It was just a couple of nights ago that Keith Olbermann was challenging us, in one of his “Special Comments”, to rise up in the streets and take back this country.
He pointed out that the only way those on the left were going to be able to fight against those who are looking to get all “Tea Party” is to be as angry and as organized and as aggressive as the Tea Party community, and if we’re smart, we’ll take him up on that challenge.
But if you really want to push “professional” Democrats to the left, most especially this President, and you want to do it in time to impact the ’12 cycle, the only way to do it is to run a candidate in primary contests that either moves the conversation your way…or leaves you with a surprising new Candidate.
And right here, right now, we actually have a chance to do exactly that – and that’s why, in today’s discussion, I’m going to challenge Olbermann right back.
“Then white men began to fence the plains so that we could not travel; and anyhow there was…nothing to travel for. We began to stay in one place, and to grow lazy and sicker all the time. Our men had fought hard against our enemies, holding them back from our beautiful country by their bravery, but now with everything else going wrong, we began to be whipped by their weak foolishness…”
–Pretty Shield, of the Crow Nation, quoted in the book “The Native Americans: An Illustrated History”
So imagine, if you will, how the political conversation would be different right now if this President was facing a primary challenge from an unabashed Lefty.
Let’s go further: just imagine how things would be different over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or over at the Capitol if someone announced they were running against this President from the left – and on the day that person announced, they had 15-20% of the Democratic electorate in their pocket, with an increasingly unpopular President on the other side.
Now imagine if that person had no qualms about “pooping in the Democratic pool”, and was willing to call out the Party establishment for having let the Nation down in so many different ways these past couple years, which would presumably make that candidate very interesting to those who support the interests of Labor, just to give one example.
And most importantly of all, imagine if this President, having just caved, again, for a second, and, soon, a third round of Republican hostage-taking (and facing a fourth in January of 2013), had to face a riled-up and articulate opponent on a debate stage.
Of course, for that to happen, you’d need a credible figure with national recognition, and in this environment, it wouldn’t hurt if that person wasn’t too closely associated with either Washington or the existing political parties.
(All of this would also make that candidate interesting to centrist voters as well; you’ll recall that the ’08 Obama Campaign appealed to many centrist voters for many of the same reasons.)
It also wouldn’t hurt if that person looked like a President, and even better, if that person was entirely familiar with the world of television.
So think about all that for a minute…and after you do, consider this: is there anyone else out there that you’d rather see primarying this President than Keith Olbermann?
Now let me take a minute and talk directly to you, Mr. Olbermann:
I know you said that it’s time for us to get organized and angry, but in this media world, if you don’t have Astroturf to get your movement off the ground, you need a celebrity with respect in all the right places, and that describes you pretty well.
Movements need to raise money, and if you were to go out there and do a week of hustling, I’ll bet you could raise seed money from both the “Left Coast” and “Upper West Side” communities (and you might even be able to hit your boss up for a donation); you could also draw a lot of PAC money (Labor, for starters, the gAyTM, for another) and lots of individual, enthusiastic, Internet contributions – and what happens to the political conversation if the Olbermann Campaign begins to raise money at a pace that puts The Fear on the Obama Campaign?
Al Gore took a big risk, and a made a big financial commitment besides, when he decided to bring you over to Current, and I don’t want you to have to worry about what’s going to happen over there; with that in mind I’m going to suggest that we ask Michael Moore to step in to take the wheel for a short time, at the same time you let Schuster run the actual newsgathering operation, so that we know you’ll be able to come back to something that has been in pretty good hands.
“…(baseball is) our national pastime, that is if you discount political campaigning.”
Before you dismiss this idea out of hand, Keith (can I call you Keith?), I want you to think about one thing, and I want you to think about this very, very, carefully:
You know what happens to those lucky few who actually make it through a Presidential campaign and win?
They get to throw out the first pitch of the new baseball season – at least four times.
You could take a few months out of what you have done so well and really change the direction of this nation’s politics, and you could think of it as a patriotic duty– but it would also be an incredible learning experience, and you’d come back to your own job with an understanding of the inner workings of realpolitik that very few on television could ever match…and after it’s over, since you wouldn’t be running again, you could actually talk about “where the bodies are buried” in a way no one else can.
Maybe you’re thinking: “How can I be credible if I have no real ability to run a government?” The answer can be found, literally, right here.
The Blogosphere is entirely capable of providing the appointees who would run a Government – after all, we have experts, including a Nobel laureate, to run an economy (Secretary of the Treasury Paul Krugman? Robert Reich for Council of Economic Advisors?), and folks like Lawrence Wilkerson who could take over at State…and I could go on and on and on, all the way down to my man Marshall Adame, who, I promise you, has all the training and skills we would need to ramrod the actual physical process of withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan (you’ll find him at BlueNC; on his resume is a stint running the Basra Airport, a couple of decades as a Marine logistician, and an unsuccessful run for Congress).
And it’s not like you would be more subject to scrutiny than you are now: virtually every hard-right Conservative out there already sees you as the Devil incarnate – and that’s actually an advantage in this situation that can’t be ignored.
So…whaddaya think?
You want to go from making Special Comments about how The Fear has overtaken Democrats to being the one who puts The Fear upon them?
You wanna drive Grover Norquist and Steny Hoyer absolutely nuts, both at the same time?
You want to finally do what Craig Nettles got to do, that you never did: play baseball and join the circus?
Well, here’s your chance to do something that could change the whole political conversation – and before we’re done, President Obama might even find those “comfortable shoes” we’ve heard so much about.
So let’s take one for America, and let’s get this thing on the hump, or whatever cliché you prefer…but let’s do it now, and let’s do it well, and let’s create something that brings the “discouraged” public to bear in a way they aren’t today.
This is your chance to do something big, something profound…something that takes your “diva tendencies” and plays them to their best advantage…and I think it’s time for you to get behind this idea; before, as you suggested could happen, the window to fight back closes.
…but someone needs to primary this guy, for the same reason you have an intervention when your other friends go off the rails.
but not against Obama.
Lamont’s primary challenge against Lieberman proved that opposition to the Iraq War could be a winning position. We need a visible challenge somewhere to show that opposition to austerity is a winning position. That doesn’t need to be against the President.
…at present to pull it off.
In the absence of any credibility outside of white middle-class elites, such an approach would only work as a Republican outreach mechanism. We have to deal with the facts on the ground.
Per Gallup:
and:
We have a paradox, wherein populations receptive to a form of populist liberalism (in the Tip O’Neill sense of the term) are intensely, personally – and justifiably – hostile to progressives in their modern iteration, due to the equal-opportunity bigotry in modern progressive culture.
We spend plenty of time doing discovery on the Right; after forty-five years of the Republicans successfully using the same game plan it’s time for due diligence on ourselves.
My interpretation of the poll you cite is that propaganda works. The right wing, aided in no small part by Fox News, has successfully made “liberal” a dirty word.
Let me offer a different (April 2011) Gallup poll(I apologize that formatting restraints stop me from replicating the table format):
That says, to me, that by a whopping 55-36 percent margin, independents agree that our wealth concentration is excessive.
That is an important “fact on the ground”.
Even in the first question (that specifically addresses the question of using heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth), a similarly whopping 63-32 percent — nearly 2-1 — of those making less than $30,000 per year support raising taxes on the rich.
One has to wonder (because the question isn’t asked) what portion of those in the other two income brackets surveyed fear that they will be considered “rich” in such an approach.
Another “fact on the ground” is that the GOP economic policies have dramatically swelled the ranks of those on the bottom end of the wealth distribution.
The economic split, both in numbers and in beliefs, works to the advantage of traditional Democratic values. I think we should have a laser-focus on that reality.
The GOP has using the media and government to fight class war for at least a decade. I think it’s time we fight back.
Maybe the way to square the polls is that people think that those with more money are more liberal.
…is telling folks what they want to believe in the absence of countervailing evidence. For all our talk about “memes”; and for all the sophistic pseudointellectual crap written by George Lakoff, progressives are missing in action when it comes to tangible matters of economic equity.
Case in point #1: at yesterday’s rally for Verizon workers, progressives were conspicuous in their absence (as was Blue Mass Group).
Case in point #2: I saw no coverage of the rally in today’s Globe, despite the presence of enough union folks to blanket Post Office Square.
Case in point #3: The only Members of Congress present were Lych and Keating. Where were (just to name three) Tsongas, Capuano and Frank?
Case in point #4: Where were the Democratic Senate candidates? (One name was cited from the rostrum – the PA distortion made it impossible for me to know which candidate – but there was no organized presence.)
It’s not a matter of “using media”: we need credibility, otherwise “fighting back” is only so much narcissism.
In the class war progressives are (to paraphrase Curley) invincible in peace; invisible in war.
It seems like you’re constantly disappointed about what you think progressives should be doing, you’ve even gone as far as to call them bigots or suggest they are elitist, both traits that are decidedly UNprogressive. I can’t speak for media or politicians and their respective schedules, but I for one knew nothing about a Verizon rally before the fact. However, since you call it a workers rally I assume it had something to do with labor rights and I would argue that by definition any person who WAS there in whatever capacity is a progressive, at least on that issue. Honestly, this has come up before and I don’t think your attitude is helpful.
I’m not “disappointed”, I’m annoyed.
I’ve never considered progressives as a class to be consistently labor-friendly; hence I’m never disappointed. I do, however, make a distinction between progressives and liberals, with a marked preference for the latter.
I think that class bigotry and elitism are integral to progressivism, as distinct from upward mobility liberalism. Hence my citing of Tip O’Neill as a reference.
There are people like Bernie Saunders; however they are exceptions that prove the rule, and reinforce my case. Anyway, strictly speaking, Saunders is a Social Democrat, not a progressive.
Re: the Verizon Rally. The company’s workers will possibly go on strike after this weekend, due to management demands that, among other things, abolish Veterans Day and Martin Luther King Day as paid holidays.
I would say that “something to do with labor rights” is an understatement.
I consider the silence of Massachusetts progressives on this matter to be evidence in and of itself. Not against you, personally, but against the media silence from those who consider themselves supportive of “progressive” causes – the Boston Globe comes to mind.
This willful ignorance of, and contempt for, working and middle class Americans creates populist backlashes, which in turn creates Right-wing support mechanisms. This is the environment in which Obama has to operate: the lack of any countervailing power on the Left (pundit arrogance notwithstanding).
Long story short: An Olbermann candidacy would be a Godsend for the Right.
How many of those “working and middle class Americans” that you refer to live in the inner city? How many of them are Latino or African-American?
When you describe “populist backlashes” that fall into the arms of the right-wing, I think you describe disillusioned white workers who are all too eager to embrace scapegoats like “immigrants”, “minorities”, and “liberals”. I think we can do a better job of helping those disillusioned white workers recognize that, in embracing the GOP, they are jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
In order to accomplish this, I think that all of us need to help those disillusioned workers find common ground, rather than differences, with those who the wealthy overlords would have them attack.
I think we need to do the same for your perceived (and perhaps accurate) division between “progressive” and “liberal”.
Let’s start with the Latino vote. The best analyses tend to come from the Pew Hispanic Center and the National Council of LaRaza. A good one-sentence summary from the latter:
The black vote, while more wedded to the Democratic Party consistently trends anti-progressive liberal in primaries (absent black candidates, when racial identification comes into play). Even the supposed alliance in the Sixties with the New Left was a fantasy. Over the past four decades black support went to Humphrey over McGovern; Carter over Kennedy, Clinton over everybody, and so on.
At the black grassroots level, the Left is simply presumed to be racist, albeit not as dangerous as the Right. This dynamic developed during the Thirties and hasn’t changed since. This is as true in Massachusetts Statewide and Congressional races as it is nationally. For this reason, Stephen Lynch won every majority-black precinct in the 2001 Ninth Congressional Special Election, and consistently carries those precincts today.
Complicating matters is the existence of parallel populisms, wherein white working class voters support the Right, while their black counterparts disengage from the process altogether, but that’s grist for a monograph.
Seems to me the left supports civil rights, even to the point of affirmative action, is more conscious about racial implications of policies that don’t obviously have them, etc. What policies to progressive promote that are racist, or conversely do we oppose that to the detriment of minority communities? Honestly you sound like the tea partier in the joke where the CEO takes 11 out of 12 cookies from the plate then says to you watch out for the union guy – he wants a piece of your cookie! Do you watch Ed Schultz, a self-identified “lefty” whose primary focus is on workers? Is he not progressive enough for you either? A true progressive is pro-worker and pro-civil rights; anyone who is not these things I would question THEIR identity as a progressive before I would question whether a true progressive adheres to these priniciples. BTW, I still don’t know why they didn’t attend the rally personally, but I’m pretty sure every Democrat in our delegation would side with the workers and be there in spirit. Unions still pretty consistently endorse Democrats and I assume there is a reason for that.
Paul Simmons has offered polling data that don’t fit this.
Political support, alas, is not just a matter of policy agreement. If it were, Democrats would do much better.
I understand that rank and file working class have become Reagan Democrats and don’t think we speak for them, which baffles me as well. What I’m pushing back on is this absurd (IMO) notion that the left/liberals/progressives (whatever we want to call them) are racist.
He makes this claim:
That’s a statement about perceptions not about your (or my) deductions.
…plus I believe he has made this argument himself in the past.
Back in 1967, Harold Cruse published The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual The same year, Martin Luther King published an essay titled Black Power Defined .
Both noted the tendency for black issues and black leadership to be defined from the outside. For reasons too lengthy to discuss here, perceptions from both the Left and Right share the same premises about black political culture. What exists is King’s nightmare that black progressives morph “from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.”
It must be remembered that by the time of his assassination, King was calling for “strategic black separatism”.
That was forty-three years ago. In the interim there was plenty of documented racism within the feminist, gay, and Left-Labor to the point that that progressives are considered ipso facto racist.
The political result is that the white Left is equated with the white Right, and “a Plague on both Houses” dynamic exists at the grassroots.
The fact remains that the black community is significantly under-represented at the top end of the wealth distribution.
When the black grassroots adopts the “plague on both houses” approach that you describe, they perpetuate their oppression at the hands of their lily-white overlords. If they act on this by embracing the GOP, they lose.
It seems to me that whether we call ourselves “progressives”, “liberals”, or both, we have both an opportunity and an obligation to make this reality as clear as we are able.
…to the comment from paulsimmons “Blacks and Progressives: A Pocket History”, but for some reason there is no “Reply” option on this and adjacent comments.
I am open to specific ideas about what we should be advocating that we are not or shouldn’t be advocating that we are. I personally have not heard what I would consider racist comments in the modern LGBT, labor, or women’s movements. I’m still not convinced that this attitude that you cite among African-Americans is any more than a feeling that can’t be nailed down without specific examples (and don’t send me to a book, just list some examples, please), and even then it seems that these attitides are a few decades old on both sides and are overdue for some updating.
everyone on this page who has made a comment seems to be correct in one way or another, which is pretty amazing.
there is a “propaganda gap”, and it does lead poll respondents to contradict themselves, on a fairly constant basis, even as they become confused over the fact that the government can’t “keep its hands off our medicare”.
but the big takeaway from obama ’08 is that a candidate can carry a perceived liberal/progressive message and do well with centrist voters, and that makes sense when you consider just how popular social security and medicare and taxing the rich actually are among even the most conservative amongst us.
there were comments about the fact that democratic politicians and progressives have been a.w.o.l. when big labor shows up for events; i live in washington, and i’ve seen some of the same things here – but to be fair, progessives are showing up to support labor, as can be seen here and here.
i’ve tried reaching out to labor, with mixed results; i get the impression that some folks don’t really want to associate with “the lefty fringe”, as it may be damaging to their own image. (if i had to guess i’d say about 2/3 of the time, when i initiate a contact with a union regarding a story that i’m trying to develop, they never respond.)
i would add one more thought to what’s been said here: this is also a battle of money, and progressives are good at withholding money as a form of punishment…but we have to find a way to get better at the “reward” part of that equation; at the same time we have to find a way to consistently recognize and (whatever the opposite of “name and shame” is) the members of congress who serve us well.
look at george miller. he’s a good guy, and he has been for years, but most folks have no idea who he is – and if we were better at letting folks know that such a breed of congresscritters exist, it might help create a bit less hopelessness and a bit more engagement within the larger public.