Democrats gearing up to win ... by surrendering in advance?

Charlie Pierce has the Democrats' number. And he also knows very well how the Establishment press functions. In Trump Is Coming Apart as the World Comes Apart Around Him 03/02/2018 he writes:

You can almost taste the flopsweat from the elite political media. They’re warming things up in case there really is a Democratic wave in the fall. Experience tells us that, if that happens, the elite political media will immediately engage the dampers on anything a Democratic majority might want to do that is in anyway Democratic or (horrors!) liberal. Expeditions to the Trumpish hinterlands will depart immediately. Appeals to “bipartisanship” will deafen the gods. This is what happened in 2006, when the country revolted against George W. Bush and his many crimes and failures. This is what will happen next fall, too.

You’re seeing it with the hilarious contortions of [the New York Times'] James Bennet regarding how he’s putting together his Opinion staff, and this obvious ratings extravaganza is another indication that all the old tracks are being set down again. In 2006, this phenomenon helped with the efforts to toss the Avignon Presidency [Cheney-Bush] down the memory hole so that people wouldn’t notice how it was the logical end to 30 years of conservative politics. It’s going to take even more of an effort to do that with this disaster. No wonder they’re starting early. [my emphasis]

Michael Tomasky looks at the prospect of big Democratic gains in the 2018 elections (The Blue Wave Is Real, and It Looks Really Big—Provided Democrats Don’t Block It Daily Beast 02/28/2018) Tomasky is a good analyst and always worth paying attention to. And he gives a good description of why the prospects for a Democratic "wave" are good.

But at the very end, he puts in the ritual preliminary surrender mantra of the Thanatosis Democrats:

If national Democratic money doesn’t deliver for Lamb for these reasons, that’s stupid and short-sighted. You want the Democrats to win 50 seats? Great. You know how many of those 50 are going to have to run as squishy on guns and anti-Pelosi? Surely half of them if not more. It’s the only path to a majority.

Democrats have a lot going for them this year. They just can’t let ideological purity get in the way. The time for determining the party’s ideological direction will be the presidential nomination battle. For now, the tent needs to be as wide as possible.

Things are going our way. So let's surrender in advance!

And the Democrats think all they need to do to recover from the massive losses in 2016 is ... blame the Russians!

Nothing the Russians could do would disadvantage the Democrats as much as their own compulsion to roll over and play dead.

Speaking of which, once again here's Democrats Vs. The Republican Hand, aka, Animals Playing Dead Supercute 10/28/2012:

Establishment "identity politics"

I'm still cautious about using the term "identity politics" because it doesn't yet seem to have achieved a reasonably stable meaning in the American political vocabulary. And the "Identitarian" movements in Europe are a small but militant and influential group among the far right.

The term was tossed about a lot in connection with the 2016 elections. It was often used by pundits to distinguish Hillary Clinton's pitch that emphasized civil rights for women and minorities from Bernie Sanders' emphasis on economic issues. while this wasn't entirely off-base, "identity politics" still carries a pejorative connotation. Especially among Republicans. Which is why some Democrats take care to emphasize that Trumpism is very much white identity politics. Dibgy Parton recently wrote, "This is the fundamental contour of American politics. When the two parties take opposite positions on slavery, now racial equality, we are divided. It's hard to believe that we are back to this place, but we are. And we can try to ascribe that to other motives all we want, it won't change anything." (It's white supremacy, people. It's always been white supremacy. Hullabaloo 02/04/2018)

But whatever term we use for it, it has become common in the internal arguments within the Democratic Party for the corporate Democrats to try to accuse progressives of being deficient in their concern for women's and minority rights. On the face of it, this doesn't make much sense, since the Sanders wing of the party is very much in favor of women's rights, including abortion rights, and of protecting minority civil rights, including affirmative action. The key difference is that the Democratic progressives also support New Deal economic policies, while the corporate Democrats are on board with the neoliberal economic agenda which is mostly in agreement with Republican positions.

After the 2008 and 2016 primary campaigns, it is now pretty much standard practice, at least at that level, for female candidates to try to portray male opponents and minority candidates to portray theirs as anti-black, anti-Latino, etc. In some cases, it's more objectively accurate than in others. But politics is politics. It's part of the mix. Whether it's effective or not depends on a lot of variables, including who is making the criticisms and, obviously, how the target audiences process the attacks.

I've expressed concern before about the Gillibrand Standard applied in the defenestration of Al Franken by his fellow Democratic Senators in 2017. I'm worried that the lessons Republicans have taken from it is to prepare to deluge Democratic candidates in October 2018 with frivolous allegations of sexual harassment. (Which doesn't exclude their being able to find some real ones.) See my posts: Kirsten Gillibrand as Presidential candidate 12/12/2017; The Gillibrand Standard Takes Out a Female Candidate? 12/17/17; Two weeks too late 12/19/17

Branko Marcetic writes about the use of "identity" issues against progressives in Only When It Suits Them Jacobin 02/02/2018.

During the primaries, Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright appeared to admonish young women for favoring Bernie Sanders over Clinton. Numerous liberal feminist writers insisted on the importance of getting Clinton into the White House, regardless of how centrist she may be. “Not electing a woman, again,” warned Rebecca Traister, would be “much more than symbolic.” In a now-deleted post on David Brock’s Blue Nation Review, Clinton loyalist Peter Daou explained that, “[Sanders’] views notwithstanding,” he was “a white male who has been in Congress for over a quarter century,” making him the “definition of establishment,” while Clinton, solely by being “a woman attempting to break the ultimate gender barrier” was “the definition of anti-establishment.”

This line of attack continued into 2017, when similar claims were used to deflect substantive criticisms of potential presidential candidates. Skeptics of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick — three establishment Democrats floated as 2020 contenders who also happen to be black — were told they were simply motivated by bigotry, to the point where some critics were blithely misidentified as white men. In the words of Briahna Joy Gray, liberal discourse became “a world in which personal identity [is] shorthand for ‘progress’ … and ‘white man’ [is] an epithet.”

Howie Klein of Blue America comments on that article at his Down With Tyranny! blog in an apparently ironically-titled post, My Budding Romance With The DCCC, The Blue Dogs, The New Dems And EMILY's List 02/06/2018. "I like his line of thinking," he writes of Marcedtic's article, "but he wastes it on [Chelsea] Manning and [Paula] Swearengin, one step up from vanity candidates." But Klein also stresses, "The tragedy of all those walking garbage candidates the DCCC--along with the Blue Dogs, New Dems and EMILY's List-- try to pass off as real Democrats is that most of them have-- or had before the DCCC chased them away-- fine progressive candidates. Don't be fooled."

Zaid Jilani calls attention to establishment Dem primary mischief in Democrats Anonymously Target Muslim Candidate, Questioning His Eligibility to Run for Michigan Governor The Intercept 02/01/2018.

Charles Blow also uses the establishment-Dem trope here, somewhat carelessly equating Trump's vote with white working-class voters assumed to be primarily motivated in their voting by white identity issues, "He [Trump] was working-class white America’s rebuff to an erudite black man and a supremely experienced woman. Trump’s defects had been validated. He was loved among those who hate." (my emphasis; Constitutional Crisis in Slow Motion New York Times 02/05/2018)

Obama this week

Former President Obama had a kickoff summit for his Obama Foundation this week. Obama himself gave the closing keynote speech, which starts just after 1:56:00. Obama Foundation Summit Closing Session 11/01/2017:

The summit was for the purpose of training activist leaders. So Obama's speech sounds like what I imagine his presentations as a community organizer were in his early career. (Full disclosure: I was actually trained in "Alinskyist" organizing methods by the United Farm Workers union once upon a time. So I have a good idea of what community organizing presentations sound like.)

Hearing an Obama speech is a reminder of some of the things that made him so attractive as a politician. He's sharp, impressive, persuasive, professional, and upbeat. It was probably very much in the mood of the rest of the conference.

It was always ironic to me that rightwingers, for whom facts don't much matter, treated "Alinskyism" as though it was akin to a full-blown anarchist ideology or something. Because one of the criticisms of Saul Alinsky's approach to community organizing was that it was largely an ideology-free approach. It stressed organizing people around specific goals like, say, refurbishing a neighborhood park. That doesn't necessarily translate easily into organizing around a larger ideology and/or parties or pressure groups that deal with a wide variety of issues. Obama's often non-ideological, "bipartisan" presentation of issues is partially an echo of that organizing style.

And that's what strikes me the most about this speech. It talks about "change" in an almost completely issue-free context. He doesn't talk about organizing to address the climate crisis, or to promote labor unions, or for single-payer medical care, or for college-for-all. It's not that what he says is bad. It's just that there's nothing particularly politically liberal or progressive about it.

In this speech, he revisits his famous hope-and-change theme of the 2008 campaign. In the cautious, deliberate voice that marks his attempts to tiptoe around something, he says, "People always misunderstood, sometimes, that slogan we used. Hope, the audacity of hope."

Edward-Isaac Dovere reports for Politico on how Obama expanded on the thought (The strange, new-age Obama reunion 11/02/2017):

“Hope does not mean that tomorrow everything’s going to be better,” he said. “Where hope comes in handy is when you’ve put everything you have into something and it hasn’t worked yet —and it hasn’t worked the week after that, and the week after that, and six months later and a year.”

I found this comment a bit depressing. Because it walks right up to saying, hey, all that talk about hope and change didn't mean that I really wanted to change anything.

It seemed a miracle in 2008 that a liberal African-American man could be elected President of the United States. A big reason was that in his person and his rhetoric, he seemed to promise substantive change in the midst of the Great Recession after the Cheney-Bush Administration's war in Iraq and their stunning neglect of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And things like the 2009 stimulus bill and Obamacare were substantive, constructive kinds of change and improvement.

But he showed over and over again that on most other policies, we was very much a centrist. And in trying repeatedly to cut Social Security and Medicare, he was conservative. To use poli-sci language, he was a transactional President rather than a transformational one.

His speech Wednesday was mostly centrist boilerplate, however eloquently it was delivered. As noted above, he seem to be suggesting that "hope and change" was a largely empty slogan, meant more as a motivational slogan than a substantive program. Hope and Change didn't look much like the New Deal or the Great Society.

And the "fierce urgency of now" was not on evidence in the speech.

In bipartisan mode, he talked about long history of the civil rights movement as though there were no enemies involved. Classic Obama. No Martin Luther King-like jeremiads against "vicious racists" or mealy-mouthed self-styled moderates.

Obama's speech also reflects the comment that Dovere makes:

What the Obama Foundation will do, no one quite knows yet — including, admittedly, the former president himself. How the newly launched outfit fits in with like-minded groups or the former president’s own vision of using civic engagement to create political change is an open question, too.

The answers provided at the summit weren’t even close to what desperate Democrats are pining for: that Obama will save them by standing up to Trump, that he’ll stop the nuclear war they’re having nightmares about, or even just provide some reassurance they might start winning House races again.