Barack Obama talks up to the base.
As a basic rule, I admire politicians. It's an incredibly hard life to live in the public eye. You can't be frivolous. You're constantly the target of criticism and scrutiny, much of it unreasonable. Your motives are constantly questioned, and you're constantly forced to find a balance between self-preservation and responsibility to the public good. Only pols who obviously, shamelessly go too far in subverting the latter to the former earn my contempt. That includes basically the entire American right, and a big chunk of Canadian conservatives, including the opportunistic whiner Peter MacKay -- but also some scattered liberal politicians in both the US and Canada. Mainly though, I long to believe. So when pols say and do things that help confirm my belief in the importance and potential of liberal politicking, it makes my day.
Which brings me to Senator Barack Obama who today had a terrific diary up at the Daily Kos called "Tone, Truth and the Democratic Party". It's mainly a discussion of how most Americans view the Roberts confirmation, and a defence of progressive Dems like Leahy and Feingold who voted to confirm him, as well as a plea for reason generally in understanding why Democrats are the way they are. My favourite part is this:
The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job. After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart. It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that's our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.
Kos himself had a smart response, agreeing with Obama in the main, but adding:
But here's the thing -- our elected officials due a piss poor job of explaining their votes, especially when those votes stray from party orthodoxy. They hope that by ignoring the issue, people will forget about the vote, or perhaps not notice it took place. And in the old media landscape, that was probably the case. Now, with blogs and wikis and email lists and 24/7 cable and all that, things have changed.
This speaks to a larger issue. Democrats do a horrible job not just of explaining themselves and their motives to voters genearally, but also of explaining thesemlves to, and dealing with, their own liberal base (or at least the part of it that's represented in the blogosphere and that makes up a big contingent of the activist class). As Kos says and as I've argued before, this is a problem that the institution of blogging has brought into new prominence, both by shining a light on the problem -- revealing grassroots discontent -- and by providing a potential remedy to the disconect between grassroots activists and party leaders.
Generally, Democrats and liberal thinkers have approached the base and its demands -- for partisanship, for aggressiveness, for clarity, for adherance to liberal orthodoxy -- in one of two ways: either by ignoring it and maintaining the traditional distance provided by the traditional media and communication mechanisms like op-eds and speeches; or by going on a blog but telling activists exactly what they want to hear, so you invite sychophantic agreement rather than any kind of feedback that might be evidence of that very lethal "dissatisfaction among your base". Even in the latter case, blogging by elected officials and their aides in the presence of a comment section that never goes away takes some guts. But what really takes guts is telling your supporters things they don't necessarily want to hear, particularly in a medium in which activists and partisans have the chance to talk back to you directly and tell you just exactly why they think you're wrong.
That's what Obama just did. I just voted in a poll at Kos in which respondants split almost 50/50 on our opinion of his diary -- a perfect microcosm of American political thought! As an added bonus, I actually agree with almost everything Obama said (and I just love his prose style -- I assume it's his). I quibble on the claim that voting yes on an extremely conservative judge, however qualified, can really be considered a "principled" thing for a liberal senator to do, at least on the floor -- though I can see that it might have strategic value. Also, taking the diary at face value, I think Obama slightly underappreciates the potential power, and occasional neccessity, of demagoguery, even in liberal politics. (For instance, I don't think it's a coincidence that Kerry improved on Gore's performance among males 18-29 by a whopping 10% in an election in which he and his partisans convinced 53% of said demographic of the unlikely possibility that Bush would reinstate the draft if reelected.) But that's not the point. What's really remarkable is Obama's guts: blogging on Daily Kos even though Hugh Hewitt and the Weekly Standard will say it confirms him as a out-of-the-mainstream-hard-lefty, just like Ted Kennedy or John Conyers. And then, having entered the medium, being honest with the Kossacks in saying that he wouldn't have supported a filibuster of Roberts; that most of his constituents don't share their views of the Adminstration; and that, in his opinion, Leahy and Feingold deserve progressives' respect even if they didn't join him in voting no on Roberts.
This sort of thing is far more impressive to me than the fact that Obama made a nice speech at the Convention a year ago, making all the pundits slobber. This was actually a pretty good imitation of leadership. Kudos, Senator.
Which brings me to Senator Barack Obama who today had a terrific diary up at the Daily Kos called "Tone, Truth and the Democratic Party". It's mainly a discussion of how most Americans view the Roberts confirmation, and a defence of progressive Dems like Leahy and Feingold who voted to confirm him, as well as a plea for reason generally in understanding why Democrats are the way they are. My favourite part is this:
The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job. After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart. It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that's our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.
Kos himself had a smart response, agreeing with Obama in the main, but adding:
But here's the thing -- our elected officials due a piss poor job of explaining their votes, especially when those votes stray from party orthodoxy. They hope that by ignoring the issue, people will forget about the vote, or perhaps not notice it took place. And in the old media landscape, that was probably the case. Now, with blogs and wikis and email lists and 24/7 cable and all that, things have changed.
This speaks to a larger issue. Democrats do a horrible job not just of explaining themselves and their motives to voters genearally, but also of explaining thesemlves to, and dealing with, their own liberal base (or at least the part of it that's represented in the blogosphere and that makes up a big contingent of the activist class). As Kos says and as I've argued before, this is a problem that the institution of blogging has brought into new prominence, both by shining a light on the problem -- revealing grassroots discontent -- and by providing a potential remedy to the disconect between grassroots activists and party leaders.
Generally, Democrats and liberal thinkers have approached the base and its demands -- for partisanship, for aggressiveness, for clarity, for adherance to liberal orthodoxy -- in one of two ways: either by ignoring it and maintaining the traditional distance provided by the traditional media and communication mechanisms like op-eds and speeches; or by going on a blog but telling activists exactly what they want to hear, so you invite sychophantic agreement rather than any kind of feedback that might be evidence of that very lethal "dissatisfaction among your base". Even in the latter case, blogging by elected officials and their aides in the presence of a comment section that never goes away takes some guts. But what really takes guts is telling your supporters things they don't necessarily want to hear, particularly in a medium in which activists and partisans have the chance to talk back to you directly and tell you just exactly why they think you're wrong.
That's what Obama just did. I just voted in a poll at Kos in which respondants split almost 50/50 on our opinion of his diary -- a perfect microcosm of American political thought! As an added bonus, I actually agree with almost everything Obama said (and I just love his prose style -- I assume it's his). I quibble on the claim that voting yes on an extremely conservative judge, however qualified, can really be considered a "principled" thing for a liberal senator to do, at least on the floor -- though I can see that it might have strategic value. Also, taking the diary at face value, I think Obama slightly underappreciates the potential power, and occasional neccessity, of demagoguery, even in liberal politics. (For instance, I don't think it's a coincidence that Kerry improved on Gore's performance among males 18-29 by a whopping 10% in an election in which he and his partisans convinced 53% of said demographic of the unlikely possibility that Bush would reinstate the draft if reelected.) But that's not the point. What's really remarkable is Obama's guts: blogging on Daily Kos even though Hugh Hewitt and the Weekly Standard will say it confirms him as a out-of-the-mainstream-hard-lefty, just like Ted Kennedy or John Conyers. And then, having entered the medium, being honest with the Kossacks in saying that he wouldn't have supported a filibuster of Roberts; that most of his constituents don't share their views of the Adminstration; and that, in his opinion, Leahy and Feingold deserve progressives' respect even if they didn't join him in voting no on Roberts.
This sort of thing is far more impressive to me than the fact that Obama made a nice speech at the Convention a year ago, making all the pundits slobber. This was actually a pretty good imitation of leadership. Kudos, Senator.
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