Hey Democratic “leaders”, Liberal Street Fighter calls your bluff.
David Mamet sums up exactly why the current “leadership” of the Democratic Party falls to defeat over and over again:
The military axiom is “he who imposes the terms of the battle imposes the terms of the peace.” The gambling equivalent is: “Don’t call unless you could raise”; that is, to merely match one’s opponent’s bet is effective only if it makes the opponent question the caller’s motives. And that can only occur if the caller has acted aggressively enough in the past to cause his opponents to wonder if the mere call is a ruse de guerre.
If you are branded as passive, the table will roll right over you — your opponents will steal antes without fear. Why? Because the addicted caller has never exhibited what, in the wider world, is known as courage.
Courage, as we all know through rueful experience, is something that the supposed party of the left hasn’t had in decades. Instead, after rising to the occasion and passing vital civil rights and voting rights legislation, the Party has since become the handmaiden of the Corporations and the wealthy. It never fights for its base, but only for a seat at the table, the high stakes table with the hyper-wealthy and the Republican Party:
For example, take a player who has never acted with initiative — he has never raised, merely called. Now, at the end of the evening, he is dealt a royal flush. The hand, per se, is unbeatable, but the passive player has never acted aggressively; his current bet (on the sure thing) will signal to the other players that his hand is unbeatable, and they will fold.
His patient, passive quest for certainty has won nothing.
The Democrats, similarly, in their quest for a strategy that would alienate no voters, have given away the store, and they have given away the country.
Committed Democrats watched while Al Gore frittered away the sure-thing election of 2000. They watched, passively, while the Bush administration concocted a phony war; they, in the main, voted for the war knowing it was purposeless, out of fear of being thought weak. They then ran a candidate who refused to stand up to accusations of lack of patriotism.
The Republicans, like the perpetual raiser at the poker table, became increasingly bold as the Democrats signaled their absolute reluctance to seize the initiative.
The party has left us to watch from the stands, increasingly unwilling to fight. Unwilling to get up from the table and make way for someone who will play the game with real initiative, real courage … with the kind of commitment required in a game where the stakes are so high:
Control of the initiative is control of the battle. In the alley, at the poker table or in politics. One must raise. The American public chose Bush over Kerry in 2004. How, the undecided electorate rightly wondered, could one believe that Kerry would stand up for America when he could not stand up to Bush? A possible response to the Swift boat veterans would have been: “I served. He didn’t. I didn’t bring up the subject, but, if all George Bush has to show for his time in the Guard is a scrap of paper with some doodling on it, I say the man was a deserter.”
This would have been a raise. Here the initiative has been seized, and the opponent must now fume and bluster and scream unfair. In combat, in politics, in poker, there is no certainty; there is only likelihood, and the likelihood is that aggression will prevail.
The press, quiescent during five years of aggressive behavior by the White House, has, perhaps, begun to recover its pride. In speaking of Karl Rove, Scott McClellan and the White House’s Valerie Plame disgrace, they have begun to use words such as “other than true,” “fabricated.” The word that they circle, still, is “lie.” The word the Democratic constituency, heartsick over the behavior of its party leaders, has been forced to consider applying to them is “coward.”
One may sit at the poker table all night and never bet and still go home broke, having anted away one’s stake.
The Democrats are anteing away their time at the table. They may be bold and risk defeat, or be passive and ensure it.
comic from Cleft
Was watching ESPN the other day, and Annie Duke (arguably the top female professional poker player) was talking about poker.
She said that most new players make two mistakes: playing too many hands and then playing them too conservatively, by just calling instead of raising.
So what does this have to do with progressive politics? Well, if we take the analogy of “playing too many hands”, maybe we need to pick our fights, go after the Repubs where we’ve got the upper hand. We’re not going to “out-moral” the Religious Reich…but we can go after the Repubs on issues like economic inequities, the mishandling of Iraq and Katrina recovery, etc. As for playing hands conservatively, we need to take the offensive on the issues we do play; that forces the opposition to decide if they really can beat us on a particular issue.
[I’m also a major poker freak, if you can’t tell…]
We’re not going to “out-moral” the Religious Reich
I think we could, but damn sure not the way the party’s been approaching that issue so far.
Imo the value structure that most Americans have has much more in common with liberals than with those blowhard hypocrites on the Christian Right. I think we keep getting beat on that issue for two primary reasons: 1) because we let them set the terms of the discussion and then beat us over the head with those terms; and 2) because we let them win the spin war after the debate takes place so even when they don’t win a debate on morality we’ve allowed them to create the impression that they did.
If we could run candidates with half the charisma Bill Clinton has (and I’m not really a fan of Bill’s, but credit where it’s due and all that), but people who are actual liberals, then we could get the message out that the conservative moral code is like that busybody Gladys Kravitz from Bewitched, always up in your business, peeking through your bedroom windows and trying to run your private life even though they don’t really understand it — and that they want governmental punishments to be very much Old Testament Jehovah style. Whereas the liberal moral code is about making sure people have basic housing, food, clothing, equal protection and equality of opportunity, very much like that Jesus fella who said all the neat stuff in the New Testament.
approaches “morals” — I’m not sure I want to “out-moral” them.
There was a piece in yesterday’s paper (it was in the San Jose Mercury News, but I think it was some wire service piece) about companies that make filtering systems and edited versions of DVD movies, taking out the sex, violence and “bad” language/situations. (Hell, they even edited “Shrek”!) Their arguement: people want to see the movies, but don’t want to see the other stuff. I guess they have the right to do what they think they must to avoid things they don’t like…but when I’m faced with a choice, I either don’t see the movie, or I close my eyes at the parts I don’t like. Sometimes violence is necessary…and even graphic violence has its place. (There’s an edited version of “Saving Private Ryan” out there; if kids saw the graphic horrors of war, maybe they wouldn’t be so gung ho to make a living out of it.)
This is what I’m thinking of when I don’t want to “out-moral” the moralists; they’re so intent on the little minutia such as sex and violence in the media, they ignore the everyday horrors of people dying in the streets of the urban wilderness, of kids being born into this world without health insurance, and that despite the “just say NO” mentality of abstinence-only education, kids are still having sex. And as for language, which is worse: a few F-bombs on the screen, or our government lying to us every day?
Here endeth the rant…
I agree with what you say here, Cali Scribe — and the way you present it sorta reiterates the point I was trying to make.
By which I mean, we’ve let the nutty religio-right set the terms for the morality discussion, so now whenever someone talks in a casual way about morality w/r/t politics the average Joe & Jane have the association you mention to vacuous issues like sex and violence on TV (among other vacuous associations). Rather than surrendering the territory, however, we can change the associations through discourse and repetition.
Rather than simply folding on the “morality hand”, I was saying that our strategy ought to be to actively try to change those associations that Republicans have programmed into people’s heads. Then whenever folks hear a reference to morality in politics, what they’ll think about instead are the liberal values I mentioned, and those you mention in your post.
It wouldn’t be beating the moralists at their own game as much as it would be subtly changing the playing field until it’s no longer slanted in their favor. I see no reason to cede the territory.