I guess Ari Berman is not interested in having a future political career in Montana because his profile of Jim Messina is brutal. If Messina is as controlling and vindictive as Berman claims then he might run into other problems trying to cover Obama’s 2012 campaign for The Nation. It’s an interesting and informative piece with a good amount of actual reporting and an impressive amount of on-the-record griping. It’s hardly balanced, however. I think there are a host of areas where progressives have a right to be disappointed in the Obama administration, and Messina has his fingerprints on some of them, but Berman seems to have no awareness that the 111th Congress was the most productive Congress in nearly a half-century. And I mean that from a progressive point of view. Messina has his fingerprints on that, too.
I know that a lot of progressives have convinced themselves that our policies would be more popular if they were presented with less dilution, but I have never seen any evidence that that is true. The backlash against Obama’s policies was remarkably strong and cost us a shit-ton of seats in Congress. I think it’s remarkable that the Democrats lined up to vote for Cap & Trade (in the House) and health care reform despite looking at polling numbers that told them that they were arousing a ferocious opposition that would most likely wash away their political careers. Somebody has to get the credit for getting them to walk the plank.
Having said that, I’m not exactly a fan of Max Baucus or his style of politics, and if that is what Messina is going to bring to Obama’s reelection effort then we’ll probably be pretty uninspired. A lot depends on the opponent, of course, but I don’t expect the Obama campaign to take a lot of chances. If they’re lucky, they won’t need to. It could easily play out a lot like the 1996 campaign, which never really materialized as a contest. If it’s a close thing, however, I hope Messina finds the inner child who cut his teeth as an organizer for Montana People’s Action. We’ll need that kind of spirit and attitude, not the transactional crap we’re used to seeing from Baucus and his army of lobbyists.
