Making Sense of the Bloomberg Rout

Bloomberg will rout the Democrats next week.  Despite everything, desite breaking the rules to run, despite the clean majority that wanted to see him out at the beginning of the race.

Clearly, money means a lot.  Spend 100 mil and you’re bound to get somewhere.  But I don’t think that tells the whole story. There’s also the media’s weak coverage of his substantial scandals, which explains the partial inability of organizations like Bloomberg Watch, or unions like CWA who have gone to bat trying to beat him.

But the battle to mobilize a populist revolt against the mayor-king was lost years ago.  For the last 8 years social movements have been cowed by a post-September 11th police state and end-of-history corporate consensus, staying out of the streets and off the radar.  All that’s left of visible confrontation is the militant left willing to directly confront police power for its own sake.  A real backlash to the city’s political elite requires the sustained activity by a vital social justice movement – and at the moment, the city’s left is so anemic as to be almost non-existent.

It’s the product of a police state, the razzle-dazzle distraction of national politics these days, and not a little defeatism for the folks trying to keep the city affordable and livable.  By whatever means, the loss of opportunities for productive collaboration and the outward appearance of a city on auto-pilot mean that Bloomberg has had it in the bag before the race began.

Runoff!

More on primary day in a bit, but until then:

“Moreover, this day is bound to be repeated shortly in Citywide form as Mark Green spends the next two weeks of his life preparing for an ass-kicking he can do nothing to prevent”

-Gatemouth (who I otherwise disagree with)

Why We Need ‘The Game’

Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn recently lamented the state of the 39th Council District race, particularly the explosion of ‘negative’ campaigning, part of ‘the game’ of winning elections.  Complaints about negative campaigning are an evergreen sport, almost as predictable as the negative campaigning itself.

The problem is twofold.  Not only does negative campaigning often work (see current health care ‘debate’ for one example), but it’s also a neccesary part of electoral democracy.  Politicians do a lot of things daily that people don’t have the time to pay attention to, or property account for.  The election season provides a platform to examine their choices, influences and judgement; a high profile, public examination of a candidate.  Opposition research and ‘dirt’ forces candidates to account for their past, and helps perform the most fundamental work of electoral democracy: forcing politicians to account for their decisions in a public way, and allowing voters to pass judgement on them.

Of course there will be cases where mountains are made of mole-hills *cough* (See the Working Families/DFS issue – more on this in a later post), but politicians risk reputation and retaliation for their mis-steps, and maintaining an open debate about the record of candidates is substantially more important that protecting the imagined sensibilities of a scandalized public.

Recipes for Defeat, Strategy and the Left

At some point, the right’s response to the Obama Presidency turned into what feels like a rout.  The old ready defeatism reemerged, the astounded bafflement about the success of right talking points, the flustered games of catch-up with proliferating memes about Obama’s ’socialism’ and ‘foreignness’.

At the same time, the left performed an incredible 180 on the President, renouncing him for selling out with remarkable speed – as if the election had itself banished every demon we needed to defeat.  Part of the defeatism is the effective corralling of mainstream liberal sentiment by the ‘veal pen’ of the President’s popularity and obsessive message discipline. There’s always been the expectation that Obama would just take care of it himself, and that adherence to his message-line would get the job done.  The result has been a woefully under-organized and frustrated independent-left looking for a point from which to put pressure on the President, but still years behind the right in its organizing capacity.

I also wonder if there’s a particular quality of liberalism that makes it prone to such defeatism.  Part of the ideology of liberalism involves an explicit consciousness of pluralism,  the relationship between different interest groups and a discourse about the interaction of those groups in the public sphere (whatever that is).  This lends itself to a focus on strategy and an obsession with telling the story about the battle of interests against each other.  Folks on the right tell a better story in the battle, and focus less on the machinations of strategy, lend itself to a more effective language for mobilization – one that is more visceral.  The endless deliberations of strategy allow more points for division, and less values-driven emotional appeals.  The result is less action, and more of an obsession with the effective strategies of your opponants.

And the defeatism slips back in, and the rout begins again.

How to Profit on a Giveaway

Fascinated by this story about the ‘profits’ from the US bailout of big banks, mainly because it seems to upset so many things that people were saying about the bailout last year – at least at first glance.

It sounds remarkable: the US invested billions in near insolvent banks, and provided enough confidence to recover a profit.  It validates an unpopular Bush/Obama strategy for recovery, proving both the lefty ‘let ‘em fail’ crowd, and the right ‘no big government socialism’ crowd.

But it’s not so simple.  The bailout funds initially came with no strings attached – none.  The US never even asked for the expectation of repayment. Goldman only started paying back its part of the bailout because of threatened restrictions placed on executive compensation, which made holding government capital unappealing.  (of course limiting executive compensation or bonuses is a prudent policy available to any other kind of shareholder, but that didn’t stop Goldman Sachs and others from whining up a storm)

As the NYT notes, the ‘profits’ seen by the US are provisional, and wouldn’t cover the massive exposure to loss from bad loans held by Bank of America and elsewhere.  It remains to be seen the real results of the bailout process – the best thing I can see coming out of this is more momentum behind effective government intervention in health care, so that fewer sick folks have to die.

Welcome to America

Z: who is jim demint and what percentage of his brain has died due to oxygen deprivation?

5 Minutes Later…

Z: oh my god he’s a senator…

jesus fucking christ…

It’s never just the bike lanes.

Oh boy, more fodder from StreetsBlog, the greatest accumulation of smug ever assembled online.

Once again, they take up the bike lanes – elitism connection, and put on display a total ignorance of the character of class and real estate in New York.  The issue is never just bike lanes.

The issue is an urban space where easy public transit access is highly correlated with high rents and a upper-middle to upper class lifestyle.  The New York City MTA is broken in a lot of ways, one of them being that subway service concentrates around Manhattan and it’s nearby neighborhoods, which tend to be the most expensive – often dramatically moreso than more distant ‘hoods’.   The more transit-accessible to Manhattan a neighborhood, the more likely urban professionals will gather there and raise rents.

This means that car ownership is correlated with distance from the CBD, which in New York means a correlation with working class communities.  Despite the cost of owning  a car in the city, folks who live in the outer boroughs are less likely to be working those well-paying jobs, and more likely to be owning a car.

Another case in point: ‘traffic calming’ in Downtown Brooklyn.  SB highlights a traffic neck-down at Smith and Bergen (actually Cobble Hill, thanks) as an example of a trend in traffic calming downtown.  However, traffic-calming advocates downtown cluster in the ritzier ‘hoods in Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Brooklyn Heights, and the responsiveness of DOT to their arguments only shows the way that the complaints of well-connected and privileged neighborhoods get overvalued by city planners.

But most importantly, we need to remember it’s not just about bike lanes.  Until city planning squarely deals with issues of class privilege and rising rents, transit issues will always be caught up in this kind of elitist bickering.

The Impact of Extremism on Health Care Reform

The health care debate of 2009 provides a classic case study in the politics of distraction, and a lesson (hopefully learned) in how to shape a debate with the rhetoric of extremism.

The teapartiers and the town hall crashers haven’t made any new arguments, but managed to hijack an entire month’s worth of news by carefully deploying left-tactics (with the leg-up of race and class privileges) to draw what should be a discussion of how to provide care for the more than 47 million Americans who are uninsured into a debate about a debate.  They strategically engaged the normal political process, targeting sites of legitimacy-building for Democrats and violating the norms of those forums to visually make the argument that the country has gone off the rails – in exceptional times, you make exceptions to the rules.  The very discussion about the process – the tactfulness of the tactics, etc. -  then provided a platform for the crazies to make their argument.

Which brings me to my second point.

It doesn’t matter if you hate them.  Not one bit.  Folks are flacks, and they know it: their job is to get you to pay attention to them, and force the debate rightwards, which they do by staking out extreme positions that anchor discussion about the bill(s).  Death panels comments and the like are memes that re-launch right-pundits into the media sphere and provide them a platform for speaking.  Extremist rhetoric allows them to set the terms of discussion, even if they lose, and that is a dangerous thing.  Political fights are won and lost on the terrain of cognative associations, and forcing the phrase ‘death panels’ into association with ‘health care reform’ (even if to say there are no panels) draws them together and muddies the terrain for pushing reform.  Inciting hate only amplifies the impact of the message.

The way to win?  Get back to talking about what matters: health care reform is about people, and the corporate assholes who will let them die for money.

The Perenial

Rudy just keeps coming back for more.  Unsatisfied with two sputtering but decicive defeats – one in 2000 for Senator, and in 2008 for President – Giuliani seems to want more electoral punishment, this time in a run for Governor in 2010.  He’s already polling pretty well behind presumptive Dem nominee AG Andrew Cuomo, and he hasn’t resolved many of the personal and political problems that drove his past defeats, without really gaining any strengths in his down time.

Rudy’s spent most of his time since the mayorality chalking up high-dollar speaking gigs and potentially compromising lobbying contracts.  He still lacks the temperament or savvy to successfully work a grueling campaign schedule, and his chest-beating and cheerleading for the bad-old GOP since 2001 doubtless undercuts his image as a barrier-breaking reformer.  Seriously, he’s managed to turn the last 8 years into little other than personal profit, allowing Democrats to fall back on the same attacks as ‘00,  plus dig for more in the dozens of contracts to Giuliani Partners or Bracewell and Giuliani.

Another run will help shuffle Rudy down the infamous path of perenial losers in American politics.  It’s a well-trod path, filled with has-beens and almost-weres, and hopefully Rudy’s latest attempt will consign him to this illustrious group for the long haul.