowns on undocumented people working in Georgia onion fields and midwestern meatpacking plants. The immigration raids drew the ire of farmers and meatpackers when onions remain unharvested and meatpacking plants shut down.
Politicians in both parties have bought into Bush’s “guest worker” program that would allow documented temporary workers into the country to do jobs “Americans won’t do.” But unless there are very strict limits put on such a program, if it becomes reality expect employers to clamor for guest workers to take jobs Americans are doing now, and still would do, but not for slave wages and medieval working conditions.
Today Bob Herbert wrote about some meatpacking jobs that native-born Americans are doing:
Life inside the Smithfield plant can border on the otherworldly. To get a sense of what conditions are like on the killing floor, where 32,000 hogs are slaughtered each day, listen to the comments of a former Smithfield worker, Edward Morrison, whose job required him to flip 200- and 300-pound hog carcasses, hour after hour:
“Going to work on the kill floor was like walking into the pit of hell. They have these fire chambers, big fires going, and this fierce boiling water solution. That’s all part of the process that the carcasses have to go through after they’re killed. It’s so hot in there. And it’s dark and noisy, with the supervisors screaming, and that de-hair machine is so loud. Some people can’t take it.
“I would go home at night and my body would be all locked up because I was dehydrated. All your fluids would just sweat out of you on your shift. I don’t think the company cared. Their thing was just get that hog out the door by any means necessary.”
Frankly, I think that if Smithfield can find native-born Americans to work in the pit of hell, it’s hard to imagine what sort of job no American would do. And if some jobs are so onerous or ill paid that Americans won’t take them, what is our moral justification for importing “guest workers” to take them?
The Smithfield plant workers have been trying to unionize for years, but the NLRB determined that the owners had not allowed the workers to hold fair elections. Recently, Herbert said, Smithfield agreed to abide by NLRB rules. Maybe Smithfield figures it eventually it will bust the union with “guest workers.”
I do prefer documented guest workers to undocumented illegal workers. But care must be taken that the guest workers are not exploited and abused and that they aren’t being used as a means to bust unions or lower wages.
Further, “guest worker” programs in Europe have not exactly worked well. The “temporary” workers were not as temporary as originally intended, yet they were given no means to assimilate into the “host” nation. From an editorial in The New Republic, April 17 issue:
… the workers, while remaining in those European countries, never became of them. Consider Germany, for instance, where more than two million Muslims of Turkish origin–whose families came as guest workers four decades ago–live today. They live in Germany not as Germans, but in a strange sort of nationless limbo–afforded certain benefits of citizenship (such as health care) but denied the privilege of actually being citizens. Which, of course, denies them any incentive to assimilate to their new country. The prospect of such a thing happening in the United States with Mexican guest workers is only too real.
Colin Nickerson wrote for the Boston Globe (April 19),
For decades, there were no efforts to integrate the newcomers. They were entitled to social benefits, but not citizenship. Their children could attend schools, but little effort was made to give them language skills. Far from a melting pot, Europe in the post-World War II era became the realm of ”parallel societies,” in which native and immigrant populations occupied the same countries but shared little common ground.
Now, the presence of millions of largely unassimilated newcomers, coupled with terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, has triggered furious debates in Europe over national identity and the future of immigration.
Europeans thought the guest worker programs would provide needed labor without having to assimilate non-European workers. It didn’t work that way, and the non-assimilated ethnic minorities are creating huge social problems — the same kind of problems that righties fear from illegal immigrants.
(Isn’t it interesting how being tough and mean often creates the very problems the toughness and meanness are supposed to eliminate?)
The European experience shows us that “temporary” workers are not always temporary. And if the programs discourage assimilation and block the “guests” from ever seeking citizenship — well, don’t expect a good outcome.
Last April Taylor Marsh wrote,
I believe in a guest worker plan that includes fines, paying taxes, learning English, background checks, then waiting in line behind those who are already waiting for their chance, but eventually offering a path to citizenship. I just don’t believe in the hobgoblin that is those big bad illegal immigrants. It’s ridiculous.
But guest worker programs don’t answer the problem, which is stemming the tide of illegal immigrants who continue to flood into this country for jobs.
And this takes us back to cracking down on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Making it more difficult to hire illegal immigrants would do a lot more to reduce illegal immigration than all the fences and Minutemen you can scrape together. Unfortunately, the Bushies seem unable — or unwilling — to do this.
Sorta kinda related — Avedon is guest blogging at Liberal Oasis; read what she says about “Those Awful Liberal Ideas.”
Sorry I’m a little too tired to comment, but here are some links not to be missed —
Sunday Times — “Horror show reveals Iraq’s descent”
Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher — “‘Wash Post’ Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Details Increasing Danger and Hardship”
David Usborne, The Independent — “Baghdad blasts mock US claims of Iraqi progress”
Carol Williams, Los Angeles Times, “Kicked out of Gitmo”
David Rose, The Observer, “How US hid the suicide secrets of Guantanamo”
Hannah Allam, Knight Ridder, “Somali leaders warned U.S. of strengthening Islamic militia”
Here are a couple of editorials that ought to be read together. The first is in today’s Baltimore Sun —
Having refused for three years to try to come up with any actual constructive ideas about the war in Iraq, congressional leaders last week chose to put the enduring conflict smack in the center of the coming election campaign. Jeering at “cut-and-run” Democrats, the Republicans placed their confidence in a formula that would keep American soldiers in the deepening quagmire — indefinitely.
There it is: their strategy for victory.
How many times have we heard that the Democrats have no proposals for dealing with Iraq? Yet the Sun is right — the GOP has no idea what to do about Iraq, other than use it as a wedge issue.
Of course, as far as the Right is concerned, just having U.S. troops fighting in Iraq is all the plan they need. We’re bound to achieve “victory” eventually if we have enough faith.
The maneuvering in the Capitol on Thursday and Friday was shameless and pandering, but at least it puts Iraq on the table for the voters to think about. The last elections, in 2004, came when it seemed to some that things could still be turned around, given a little patience. Two years later, with no significant progress, Americans’ patience has about run out.
Yet the Republicans are still using Iraq as a wedge to split Democrats —
… the country, after all this time, deserves a real debate, not the lugubrious emoting that went on in Congress last week. The Republicans there were feeling their oats, because Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bogeyman of Baghdad, had been whacked with a half-ton of explosives, because President Bush had spent five hours in Baghdad and come away confident that the Iraqi government was going to come up with a plan, and because that government itself has finally been formed just six short months after elections.
The House and Senate, as expected, rejected any sort of timetable for withdrawal. A plausible argument could be made that such an approach is not the best way to extract U.S. troops from Iraq, but plausible arguments were not what congressional Republicans were about. If there’s a better way to get out of Iraq and leave the country in some sort of stable shape, they should be talking to Americans about it. … If the Republicans think that doing nothing different is a good strategy, let’s talk about that, too.
The Sun is right; the Dems should be challenging the Republicans on Iraq and demanding they trot out ideas for dealing with it.
The second editorial is in today’s Los Angeles Times.
On Friday, the House, by a 256-153 vote, approved a nonbinding resolution opposing an “arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment.” During debate, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill) dusted off the specious connection between Iraq and 9/11, piously pleading with his colleagues to “show the same steely resolve as those men and women on United Flight 93, the same sense of duty as the first responders who headed up the stairs of the twin towers.” For its part, the Pentagon unwisely provided members with “rapid-response talking points” that sounded more like a stump speech than a military reference work.
The President himself is taking (for him) a softer tone —
The commander in chief, meanwhile, appears to recognize that being too triumphalist and partisan could undermine support for his stated intention of reducing U.S. forces gradually as the Iraqi government takes over more responsibility for security.
This is standard operating procedure for the Bushies. Although last week’s maneuvers to paint the Dems as wusses on the war was no doubt orchestrated by the White House — Karl’s gettin’ feisty now that he no longer has a threat of indictment hanging over his head — it’s essential that the President appears to be above it all.
In his homecoming news conference last week, Bush sent mixed signals about whether he understands that public impatience with the U.S. presence in Iraq threatens his stated goal there: to help Iraq “govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself” and become “an ally in the war on terror.” On the one hand, he said, “success in Iraq depends upon the Iraqis.” Yet he also suggested that Iraq was so crucial to the war on terror that it could not be left to the Iraqis, at least not yet. “If we fail in Iraq, it’s going to embolden Al Qaeda types,” he said. There is, to put it mildly, a tension between those two statements.
Yes, and let’s see the Dems capitalize on that. Let’s see the Dems take the GOP smear campaign and shove it back in their faces.
Behind the New York Times firewall, Frank Rich writes [UPDATE: Here’s a public link to the article at True Blue Liberal],
Polls last week showed scant movement in either the president’s approval rating (37 percent in the NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey released on Wednesday night) or that of the war (53 percent deem it a mistake). On NBC Tim Russert listed Mr. Bush’s woes: “Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.” Americans pick Iraq as the most pressing national issue, 21 points ahead of immigration, the runner-up. They find the war so dispiriting that the networks spend less and less time covering it. Had the much-hyped Alberto roused itself from tropical storm to hurricane, Mr. Bush’s Baghdad jaunt would have been bumped for the surefire Nielsen boost of tempest-tossed male anchors emoting in the great outdoors.
All of which makes it stupendously counterintuitive that the Republican campaign strategy for 2006 is to run on the war. But there was Karl Rove, freshly released from legal jeopardy, proposing exactly that in a speech just before the president’s trip. In a drive-by Swift Boating, he portrayed John Kerry and John Murtha, two decorated Vietnam veterans calling for an expedited exit from Iraq, as cowards who exemplify their party’s “old pattern of cutting and running.”
Rich points out that Karl is working from exactly the same playbook he was using back in 2002. But in 2002, Bush’s approval ratings were sky-high, and in the four years since the American public learned the hard way that Bush can’t be trusted. Why isn’t Karl adjusting the playbook?
One explanation might be that he thinks his team can still keep the ball by running the old plays, because the Dems still haven’t developed much in the way of a defense. Although individual Dems have taken firm positions on Iraq, the party as a whole is all over the map and can’t agree on anything approximating a united counter-strategy. Rich continues,
While the Democrats dither about Iraq, you can bet that the White House will ambush them with its own election-year facsimile of an exit strategy, dangling nominal troop withdrawals as bait for voters. To sweeten the pot, it could push Donald Rumsfeld to join Mr. DeLay in retirement. Since Republicans also vilify the defense secretary’s incompetence, his only remaining value to the White House is as a political pawn that Mr. Rove can pluck from the board at the most advantageous moment. October, perhaps?
In a post I published recently at Unclaimed Territory I linked to an article from In These Times magazine that calls for liberals and progressives to develop a “unified progressive narrative.â€
“An opening now exists, as it hasn’t in a very long time, for the Democrats to be the visionaries,†writes Michael Tomasky, the editor of The American Prospect, in the magazine’s May 3 issue. “To seize this moment, the Democrats need to think differently—to stop focusing on their grab bag of small-bore proposals that so often seek not to offend and that accept conservative terms of debate. And to do that, they need to begin by looking to their history, for in that history there is an idea about liberal governance that amounts to more than the million-little-pieces, interest-group approach to politics that has recently come under deserved scrutiny and that can clearly offer the most compelling progressive response to the radical individualism of the Bush era.â€
A narrative is more than a bulleted list of policy proposals. A narrative is a story. A narrative puts policy in the context of history. And stories are often saturated with mythos — traditional beliefs and notions accumulated about a particular subject. The Republican mythos about Democrats and liberals is that they don’t know how to fight bad things, like Communism, crime, and terrorism. They don’t seem to understand how dangerous these bad things are. They raise taxes to ruinous degrees and throw money at expensive social programs that only make [mostly black and brown] people lazy. They are impractical and snooty and don’t love America/children/God as much as normal folks do.
Ann Coulter’s whole shtick is the Republican mythos. She has become the perfect reflection and embodiment of the mythos, like a priestess who gives voice to the pure and undiluted narratives of her tribe.
This mythos has been so thoroughly internalized by much of the American public that it doesn’t have to be spelled out in Republican narratives. Dennis Hastert merely has to evoke the memory of Flight 96 to conjure the lore of weak and wussy liberals who don’t know how to fight. This mythos is so hardwired into American brains that a baby-faced pudge like Karl Rove can tell Republicans audiences that Democrats are wussy and soft, and the audience can’t see what a joke that is coming from Karl.
Frank Rich continues,
What’s most impressive about Mr. Rove, however, is not his ruthlessness, it’s his unshakable faith in the power of a story. The story he’s stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won’t lose at the polls if there’s no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won’t tell their own. And they don’t — whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans’.
Rich also links to Michael Tomasky:
What’s needed, wrote Michael Tomasky in an influential American Prospect essay last fall, is a “big-picture case based on core principles.” As he argued, Washington’s continued and inhumane failure to ameliorate the devastation of Katrina could not be a more pregnant opportunity for the Democrats to set forth a comprehensive alternative to the party in power. Another opportunity, of course, is the oil dependence that holds America hostage to the worst governments in the Middle East.
Instead the Democrats float Band-Aid nostrums and bumper-sticker marketing strategies like “Together, America Can Do Better.” As the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, “The very ungrammaticality of the Democrats’ slogan reminds you that this is a party with a chronic problem of telling a coherent story about itself, right down to an inability to get its adverbs and subjects to agree.” On Wednesday Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were to announce their party’s “New Direction” agenda — actually, an inoffensive checklist of old directions (raise the minimum wage, cut student loan costs, etc.) — that didn’t even mention Iraq. Symbolically enough, they had to abruptly reschedule the public unveiling to attend Mr. Bush’s briefing on his triumphant trip to Baghdad.
Talking points alone are not enough. Agendas are not enough. George Lakoff’s “framing” technique, with which I essentially agree, is not enough, either. And it may be that standing up to Bush and the wingnuts is not enough, either, as long as their stories are better than ours. But it’s a start.
Yesterday I linked to a Digby post, which said,
Let’s be clear about this: if we lose this fall, it will not be because the “war colored glasses†crowd was immature and failed to behave properly at the debutante ball. It will be because the Democratic establishment blew off its own voters in order to please David Broder and the stale DC punditocrisy — the same thing they have been doing for more than a decade and losing.
Today David Broder himself provides the perfect follow up. Those untidy antiwar activists in Connecticut are messing with poor Joe Lieberman’s re-election bid, he says, and ain’t it just awful?
Senator Lieberman waxes nostalgic for those more civilized times when candidates for office were chosen behind closed doors by gentlemen —
In an interview, Lieberman sounded a note of nostalgia for the old days. “John Bailey genuinely believed that primaries were not only divisive but often didn’t pass the ultimate test of finding the candidate who could win,” he said. If Bailey were alive, his attitude would be, “We have an incumbent senator who is quite popular in the state; we have an opportunity to elect three Democratic congressional challengers; we have a very tough race for governor. Why would we want to challenge an incumbent senator who could lead the other candidates to victory?”
Um, because his record sucks?
The answer is simple: the war, which has lost support among Connecticut voters, especially those likely to vote in a Democratic primary in the heart of summer-vacation season.
Except that isn’t the simple answer. It isn’t just the war.
[February 27, 2006]Just this past year, Lieberman voted to confirm John Roberts, and he voted against the filibuster of Samuel Alito LAW ‘75. He also voted for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who, as White House Counsel, called the Geneva Conventions “quaint†and was responsible for the legal justifications for torture at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons. Lieberman’s strong ties to industry left him standing alone as a Democrat willing to work on Bush’s ultimately failed privatization of Social Security. And just this week, he refused to join an overwhelming majority of lawmakers from both parties in opposing the Bush administration’s sale of administrative contracts for 21 ports to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. Lieberman supported federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case, voted to stop federal aid to public schools that used materials “supportive of homosexuality†and, in 2002, he presided over the confirmation hearings for Michael Brown, the supremely unqualified nominee for FEMA chief whom Lieberman wholeheartedly supported.
It can’t get much worse than that, can it? Oh, it can. Perhaps Lieberman’s most galling characteristic is his willingness to appear in conservative media and to publicly and unreservedly bash Democratic policies and other Democrats. As a Democrat with a bullhorn, Lieberman can and does do more harm to the Democratic message machine than any Republican. It is no surprise then that his approval rating is 15 points higher among Republicans than among Democrats or that he has fundraising parties hosted by Republican lobbyists. He carries water for the GOP and reinforces GOP frames. Consider the case of Rep. John Murtha, a retired colonel. After many talks with commanders on the ground and other Pentagon experts, Murtha — an elder statesman of the House Democratic Caucus and a respected voice on security issues — called for a measured withdrawal of troops from Iraq. In response, Sen. Lieberman cried, “In matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.†Murtha retorted, “What credibility?†It’s bad enough for someone like Karl Rove to routinely impugn the motives of Democrats; it is quite another for our own Democratic senator to do so.
More from the Broder column — you’ll like this —
“I think we did the right thing in overthrowing Saddam, and I think we are safer as a result,” he continued. “Second, while I have been very critical of the Bush foreign policy before the war and the Rumsfeld-Bush policies in Iraq after Saddam was overthrown, I also made a judgment I would not invoke partisan politics on this war.”
No, he’ll stand by shufflin’ and grinnin’ while the Republicans invoke partisan politics on this war.
“My opponent says it [Lieberman’s support for the war] broke Democratic unity,” Lieberman said. “Well, dammit, I wasn’t thinking about Democratic unity. It was a moment to put the national interest above partisan interest.”
If “national interest” means shredding our political heritage and institutions in favor of jack boots and a perpetual state of war, he has a point.
“I know I’m taking a position that is not popular within the party,” Lieberman said, “but that is a challenge for the party — whether it will accept diversity of opinion or is on a kind of crusade or jihad of its own to have everybody toe the line. No successful political party has ever done that.”
Got that? If you’re opposed to Lieberman, you’re a jihadist.
Broder says that Lieberman is considering running as an independent. “A former Democratic vice presidential candidate, a three-term senator, a former state Senate majority leader and state attorney general forced to run as an independent,” Broder says. How distressing.
Update: See also Glenn Greenwald:
One of the most absurd arguments currently being circulated is that there is something misguided or even unethical about supporting a primary challenge to Lieberman. These complaints often include the supremely ironic accusation there is even something anti-democratic about the primary challenge, because it somehow signifies that diversity of opinion is prohibited and dissent punished. But as Roger Ailes points out: “Seems to me that having a pro-war candidate and an anti-war candidate running against each other within a party is about accepting diversity of opinion.”
It would be incredibly irresponsible for the Democrats not to have an all-out debate about whether they want to be represented in the Senate by someone whose foreign policy views are more or less identical to the most militaristic ideologues in the administration. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the primary challenge against Lieberman is motivated almost exclusively by his support for the Iraq war (an obviously false claim given that numerous Democrats who supported the war are still supported by most Democrats), Lieberman’s neoconservative world-view is squarely at odds with the views of most Democrats (and most Americans), and that, among other things, is what is at issue in his primary challenge.
It is highly revealing that those who view the Connecticut primary challenge as being some sort of anti-democratic affront — such as those geniuses at The New Republic for whom the only more important goal than Middle Eastern wars is Lieberman’s re-election — do not attack the specific views of Ned Lamont, but instead attack the existence of the democratic contest itself. As was true with their advocacy of the invasion of Iraq, neoconservatives don’t want to win a debate over whether further war-mongering, this time in Iran, makes sense. They once again want to squelch meaningful debate entirely, even if it means advancing that blatantly inane claim that a primary challenge to a highly controversial Senator with extremist foreign policy views is inappropriate and even anti-democratic.
Conventional wisdom before and after the Take Back America conference — featuring The Booing of Hillary — is that liberals are “dividing” the Democratic Party. Unlike the groomed and housebroken “centrist” Dems like Joe Lieberman, we liberals are flea-bitten, uncombed mutts scratching at the door with muddy paws. Our disagreement with the indoor pooches is not a difference in opposing views but an untidy “disarray” that threatens to soil the carpets.
Last Tuesday morning Senators Clinton and Kerry separately addressed the Take Back America attendees, who were assumed to be “liberal activists” in some news stories, although that point is debatable. Senator Clinton’s speech was well received on the whole, but her non-position on the Iraq War — she wants neither an open-ended commitment nor “a date certain” for withdrawal — drew polite applause, plus some heckling and boos. By contrast, Senator Kerry won the day, and the audience, by admitting he had been wrong on the war in 2002 and calling for a firm withdrawal date. When Kerry said this the audience caught fire and leapt to its feet, cheering and applauding lustily.
John Gibson of Fox News, believing he saw disarray among the Dems and overlooking parallel disagreements about the war among Republicans, attempted to shove a wedge into the party by pressing former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe to choose between “Hillary’s side” or “the John Kerry side.”
Wow, which is it? The divide is widening within the Democratic party over the war in Iraq. Two top Dems don’t agree on an exit strategy, as you’ve just heard. And all this comes as the party fights to take back control of Congress. Now some Democratic leaders are trying to take things in a new direction. Former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe joins us now. Before we get into a new direction, Terry, what am I supposed to make of no deadline from Hillary, must have a deadline now from John Kerry? What is a Democrat to think?
I think the audience at Take Back America answered that question clearly; a whopping majority of Dems at the conference preferred a firm withdrawal date to “whenever .” I realize the TBA crowd is not necessarily a representative sample of Democratic voters. But considering that only 9 percent of Democrats approve of the George Bush non-strategy in Iraq (CBS News Poll, June 10-11), the TBA attendees may reflect rank-and-file Dem opinion pretty durn accurately.
And it seems to me the same poll reveals the Republicans are more “disarrayed” than the Dems. The GOP split on the question “Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?” was 71 to 24; the Dems split 9 to 85 (remainders were unsure).
Speaking for myself, I’m willing to consider options other than a firm withdrawal date. For example, I could live with a plan for withdrawal or redeployment within a time range — say, six to nine months, or by the end of 2007, or some such. What’s important is that the government draw up a concrete plan and then implement it in a timely manner. “Whenever” is not satisfactory. That appears to be the opinion of a solid majority of Dems.
Now, finally, print pundit Robert Kuttner suggests in today’s Boston Globe that just maybe the Dem party’s “disarray” is no disarray at all, but instead is a vacuum of leadership.
Most voters want to end American involvement in Iraq. As in the Vietnam War, the voters are ahead of most politicians. And political debate about defense is finally recovering from the administration’s manipulation of 9/11 trauma.
Yesterday’s passage of a House resolution affirming the President’s “plan” shows us political debate hasn’t recovered enough, however. Forty-two House Dems caved.
Democrats serious about national security are redefining what it means to protect America, and what it means to be a “Defense Democrat.” The dwindling Lieberman wing of the party and its enablers of George W. Bush have had a lock on that label for far too long.
Wow, a print pundit almost caught up to where leftie bloggers were even before the bleeping invasion. Be still my heart.
Digby links to a Republican analysis that says Dems aren’t ready to lead. The analysis points to the Lamont challenge of Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat as an example of immature Dem voters viewing the world through “war colored glasses.” Digby comments:
“The Democrats are not ready to lead.” I think we all know why, don’t we? The “war colored glasses” crowd is a terrible influence, don’t you know. We’re so out of control we are supporting a challenger in a Senate primary! Call out the guard!
And to charges the Dems haven’t fired up the base enough to ensure a House takeover by the Dems, Digby says,
I have to agree that Democrats have yet to fire up the base enough. And the reason is that although many voters are unhappy with Bush they can’t see how things will be any different with Democrats in charge of the congress….
…Democrats can ignore this and fret about the immature and distasteful grassroots — or they can start giving their base a reason to vote for them. Mid-terms are about turn-out. Until rank and file Dems see that their party won’t just excuse, enable and endorse GOP policies they have no reason to get off the couch.
Let’s be clear about this: if we lose this fall, it will not be because the “war colored glasses” crowd was immature and failed to behave properly at the debutante ball. It will be because the Democratic establishment blew off its own voters in order to please David Broder and the stale DC punditocrisy — the same thing they have been doing for more than a decade and losing.
Don’t look at us. We’re trying to get Democratic voters charged up about being Democrats again. Pissing and moaning because Joe Lieberman is facing a primary challenge is having the opposite effect. If we lose, it will be because the party establishment once more showed contempt for Democratic voters — a fatal error the Republicans never ever make.
I cannot understand why the Dems are so clueless. According to a CNN poll of June 14-15, Bush’s disapproval numbers are still sixteen points higher than his approval numbers. This was after the glorious victory over Zarqawi and the publicity stunt visit to Iraq, notice. The war remains solidly unpopular with big majorities of Dems and Independents (the “I’s” poll at 67 percent against, 27 percent for, same poll linked above). Yet the Bushies can still scare the Dems into covering Bush’s butt with the ol’ soft on Communism terrorism threat.
You want to look tough and strong, Democrats? Then stand up to Bush. Every time you cave you prove to America you’re a pack of weenies.
This is an addendum to the post on the YearlyKos and Take Back America conferences I published yesterday at Unclaimed Territory, in which I complained that there was much talk of building progressive media infrastructure but no real plan for doing it. Robert Perry writes at Consortium News:
Some e-mailers and friends have asked why I didn’t attend some of the recent progressive conferences – like “Take Back America†or the “Yearly Kos Convention†– where media was on the agenda. The short answer is that I have been to progressive meetings in the past where media was discussed – and almost nothing gets done.
As the Right has built up a vertically integrated media infrastructure that stretches from newspapers, magazines and books to talk radio, cable news and well-funded Internet sites, wealthy liberals mostly have sat on their hands. Even now, as the Right expands that infrastructure horizontally down to state, district and local levels – with ominous portents for Election 2006 – well-heeled liberals remain mostly passive.
And this pattern has been going on for years.
In the 1990s – after I left Newsweek over internal battles about what I viewed as the magazine’s mis-reporting of the Iran-Contra Affair – I talked to executives of leading liberal foundations about the desperate need for building honest media in America. I often got bemused looks. One foundation bureaucrat laughed and announced, “Oh, we don’t do media.†Another liberal foundation actually banned media-related proposals.
It’s as if American liberals and possibly some tribe in Borneo are the only groups on earth who don’t understand the transformational power of media.
I believe we have progressed to the point that American liberals — the ones at the conferences, anyway — now understand that in the long run “building honest media” is our biggest and most essential task. Without this, even though we might win elections here and there, liberals cannot expect to take back any real political power or have any influence in American policies. But how do we do this?
Perry explains the steps taken by right-wing think tanks and foundations to build the Wingnut Echo Chamber that would assimilate most of the “MSM.” He continues,
Indeed, in the treatment of Clinton during his presidency and Gore during the pivotal Election 2000, it was difficult to distinguish between the hostility from the right-wing media and the venom from the mainstream media. Yet, wealthy liberals – including many who made their fortune in the entertainment media – just couldn’t get their brains around the need to build strong media outlets for honest journalism.
There were always reasons why that couldn’t happen. One plan was too ambitious; another plan wasn’t ambitious enough.
Other times, perfection became the enemy of the good. There were esoteric debates about how media outlets should maintain their purity by not taking commercials, even though that guaranteed that under-funded operations couldn’t pay professional salaries or achieve necessary technical standards.
Or there were self-absorbed discussions about how liberals don’t need media the way conservatives do because liberals are more free-thinking. Or there was the defeatism about how liberal talk radio couldn’t succeed. Some activists even thought one answer was to get Americans to stop watching TV (after all, the strategy to get Americans to turn off their radios had worked so well).
There was also a strange embarrassment on the Left about the importance of money in achieving what needed to be done. The reason we put the word “consortium†in our title was to stress our view that the only hope for achieving the honest media needed to address America’s political crisis was to pull together substantial resources for building strong media outlets and producing quality journalistic content.
But whenever I’d attend one of those progressive conferences, I left with the feeling that the people who had the money were not serious about doing anything with it, at least not on media. Or maybe they just didn’t see media as all that important.
Even in the past year when some liberal foundations have told me that “oh, we now get the media thing,†what they really wanted to do with their money was put it into activism on media issues, such as organizing demonstrations to oppose funding cuts at PBS.
When I spoke to two foundation officials a year ago and made my pitch for the need to support journalistic “outlets and content,†one of them responded, “oh, those are just words.†What they decided to do with their money was to support “media reform,†i.e. organizing around media issues.
After this year’s “Take Back America†assemblage of liberal activists had ended in Washington, I sat down with a West Coast friend who had attended the conference. He had been there pushing the need for investments in media and had concluded, “All they care about is organizing.â€
Yeah, pretty much. That said, I think the YearlyKos media panel, which consisted of real smart people I had actually heard of — Jay Rosen, Christy Hardin-Smith, Jamison Foser, Duncan Black, and Matt Bai — was way better than the TBA media panel, in which some polling consultant took up most of the time. But without money there’s not much we can do but organize.
This morning the House approved a non-binding resolution “that effectively endorses President Bush’s war policy and rejects setting a date for the withdrawal of U.S. forces” from Iraq, writes William Branigin at WaPo.
The nonbinding resolution, which declares “that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror,” passed by a vote of 256 to 153, with five lawmakers voting “present” and 19 others not participating. Forty-two Democrats sided with 214 Republicans in supporting the measure. Three Republicans and one independent joined 149 Democrats in voting against it.
Curious about which House Dems are still providing butt cover for Bush, I combed through this list of how House members voted and pulled out Democrats who voted yes; also noted are Dems who were present but didn’t vote and those who were absent. Any Dem congress critters not on this list voted no.
AL Cramer
AR Berry, Ross, Snyder
CA Berman, Cardoza, Costa (Sherman was present but did not vote. Waxman was absent.)
CO Salazar
FL (Boyd was present but did not vote.)
GA Barrow, Bishop, Marshall
HI Case
IL Bean, Costello, Lipinski (Evans and Butierrez were absent.)
IA Boxwell
KS Moore
KY Chandler
LA Melancon
MA Lynch
MI (Dingell and Kilpatrick were absent)
MN Peterson
MS Taylor, Thompson
MO (Cleaver was absent)
NY Higgins, McCarthy (Bishop was absent)
NC Etheridge, McIntyre
OK Boren
PA Holden
SC Spratt
SD Herseth
TN Cooper, Davis, Gordon
TX Cuellar, Edwards, G. Green
UT Matheson
VA Boucher
WA Larsen, Smith
WI Kind
The Republicans who voted no were Leach of Iowa, Duncan of Tennessee, and Paul of Texas. Sanders of Vermont, an Independent, voted no.
In a 256-153 vote that mirrored the position taken by the Senate earlier, the GOP-led House approved a nonbinding resolution that praises U.S. troops, labels the Iraq war part of the larger global fight against terrorism and says an “arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment” of troops is not in the national interest.
“Retreat is not an option in Iraq,” declared House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. “Achieving victory is our only option … We have no choice but to confront these terrorists, win the war on terror and spread freedom and democracy around the world.”
I see Boehner still believes in the Good Democracy Fairy.
Balking carried a risk for Democrats, particularly when they see an opportunity to win back control of Congress from the GOP. Republicans likely will use Democratic “no” votes to claim that their opponents don’t support U.S. troops.
The most recent polls still say a big majority of Americans — 61 percent in the latest CBS News poll — disapprove of the way Bush is handling the war. Yet voting for “staying the course” is the “safe” vote, and votes that reflect the opinion of a big majority of Americans is a “risky” vote. This suggests the Good Democracy Fairy needs to spend some time in Washington. Along with the Accuracy and Fairness in Media Fairy.
Some GOP incumbents who face tough challenges from Democrats in November issued qualified support for the measure while criticizing the GOP-led Congress.
“The American people are looking to us to answer their questions on how much progress is being made, what are the Iraqis themselves willing to do to fight for their freedom and when will our men and women come home,” Rep. Jim Gerlach, R-Pennsylvania, said before voting in favor of the resolution.
Like I said in the post title — resolve has nothing to do with this.
The House vote comes one day after the Senate soundly rejected a call to withdraw combat troops by year’s end by shelving a proposal that would allow “only forces that are critical to completing the mission of standing up Iraqi security forces” to remain in Iraq in 2007.
That vote was 93-6, but Democrats assailed the GOP maneuver that led to the vote as political gamesmanship and promised further debate next week on a proposal to start redeploying troops this year.
Wake me up when the Senate gets some real resolve.
I posted a long rumination about Conference-a-thon at Unclaimed Territory, if you’re interested.