Hope and the corporate Democrats

Micah Sifry has been attracting a fair amount of attention in Left Blogstan for his piece, The Obama Disconnect: What Happens When Myth Meets Reality techPresident 12/31/09. He makes the critical point that the grassroots have to force constructive change to happen if it's going to happen.

I've always thought that the idea of Obama as grassroots champion was more myth than reality, especially after reporting on how his campaign treated one genuine grassroots activist, Joe Anthony, who had spent more than two years of his life nurturing a page on MySpace dedicated to Obama, well before there was any campaign, only to have it stripped out of his control when it became a valuable campaign asset. But I also thought this was a useful myth because it generated rising expectations both here and abroad, not only in what Obama might do if elected president, but also in what anyone might do today using their greatly enhanced powers to communicate and collaborate around common causes. (In case you haven't noticed by now, I tend to be pretty skeptical of all politicians, and far more interested in small-d democratic self-empowerment as the best path to a better society.) The problem for Obama and the Democrats today, as they head into 2010, is that much of their activist base appears to have swallowed too much of the wrong half of the myth: they thought that Obama would be more of a change-agent, and never really embraced their own role. [my emphasis]

But, to use terms from another political era, there is also an important and critical relationship between leadership and the "masses" in a political party. American political parties, like the government, are structured to be representative institutions, in which the voters select leaders and officeholders to carry out the programs they want to see carried out. The Party base has to insist on the policies it wants. But for that to be effective we also have to have people in leadership roles who are willing to lead in the same direction.

Sifry looks at two of the recent books on the Obama campaign, The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe, who was Obama's campaign manager, and Electing the President 2008: The Insiders' View, edited by Kathleen Hall Jamieson. He draws some lessons from them about the change in approach to the Party base during the campaign and afterwards.

Democratic voters and activists have to go on the assumption right now that a corporate Democrat like Obama can be persuaded to act like a progressive, at least on some major issues. But throughout 2009, he was more interested in de-activating the base than in fighting for its goals.

Sifry's analysis reinforces the strong negative impression I got from hearing Valerie Jarrett speaking as the White House's representative at the Netroots Nation convention in 2009 in Pittburgh. It struck me that her attitude was that of a Party chieftain giving instructions to low-level functionaries on what they should be saying to support the White House line of the day. The Obama administration is happy to have pressure applied by insurance lobbyists against the public option in health care reform. Pressure from the grass roots supporting the positions on which he campaigned? Not so much. Sifry writes:

In The Audacity to Win, Plouffe writes often of an "enthusiasm gap" that he saw between Obama's supporters and the other Democratic candidates, notably Clinton. Back then, there was plenty of evidence to support Plouffe's claim: Obama was surging on all the online social networks, his videos were being shared and viewed in huge numbers, and the buzz was everywhere. We certainly wrote about it often here on techPresident. Now, there is a new enthusiasm gap, but it's no longer in Obama's favor. That's because you can't order volunteers to do anything--you have to motivate them, and Obama's compromises to almost every powers-that-be are tremendously demotivating. The returns OFA [Organizing for America, Obama's Potemkin netroots organization] is getting on email blasts appear to be dropping significantly, for example. "“People are frustrated because we have done our part,” one frustrated Florida Obama activist told the Politico. “We put these people in the position to make change and they’re not doing it.” (See also this petition from 400 former Obama staffers.) DC insiders may blame the fickle media, or the ugliness of the cable/blog chatter, or the singleminded Republican opposition, for the new enthusiasm gap. These are all certainly factors. But I suspect that when the full history of Obama's presidency is written, scholars may decide that his team's failure to devote more attention to reinventing the bully pulpit in the digital age, and to carrying over more of the campaign's grassroots energy, may turn out to be pivotal to evaluations of Obama's success, or failure, as president. [my emphasis]

But to succeed as a corporate Democrat, Obama has to keep the Democratic base as deactivated as possible except when it comes to performing unpaid election tasks for the Party. Ploffle makes this explicit:

Now that Obama is President, Plouffe--a well-paid adviser to the DNC and OFA-- apparently doesn't see the same need as he did during the campaign for muscular local organization, even of the top-down kind. In his 40-minute interview with Ari Melber of The Nation (and regular techPresident contributor) a few weeks ago, he explains that the White House doesn't need to be putting its new media operation on the same high level that the campaign did. "In the White House, obviously you're not really raising money and you're not really doing organizing," he says to Melber. (Really?) "The main focus is to help deliver message." Hence the new media team belongs as a subset of White House communications, as opposed to "digital strategy." The dusty old playbook at work. [my emphasis]

The dusty old playbook is delivering the goods to Wall Street investment banking chiefs and to the health insurance monopolies. But it's not what most of the people need. And I hope the pressure from labor and progessives will be enough to put the Party, with Obama at its head, on a more constructive track. And fast.

Tags: democratic party, obama administration

Security cost of war

Robert Scheer takes a non-hysterical look at the fact that making war against Muslim countries has been since 9/11, and continues to be under the Obama administration and the Bush-Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates, far more of a priority that ordinary airline security in The Global War on Stealth Underwear The Nation 12/30/09:

The technology that could help detect a sophisticated plane hijacker or suicide bomber has been largely botched in development and only halfheartedly deployed even when it is available. On Tuesday, a devastating report in the Washington Post revealed that the full-body scanning equipment hyped after 9/11, which might have detected the explosives involved in last week's incident, is still not in wide use. As the Post stated, "A plan that would have helped focus the development of better screening technology and procedures--including a risk-based assessment of aviation threats--is almost two years overdue, according to a report this fall by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress."

So, screening equipment that can detect plastic explosives exists, but it was not used in this case and, as the GAO predicted, "TSA cannot ensure that it is targeting the highest priority security needs at checkpoints; measure the extent to which deployed technologies reduce the risk of terrorist attacks; or make needed adjustments to its PSP (Passenger Screening Program) strategy." As a result, the GAO concluded: "TSA lacks assurance that its investments in screening technologies address the highest priority security needs at airport passenger checkpoints." [my emphasis]

As I've written before, I'm not at all thrilled about the full-body scanning notion. Like any technology, it requires people with good sense in charge of using it to make it effective. But Scheer's point about security priorities is well taken. And the more wars we make on Muslim countries the more enemies we will make in the Muslim world.

Tags: obama administration

Iran sanctions

During the 1990s I was pretty much indifferent to the negative side of economic sanctions like those imposed on Iraq. Economic sanctions looked like a constructive alternative to military confrontation. I'm more skeptical now. In the case of Iran, sanctions targeted to deny them materials critical for nuclear weapons make sense to me. But for our militarists, the alleged Iranian nuclear program is just an excuse for promoting an invasion and new war in yet another Muslim country.

Daniel Luban writes in Neocons Worried That Sanctions Might Not Kill Enough Innocent Iranians LobeLog 12/30/09:

But targeted sanctions are evidently not gratuitously destructive enough to satisfy the “bomb Iran” crowd. Thus we see Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin complaining that such sanctions reflect the administration’s misguided desire to “avoid being too harsh, too effective, or inflict too much damage”. Instead of genuinely “crippling sanctions,” the weak-kneed administration “[doesn’t] want to topple the regime nor inflict much damage, just target those ‘elements’ they think are the really bad guys.”

Rubin is rather vague about fleshing out what kind of “damage” she is hoping for. This is hardly surprising, since the unpleasant truth underlying all the chest-beating talk about “crippling” sanctions is that their primary effect would be to inflict suffering upon precisely the civilians on whose behalf she claims to speak. The logic endorsed by sanctions proponents dictates that once the civilian population is sufficiently ravaged and impoverished, they will rise up in earnest and overthrow the regime. A far more likely outcome, however, is that crude sanctions like the refined petroleum bills will merely inflict gratuitous suffering on the population without harming the regime itself — as we saw in Iraq, where “crippling” sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of civilians (at the very least) without weakening Saddam Hussein’s hold on power. [my emphasis]

I'm not clear on what the best estimates of civilian death in Iraq due to sanctions really are. But the point is an important one.

Tags: iran,
iran war

The naked passenger

I must say, I'm not really thrilled about this whole digital strip-search idea: Germany Reconsiders Controversial Airport Security Measure Der Spiegel 12/30/09:

It is highly likely that, had Abdulmutallab passed through such a scanner, the explosives he had moulded to his inner thigh would have been detected. And in fact, such scanners are already in use at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, where Abdulmutallab boarded the flight to Detroit. But as NRC Handelsblad reports Abdulmutallab never passed through Amsterdam customs because, as a transit passenger with a connecting flight, he technically never entered the Netherlands. He was simply subjected to another standard security check before boarding the flight to Detroit.

On Wednesday, the Dutch government announced at a press conference that within the next three weeks it would begin screening all US-bound passengers using full-body scanners. Debates over full-body scanners have simmered in the European Union for several years now. Although a pilot program is being tested by the Dutch government at Schiphol, the EU has been reluctant to permit mandatory use of the technology because it has the potential of taking nude images of passengers. Earlier this week, Schiphol spokesperson Mirjam Snoerwang told NRC Handelsblad, "European regulations tell us we can only put people through them (the full body scanners) on a voluntary basis. And objections have been raised with regards to privacy." Several airports in the United Kingdom also have full body scanners.

Something for bets for the new year: how many weeks will it be before airport body scan images of celebrities and models begin showing up on the Internet?

Tags: privacy

2010: hope or despair

David Swanson in a piece from last year at ConsortiumNews takes a lot at the potential for what I've been calling the poltiics of despair to emerge in the wake of what turned out to be in many ways a dismal year for labor, progressives and the Democratic base, The Danger of Defeatism 12/31/09.

He's noticed an unfortunate trend the last few weeks in appearing before progressive-oriented audiences:

If current trends continue, by 2011 the only people showing up at forums on peace and justice will all be old enough to tell my grandparents they're too young to understand how pointless it is to try. And my grandparents are dead.

As a Jacksonian Democrat, I'm kind of chronically inclined to believe that the wretched of the earth will win out in the long run. And inclined to want to hurry that result along. Shoot, right now in the US I'd be happy with the victory of the not-so-wretched-but-not-totally-in-the-pockets-of-antisocial-CEOs. But the problem with the long run, as John Maynard Keynes famously said, is that in the long run we all wind up like David Swanson's grandparents, i.e., dead. Since I hope to around for a few decades yet, I hope to see some progress before that particular "long run" arrives.

It's also worth remembering the advice I heard Molly Ivins give about 15 years ago: no matter how bad things seem, there's always the possibility that we'll look back on now as the "good old days".

For one reason, neglecting some problems can mean they will get much worse. Global warming isn't going to stop just because Republican witch doctors deny it exists. I can respect but to a point Obama's excuse for the meager results of the Copenhagen climate conference that what was achieved was just a first step. But, as the fictional Fox Mulder once said, we should always respect nature because nature has not respect for us. Coastal flooding and the intensification or hurricanes and the melting of the polar ice caps is not go to slow down because Nature has respect for politicians' promises that sometime we'll get around to doing what's needed, in the sweet by-and-by. Nature itself is indifferent to whether tens of millions of people have to evacuate coastal cities that will sink underwater in decades to come.

Anyone who has been around Democratic politics very long knows that there are some people who enjoy being Cassandras and just whining about how screwed up things are and that they're never going to get better. Admittedly, there's a certain comfort in doing that. Not to mention the advantage of moral superiority over the fools who might actually try to get something constructive done. But it's not a perspective I find particularly attractive, not least because it's often indistinguishable from Republican hostility to actually solving any problem that affects anyone but the super-rich.

Swanson mentions one of the worst problems of American democracy, the outsized role of the President in our political system and politics:

The corruptions of money, media, party, militarism, election rigging, etc., have worsened and are rapidly worsening. So it would make sense that at some point our population would either break and give up or be radicalized and push back.

But why in 2009 in particular? Why such a dramatic increase in defeatism from 2008?

Well, another trend that has advanced to an extreme maturity is the equation of civic involvement with participation in presidential elections. The President is a character in a television drama, and our job is to vote the lesser of the two presidential contenders off the fictional island.

And then our job is complete, and the good President will fix everything for us. So many people seem to believe.

The politics of despair, which manifests itself in apathy as well as in other ways like sectarian dead-endism (if that's a word!) is the perfect public attitude for the Predator State Republicans. An apathetic or cynical public may believe that reforms to benefit them are not possible. But the wealthiest part of the public and the lobbyists they employ on a massive scale will continue to push for policies that benefit them.

Tags: democratic party, politics of despair

Guilty humor

It's naughty, I know. And it's really not nice to make fun of the mentally impaired. But this unquestionably rude takedown of Joke Line (aka, Joe Klein) by Driftglass at Crooks and Liars (Joe Klein and the 'one time the left was right'? 01/01/10) left me in stitches. Or ROTFLMAO, as the kids say on the Internet:

One of the nicer things he says about Joke Line's brand of phony centrism: "And like mercury in the water, the poison is now everywhere."

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press