Nate Silver documented how the left-wing blogosphere launched the AIG bonus story into orbit, much to the detriment of President Obama and the Democratic Party. Which might put the following more in perspective.
Seventy-three years after a white-suited Huey Long was assassinated in Baton Rouge, the iron-fisted Louisiana governor is all the rage in Barack Obama’s Washington. At a time when a crash course in the New Deal has supplanted Watergate studies as the capital’s requisite history lesson, attention is suddenly being paid to the Kingfish, as well as radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, the two leading 1930s tribunes of little-man economic anger. When you sit down with Obama insiders, Long’s name pops up in one conversation, Coughlin’s in the next. “You have to remember,” says one Obama adviser, “Huey Long and left-wing populism were a much bigger problem for Franklin Roosevelt than the Republicans.”
The center of left-wing populism (in the blogosphere, anyway) is Open Left. Some recent samples:
Galbraith Weighs In: Geithner Plan => Looting, Fraud & Renewed Speculation, by Paul Rosenberg
Incompetence Watch: Tim Geithner and Larry Summers Don’t Read the Business Press? by David Sirota
Economic Credibility Gap: Obama Says People Are Angry About AIG, Axelrod Says No One Cares by David Sirota
The front-pagers there appear to be united in calling for Tim Geithner’s resignation after less than two months in the job. Meanwhile, Chris Bowers concludes “Democrats and progressives are screwed if we don’t catch this populist wave.”
The Open Left crew appears to believe that there is a populist wave forming in the country and either we catch that wave or the right-wing will. If Glenn Beck catches our wave, “we’re screwed.”
The problem isn’t so much David Sirota writing this:
If the White House doesn’t get out of the tone deaf D.C. echo chamber and get back on message, my bet is that very soon Republicans’ faux populism that portrays Democrats as part of the problem is going to start getting traction.
As this:
Now today, White House adviser David Axelrod insists nobody cares about AIG ripping off taxpayers. “People are not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG,” he told the Washington Post.
Look, I get that nobody in Establishment Washington genuinely cares that taxpayers are being ripped off, and I get that the super-wealthy political class from millionaire investment banker Emanuel to millionaire consultant Axelrod to millionaire banker Tim Geithner gives much of a shit that our taxpayer dollars are being used to make new millionaires on Wall Street. But their boss, President Obama, is right: A huge majority of Americans, most of whom are not millionaires, are really angry and [sic] has a right to be angry.
Sirota isn’t making a dispassionate assessment that the Obama administration is making a political miscalculation. He’s making an indictment of the character of the Obama administration and accusing them of putting their class interests ahead of the public good. He’s saying that they are deliberately looting the treasury to make ‘new millionaires’ on Wall Street. It would be hard to do a better emulation of Huey Long’s anti-FDR rhetoric.
One key technique that Long used to win support was the radio. In Louisiana, he had regularly used the radio to campaign and present his policies. (He offered lengthy broadcasts over a New Orleans radio station that mixed his remarks with musical selections.) In 1933 when he first introduced three bills in Congress embodying his ideas on the problem of concentrated wealth, he took the–then–unprecedented step of buying radio time from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to speak on behalf of the legislation. As his national recognition (and ambitions) grew, he spoke with increasing frequency to national radio audiences. No politician in this era–except Roosevelt himself–used radio as frequently and as effectively as Long.
The speech included here was from one of his 1935 broadcasts. Typical of Long’s remarks from this period, it includes a litany of charges against Roosevelt and the New Deal (the failure to break up great fortunes, the persistence of unemployment and the growth of indebtedness, for instance), populist attacks on the concentration of wealth in a small number of hands, and proposals to “share” the wealth and provide a homestead and guaranteed income for all as well as old age pensions and a bonus for veterans.
Now, to some degree I do not doubt that the Open Left crew is well-intentioned. They honestly believe that Obama is making mistakes. They think that pushing hard from the left will bring Obama away from the center. But it’s hard to credit remarks like the above from Sirota as well-intentioned. Many people credit Huey Long with having a positive overall influence on FDR because he created political cover for the New Deal as a compromise rather than a series of radical restructurings of American government. But many of the criticisms of Long remain valid, including that he was dishonest and corrupt, that his platform was unrealistic and impractical, and that his demagoguery was somewhat dangerous. Whatever Huey Long was, he was not a political analyst. You wouldn’t have looked to him for the truth about the choices facing the nation or a fair assessment of the job FDR was doing in the White House.
I don’t think it is necessarily progressive to stake out a hard-left position and relentlessly criticize the Obama administration using dishonest rhetoric and ungenerous analysis. I think Al Giordano is a genuine progressive, and I agree with most of the points he has been making in recent days. I also think it is important to listen to Nate Silver’s observations:
What was definitely true in this instance (as is very often the case) is that the blogs (at least the liberal ones) were ahead of the mainstream media in getting after the story; AIG was dominating the blogosphere discussion by midday on Sunday, whereas mainstream media outlets, except for the Times and Post, didn’t really catch up until that evening. On the other hand, the conservative blogs were quite slow in gravitating toward the story, not really focusing upon it until late yesterday morning, in spite of the fact that it had all sorts of potential to be damaging to the Obama administration. Conservative bloggers should probably spend more time reading liberal blogs for story ideas (likewise, liberal bloggers should spend more time reading conservative ones).
What’s remarkable is that a mere two months into Obama’s presidency we have reached a point where conservatives are well-advised to find their anti-Obama talking points by reading liberal blogs. We used to cringe whenever Democrat Joe Lieberman provided this same service to the Republicans. In fact, many of the people currently engaging in the harshest and least generous criticisms of Obama (thereby creating precisely the same kind of bipartisan cover Lieberman is famous for providing) were the most ardent supporters of Ned Lamont.
What’s odd is that I get the sense that none of these liberal bloggers have any sense of irony about this. They think their criticisms are fair and necessary and will serve a progressive purpose in the long-run. But accusing the Obama administration of being in the business of looting the treasury for the purpose of creating new millionaires on Wall Street is hardly fair and necessary.
There is a populist wave of anger in the country and that can provide us with opportunities to regulate the markets, impose higher marginal tax rates, and disempower the insurance and credit industries in ways not normally open to us. There is a place for populist legislation. But that’s not what we’re getting by ignoring analysis in favor of disingenuous advocacy. And there is a difference between the two.
