While I don’t know that this is directed as me, I will respond to it anyway.
It’s been a bit of mystery to me why there’s this narrative about blogreading newsjunkies not being enthusiastic enough to vote. Those people vote. It’s somewhat disconnected people who might be a bit too worried about their lack of employment to head out to the polls that Dems should worry about…
This is a misreading of my narrative and the narrative that I think is important. The people who read the progressive blogosphere’s product are indeed political newsjunkies, and are going to vote in extremely high numbers. Some of them may vote for third-party candidates because they’ve been told over and over again that the Democrats suck, but the overwhelming majority of them will vote for the Democrats. The problem lies elsewhere. We’re not just preaching to the choir. We’re helping to set the narrative. No one on the right is going to defend the Democrats’ record. The corporate media isn’t going to defend it or even report it accurately. That’s why most of the country is completely wrong about whether their taxes have gone up or down, or whether or not we lost the money that Bush gave to the banks.
I understand that progressives want to advocate for progressive policies. But, in my opinion, we lost sight of the fact that there is literally no one else in the media who can or who will defend the Democrats if we won’t do it. What most of us did was the opposite. And, because our critiques were factual for the most part, and because we had no political incentive to lie, our critiques carried a lot of credibility with our own base and with the media at large. And, so, no one defended the health care bill, no one defended the stimulus, no one defended TARP, and no one defended the Wall Street reforms. Is it any wonder that people are misinformed about those programs and policies?
And I am not saying that people were wrong to advocate for better policies or that people should have STFU. I am saying that people need to think about what they are trying to accomplish. If you are trying to influence the administration or the Democrats in Congress to do something differently, I don’t see a problem. But if you are just tearing them down, day after day, focusing relentlessly on their shortcomings and consistently failing to highlight their accomplishments, then you are driving a narrative that is going to help keep people uninformed and hostile to progressive aims.
Anyone remotely objective acknowledges that this past Congress has the most progressive record of accomplishment of any Congress since the 1960’s. In fact, the mainstream media is more consistent about reporting this fact than the blogosphere. We certainly haven’t pushed that narrative on the corporate media. They’ve reported it because it’s inarguable. Yet, they haven’t reported it enough. They haven’t reported it in a way that it sunk into the thick skulls of an American public that is being saturated with bullshit.
And the last point is that all this concentration on the plank in our own eye has led to us letting our guard down about what we’re facing from the opposition. If you can name me one area where the current crop of Republicans will be better, let me know. Are they going to be better on refinancing mortgages? On civil rights and privacy? On gay rights? On foreign policy? On health care policy? On regulating Wall Street? On women’s rights? On immigration? On climate? On science? On campaign finance reform? On judges? On process?
So, my narrative is not about depressing the readers of the blogosphere so they won’t go out and vote. It’s about the lost opportunity, the misdirection of focus, the lack of perspective, and the failure to do the one job that only we can do.
And how does this information get to a general audience? The only way I figure that is does is through the personal networks of folks who are political junkies and discuss issues and facts on blogs. And these political junkies are going to pick the information that suits their purposes, which is likely not much different than the information that they would provide if blogs did not exist. And if most personal networks are like mine, characterizing it as the Democratic base is way off the mark; it is much more diverse than that.
I didn’t know that we could push a positive narrative about the Obama administration on the corporate media. They’re too busy reading Politico and hiring Andrew Breitbart.
We push stories into the media every day. What Fox covers, what MSNBC covers, most of it originated in the blogosphere. How were the media going to pick up a story about the wonderful tax breaks everyone got if no one was ever writing about them? Ever.
The narrative on the stimulus was either that it created no jobs (the right’s lies) or that it didn’t go far enough (the left’s truth).
But I was close to alone in trying to explain the constraints placed on the Democrats. That more literally could not be done. That what we got was better than nothing. I mean this not just for the stimulus, but for the whole spectrum of legislation that was produced.
And I mixed in my advice. I didn’t fail to say that policies and political outcomes would be better if they were more progressive. But I knew the constraints. And I told people about them.
The blogosphere, as a whole, has helped undermine our popularity and has not helped inform people about our accomplishments, or put things in perspective, or help set the media narrative for why we deserve to retain power.
What positive stories about the Obama administration have you seen pushed in the media?
What stories of yours have shown up in the media?
The assertion that the blogosphere has helped undermine our popularity is so very far from the truth. There is too much in the blogosphere, even the left blogosphere, even the liberal blogosphere, even the Democratic blogosphere to push people in any particular direction.
We just aren’t that organized, nor that coordinated, not the monomaniacal about anything. We are Will Rogers’s Democratic Party written large across the internet.
And we are too much peanuts to affect the media narrative in a way that the media has decided not to go. There is a lot of power in being peanuts. You are not in the klieg lights. You are not big enough to fight. You are ignored. And you get stuff done. And the liberal blogosphere for the most part is peanuts.
And BTW, you are not the target. Or if you are, you have lots of company in the blogosphere, even among the A-list. But there are many more blogs that going unnoticed have influence and have gotten out the word. State and local progressive blogs, at least in North Carolina, have pushed the accomplishments of the Obama administration. And they are much easier to steer people to than the A-listers that arouse folks’s prejudice because they have heard negative things about them but can’t remember what.
There is too much coordinated messaging from corporate-sponsored Republican operatives, too much message control by owners of the corporate media, too much email blasting to conservatives and rightwinger who mindlessly forward it to other people, too much crap introduced into the national conversation. Folks are lost in the cacophony.
We will not win by pushing stories into the media (unless there is a revolutionary transformation in the media or a rebellion by media employees against shading the truth). We have no other choice than to win by end running the media. Being inter-local instead of national in our channels of communication.
And we (meaning Democrats) can’t retain power we never had in the first place; we can hope that we still have that handhold in the cliff that Barack Obama gave us two years ago.
And the corporate media are maddening but not as overwhelmingly influential as they were even a decade ago.
Here’s what you’re missing.
The corporate media is one of the biggest consumers of new progressive media and new right-wing media. A big part of their reporting is based on the arguments we are having. Most of the time, the stories that are covered on cable news originated in the blogs. This is a new phenomenon, but it’s now true. Once the papers decided to hire their own bloggers and ask their journalists to blog, the circle was complete. And the conversation over health care, for example, did not include more than a handful of people who were positive about the effort. So, that was communicated to the public. No one likes it. Well, I didn’t like it. Not, overall, anyway. And I said so. I called it a piece of shit bill repeatedly. But I also made every effort to make people understand why it was a piece of shit bill and why it should still be championed for the major achievement that it is. I didn’t decide to compound the problem by demonizing the people who actually did the hard work to get it passed.
The corporate media only consumes information from a select number of blogs, left and right. For 15 years, the most consumed rightwing blog has been Drudge. And his blog still drives a lot of coverage. Which are the blogs that the corporate media has picked up on the left? Mainly those that push a negative narrative. And mainly the front page of those blogs and not the struggle going on in the diaries. And mainly with a view to having some blog personalities who will face off against their chosen rightwing bloggers in a he-said she-said conflict.
Thinking that the corporate media is going to represent positive positions taken by blogs is a suckers game.
They read whatever Memeorandum tells them to read, and Real Clear Politics, and Drudge. And they scan their twitter feeds. And they google their own names obsessively.
And the truth. 290 million Americans don’t give a shit about what the media Village reads or what they opine. There isn’t a one on the TV or the radio that commands the respect that Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, or Edward R. Murrow commanded.
OK, 130 million of those are children. That leaves a number very much like the number who voted for Obama. But select out some folks who voted for Obama and are political junkies, then add in folks who voted for John McCain and are not obsessed with Obama or Tea Party or socialism or… You still get around 160 million Americans (a majority in a Presidential election) who don’t give a fig about most of what the media reports.
And are put out with the effort it takes to find the real “news you can use” in all that dreck.
Other than the tea party, what has been the biggest poltical story line of the year? ‘Obama has lost the left’. The left bloghesphere, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, congressional media whores who couldn’t keep their asses off Morning Joe who was playing their asses, and Jon Stewart, a self identified moderate who has the damn nerve to criticize the President from the left, helped create that narrative. Take some damn responsibilty for burning down your own house.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying but I see Booman’s point to. Leading internet writers, and they know who they are, have a responsibility to consider not just what they see as the truth but the context of politics in america, right now and in the last 50 years. They will likely never have influence like say, talk radio bigots, but they do have some influence, both on the national media’s framing of issues and on what democrats in general are talking about. I mean, I like Atrios but he’s like 95% or more negative about Obama. And there are many justifiable reasons why someone would be that way. I’m not that far away! But at the same time it’s reasonable to point out that politics is not academic and that such negativity may well not have a positive effect!
It’s seems like the main thing, setting aside all the pathologies of the corporate media, is that the right has a top down structure based in actual money: when a republican president wants to privatize social security or illegally invade asian countries, he can count on a whole structure of interconnected media personalities, retired generals, former congressmen and lobbyists, think-tank talking heads and corporate funded “experts” to come out and preach the word-for-word identical message 24/7, all basically drawing from the same nexus of ruling class money. This exerts a huge pull on the entire supposedly objective and neutral journalist class. A Democratic president can’t even count on not being undercut by congressmen from his own party, much less 3rd and 4th rate bloggers with minuscule readerships. Think about it, was there a single issue where the right wing media broke with GW, excepting possibly TARP when the rats were fleeing the ship anyway? I think Tarheel has a point in saying we’ll never have that kind of structure, the corporate media will always be laundering right-wing propaganda, and so we need to focus on grass roots organization.
At the same time, there are (and always will be) leading progressive voices, and as leaders they have a responsibility to be realistic and to consider the consequences of their message. Because relentless negativity can be become self-indulgent and self-fulfilling. Lord knows it’s hard seeing the naked facts of history and science systematically ignored, belittled and murdered, to be right about essentially everything important in our world and see nearly every powerful institution in our country designed to strangle this truth. But that’s where we are, and progress is always good, even if in a “just” world that progress is itself nearly criminal. Really, I think these two perspectives work well together.
I mean, I like Atrios but he’s like 95% or more negative about Obama.
You do know that Atrios is an economist by trade, right? Did you ever wonder why a middle of the pack blogger knows Krugman personally? And why wouldn’t Atrios be pissed when Obama hired Summers and Geithner and re-hired Bernanke? Just because he’s never had the fancy titles those three have doesn’t mean he’s not as smart(or smarter) as them. So he sees what’s going on and is rightly pissed. He, like Krugman, see that not enough is being done to get the economy on track. He, like Krugman, sees us doing this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEmJ-VWPDM4
If you know why I post that, you’ll damn well know why they are worried and pissed.
I totally get that. But again, Obama is just one person. He’s made mistakes yes. He may turn out to be a failure. But we have to at least acknowledge what has been done before we judge him. And judging him is probably less important that really speaking our values as progressives. Part of this is standing strongly behind the changes that have taken us forward. That these changes have been painful is perhaps an indication of their worth.
This is why I sometimes am surprised that progressives (or whatever this coalition is) aren’t more impressed by the progress of equality. Gay rights will not end the injustices of america, but it is a victory in a long war. Republicans are really and truly losing on this issue. It’s disappointing to our vision of Obama that he’s not driving this bus. But he’s also not trying to blow the bus up.
So I go back to my interpretation of Tarheel: we have the largest block of registered voters nationwide. If we focus on mobilizing this block, we can consistently beat the republicans. It’s that simple. If we mobilize the Obama vote, we’ll smack the pukes around just like 2008, or worse. Their demographic decline, building across american history, is at hand. Which takes me back to Booman: how do we speak to ourselves? For if we speak immoderately we threaten the community of voices that Obama represented. We literally compromise our ability to get them to the polls, which is the foundation of any change we can make. We have to speak the values that bring us together, even while acknowledging the imperfection of our world. And back to Tarheel: the way to speak our values is to the people we know and who know us. Not wishing we could have a cable news channel/home shopping network for our values-demographic, but speaking them to others.
Really well said, torpid bunny.
Atrios is barely negative of Obama. I don’t mind his or digby’s criticisms because they rightly know who to target; they know who the real enemy is. So I’m not sure where that argument comes from anyway. So what if he talks about HAMP a lot; that’s his shtick, and the admin failed on that policy by themselves. Other than that, I’d hardly call Duncan a harsh critic or one who attacks relentlessly. Paul Rosenberg and everyone at FDL other than dday — who I still wish would have stayed at digby’s — are ones who come to mind fitting BooMan’s critique, not Atrios.
Besides, Duncan, like me, didn’t really care if Bernanke was reappointed or not. He didn’t necessarily support it, but he didn’t oppose it either. Especially once the president nominated him. If the nomination failed, then you’d have the administration forced into accepting someone that Chris Dodd “suggests” can easily get confirmed. The devil you know, and all that.
But I was close to alone in trying to explain the constraints placed on the Democrats. That more literally could not be done.
So you are basically admitting that we are f-cked. And that Congressional Democrats as a group are dumber than a bunch of rocks. And that Obama doesn’t know 11-D chess. Because given the current environment, I can’t say with any certainty that I think Obama will be re-elected in ’12 if the economy doesn’t markedly improve. What is Obama’s plan for getting re-elected and making sure Democrats control the House and Senate in ’12(that can accomplish stuff for the economy)?
Only because the left wants to be better. The right just wants to win. Its because we give a damn that this happens. Sometimes we need the reminder to focus on winning and not on the purity of our souls.
You can give a damn what happens without cutting off your noses to spite your faces. How are you going to help the vulnerable communities you claim to care about with Boehner as speaker?
I’m on your side Bro. I support the president and feel he has done an admirable job under extreme conditions. I have given a couple hundred dollars to the DCCC in the last two months. Nothing compares to the Repugs and their mindless blather and violent tendencies.
Boehner as speaker is an abomination.
However I know how hard it is to condone the coddling of the Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln type of democrat. So I do understand why some of the left goes overboard criticizing the President. I however trust and admire the man.
The harping on the perceived failures of Obama and the Democrats is self defeating. It feeds into a bottomless pit of negativity.
The ones who complain constantly about what Obama did wasn’t good enough are not concerned about the country or the people in it. They are concerned for themselves.
It’s gotten really mean.
They don’t offer any solutions or seem to understand the complexity of writing legislation that will work. The mantra do something about this or that is simplistic.
The Republicans are good at taking some lines out of a left blog and using it against the Democrats.
The msm is after drama of the day and a lot of cable shows that pretend to be news oriented are hosted by people who are bored by facts and too lazy to find out the complete story.
Some days it almost seems as if Obama and the Democrats are the enemies.
The ones who complain constantly about what Obama did wasn’t good enough are not concerned about the country or the people in it. They are concerned for themselves.
I’m sorry for the sensitive eyes(or ears) but that’s bullshit. Promoting cramdown as a method to fix the housing mess isn’t selfish. Saying the stimulus was too small isn’t selfish.
you’re right. those are solid policy assessments and recommendations, and they are not what I am complaining about. I made those same observations. I just didn’t make it a mantra to the near exclusion of anything positive. I have never once criticized Duncan for his effort to promote cramdown because he’s right and he’s trying to convince the administration that he’s right. That’s why Duncan used his time with the president to ask about it.
The stimulus is different. It made sense to say the stimulus needed to be bigger while it was being debated in Congress. After it passed it made sense to say that we were going to need more stimulus. But, we should not have neglected to highlight all the wonderful things in the stimulus bill. And, for the most party, we did. And now we’re not paying the price for the stimulus being too small (in a way we are, because of the overall economy, but not as a perceptual matter), we are paying a price because people think we spent 800 billion dollars and got nothing for it.
On that inaccurate ‘corporate media’ thing on the stimulus. This is law:
But the entire media establishment used numbers from CBO “estimates” of 861 billion (except Leonhardt). Contrary to popular opinion, the corporate media is indeed entitled to it’s own facts.
But you are missing one thing, Boo. We need more, because Bernanke isn’t going to save the day. And will we be able to pass more anytime soon? No!! Why, because it was oversold by the powers that be. Krugman was telling them it was too damn small, but they didn’t listen to him at all(meaning .. they torpedoed themselves from passing a 2nd one politically). I’m sorry Boo, but with the economy muddling along isn’t going to help us. And we are paying a price politically for having asshats like Ben Nelson in our caucus. I know the truth hurts, but so be it.
We had a second stimulus pass the House and was ready for the Senate when Coakley lost. Why did she lose? In large part, other than her personal gaffes, it was because our side wasn’t hearing anything good about what Congress was doing.
But did she really lose because of Congress? Or because she took weeks off of campaigning .. and basically dissed Red Sox fans(the dumbest thing you can do in Boston and Mass. in general)? You do remember how she cried about standing outside Fenway and shaking hands in cold weather .. right?
It was a combination. A Republican doesn’t win that seat on small gaffes alone.
Amen, Booman. I similarly blogged on this topic a few weeks ago.
http://www.winningprogressive.org/progressive-reasons-to-vote
I often share the frustration that many progressives have when a certain compromise is made, or a policy is not as strong as we want it to be. But we also have to realize that progressive change is a long, ongoing struggle that we must all be involved in, and that we have to celebrate and reward successes along the way in order to keep moving forward in that struggle.
Unfortunately, over the past 18 months, too many progressives have focused so heavily on what we have not (yet) gotten out of the Obama Administration that we have failed to be ready to fight back against the conservative onslaught that we should have known was coming. The right wing has a very well funded and oiled messaging machine that progressives play into when they focus almost solely on our defeats and compromises. The only way to overcome that is to make our own message and spread it through blogging, social media, letters to newspaper editors, and talking to family and friends directly about the good things that progressive Democrats are achieving, rather than overly focusing on the disappointments that we would have with any Presidential administration.
You didn’t mention the public option. Or Dawn Johnsen. Again.
I can’t bring myself to defend policies that I think are making things worse in the long run. Is that all the policies of the Obama administration? No.
“Progressive” radio is where I see a problem. The worst is David Sirota. He not only writes articles but has a local 3 hr program in Denver. His programs are available on am760.net
It was especially bad this last week. He had 15 hours of his own program and then substituted for Thom Hartmann one day and Ed Schultz another day. Six hours on those days of beating on Democrats. If you disagree with him he just rails about shooting the messenger. He was definitely not helping morale.
Thom Hartmann is bad enough but Sirota is twice as bad.
Then there is Ring of Fire. Papantonio really beats Dems in the ground. I got upset with him at one point when he was going on radio and cable programs and claiming that the Obama Adm had suspended the Davis-Bacon act in the Gulf states after the oil spill. I couldn’t find anything to that effect and others had refuted it so I wrote a comment on their website addressed to Robert Kennedy Jr asking him to get Pap to stop lying. That was the last time that I heard Pap mention it. There were a couple people on the blog that didn’t care if Pap lied, they would defend him and attack me anyway!
Some are so far to the left that noone could ever make them happy. Sirota worked for Sen Sanders at one time but I have even heard him criticize him.
They are never happy and there are no explanations that justify things not being as they wish they were.