If I could get a decent advance, I think I could write a decent book about what’s wrong with the Drew Westen piece. It’s really that epically bad. But it’s more than bad. It’s bad in a way that kind of perfectly illustrates everything I’ve ever written about progressive politics. It’s bad in a way that I could go on about for long enough to create a book. It seems to encompass every bad idea that progressives cling to like zombie lies. It’s lazy. It’s wrong. It’s myopic and forgetful. It’s stupid. It’s counter-factual. It involves magical thinking. It’s ungenerous and uncharitable. And it raises the power of rhetoric above the power of organizing. And, yet, it is so incredibly seductive, isn’t it?
It needs to be demolished. I wish I had the time and money to demolish it.
Also, too, and forever, framing is for suckers.
I’m with you.
It’s spreading. I see so many people recommending it, from close friends to the likes of David Schuster.
Not sure I agree with this:
Part of the power of organizing lies in rhetoric and leadership to advance troops to the battlefield.
“Part of”
Reflect on that for a while. Like a koan.
When I applied to the Service Academies, one of the questions that the Captains and Colonels asked me during my interview — like 10 of them…very intimidating — was, “If you’re not very good at expressing your thoughts vocally, in that you can only write, then how can you expect to lead your troops into battle as a commanding officer? What makes them want to fight if you’re bad with words?”
The seductiveness of Obama’s campaign was his rallying call to arms and organizing, and it was done with rhetoric. They go together. I’m not sure what you’re saying.
“For a while.”
Reflect on that, too.
You guys should keep going. This thread has me cracking up.
When you are the president, they are the same, organizing and rhetoric.
When people no longer buy the rhetoric, they no longer do the organizing.
When the rhetoric and the actions are totally dis-combobulated, so that the rhetoric is simply rhetoric rather than action in words, then you will fail.
And that is where Obama is right now. His rhetoric is irrelevant. It is, to me, just words. He says nothing of value. Because I know that, whatever he says, he is already preparing the next concession.
If your disappointment in Obama’s rhetoric has caused you to give up on organizing, you were never an organizer to begin with.
It might take you a whole book to demolish it, but you did a pretty good job of eviscerating it with just a paragraph.
No, ad hominems do not make an argument.
If evisceration required an argument a grizzly bear wouldn’t be able to eviscerate you.
True, but I lack the power of a grizzly bear.
This is all so zen this evening!
I like the book idea
If I had the money I’d give it to you so you can write it. Then we sell the rights to HBO. or not.
Pretty sure Obama’s seen it, then rolled his eyes and sighed heavily.
I think I blame Hollywood. I mean, the rhetoric trope has been around since the Greeks, obviously. Henry V at Agincourt and whatever.
But like Aaron Sorkin, or The King’s Speech, or even, I don’t know, Independence Day or whatever. Pretty much most movies have the climactic speech that saves the day. And it feels natural, but it’s complete bullshit.
The civil war wasn’t won because the emancipation proclamation or the second inaugural sounded good. It was won because hundreds of thousands of black men were allowed to take up arms and fight, and Grant and Sherman opened a can of whoop ass from the Mississippi to the sea.
Hmmm. Good example, the Civil War. If Obama was running the Civil War, he would be walking to Richmond, saying “If Jeff and i could just sit down, we’d see eye-to-eye and do a bipartisanshit thing”.
Yep, and that would be that.
It’s so much easier to realize how beaten you are before you actually fight, and just acknowledge that fact sort of ruefully, with a wise and adult-like chuckle.
And if you just give up pre-emptively, it avoids unpleasantness, doesn’t it?
It’s quite hysterical to think of how long Obama would have vacillated after Fort Sumter. Months and months would be my guess.
Just like he did with Bin Laden!
the cool part about nonfiction is that you can pitch it before you’re done. So if nobody is interested in your idea to the level you need, you don’t have to waste too much time. Just have a few chapters as backup and put together a good proposal.
Worst case, you don’t get a book thing going but you still have enough material for a kick-ass nonfiction essay, and there are hundreds of publications that take those – and it’s much easier to publish in that category than say a short story.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/93323/drew-westens-nonsense
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2011/08/obamas-light-under-bushel-jonathan.html
Good piece. The point of rhetoric is that it must be consistent, clear, and predictable.
Obama is none of that. He is inconsistent. He is unclear.
And he is not predictable. He says one thing on the campaign trail, and just chucks it for nothing while POTUS.
Me, I sure hope that Obama is thinking “I wonder how many people take this Westen crap seriously?”
He is consistent. He wants everyone to like him. He thinks everyone aught to be able to come together and hold hands and sing kumbaya.
i admire you, Boo. You read the piece, you chant OOOOOBBBBAAAMMMMAAA and all is well.
Perhaps, as the time goes on, you will realize that the piece is about some of the former Obama supporters more than it is about Obama himself, and is a discussion of the problems that many like myself have with him.
But chanting OOOOBBBBAAAMAMAMAAAMMMAA is so much more satisfying.
I couldn’t bear to read the whole thing, or even much of it, the part about story set me off- something he obviously made up, had no relation to theory of narrative or anything – and we are children being told stories by our president? and it affects our brain evolution? – I don’t think so.
I like your book idea. Look into getting an advance for it. I can ask around for leads on that for you.
this piece sounds like the open letter Dan Gilbert wrote to LeBron.
Write fast, Booman! There are quite a few other blogs who are taking Westin to task. Andrew Sullivan for one.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/08/then-fairy-tale-of-drew-westen.html
And Andrew Sprung:
http://xpostfactoid.blogspot.com/2011/08/lover-of-fairy-tales-casts-obama-as.html
My view is that Westin’s ulterior motive is to be sure that a Republican is elected in 2012. There are so many people that wrote trash (much of it true) about Bush and it became such a habit that they just continued even after the President changed.
Westin should stick to his brain book and stay out of Politics! He is one of many whose hubris is truly unbelievable!
The Sprung piece is truly excellent.
And Jonathan Bernstein… http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2011/08/westen-piece.html
Bernstein isn’t too bright himself.
If only Obama would give a speech and stop the London riots.
On the whole idea of “framing,” I feel like far too many people fell in love with it because they, too, like to craft words, and they feel like they’d be really good at it.
The real problem with framing, narrative, and rhetoric is that there’s no necessary connection now between good framing that connects with people and good voting by politicians. You’d think that the president tells stories, the people buy them, they tell off the politicians who take sides against the president, and then those politicians cave because they want to get the people back on their side.
But the entire McConnell strategy is to hang together and refuse to cave, regardless of what the people might say they want, because if they cave it gives the president a win, and when he wins the opposition loses. Westen doesn’t have any idea what to do with that. He just wants to hit the jukebox like Fonzie and make a better story come out, because better stories win, he thinks.
Westen et al have to make a much more intelligent distinction between the criticism that they would like to hear Obama say different things, which is fine — a little vain, but fine — and the implicit point that if they heard Obama say different things that Obama would be getting more done that they would approve. The latter is a tremendous heap of bullshit. They should stop spreading it.
Jonathan Chait? Seriously? One neo-liberal in love with another? Spare me! And Sprung’s piece isn’t much better than Westen’s. He engages in magical thinking he chides Westen for doing. Not to mention, if he’s the only one that writes on his blog, that he has unkind words for the President on his next post. Talk about whiplash.
I read Westen’s piece, and I think it’s important to read it in it’s entirety. I’m with you, Booman, he’s packed a whole lot of wrong into one lousy piece of writing. The worst, for me, is that he wants to be told a story, like a child before bed. This implies that Reagan was his type of President–it doesn’t matter if it’s a fairy tale; make me feel good with a tidy tale of good guys and bad guys, with a linear narrative where everything ends up okay.
It’s frightening, really, to see just how naive and childish are the brains of so many in the progressive blogosphere (for an object lesson see “the Whiner in Chief”, currently thriving on the rec lust at DKos).
It’s also important to note the forum. For Westen’s piece to be given the type of real estate it received, splashed on the cover of what used to be the Week in Review of the NY Times speaks volumes. It’s like some kind style section piece for people on the beach at the Hamptons, a conversation piece, with none of the bite or heft of the now departed Frank Rich or Bob Herbert.
It isn’t that Obama is above criticism, it’s that the quality and weight of criticism like Westen’s is so shallow, lacking and beside the point. I think it’s due in part to Obama’s very different way of doing politics, which willfully substitutes long term goals for the more familiar and apparently more comforting short term pandering. People who should know better what the imperative is need to be told a story? The bottom line is how can we defeat republicans in their current form, the President Grayson/President Kucinich way or some other way, that might actually work in the long run? Or to put it another way that would make heads explode at DKos, I think Obama is more authentically progressive than Westen, Cornell West, Tavis Smiley, Glenn Greenwald, etc. because he’s not busy fighting skirmishes that don’t ultimately don’t advance the cause, he’s fighting the war that has to be won.
And your:
seems very odd. Didn’t you describe your blog as “progressive”? Didn’t you think Hillary Clinton was insufficiently “progressive”? Your using that word as a pejorative shows how far Obama has dragged you down.
Poor guy. He needs a pick-me-up.
Ed, Hillary and Bill filled her staff with a bunch of classic DLC bullies. Obama used their own blustering and brawn to completely bewilder and dismantle them. He just didn’t do it in a single encounter, and that doesn’t make for a dramatic “story” of the type Westen yearns for–he thoroughly beat them and left them wondering what happened because they always were allowed to think they were somehow “winning”. Scoreboard, by which I mean we’ll see what happens at the end of the game.
My recollection of the 60’s is that MLK pursued a dignified, inclusive long-term strategy that achieved its goals incrementally. As a child I sat and watched the I Have a Dream speech in Washington, and no bully could have gathered a mass of people with such a unified feeling of warmth and determination.
Good, Obama outsmarted the Clintons. But I don’t get the comparison to MLK. That man a dream, a concrete goal. What is Obama’s? To outsmart everyone to get reelected. to end poverty (LBJ), to get to the moon (JFK), to make raw capitalism triumphant (Reagan), to start a war in Iraq (Dubya) and on and on. What is Obama’s big goal: bipartisanship?
Obama showed a more effective path to destroying the Clinton bullies. Imagine MLK having to operate in the cauldron of the 24/7 frenzy of today’s media spectacle. I suspect a lot of progressives would have been “helping” the cause by calling him an accommodating Uncle Tom.
The mistake so many of today’s progressives make is to compress time, making struggles that took years and years seem like a short time period because they are contained in one chapter of a high school history book. The failure to see that FDR, MLK and LBJ accomplished what they did over time, in increments, is what’s causing so many progressives to prematurely bail on Obama, and it’s hurting the greater cause.
OK, I’ll bite.
If Obama has all the time that it takes to accomplish, just EXACTLY what would he attempt to accomplish?
Just exactly what is Obama running for?
He’s no Democrat. He doesn’t give a shit about Democratic Party objectives.
What does he want to do?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues
Each one of these people was of course subject and limited to the conditions of their times. Ány comparison to past leaders assumes that as a given. Obama grew up in the 27/7 media circus. He was/is in fact part of it and seems to thrive in it. Right, if Cleopatra turned up today in Washington she’d even have trouble stealing the limelight from Ms. Michelle Bachmann. I need to clear my throat after that stupid wisecrack.
Everyone with an ounce of political sense knows that Obama is not dictator and cannot simply “do” all the things that we want to get done.
I presume here that we are in general agreement on those things: Progressive Tax Rates, Cut Defense Spending, Jobs Bill, Trains, and on and on.
Again, everyone with an ounce of sense realizes that A) The GOP are completely batshit crazy, and will sacrifice the country’s well being to try and take out Obama, and B) Approximately half of the Democrats in congress are nearly as bad.
What many folks want is someone who is going to bloody knuckles, bash heads, and bring rhetorical brickbats, political brass knuckles, and organizational fighting to DC, to fulfill those political goals
I want him to start to speak the truth to the American People. Confront the nonsense aggressively and straightforwardly.
I want him to make the case for doing what is right, and make that case in no uncertain terms.
That way, when the next election rolls around, people have a clear, blatant choice.
If more people still choose insanity and stupidity, then … well, then they can stew in their own shit, and the rest of us can move or hide.
But the problem is that Obama never makes the case, barely ever stands for what is right, and never even makes the same kinds of statements that he made when he was campaigning.
That’s just lame.
Enough with the mealy-mouthed compromise bullshit. Nobody cares about compromise, nobody cares about nice. People want and need results, and more than that, people want and need a forceful, forthright, unforgiving public advocate with a loud voice to make the basic statements that are so glaringly true.
So, granted, he’s not a dictator, nor is he a fairy godmother with a wand to wave.
However, he IS the most visible, prominent single individual on the planet. He HAS the bully pulpit. He IS the leader of a party with control over one house of congress, and a significant minority in the other. He CAN influence elections, he CAN influence what is stated in the press, and it IS his job to do that.
You may denigrate me if you wish, call me another weakling who wants the president to tell them a story… but the political reality is that under most circumstances, aside from nominations, vetoes, signing statements, and suchlike, “telling stories” is EXACTLY what the President can do on the political battlefield, and it is ALL that the president can do on the political battlefield.
His job is to present the story effectively, sharply, dynamically, and attractively to the people, and get them to want to vote for it.
So that the bad guys in the story get un-elected, and the good guys in the story get new good guy allies to pass the good guys’ laws and bills.
.
See my diary – The Circular Firing Squad for Drew Westen
One can not argue, debate or negotiate with bat-shitty Republicans in good faith or from one-sided bipartisanship view. What’s wrong just calling them what they are: “Tea Party Downgrade” and “Corporate Party Shills.” The Republican Party a “Tax Haven for the Millionaires of America. “
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Right. Congratulations RedDan. You said what I’ve been trying to formulate much better than I ever could.
Now the next qestion is: Why doesn’t Obama just do that? What’s against it? What is he actually trying to do? And so we end up with an article like Westen’s.
A story is what everyone is craving for. How was all that talk about hope and change during the campaign anything more than a story. Or a narrative , if you prefer. Or even a frame(work). The whole thing is pitiful. He refuses to show himself one way or the other.
Thank you, Red Dan. This sums up exactly my thinking, and the reasoning behind my deep disappointment with President Obama (and the reason I recommended the Westen piece on Facebook). I understand all of the political reality, and I realize the Republicans are completely intransigent and unrepentant, and therefore extremely difficult to deal with. My interest in the piece has to do with Obama’s unwillingness to call bullshit on them. Ever. He is more interested in seeming grown up than he is in fighting for what we elected him to do.
Boo, you have the option to self publish your book.
Put the whole thing in a single Word .doc document with page breaks between the chapters. You can upload it to Pubit! at Barnes & Noble and at Kindle Direct for Amazon.
It is faster and you have ways to promote your book.
I bet the book would sell.
Everyone with an ounce of political sense knows that Obama is not dictator and cannot simply “do” all the things that we want to get done.
I presume here that we are in general agreement on those things: Progressive Tax Rates, Cut Defense Spending, Jobs Bill, Trains, and on and on.
Again, everyone with an ounce of sense realizes that A) The GOP are completely batshit crazy, and will sacrifice the country’s well being to try and take out Obama, and B) Approximately half of the Democrats in congress are nearly as bad.
What many folks want is someone who is going to bloody knuckles, bash heads, and bring rhetorical brickbats, political brass knuckles, and organizational fighting to DC, to fulfill those political goals
I want him to start to speak the truth to the American People. Confront the nonsense aggressively and straightforwardly.
I want him to make the case for doing what is right, and make that case in no uncertain terms.
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