Why the Momentum Died

I’ve been thinking for a while about the narrative Democrats have produced around the health care debate, specifically the way that coverage devolved into horse-trading and vote counting starting in late fall.  I believe that this shift towards coverage of legislative politics largely accounts for the failure of interest and momentum on the part of the Democrat’s base.  I’m interested in why this shift occurred, but for a moment I’d like to examine its effects.

At it’s core, coverage of legislative politics is boring, and not conducive to motivating even moderately interesting political activity by everyday folks.  It doesn’t imply conviction, moral certainty, or a clear path to victory, all important elements if someone is to take a personally/emotionally risky step to publicly support a political position.

Also, it overemphasized the comprises made to move a bill forward, and the perceived weakness of the progressive position.  The constant, hour by hour, day by day coverage focused attention on the noisy process – and by that I mean on the literally confusing, often meaningless signals of process interpreted by newsmedia to mean much more than intended.  Close followers of the debate were subjected to an outsize number of highs and lows: The Bill is moving forward! Vote by August! Leiberman had a press conference! Grassley says no! Schumer says yes!  In the course of political emotions, the lows always outweigh the highs.  As humans, we tend to feel losses more than victories – we are easily brought low.  The failures multiplied, from the actual compromises that undermined substantive reform to the legislative roadblocks constructed by the insurers and their allies. Compared to the outlandish hopes for the Obama presidency, this felt like abject failure.

The emotional experience of the health care reform madness shows the organizing value of a movement substantially independent from the Democrats and their legislative agenda.  Having your own organizing goals directed at corporate power, rather than just legislative opponents would allow a movement to build then maintain momentum even as legislative progress flounders.

I think this is a strength of the culture-war frame adopted by the right in America.  They are able to find persistent targets in culture, science, and occasionally politics, giving many different frames by which to judge their progress as a movement.  They’re not beholden to certain champions in government, and because of their sustained power, their champions in government are in fact beholden to them.

Why Stop at Wall Street?

Most everyone in the political class of America shifted their populist outrage engines back into gear for bonus season on Wall Street, which JP Morgan kicked off this morning with their ’09 earnings statement.  Folks have the right to be fed up with an industry that benefited wildly from working folks but extravagantly reward the people working for them, even as Americans wait for payback of their lifeline. I’m happy to see even elected officials get mad, as long as they really follow through on taxing the bastards.

But I see no reason to stop there.  Many industries and companies enjoy the fruits of government largess, or occupy near-monopolistic positions in our economy, and they should all be subject to similar scrutiny.

Location shopping for local government tax breaks is virtually an industry of its own, and executive compensation should be curbed for companies receiving deep discounts on taxes that pay for local services like police, fire and water.  Even Barack Obama publicly considered a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, the direct beneficiaries of public works projects to ensure the flow of oil around the country, and the flow of people via carbon-fueled vehicles.  Any number of industrial farming companies take people’s money in the form of ag subsidies which also happen to devastate the rest of the world – they should be taxed heavily as well.  The list goes on.

The point is this: Americans still haven’t reckoned fully with the realities of wealth and welfare in this country, and while reining in bonuses on Wall Street is certainly a good idea, the disease goes much deeper, and we have a long ways to go before we can establish a equitable way of maintaining people’s wellbeing in America.

Obama’s Hardball

Obama’s ‘responsibility fee’ for financial institutions is long overdue – and impressive politics.  It neatly splits the GOP away from its tea party base.  The party’s obstructionism will be forced to reckon with the real grassroots anger towards the bailout.  It also might fry some tea party brains with their wires crossed about the GOP and Obama.

It’s also timely.  Financial reform will be winding its way through Congress as they parties shift into high gear for the 2010 election cycle, putting a big piece of popular, base splitting legislation front and center when people go to the polls.

100 billion is nothing to shake a stick at either.  It’s a well-aimed tax on the people willing to sacrafice you and your livelihood for their personal gain.

On Stupak

The problem isn’t just selling out women to pass a bill.  It goes deeper than that.

Pelosi needed the votes, but she was never cornered.  Even if she needed the amendment to pass reform, she had the option to stem the pain, to offer some promise to women that Democrats’ support for the right to choose is more than momentary political convenience.  Instead, the women who worked hard for a Democratic majority got sold down the river, into a future where insurance that covers abortion will become totally unavailable.

The other problem is with the virtually nonexistent pro Choice movement in America.  I don’t understand why this hasn’t been more part of the discussion.  Pro-Choicers haven’t been able to organize themselves to create power and decades.  Their legislative strategy involves a shrll reactionary posture and no proactive planning for rolling back restrictions on choice.  They connect with natural constituencies in the Feminist-y online media space as an afterthought, rather than a dedicated goal.

The Story of Futility

Snippy snippy.

Wondering why climate legislation (and health care, and everything) is getting nowhere?  Because it’s business as usual with big green and progressive groups.

One symptom: sniping smart progressive media with hedging and a ‘strategic’ wet blanket.

The Story of Cap and Trade is a climate justice approach to proposed legislation to regulate US greenhouse gas emisions.  In short, a climate justice approach puts equal emphasis on who wins and loses in the course of capping carbon, while a straight climate change approach just tries to put a hold on carbon.

The Story builds off of the popular ‘Story of Stuff’ video, and makes compelling and provacative arguments about the folks running impending carbon markets.  It uses widely-employed populist tropes focusing on bankers and billionaires who ruined our economy to get folks motivated for better climate solutions.

Which, aparantly isn’t good enough for some people.  Grist throws a dreary wet blanket on the whole thing, claiming that it “missed it’s mark” on a number of points.  The response makes a number of strategic errors, number one of which being confusing good rhetoric for policy analysis.  It’s classic liberal wallowing: getting tied down in policy-speak instead of trying to frame the debate.

More importantly, it mis-judges the gravity of the emotional battle left un-fought on climate change.  The deniers are just more evocative when it comes to setting the stage for what needs to be done.  Paul Rosenberg from OpenLeft hit the nail on the head when he described the difficulties climate action supporters face in dealing with the ‘climate-gate’ email leaks.

Beating them means embracing simple strong messages that deal squarely with the contemporary rhetorical environment.  It means not making the most hated people in America (Goldman Sachs) your ally of convenience, saddling you with their baggage and none of the good language they use to defend it. It means letting folks looking for more than politically convenient solutions set the terms for debate.

If the health care reform process has taught us anything, it’s that cutting off the left-activist wing of the movement substantially weakens the center hammering out a deal.  The folks looking to stop climate change need to learn it, and learn quick.

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.