Everyone has a different way of interpreting the data that the world presents to them and that is what makes the world so interesting. My mind tends to look at power in terms of structures: what are they, whom do they represent, what do they do, and how can they be changed?
If I’m thinking about progressive politics, I think about the power structures that oppose or stand in the way of progressive policy. And aside from some breaking news pieces, pretty much everything I write is designed in some way to attack the power structures that stand in the way of progressive power.
If I am writing about the history of the CIA or FISA and the Church Committee, it is to attack the power structure that wrote the political narrative (or history) of the last 40 years.
If I write about candidate recruitment it is to attack the leaders of the DSCC and DCCC, who have repeatedly shown favor to less progressive candidates.
If I write about ostensibly left-wing columnists like Joe Klein, Maureen Dowd, Richard Cohen, and David Broder, it is to combat the impression that they actually speak for the left.
If I write negatively about the DLC and their members, it is to combat their influence within the party.
If I write about our ‘forward-basing strategy’ it is to challenge the bipartisan foreign policy consensus about American empire.
It’s all part and parcel of the same struggle.
So, I understand why it is annoying when a candidate for office, like Barack Obama, reinforces the political/academic/media false history about the Ronald Reagan years. Amending and revising that false history is fundamental to what the blogosphere is all about. Contemporary history would be much more right-biased if it were not for the blogospere’s ability to correct the record in real time as it is being written (by mostly corporate media). That didn’t happen in the 1980’s and the result is that we’re left with a very distorted picture where the extant record is almost indistinguishable from hagiography.
I think BooTrib commenter Alice put it best when she pointed out the fait accompli of that hagiography in our current culture.
I think we can still have hope that a black man may be elected president of our country where millions of people worship the memory of Reagan.
I mean, what’s the guy gonna say? – “Your God is bullshit.”
And the answer is: ‘No, that’s our job.’ Barack Obama is running for president, not chairman of the history department at Harvard. He has to speak to the public as he finds it, not (to use some Rumsfeldian language) as we might wish it to be. But isn’t there a problem here? Hasn’t Obama attempted to take the mantle of transformation? How can he lead a transformative administration if he will not engage in transforming false-narratives about Ronald Reagan?
I admit, there is something troubling about a candidate that breezily accepts false narratives. In doing so, he reinforces them, making our job infinitesimally harder to accomplish. But, frankly, running a presidential campaign is largely about marshaling limited energy and resources in productive ways. The point is communicating with brevity and conciseness, and a candidate cannot get bogged down in questioning the premise of every dubious question thrown their way.
None of the candidates are going to invest any time in trying to tear down Reagan’s reputation in this campaign. They would be fools to try. We might ask them not to reinforce false narratives, but it really is not too important in the overall scheme of things. What is far more important is the end result. Will a Democrat get elected? Will that Democrat push progressives aside in the DNC, the DSCC, the DCCC and put in people like Terry McAuliffe, Harold Ford, Jr., and Mark Penn? Will the Democrats win eight or more seats in the Senate? Notice that red-state Democrats like Tim Johnson, Kent Conrad, Claire McCaskill, Tim Kaine, and Janet Napolitano have all endorsed Obama. What does that tell you about their estimation of the race and how coattails will affect their states? These are the kind of structural issues that will determine what kind of chance progressive policies will have in the next eight years. Obama’s admiration for Reagan’s political skills will have no bearing whatsoever.
I think not. I think it makes Reagan, and all the crap he stood for, even more untouchable. Obama invoked, right after his elaborate praise of Reagan, JFK. Then proceeded to say nothing about JFK’s principles, and that man is a genuinely popular dead president whom he could have invoked without raising a stir.
Yes, it makes it a little harder that he kicked Krugman.
And a little harder that he kicked DailyKos.
And a little harder that he kicked gays.
And a little harder that he repeats continually the ‘both sides are to blame’ story that we’ve spent years fighting, and is the main reason why Broder sucks so badly.
And a little harder that he kicked government in Reagan’s own terms.
What’s the excuse going to be next time? What’s the excuse going to be when he does this to a progressive cause or ideal that really matters to you? Looking for disturbing patterns, my foot. Only in Democrats you’ve already said you despise.
Natasha’s comment amplifies, again, the reasons I am so conflicted about Obama.
I keep hearing how progressive he is and people like Luam point me to his record as state senator.
Then I see stuff like what Natasha (accurately) points out and I want to tear out my hair.
Is anyone surprised that I’ve become one of the disaffected, who doesn’t believe one single word that comes out of a politician’s mouth?
or as the old song goes, “I’ll never marry a lawyer/ and I’ll tell you the reason why/ every time he opens his mouth/ he tells a great big lie.”
Booman: to paraphrase Obama’s new example for Democrats, Ronald Reagan, if I’m better off four years from Obama’s (or for that matter ANY Democrat’s) election, I’ll brew you a keg of my best ale.
If people grouped all ale brewers together in a generalized way and attached a libelous label to that group, you might object.
I object to the generalized statement that all lawyers lie.
IT’S A LYRIC.
FROM A PLAY-PARTY SONG THAT’S WELL OVER A HUNDRED YEARS OLD.
GET. A. SENSE. OF. HUMOR.
Ah, the old “get a sense of humor” strategy when after you hurl an insult and get called on it.
Well, fuck you Brendan.
well fuck you too.
I have better things to do than argue with someone who gets that bent out of shape about a snippet of lyric, which certainly wasn’t aimed at you directly (and by the topic is “Obama’s Reagan Rehetoric” not “Call the Waaahmbulance to Attend to Maryb2004’s Perceived Slight”).
Oh, and while you’re getting that sense of humor, you might want to get over yourself while you’re at it. As much as this may surprise you, i don’t write every comment with “will maryb2004 be offended by this. ooh, jiminy cricket, i sure hope not.
Don’t bother to reply: I’m logging off for the day anyway.
Note to both parties: I know and like both of you, and if you knew each other, you wouldn’t be doing this. So please stop. NOW.
</imitation of your mother’s voice>
Obama is “too liberal”, is the Establishment Candidate
Moments ago, Obama won a big endorsement.
Will Dems ever be unified? We should look at the big pic. Obama is attracting Red States, Blue States and Independents.
Be careful. We could be relegated to minority status for the next 16 years. Bloomberg may look over the current state of both parties and jump right in. And he may just win.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, Obama already has the secular left, the intelligentsia, and the black vote sown up. He is working on cutting into Hillary’s strengths among older women and the lower middle class (Reagan Democrats) in order to win this damn election. You should expect to get kicked several more times.
You think he’ll quit such a profitable strategy, the strategy that got him the big job?
If he were really calling for unity and appealing to people’s better natures, he wouldn’t be making the people whose votes he counts on the enemy. Do they see it? Probably very few. When does the press talk about this? They don’t care about the things progressives care about.
If he wanted to just positively reach out to the other side, he could do that. But. He. Doesn’t. He praises them and criticizes us. The very definition of establishment centrism: specifically praise conservatives and specifically complain about liberal extremists, then generally complain about how both sides are just as bad.
What I really don’t understand is how you can criticize Broder for making this case, but then turn around and laud Obama for it.
It’s hard for me take your argument seriously when you compare Obama’s rhetoric to David Broder.
If David Broder took a microphone and attempted to rouse a crowd of 5,000 to their feet, well…I don’t think he has it in him.
In any case, your willingness to overlook Hillary’s ties to Carper, Bayh, Ford Jr., Penn, Begala, Peretz, Lieberman, McAuliffe, Emanuel, Carville-Matalin-Cheney-Libby, her husband’s imperialistic foreign policies, the Democratic Leadership Council, the New Democratic caucus, Dick Morris, triangulation, etc., is just staggering, given your politics. I wouldn’t touch any one of those people or things with a 100 foot pole.
And anyone that can overlook that, overlook where they have collectively been on the war, on torture, on rendition, on gay marriage, and then give me shit for opposing them? I’m sorry, but I don’t understand it.
I also really think this is a realignment moment. Look at the rethugs…they are falling apart and I do think “conservatism” has been discredited by junior.
He’s using inspirational language and his ability to connect with people to get elected. He says that we have to look out for each other, for example. That sounds to my ears like a very elegant “fuck you” to the “on your own society.”
And the problem with that would be…what?
Again, if Obama uses Ray-gun’s methods for liberal ends, then more power to him. They WORKED after all. This is not the same as praising Ray-gun. Not at all. I personally hope he’s roasting in hell right about now.
It seems to me that people are either reflexively reacting to the mere mention of Ray-gun or intentionally mis-representing Obama’s argument.
Sorry, I don’t remember when I said that Clinton was perfect or unobjectionable in every respect. I laid out my reasons for supporting her very clearly, and “I like her advisers and the whole legacy of Bill Clinton in its entirety,” wasn’t one of them.
She takes money from lobbyists, he takes money from the CEOs that hire them. She takes advice from union busters, he takes advice from the coal industry. Yadda, yadda, yadda. And I have to vote for one of these people in November, a prospect about which I am not thrilled, but prefer to either not voting or voting for a Republican. So it goes.
I picked based on partisanship, for the one of them that seemed to know best who their team was. If I’ve said so once, I’ve said so a dozen times. Was it anything but inevitable that this sort of thing would offend me?
I don’t remember seeing your reasons for supporting Hillary Clinton but I can’t imagine I would agree with any of them because she is representative of pretty much everything you oppose politically.
For starters, a new Clinton administration will empower every single one of the people that have spent the last eight years telling us we lose elections because we are too liberal. She will seed the entire bureaucracy and party apparatus with such people. The New Republic will become must-read again, as it was in the Clintons’ first two terms.
The DNC will be run by a DLC hack, and money will flow away from grassroots politicians by the truckload.
Do you care? No. Some inexplicable myopia seems to have blinded you to this and allowed you to focus on empty pandering from the Obama campaign, as if these two things were remotely equivalent. They’re not. I can’t even make up my mind between Edwards and Obama, but at least I know neither of them will have silencing and marginalizing me as one of their first orders of business.
Bowers has different priorities than I do, but rationale is solid.
progressive. The sooner people wake up to that, the better.
The more that A-Listers perpetuate that fantasy, they more I see the need for a truly progressive blogosphere.
Reagan was a racist pig. Giving aid to Republicans by pushing even part of the Raegan myth is just another example of the harm Obama does to progressive change.
Whne will the netroots wake up?
Let me ask you, who is a progressive in the U.S. Senate? Maybe Patrick Leahy?
Obama’s lifetime progressive score places him just below Feingold and just above Ron Wyden. And his score would be higher but he is getting killed by missed votes as he campaigns (missed votes on close votes hurt progressive scores). Of course, Clinton’s score is better, so my argument is not that the progressive score is wholly determinative. Obama comes in at about the midway point within the Democratic caucus…but then so does Feingold. A lot depends on home state and also iconoclasm. Feingold votes against the progressive majority frequently because the progressive majority is a bunch of wavering cowards.
Maybe that’s the problem here. I had never thought of Obama as a progressive. Why should I? I hadn’t even considered him a liberal. To me, Obama is a Democrat. Plain, old boring middle-of-the-road Democrat. I think he’s only slightly left to Clinton. I do not understadn why no one else thinks this way. Nothing in his votes has shown me that he is.
FWIW, I prefer my elected not to kowtow to the wind-changing minds of the progressive blogosphere. Until the so-called progressives in the blogosphere can base all the candidates on the same criteria, I’ll never throw my hat in with them. Unless the hypocrisy is reined in or at least acknowledged, I’ll continue to not call myself a progressive. That’s probably why I loved Obama’s line, “there’s nothing new there” when referencing the “progressive” blogosphere. He was right on that point and the teeth gnashing just proved it.
I am not sure how to read the Reagan comment without context, but I think that Obama was praising Reagan for being effective not for his policy or mantras.
We have a need for leadership in this country. We haven’t had it for too long now. We need a leader who will at least try to lead all of us. I admire Obama for seeing the need for a governing coalition in this country and actively trying to create that. I think he is looking beyond the primary and even beyond the general to how will he govern and who will be his partners in governing (if Booman has his way Obama will have 60 Democratic Senators to help him).
I look at Obama and see a candidate who has lived progressive values, who has organized communities, spoken out against the war, passed laws against lobbyist and is willing to speak inconvenient truths to power. I see a man who has been successful in politics, who for the most part has done it using means that I approve of.
There are times I think he could do better. There are times when my advice would have been different than what he did.
What I think is that he is a politician with the right instincts. He is almost certainly the most liberal and progressive politician who has good chance to be our next president, and he can win that office in a way that will bring together a strong coalition of our fellow Americans.
I think Obama is, indeed, a wild card. In my view, he has the potential to be a truly great president. He also has the potential to be a zero president. I think Hillary has neither potential, which is why I much prefer Obama if Edwards doesn’t make it…and Edwards, too, has to be taken with a lot of blind trust. I mainly prefer him because he’s more overtly partisan and political. But a great president would rise above partisanship. So do you go for the high risk or the reasonable gamble or the status quo? I think that’s the real question for Dems this year.
I guess it’s a good thing he doesn’t kick too hard or someone might have actually gotten hurt.
Oh yeah, and Reagan is “god” now. That is just exactly the sort of thing I know I like to read on a progressive blog’s front page. An excuse for a man who rhetorically treats Reagan like God, apparently.
He wasn’t asked about Reagan, he brought him up on his own. No wonder every Republican I hear likes this guy. That’s just a sterling recommendation to me. Gives me the warm fuzzies.
Reagan has been and still IS a “GOD” until a new “religion” eclipses his movement. That’s just political reality. You can’t fight their faith, you can only try and convert them to yours… and offending them is no way to win them over. They know that the Reagan movement and what followed it has been a failure. We don’t need to rub their noses in it, as much as we might love to. We all need to face the future together and many of them will come around if we welcome them. If we stay so hatefully divided, we’ll all fail. Boo chose a very apt quote.
I can’t believe I’m an atheist using religious analogies…
I don’t know for sure whether that’s what Obama meant but still one way to interpret the ‘Reagan’ excerpt is that he was saying that there are instances in history when a candidate comes along whose vision matches that of the majority of voters. That would not mean an endorsement of Reagan, heaven forbid!
Exactly right. Good to see somebody on the “left” is still paying attention.
More to the point, if he’s connecting with people and moving left–as Ray-gun connected with people and moved right–then more power to him. What is so wrong with that?
That. Is. Not. The. Same. As. Praising. Ray-gun.
Now I know it comes as no newsflash to anyone reading here, but our political language is debased. It is also going to take a while to refine and re-define our political language. We are not going to do so in a few months or a year.
So why does anyone think it makes sense to use words and phrases that have been twisted, perverted and debased but accepted as “fact”?
E.g., the word madrassa. It just means school in another language like escuela means school in another language. Period. Nothing more, nothing less. But its meaning has been perverted to mean “indoctrination training ground for future terrorists.” And…many people believe the perverted meaning. Does it then make sense to use that word, even if you’re technically right if you’re trying to win over a majority of people to fund a school in Afganistan? Which term would you use?
So why would Obama or anyone use the same language as Kucinich, for example, if most people have been conditioned against it? And if you had the chance to use Ray-gun’s methods for progressive ends, why wouldn’t you?
Why bring it up? Why even mention Reagan? Obama has been talking to the wrong people.
I don’t like the Reagan comparison either, but I am at the point (starting after the Iowa results) of cutting Obama’s campaign some slack. From a purely political standpoint, they seem to know what they are doing (maybe BooMan’s point on Reagan Democrats). How else to explain this guy being where he is right now? They’ve taken a guy, unknown on the national scene 3 years ago, with an interesting background and great oratory, and made him a co-frontrunner for the presidency.
This whole “issue” makes Fox News look almost like journalism. In context, it seems clear that Obama was not admiring Reagan, but meditating on how he came to power by personifying a particular cultural and political moment. I would have liked him to note that Reagan was one of the most malignant political forces in at least a century, but that wasn’t what he was talking about.
Blog folks are always quick to jump on the media for their addiction to soundbites and instant, fact-free, conclusions, but that is also one of our chief characteristics. Obama dared to try to get past the cliches and actually think about how politics has worked in the past. Here’s the quote that has all the liberals atitter:
Reagan DID put the country on a different path. He did tap into a reaction against the 60s and 70s. Yeah, I’d have been happier if Obama had said the Reagan path was a disaster, but that would have sidetracked the general argument he was trying to make. He was, god forbid, being a professor instead of a politician for a moment. He forgot that everything he says has to be laden with campaign boilerplate. Is that really cause for “progressives” to go nuts? I think Matt Stoller, among others, has a lot to answer for in this case. I know he’s lost a lot of respect from me.
Maybe Obama can be criticized for straying from the script and admitting that big government is not a standalone good. Telling the truth is apparently bad politics among righties and lefties alike. Maybe Stoller can accuse Obama of being a pointy-headed intellectual next. As for me, I think “mistakes” like this are a refreshing change. Obama is still not my first choice, but senseless attacks like this do nothing to help his Dem rivals.
Yes, you’re right. The reaction to this seems sensationalistic and shallow. Is it any wonder that our political discourse is so f’ed up today when a candidate can’t make a moderately subtle point about a pair of presidents?
I also agree about Matt Stoller. Fortunately, I did some digging last night and discovered how to subscribe only to Chris and Mike’s feeds at Openleft.
Well said.
Whoever put that truncated clip together would make Fox News proud. At least when Politico (who I don’t love, either) covered it, they showed that clip and also referred readers to the whole interview with The Reno Gazette Journal’s Editorial Board. They also put in the context missing from the video clip… that he was talking about the generational changes in political movements from Kennedy to Reagan and now we’re at another dark period in history when a new one is needed. And he would like to lead this movement back in the other direction (left.)
Matt Stoller’s got some ‘splainin to do…
Uhhhhh……am i not at booman.com? insight central?
Is Obama so out of touch he doesn’t know how we feel about Reagan? One thing we all feel though, Reagan had the power to transform politics through force of his personality. And who does Obama then compare Reagan (who we already don’t like) to and say just didn’t have the transformational mojo? Bill Clinton. AND he lumps Clinton with Nixon!
Triangulation was good for Bill, bad for us. And Obama leaves the listener to answer the unspoken question: do we want more triangulation or a Dem transformational president?
Could be a bumper sticker: Transformation, not triangulation!
Well played, i say.
“I don’t wanna spend the next year or the next four years refighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s,” says the Illinois senator. “I don’t wanna pit red America against blue America. I want to be the President…of the United States of America.”
Please read an op-ed Barney Frank wrote for the HuffPost: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-barney-frank/refight-the-nineties_b_80751.html
Just one small point in the article:
As a Democratic Member of the U.S. House of Representatives today, I close by noting that there does appear to me to be a strong contradiction between two of the criticisms we sometimes receive. One is the approach taken by Senator Obama, which I have just tried to describe, which expresses distaste for too much fighting and too much anger, with too little effort to govern in a way that bridges differences. But contrary to that, I often hear that we Democrats in the Congress have not fought hard enough, that we have not stood up enough for what we believe in, and have been too prone to conciliate. I personally do not think that either criticism is justified, but I know as a fact that they cannot both be true.
Think about it.
Rick Perlstein’s take is good:
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/perlsteins-greatest-hits-5-miscasting-reagan-optimistic
By the way, with all the controversy over Barack Obama’s interview with the Editorial Board of The Reno Gazette Journal where he dared discuss political history and mention past presidents like Kennedy and – gasp – Reagan… He won their endorsement. And they were particularly impressed with that part of the interview because they actually watched the whole thing.
from their endorsement: