I guess Ari Berman is not interested in having a future political career in Montana because his profile of Jim Messina is brutal. If Messina is as controlling and vindictive as Berman claims then he might run into other problems trying to cover Obama’s 2012 campaign for The Nation. It’s an interesting and informative piece with a good amount of actual reporting and an impressive amount of on-the-record griping. It’s hardly balanced, however. I think there are a host of areas where progressives have a right to be disappointed in the Obama administration, and Messina has his fingerprints on some of them, but Berman seems to have no awareness that the 111th Congress was the most productive Congress in nearly a half-century. And I mean that from a progressive point of view. Messina has his fingerprints on that, too.
I know that a lot of progressives have convinced themselves that our policies would be more popular if they were presented with less dilution, but I have never seen any evidence that that is true. The backlash against Obama’s policies was remarkably strong and cost us a shit-ton of seats in Congress. I think it’s remarkable that the Democrats lined up to vote for Cap & Trade (in the House) and health care reform despite looking at polling numbers that told them that they were arousing a ferocious opposition that would most likely wash away their political careers. Somebody has to get the credit for getting them to walk the plank.
Having said that, I’m not exactly a fan of Max Baucus or his style of politics, and if that is what Messina is going to bring to Obama’s reelection effort then we’ll probably be pretty uninspired. A lot depends on the opponent, of course, but I don’t expect the Obama campaign to take a lot of chances. If they’re lucky, they won’t need to. It could easily play out a lot like the 1996 campaign, which never really materialized as a contest. If it’s a close thing, however, I hope Messina finds the inner child who cut his teeth as an organizer for Montana People’s Action. We’ll need that kind of spirit and attitude, not the transactional crap we’re used to seeing from Baucus and his army of lobbyists.
I’m not buying the idea that we lost a ton of congressional seats simply as a result of a backlash against Obama’s policies. IMHO, we lost all those seats mostly because those who had fervently supported Obama’s election in 2008 were disillusioned with their new President and came to the realization that he is not the progressive crusader that he presented himself as during the campaign. Thus, all those young people and newly-activated Democrats didn’t come to the polls.
i second that. You only have to look at the way the bailouts were handled (and btw, yesterday’s op-ed in the times by Barofsky is more evidence that I was right about the bailouts).
but all that aside, any campaign involving baucus-style politics is a loser.
http://economicsofcontempt.blogspot.com/2011/03/neil-barofsky-future-politician.html
Barofsky’s op-ed is one of the most mendacious bits of self-promotion ever published in the Times – and that’s a real accomplishment.
Note how many times the name of Hank Paulson appears in the article. The guy who wrote the TARP bill originally, handed out the money to banks, and ignored the crisis until it was nearly impossible to fix – you know, that guy. The Republicans have, since day one, tried to saddle the Democrats with Bush’s fuckup, but it’s remarkable to watch how easily they have dragged “progressives” into that.
Wow, for once I agree with rootless.
Disappointed with Obama might be part of it. Much more, as Atrios and others repeatedly point out, was that the national Democratic Party in 2010 stood for absolutely nothing. And the sad thing is, most of them still don’t.
Quick, name the three issues Democrats will run on in 2012. Name the major cause they’re championing right now. In fact, take all day.
(You’d think it would be (1) jobs, jobs, jobs, and (2) jobs. Notice how it totally isn’t.)
Beyond that I got nothing. Folks running for House seats might well pick up on the “jobs jobs jobs” thing – especially folks who voted Republicans into office thinking they were going to worry about “jobs jobs jobs” but instead found themselves riding the crazybus.
But I doubt that either the president or most of the Democratic members of the Senate will be wanting to run on jobs, jobs, jobs, since it would just be a pointed reminder to the voters that they’re nominally in power already and what they’re doing hasn’t worked.
(I might expect someone like Sherrod Brown to run on “jobs, jobs, jobs” – but I think Kasich is doing a fine job of preparing points 1-3 above for Brown’s run for him. So he might actually have no choice but to run on the “these people are madmen and they need to be stopped” campaign.)
How well did “the Republicans are nuts” work in 2010 — true though that was and is?
Say a voter has been out of work for two years. One candidate says, “Things need to change! You need a job, so vote for me and we’ll go back on the gold standard. Also, up is down.” The other says, “Meh, what do you want me to do? Just be patient. Also, that guy’s nuts.” Guess who the voter’s inclined to cast a ballot for?
And it’s telling that you think only liberals care about jobs. As far as I can tell, it’s entirely true in DC today, but that’s just an incredible indictment of a dysfunctional Democratic Party.
P.S. What the national Democrats are doing about unemployment hasn’t worked. If they don’t want to lose the Senate in 2012, not to mention the presidency, they might want to think about trying something else. Even if it is something, you know, liberal.
Hey I’m not saying it’s a good strategy – I think it’s a lousy strategy. It’s actually the absence of a strategy when you’re hoping that your opposition is going to be so extreme that people reject them. It runs counter to hundreds of years of our history on how more extreme elements in a society come to power, and the Dems are doing exactly the wrong things.
But it’s the only unified strategy they have given that at this point the only thing that the Democratic Party stands for is “we’re not Republicans”. Individual Democrats stand for things, but the party as a collection of politicians has reached the point where they’re so diverse, so “Big Tent” that all they have as a unifying theme is “we’re not as crazy as they are”. And that’s a problem for having a unified message. (I mean we’re talking about a party that has both Joe Manchin and Dennis Kucinich as members. The tent doesn’t get any bigger than that without giving up on the whole idea of having a tent and just standing in a field.)
That’s because only liberals care about jobs. If we had Labor politicians they might care about jobs, but unfortunately the best we’ve got in the use are the liberals.
Unemployment is actually good for Big Business to a certain level – you don’t want it so high that you destroy the economy, but just high enough that your workers are worried more about losing their jobs than they are about you screwing them over. You can get workers cheaper and replace them if they start thinking dangerous thoughts about collective bargaining.
And so if you have a party that is all about helping Big Business (Republicans) and another party that is so fractured ideologically that it contains a sizable chunk of people indebted to Big Business interests (Democrats) of course you get a system where no one cares about unemployment. The biggest businesses in the country don’t want the employment problem fixed because it’s better for their bottom line if things stay roughly as they are now or maybe just a shade better than things are now – but not TOO much better.
If we had a real Labor party in this country (not just named Labor like the moderate party in the UK, but one that actually was an advocate for Labor) things would probably be different. But the Democrats co-opted the Labor movement back in the day and the Big Business interests succeeded in neutering it. So now there are only a handful of politicians who care.
I would also add – the only real reason that Democrats as a party cared about Labor in the early part of the century was the very real concern over Communist revolts occurring all over the world. The folks sympathetic to Big Business in the Democratic party at the time thought labor concessions and a bit of socialism could work to neuter the push towards Communism that was happening (this is also why socialism emerged in Europe – as a stopgap against the possibility of a Communist revolt).
Nowadays there’s no fear that workers are going to rise up because there are no examples of such a thing happening. No fear means no one cares.
We stopped the economic collapse and the economy is recovering
We saved the auto companies
We passed a health care reform that is already holding down rates and has given millions of new people access to health insurance
We carried out our pledge to remove US forces in Iraq from combat.
The EPA acted to save American from mercury poisoning
We added record breaking amounts of wind power and created from nothing a US electric car battery industry
We enforced civil rights laws and put crooked cops who murdered people and burned their bodies in jail
We passed a financial reform bill with a financial consumer protection agency that has already forced down fees you pay on debit cards
…
Of course neither Fox nor “Progressive” media will inform you of any of this.
Because on the facts he’s struck out enough to invoke the mercy rule.
http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2011/03/tim-geithner-continues-to-uh-make-money.html
By some estimates, turnout was the highest for a midterm since 1982. People turned out, but they turned out to vote for the Republicans.
I have to agree with this. Look at what the tea party says are their reasons for opposing Obama and you’ll quickly realize that they would have opposed anything he passed. HCR was what Heritage Foundation proposed. I challenge you to find any health care reform package that the tea party would NOT have labeled Marxist. Any at all. You’ll note that the GOP was very careful not to propose anything as an alternative. I’m sure that’s because they didn’t want to get caught in the trap of sharing ownership for anything Obama did.
No, the tea party was rabidly anti-Obama dating back to long before the election of 2008.
No, the reason the middle of the roaders voted against the party in power was that the economy sucked. As basically all of the leftist economists warned in January 2009: if you don’t do enough to address the economy you’ll get creamed in the midterms. Well they didn’t do enough, and they did get creamed. And no, going even further to the right wouldn’t have helped one iota.
Booman writes: I know that a lot of progressives have convinced themselves that our policies would be more popular if they were presented with less dilution, but I have never seen any evidence that that is true.
Well, boo, how the fuck do you know? When is the last time a progressive policy was passed in this country? 1964? In the past 4.5 decades every progressive proposal has been watered down in committee long before it comes close to seeing the light of day. Maybe it’s time to take a RISK and actually TRY what we believe in, instead of compromising in advance of negotiations and once again getting creamed at election time.
As Truman said, when people have to choose between Republicans and Republicans, they’ll choose Republicans every time. It’s long past time for a real choice again in the U.S.
FDR came into office with 25% unemployment. In 4 years he reduced it to — 19%. And yet, he won that election overwhelmingly.
The trouble with the “warnings” from “leftist economists” is that they were unable to propose actual practical solutions to the problem – much of which is long-term and difficult to address. What they proposed were legislative and PR tactics that were unworkable and frankly laughable. And they worked hard to reinforce the Republican PR about the supposedly botched economic moves of the administration. Even those who claimed to be in support of more stimulus never made the obvious argument “look at the good that we got from stimulus, we need more”. The argument they made was “Obama sux”. Great!
That dude’s job was to manage the politics (let the wonks handle the policy) of these major legislative initiatives. He failed at that as evidenced by the thumping we got in the mid terms. I’m sympathetic to the argument that nobody could have done better (change creates backlash, our institutions our biased towards the status quo, GOP is in a weird parliamentary place right now, etc), but still, that was his job and he should have put fired, not promoted.
I don’t think guys like Messina are evil, I just think they’re dinosaurs. The world he and Baucus want so desperately to live in with all sorts of compromise, split the difference, lets grab a drink after work type Republicans don’t exist anymore. You can’t co-opt them, you have to beat them. And since he’s not the man to do that, he needs to go and be replaced by someone who has a track record of doing that.
You have a weird definition of fail. He succeeded at passing a lot of important legislation. Sounds like success to me.
Sort of. Obama won the presidency and a howard dean-led DNC and Rahm Emmanuel led DCCC, and a DSCC led by Chuck Schumer won a huge majority in the house and senate. Not sure whether Messina should get tons of credit for passing legislation with those margins. And as far as I can tell, Messina wasn’t a vote counter, or the guy who knew what each person wanted in return for their yes vote. He (or perhaps Axelrod) was responsible for saying, OK, lets do this in a way that doesn’t cause us to massively get destroyed in the midterms. He failed at that task. Again, I’m not crucifying the guy and I don’t know much about him. But Obama’s 1st 2 years were a political failure, policy success. Policy people get promotions, political team gets fired. Isn’t that how accountability works?
Margins?
The US Senate that Obama worked with was substantially the same as this one
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/politics/politicsspecial1/30wire-rollcall.html
there were numerous other examples, but about 20-25 solid liberal democrats who support things like health care reform and judges who are not fascistic creeps. And this is the same Senate that voted 96/4 to prohibit Obama from closing Guantanamo. Why ‘progressives” want to believe that the US has some system where the Democrats are a disciplined political party is something I don’t get.
I understand perfectly well that the democratic party is not a parliamentary style party. I and many progressive bloggers were the first to recognize that the GOP in the Senate IS acting like a parliamentary style party. Adjusting and adapting to this dynamic is what I think most of us think is guys like Messina’s job. And if information comes out that makes it seem like he played the new game (parliamentary style Senate GOP) under the old rules (reasonable bipartisan GOP Senate from the 80s) then that explains a lot. He’s just the wrong man for the job. Get someone who knows how the game is played now.
The fact is that the Obama administration has been more successful in passing its legislation than any Democratic President since LBJ. What do you think he should have done differently?
not a fan of Baucus…
not a fan of Messina..his ass should have been canned for the Shirley Sherrod fiasco.
The guy manages the bills passage and weeps when it passes, but there was no “falling on a sword” in the kind of losing effort that appeals to the professional activists (failing is their calling card, after all).
Worse, the whole narrative continues to flat-out ignore easily accessible history. I remember in the lead-up to the DADT repeal, I counseled my friends to withhold judgment on the WH approach until the end of the lame duck session. Not because of any blind faith in the administration, but because a very senior official was saying that the end of 2010 was the goal of the president. That person was Jim Messina, and his comments were reported in the Montana local press and picked up in The Advocate.
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/09/24/Top_WH_Aide_DADT_Repeal_This_Year/
In other words, whatever was being reported or misunderstood as ambivalence toward getting DADT done in 2010 was being directly contradicted by the source himself in very public settings, but it couldn’t get any recognition in the blogosphere. This example is just one data point whenever I argue that overreacting to second-hand reports is counterproductive, and that the WH’s normal MO is to try and stick to its promises and goals, despite whatever mythical villains the blogosphere has created.
Berman ignoring this detail when quoting his sources is one reason I’ve stopped listening to him and others since the health care implosion in the progressive netroots.
To be fair, the “progressives” knew that the WH was lying to them and would not move the bill, they also knew that following the WH plan would fail, and when the bill passed they knew they had been right all along and it just passed by some lucky accident.
Because empirical stuff is not their bag.
Thanks for this Booman. As you said, a well-sourced bit of reporting by Berman.
Just a thought on Messina’s organizing background. If he went to work for Baucus in 1995 at age 26, his organizing career was likely even shorter than Obama’s; and from what I could find online about Montana People’s Action, it seems unlikely they invested as heavily in the training and formation of young organizers as Gamaliel did in the 1980s (and does today). All of which is to say, like a lot of Democratic operatives, he may well think he knows more about organizing than he actually does.
I’m constantly amazed at “progressives”. The guy is put in charge of passing repeal of DADT and it passes. The head of the largest lobbying organization involved in repeal, HCR, says he was an “unsung hero”.
This is exactly like TARP/Bank-failure handling. Geithner’s methods worked – but they worked “wrong” so failure would have been preferable.
Just to clarify, I’m not knocking Messina for not having a lot of “organizing” experience—just observing.
For what it’s worth, based on Berman’s article and other things I’ve read, Messina seems like a very savvy, skilled and successful political operative.
The converse of this argument, of course, is that a lot of Democratic activists think they know a lot about managing a national campaign when the actions they demand are not always helpful to winning.
Messina’s most relevant experience, if you’ve read David Plouffe’s book on the 2008 race, was more or less running the Obama campaign in the general election. Operational discipline under the guidance of trusted strategic advisors was how Obama operated in 2008, and thus it’s a sign of continuity if they’ve put Messina in charge of the reelection.