Some liberal bloggers are very sensitive and get upset when people call them the “professional left” or suggest that they are the mirror image of the Tea Party, just with less clout and credibility. I shrug that stuff off.
First of all, there is a professional left, and I have been a part of it. I did a year of consulting work for Democracy for America. It was a rewarding experience, but it also taught me about the tradeoffs these organizations have to make in order to grow their membership and reach their fundraising goals. In issue advocacy, passion is the name of the game, and compromise is a toxin. When your job is to stake out a maximalist position (no new taxes, ever, or no cuts to entitlements, ever) then anyone who falls short of your demands is going to be a sell-out. Unfortunately, nothing can get done without some give-and-take, and legislators need the freedom of action to make a deal.
As for Schumer’s observation, I’m willing to grant that a lot of the left-wing blogosphere is engaged in maximalist rhetoric that mirrors the Tea Party faction on the right, and I am willing to agree that we collectively have less clout than the Tea Party. But I am not willing to agree that we have less credibility than the Tea Party.
While there are outliers, most of the left-wing blogosphere has been very astute and accurate in their predictions going back all the way to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The Tea Partiers can’t predict what is packed in their lunch. The truth (as they understand it) is the lode-star for left-wing bloggers. The truth isn’t even a regret for right-wing bloggers. They have no use for the truth at all. Right-wing blogging is all about tactics and ginning up outrage. Very few of them ever engage in honest analysis; everything is about persuasion.
In other words, the left-wing professional left, at its worst, parallels the right-wing blogosphere at its best. If “credible” means that you can rely on the accuracy, then the difference between left-wing bloggers and right-wing bloggers is the same as the difference between Nate Silver and Dick Morris.
So, I don’t like being insulted by Chuck Schumer, but it doesn’t really bother me because I know that he is wrong about the only thing I care about. And that’s my credibility.
A public policy issue or problem that is correctly defined and/or analyzed either presents the obvious solution/resolution or a range of solutions/resolutions that are easily ranked ordered from optimal to leave the heavy lifting for future generations. In fits and starts, Lincoln and a majority in Congress finally recognized that slavery had to go. Then, after the Confederate states had lost the argument on the battlefield, they came back with “let’s compromise.” Allowing that door to be opened robbed generations of newly freed slaves from full and equal participation in their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. That continues to fester in this country to this day.
If “go slow” means taking a decade to implement the obvious solution/resolution, it might be a reasonable approach. However, the solution/resolution aspirations of the New Deal were deferred for decades and never fully realized. So, instead of UHC that costs 12% of GDP, similar to that in the most costly of European countries and those countries have a much larger proportion of seniors, we’re soon going to hit 20% and still not everyone will be entitled to health care and many will struggle to access it because the required supply for those with Medicaid and Medicare insurance doesn’t exist.
“Compromise” by legislatures, unions, and inadequately informed voters is one piece of the puzzle that has led to what Harold Myerson describes in The 40 Year Slump
The whole article is too good not to read in its entirety.
Exactly what I was going to say when we talk about “compromise”.
Compromising by cutting workers’ benefits isn’t compromise, it’s just straight up theft. An actual compromise would be hurting the wealthy equally as much as hurting the workers if we’re going to argue for cutting SS at all. For example, 90% marginal tax rates on $1 million or more income and taxing capital gains as income would be an actual compromise to trade for cutting Social Security. A little bit of tip money that is raised through loopholes is not a compromise.
Similarly, the ACA is what we would call in a normal world a “compromise”. You cannot compromise with people who don’t believe in universal health care/insurance, however. So there is no compromise to be had.
FYI, your link to the Myerson article needs fixin’.
Sorry about that:
The 40 Year Slump
I think what he means as credible is in political terms. As in the tea party makes credible threats to primary someone. Since the tea party has rich large people behind them they can recruit and fund primary candidates. The left does not have that much money and can’t really scare politicians that much. Esp since the left is very susceptibly to the ‘well they are not as bad as the batshit crazy republican in the race’ argument.
Until Democrats are willing to loose a few elections by primarying a democrat then the politicians like Schumer have nothing to fear.
Which is why the likes of Schumer greatly benefit from the toxic insanity of the current Republican Party, something they understand very well. “Either me or chaos” is a very comfortable position for an incumbent to be in.
That is definitely what he meant by credibility.
Back in the early 1990s when I first started doing advocacy/grassroots lobbying, one of the first thing I learned was the difference between scholarly credibility (I was coming from an academic background), political credibility, and journalistic credibility.
Scholarly credibility, of course, is having the facts. And I’ll extend that to being able to present them in a way that supports your views (rhetorical skills). (Krugman is a great example of this.)
I discovered to my amazement that, even in an environment where politicians were uninformed, and I’m talking about Democratic state legislators who were mostly sympathetic or at least potentially sympathetic, just presenting the facts had no effect. (This is something that Krugman still doesn’t understand very well.)
To be credible you had to not only present the facts, but also show how they affected the legislator’s constituency, and above all that you had organized support. Which meant you had to get that support. Then you had some credibility.
You also had to be clear as to what you wanted to achieve legislatively. (The art of the possible.) The aspects of support and legislative goal are where the politicians’ heads are really at, and where you can really sense their expertise and passion.
As for journalism, that could be weird. They always had some boiler plate narrative strategy in mind. If it was anything like your actual message, they could be great. Often, though, they would try to get you to say what THEY wanted you to say. And if the issue was something where they lacked a ready-made boiler-plate narrative, and you gave them the facts, and why the issue was important, they would just say “yes, but what’s the STORY?” With journalists, to be credible, fatcs were not enough, and political credibility was not enough. You needed an EVENT.
(Krugman’s a very well-informed thinker and an excellent writer. But he’s not a journalist. Maureen Dowd’s a journalist.)
(Krugman’s a very well-informed thinker and an excellent writer. But he’s not a journalist. Maureen Dowd’s a journalist.)
MoDo is not a journalist. She’s a deeply damaged individual who should be seeing a shrink instead of writing garbage for a major newspaper.
I’ll grant you she’s not a good journalist. But I trying to make a point: She embodies to an extreme (at least extreme for a “respectable” newspaper) the kind of narrative manipulation I was referring to. There is also the significant distinction that she writes opinion rather than reporting — but then, so does Krugman.
What I was trying to bring out is that the idea of credibility in American journalism is not reporting fact on the basis of what’s most important to know, but rather, very often, how selected facts can be fit to a preset narrative that is “credible” to the “serious people”. Kind of like Pravda, but by social and job pressure rather than fear of KGB.
“Credibility” is a valid concept in communications research, but when it’s used as a substitute for truth (which was the point of it), it’s nothing but “truthiness”. I can still remember, when the phrase “credibility gap” became popular around 1966, it pissed me off that instead of talking about what was actually happening, they were reporting on “the relative effectiveness of competing messages”. Perception trumps existence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_gap
Politics would be a very easy craft if all you ever had to do was weigh up where the political center of gravity of support lies, and then just do that. This center of gravity can be defined by your donor base, by your caucus/party, by the opinion polls, or by the overton window of an acceptable range of policies defined by the prevailing dominant ideology as defined by the media, the corporate world and the plutocrats.
This is politics as a technical art form: weigh up the strength of competing interests insofar as they can help/damage your interests, and optimize your self interest. It doesn’t take a whole lot of skill and zero courage to do/advocate what your key support bases want anyway. Politics can be seen as a business, and anyone who doesn’t build political and turn a personal profit can be categorized as a loser. Politics can be reduced to economics, and more particularly the economic self interests of the key actors involved.
But it also means you place no value on human rights, social justice, advocacy on behalf of the less powerful, and doing what you believe is right regardless of it’s impact on your personal career prospects. All of these things require great courage, integrity, strength of mind, intellectual rigour and huge skill just to survive. They leave you open to accusations of extremism, naivete, lack of “realism” and even stupidity. But these are perhaps also the only things which make life and politics worthwhile.
Sometimes the stars align as what is good and just also becomes politically possible. More often than not you are swimming against the tide. You make what alliances you have to to get at least some things done, but you never lose sight of your bigger gols and the values they represent. All worthwhile change comes from some people acting unreasonably when viewed from the perspective of the status quo. Would Schumer ever accomplish anything worthwhile if he didn’t have “the professional left” lighting a fire under his arse? His irritation is instructive: it shows they are having some effect.
You can choose to play the establishment game for the edification of the masses, or you can choose to work for real change. Your choice.
The problem with the “professional left” designation as Charles Schumer uses it is that intends to disenfranchise the expectations of part of the Democratic Party base and it has nothing to do with professional political people at all. The fact that people who were aggressively pushing single-payer or the public option in 2009-2010 were exposing where the Democratic Party had sold out to lobbyists in order to get a health care reform bill–any health care reform bill.
It was a dishonest slap-down by establishment politicians then about health care policy. And it is equally dishonest now about progressive concerns about the financial industry and progressive defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Chuck Schumer just allied himself with the corruption of folks like Lanny Davis, who was among the first to use the slur. That Rahm Emanuel, the White House communications staff, and President Obama himself chose to repeat it opened divisions with folks who supported all of the President’s stated policies, taking them for granted, while chasing the vision of getting Blue Dog votes as they were running away faster the closer the President’s positions came to theirs.
Whoever has decided to resurrect this tactic of at this moment of budget talks and the grow in Elizabeth Warren’s profile signals somebody’s decision that the progressive movement of opinion since the GOP shutdown needs to be stopped instead of pressed.
It would be interesting to know at that point how many Senate Democrats stand with Schumer. And whether this is the beginning of Schumer’s maneuverings to try to unseat Harry Reid in 2015.
It was Robert Gibbs who initiated the use of the term.
And he was justifiably frustrated with the tone of the criticisms the White House was receiving from the PCCC, FireDogLake, and others who will not be satisfied until “we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.”
And it was always about the tone, because the White House understands the job of the professional left is to make maximalist demands. That, in itself, was never the problem and was even helpful to the White House. It was the way the White House was attacked using a totally unrealistic metric of the possible that was annoying and unhelpful, and which contributed to a lack of enthusiasm among progressives in the 2010 cycle.
It was Robert Gibbs who initiated the use of the term.
And he was justifiably frustrated with the tone of the criticisms the White House was receiving from the PCCC, FireDogLake, and others who will not be satisfied until “we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.”
It’s telling that you stick up for a pig like Gibbs. No one ever argued for the elimination for the Pentagon. But spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined is just insane. Especially given all the other problems we have. If a clownshow scumbag like Gibbs doesn’t like criticism why did he ever get into politics?
Why is Robert Gibbs a scumbag?
Just for starters:
http://news.antiwar.com/2012/10/24/top-obama-adviser-awlakis-16-year-old-son-should-have-a-more-resp
onsible-father-if-he-wants-us-not-to-kill-him/
Sometimes, a press secretary has the unfortunate responsibility to defend the indefensible. Gibbs’ answer to that question was as close as anyone could come to rationalizing the death of that kid, who was actually killed separately from his father. He should have refused to answer at all, but in a broader sense his answer was actually correct. “I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”
His father was actively involved in trying to bring down civilian aircraft in the United States and was inciting violence against innocent American citizens. We shouldn’t have killed his son. I don’t know why we did. But he doesn’t have any moral authority to complain about it, and it’s his own fault that he aroused the fury of the American death machine.
Again, it’s disgusting. Are you really unaware of Gibbs’ sins, both in and out of government?
Robert Gibbs is the proximate cause of the 2010 election fiasco by doing the August vacation silence while the Tea Party was being rolled out and scaring Blue Dog Democrats to the right.
And his “Canadian healthcare and eliminated the Pentagon” smear just shows who they saw as enemies and it wasn’t the Republican Party. That is not about tone, that is a policy advocacy statement.
It was not tone that was at issue (except maybe for Ed Schultz). PCCC was beginning to primary Democratic incumbents who were not supporting the compromise “public option”; that’s a long way from “Canadian healthcare”. Firedoglake had been taking apart Rahm Emanuel’s negotiating deals with providers and Big Pharma for months, but it was the activism in support of primarying Blanche Lincoln and especially Jane Hamsher’s calling out Lanny Davis’s contracting with health care industry stakeholders to made her and Firedoglake the target of systematic cross-blog attacks that catalyzed a full-scale pie fight. I still see the hand of Lanny Davis and his communication consultant buddies behind that one.
It was Blue Dogs who ran away from Obamacare that lost in 2010 more than any other. And the significant victories in Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan were the result of the GOP posing as defenders of Medicare against Obamacare–an outright lie that never got challenged by Democrats.
The lack of progressive enthusiasm as reason for the 2010 defeat is still the worst sort of bullshit scapegoating by an establishment that has lost touch with constituents. That delusion about 2010 is the proximate reason that NC was lost in 2012; the state Democratic establishment kept on being their same old compromised selves. And ask Bob Etheridge about his sense of entitlement not to be approached by and held accountable “constituents”. Had he lacked that sense of establishment privilege, he might have dealt more effectively to that ambush.
There is a difference between “compromise” in politics and “being compromised”. Given Chuck Schumer’s statements, I’m not sure how aware the Senate Democratic caucus is of that difference.
It’s amazing to me that it’s okay for the WH to be called every name in the book by their supposed allies and then when they push back just a little, they’ve committed some atrocity against their base.
That’s just bullshit, Tarheel.
Just on this issue of gay rights, the WH was absolutely pummeled in 2009. And look at how that worked out? It was absolutely fine for gay rights activists to push hard for action, but a lot of people were way too tough on the WH and made very personal and unfair attacks. Gibbs was responding to that, too. He was feeling wounded and hurt by the abuse he was taking, and a lot of it didn’t seem fair because it wasn’t fair. So, he snapped and talked some shit back to the people who were mistreating him. I applaud him for it.
Gibbs dropped the ball big time in 2009 and 2010. I’m not going to cut him any slack because his fee-fees were hurt. He was adequately compensated for that and held and still holds himself out as a communications consultant.
But you can just stop peddling the nonsense that progressive lack of enthusiasm was at fault for the losses in 2010. The map disagrees.
The White House was perceived (and in some circles is still perceived) as having betrayed their promises of hope. It exposed the perennial divide between white liberals and people of color and between liberals and the left. The communications staff and political staff at the White House allowed that divide to open or in the case of Rahm Emannuel exploited that divide for their own purposes. It is a failure of highly paid political operatives to do their job competently. At the level of the White House, whether comments are fair or not is irrelevant. By allowing the Republicans to marginalize the President’s policies as left wing Gibbs lost the 2010 election. And then to allow them to come back in the immediate run-up to the election of 2010 and not answer the charges of cutting Medicare lost two state governors and wreaked immense suffering. The communications director’s job is to make sure that shit like that does not happen. And that is still the weakest branch of the White House operation.
In 2014, the Democratic Party would be wise to repair those breaches. And that has to do with redefining where the center of politics is in this country.
The map?
Turnout was below 42 percent nationally, down from over 62 percent in 2008.
In 2010, youth turnout dropped by 60 percent.
Meanwhile, liberals stayed home while white working class voters voted in the same numbers.
You want to blame Robert Gibbs for this and not any of the people who actually are persuasive to liberals? Most analysts believe the Democrats lost so badly because they spent all their energy on health care when the people were concerned about employment. But liberal pundits absolutely killed the administration on health care and gave them no cover at all.
We can argue about degrees of responsibility, but the liberal punditocracy was killing liberal enthusiasm 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the lead-up to the midterms, and they cannot escape their share of blame for the result.
National statistics are misleading. The key question was where did low turnout for Democrats affect the outcome of races and who was it that failed to turn out in those Congressional districts or in those states.
Because in San Francisco and New York and some of the other hotbeds of liberal dissatisfaction and lack of enthusiasm, it didn’t matter at all.
Tom Periello didn’t lose because liberals failed to turn out. Alan Grayson didn’t lose because liberals failed to turn out. The replacement to Bart Stupak didn’t lose because liberals failed to turn out. Rick Snyder didn’t become governor of Michigan because the liberals failed to turn out. Scott Walker didn’t become governor of Wisconsin because liberals failed to turn out. John Kasich didn’t become governor of Ohio because liberals failed to turn out.
If liberals failed to turn out in Pennsylvania, I never heard that analysis reported. What do you know about those significant losses in the Philly suburbs and the loss of governor and US Senate? Are you saying that the liberals sandbagged Sestak?
Which races were lost because of the failure of liberal turnout? And which were lost because conservative Democrats crossed over and voted Republican?
Even in 2009 Martha Coakley lost for the same reason that Barbara Buono lost in in NJ; she pissed off a key part of the party establishment, which then sat on its hands.
Are you nuts?
Every race you mentioned was lost because young people and minorities (i.e., progressives) didn’t turn out at anywhere near the rate of 2008 or 2012, and because white working class people and old folks did turn out.
Democrats did modestly worse with the elderly in 2010, but that minor difference was swamped by differential turnout.
If we’re talking about the blogosphere, though, most people voted. The damage was to organizing, fundraising, and pushing back on the media messaging. We sat on our hands, unlike in 2006 when he maximized the Democrats’ wins. No blogosphere, no Sen. Tester or Sen. Webb, for example, and no majority in the Senate.
And Tomasky’s conclusion is correct:
Neither in 2010 or 2012 was there substantial establishment investment in GOTV in down-ticket campaigns in NC. Unlike the 50-state strategy investments made in 2008.
They’re politicians!! Wear big-boy pants. If you can’t handle being called names, why are you in politics? Politics is rough and tumble. And using Tomasky to prove your point? Hahahaha!! Why didn’t the young come out in ’10? It’s not like that was something new. The dropoff among the young almost always happens. Where was the effort to keep them engaged? In PA, as I’m sure you’re aware, Sestak didn’t work hand-in-hand with the state Democratic establishment. I know. I volunteered for Sestak. Yet Sestak outperformed all other state-wide Democrats. Another thing, who the hell was jazzed about Onorato in ’10? Anyone? Have you ever thought that maybe squish centrist crap like Onorato was part of the reason Democratic voters didn’t come out in ’10?
This is what Chuck Schumer should be talking down. Where is he? Is he scared of “Canadian health care”?
Time for Democrats to do a surprise pivot to Medicare for All and backfoot this nonsense.