( – promoted by buhdydharma )
The Obama Test: Personnel is Policy
Forget the election. With November 4 just days away and Barack Obama positioned to become the nation’s first African American president, the question has begun to turn to: Who gets what?
While I don’t think we should forget the election just yet, I do agree that “who is going to get what” is a looming question on the minds of many.
Sirota rightly points out that conservatism is on the ropes and makes the case that progressives need to step up and claim the credit due.
The Village is in a freakout – the conservative pundits are really melting down like I’ve never seen. They sense a huge progressive mandate may be coming, and are trying – desperately trying – to get out enough propaganda to obscure that mandate. Get used to this kind of fact-free nonsense from the Village – it is only going to get more intense in the coming weeks and months if Obama wins. And it will be up to us to remind Obama and the Democrats exactly why they won (if they do win).
Why they won will be the first major dispute. Everyone will claim that Obama and the Democrats couldn’t have done it without them, and we’ve seen it before. We all watched Dean create the 50 state strategy that helped Democrats win everywhere in 2006, and we all watched Rahm and Schumer take the credit for this victory.
Matt Stoller also addresses what next from within the context of the Darcy Burner battle and points out that Obama doesn’t need any of us to get elected and never did.
Backing candidates who rely on us and not the establishment network makes us stronger, and them weaker. It’s not that we’re giving to Burner or Grayson or Franken or anyone else, it’s that we’re freeing them from having to kowtow to people like Steny Hoyer, Frank Blethen, Michael Bloomberg, and their servants like reporter Emily Heffter. It’s a complicated set of steps we’ve taken, but it’s working. Obama has repudiated lobbyists in his campaign, and has acquired massive amounts of power and influence through his ability to inspire trust in the electorate. Unlike Burner, though, he did this both through the networks of the establishment and the progressive populists; he doesn’t need any of us to get elected and never did, and he’s shown that through his vote on FISA and his whipping for the bailout.
Obama, though, is not just a guy, he’s a franchise, a network of people currying favor and looking for jobs and seeking to impose their own stamp on the world through differing ideas about how to govern. And by fighting through these thickets, by helping people like Burner and Merkley into office, we help give Obama and the people in his orbit a little bit more space to make the choice to be a progressive populist.
Obama has made a similar point. In a nut shell, he basically said “yell louder”. He told us to give Washington squeaky wheels that can’t be ignored and won’t go away.
If we are going to be heard above the monied speech of the lobbyists and neoliberals, we will have to yell very loud indeed. Maybe a pony or two would help.
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Obama will have to decide where he stands. He is so smart, handsome, educated, and articulate that he can be whatever he wants. He will either be for his campaign promises or agin em.
and i keep my fingers crossed that you are 1000 percent right in this:
of those parties controlling most of the power positions, but those parties aren’t made up of two homogeneous groups of compatible people.
Many countries have coalition governments of co-operating minority parties in order to form a majority voting bloc:
IMHO, the Democratic and republican parties are “coalition” Parties. Each one is made up of various minority groups that cooperate–to a greater or lesser degree–in order to outnumber the opposition party. Also, again, IMHO, the Democratic Party consists of more groups, with a broader spectrum of ideas–which makes it harder for the Democrats to gain consensus on most issues. And, there’s a lot of internal jockying for position within the Party.
That’s where we come in–by staying united on the issues most important to most progressives, and by keeping the pressure on the powers that be.
I just put dibs on that over at Agent Orange.
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Pelosi and Hoyer are top members of that party. They need to go immediately. It’s time to roto-till the chairmanships and leadership positions to put the progressives in power.