Matt Stoller has a post on the punditocracy that I think is very on the mark. Stoller is reacting to a rather dramatic (and unacknowledged) flip-flop from Dick Morris. Back in March he said Lamont “need not be taken very seriously”; now he says, “Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) will lose the primary and will be so crippled by the defeat and Ned Lamont (D) so empowered, that he will lose the general election as an independent.” But Stoller uses this turnabout to make a broader point.
I’ve stopped thinking in partisan terms, though I am pretty much a partisan. To me, politics is all about conflicting political machines. The pundit/Republican class is not partisan, it’s a class. It’s composed of those who do their business with the machine, the lobbyists, the candidates, the media consultants, and the donors who demand fealty to a certain pro-corporate mindset. The reason I call it the pundit/Republican class is because it’s more profitable for Republicans and pundits, but it’s a class based on false certitude, fear-mongering, and elitism, and there are those who engage in this on both sides.
I think this analysis is correct and it leads to an important point. The netroots should not be about “just winning” in the hope of gaining a majority. We really cannot avoid being generally anti-incumbent. When the outsiders (bloggers) get invited into the inner sanctum it is always jarring to see how elitist, how insular, and how stupid the punditocracy really is. Most of the time I ascribe bad intentions and ill will to the idiotic statements I read from people like Nagourney, Klein, Kurtz, Broder, Fineman, and the like. But, that is not always the case. They really do live in a fantasy world, where they continually mistake their own self-interest as a disinterested analysis of political reality.
Bloggers act as a kind of journalistic incumbent challenge. We constantly challenge their common wisdom. Political incumbent challengers are our natural allies. That doesn’t mean that we should form a circular firing squad and fight Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer at every opportunity. But, it does mean that we should never, ever, assent to their will, their strategy, or their efforts to shut down primaries. If Ned Lamont’s campaign has done nothing else, it has shown us who our real enemies are. They are everyone that has been seen to squirm. For example, watch Tim Russert squirm, and watch Russ Feingold explain reality outside the beltway.
MR. RUSSERT: But Senator, you only have 13 votes for your resolution.
SEN. FEINGOLD: Yeah, that’s not the American people. The 13 votes…
MR. RUSSERT: But that’s the Democratic Party.
SEN. FEINGOLD: No, it’s not.
MR. RUSSERT: It’s less than a third of the–in the Senate.
SEN. FEINGOLD: The Democratic Party of this country is
the people of this country. And I have been all over Wisconsin, all 72
counties, to 12 different states. I can tell you, the one thing I’m
sure of, Tim, is the American people have had it with this
intervention. They do want a timetable for bringing home the troops.
And the fact that the United States Senate doesn’t get it shouldn’t
surprise you.MR. RUSSERT: So the majority of the Democratic Senate is out of touch with the American people?
SEN. FEINGOLD: Yes, it is at this point. Those who vote
against bringing the troops home don’t get it. They’re not out there
enough. They’re not listening to the people. Frankly, they’re not even
looking at the polls. I saw two or three polls, Tim, in the last week
that showed that a majority of the American people favor a timetable.
So it is to our–you know, we lost in 2000, we lost in 2002, we lost in
2004. Why don’t we try something different, like listening to the
American people?
Russ Feingold understands that the Democratic Party is out of touch. And they are not about to get in touch with American people, or the netroots, by suddenly gaining a majority. And we can’t think we will get universal health care or have Congress protect our rights if we don’t get new thinking in Congress, new representatives. Stoller concludes:
You’ve just got to work for what you believe, because the idea of predictability or electability is often wrong, and it’s used as a tool to keep you from working for what you believe.
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The insider Democrats and the punditocracy are worried the netroots will pull them to the left and that, as a result, they won’t be able to win. They no longer even realize that this merely serves their self-interest in bland centrism. They take no responsibility for creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. They don’t correct themselves when their conventional wisdom is proven wrong.
Some bloggers succumb to this thinking, too. Tired of losing, they agree to drop certain principles, or make heroic efforts to frame them correctly, as if we could win if only we could do a Vulcan mind meld with the electorate. What we need is to work for what we believe, and to do so with confidence. A self-conscious salesman is a failure as a saleman. Feingold understands this. It appears that Stoller does too.
