Since September 11, many Americans have rediscovered the virtues of manliness in office. The Democrats have a job to do if they’re to challenge the “daddy party” in this respect. -Jay Nordlinger, Sept. 17, 2004, Wall Street Journal.
I don’t like Joe Klein. I might enjoy sipping a martini and having a cocktail weinie while Joe plied me with inside baseball stories on the Washington elite. But, deep down, I’d be suppressing an urge to kick his ass. Klein has a new book out called, Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid. I haven’t read it, and I don’t plan on reading it. But, I just got done reading Thomas Frank’s merciless review of it in the New York Observer. And it reminded me of why I don’t like Klein. It also reminded me of why I don’t like Howard Fineman, or Chris Matthews, or any number of guys of a certain age that pass for sage observers of American politics.
Frank gets right to the heart of it, here:
The second fixed idea in Mr. Klein’s mental universe is a persistent disdain for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. This, too, is common sense for certain self-designated spokesmen of the 60’s generation (remember the annoying “rebel capitalist” meme of the late 90’s, in which the libertarian New Economy was supposed to be the final flowering of the counterculture?), and Mr. Klein duly assails “the mopey left” with their “down-on-America pessimism.” He laughs off “state-run health care” as a “vegetarian notion” and, as he has done in his other books, heaps contempt on traditional liberalism—on the economic issues like education, wages and Social Security that once linked the Democratic Party to its working-class base. Economic liberalism, Mr. Klein yawns, is boring stuff—“jobs, health-care, and blah-blah-blah,” is how he summarizes it at one point—pure boilerplate platitude that only a consultant could love.
…Liberalism sucks, authenticity rocks:
…This makes for a truly bizarre series of conclusions, the first and most important of which is the courageousness of centrism. Up until now, you have probably thought that when you saw Democrats dumping their traditional principles in order to run pallid, market-tested campaigns appealing to swing voters with rhetoric borrowed from the G.O.P., they were doing so because they had been listening to consultants, pollsters, focus groups and so on. Well—according to Mr. Klein, you have it precisely backwards. In Joe’s world, the consultants and the pollsters and even the money are all on the other side, forever driving the cowardly politicians to the partisan extremes. Consultants on the Democratic side seem always to turn out to be liberals in Mr. Klein’s telling, and liberalism itself is usually the sad result of a candidate listening to consultants. What the Democratic Party is in need of is what Mr. Klein calls a “radical middle” that talks truth rather than liberal platitude.
Now, I could get all upset about Klein’s analysis of consulting and its influence. But, that’s not what really irks me. What irks me is this idea that liberals are boring, anti-American, wussie-boys. We get this from a plethora of men in the punditocracy…most of them are nominal or reformed Democrats.
From Tweety:
MCMAHON: Chris, there are so many bills sitting up in committees, bottled up because Republicans won‘t let Democrats bring them to a vote. There are bills that would make health insurance more available and more affordable, that would control health care costs, that would do all kinds of things, but Republicans won‘t let us.
MATTHEWS: You know what I think? It‘s your reputation as the mommy party that hangs in there, even when you blow it. You‘re still the mommy you go to when you have a problem.
O‘BEIRNE: They love their mothers.
MATTHEWS: Your nose is running, you know.
MCMAHON: I love my mother, don‘t you love your mother, Chris?
MATTHEWS: How many shots do you have? Ask any guy if they know what shots the kids have had, right? They have no idea. Anyway thank you, Steve McMahon, happy St. Patrick‘s Day to both of you. Kate O‘Beirne, Katie O‘Beirne.
From Howard Fineman:
The first salvo came the other week, when Bush and Cheney asserted that the war in Iraq was in fact being won (just read the bullet points). And now they have the Democrats in their gun sights, as the Mommy Party of “cut and run,” confusion and weakness in the face of global evil.
It’s easy to be bored by bread and butter issues when you make six figures, have health care, and send your kids to private schools and universities. Dismissing those issues as ‘mommy issues’ from a defunct ‘mommy party’ and then calling centrism ‘courageous’ and ‘radical’ is just obnoxious. If these assholes ever stopped to consider the real-world ramifications of their centrist consensus that it is morally acceptable to leave 45 million people without access to preventative care, they might just realize their dismissiveness goes beyond obnoxiousness and trends toward pure evil.
But, they won’t think about that until something happens to someone they know and love and it touches their calloused-over hearts. In the meantime, they will go on manufacturing consensus and touting the courage of centrists like Joe Lieberman and John McCain…men, both of whom, are to the right of Barry Goldwater and approaching Attila the Hun.
Joe Klein deserves a knuckle sandwich for writing a book called How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid. No one is more responsible for trivializing politics and the seriousness of bland centrism on poor American lives, than Joe Klein. Klein thinks we’re stupid….stupid enough to stay asleep while he and Fineman and Matthews and the rest of them sing us a lullaby about Republican manliness and the ‘vegetarian’ concept of a national health care system.
