Taking a stand

I've been making some posts on the DailyKos diary previously mentioned. Many of these posts are along similar lines to the previous post.

In one such posting I said:

Markos points out clearly the biggest problem with Hillary: she doesn't stand for anything because standing for something requires you to defend it.

It is a cowardly form of campaigning and its now wonder that the American people have rejected it repeatedly in the last few years. Bush may offer some truly outrageous crap. But at least he stands for something and that results in his victory by default.

To which one person responded:

Why don't you learn something about where Hillary stands on the issues before you recite the GOP meme about Democrats?

She has the right stands on most of the issues: Health care, the environment, education.

She is dead wrong on Iraq of course. But you can't accuse her of not standing for the same position.

In thinking about how to respond to this it occurs to me that I really don't know enough about Hillary's record to dispute it or agree with it. But then, that's part of the problem.

It is not uncommon for politicians to respond to challenges like this by pointing out specific examples that refute the challenge. But what is interesting is that often you don't hear about those specific examples until the politician is challenged on their credentials.

My point? That it isn't enough to have a record to stand on when faced with criticism. You have to proactively push your stances so that people know about them already. The fact that there is this kind of criticism and that this kind of criticism is common (I hear it from a lot of people) is an indicator that Hillary Clinton isn't doing enough to promote her stands on these issues.

Which leads to the question of why? Is it because she is just shy? [Successful politicians are never shy] Is it because she can't get the attention of the press? [Oh yeah, the press just ignores Hillary] Or is it because they are listening to consultants who tell her that it isn't wise to draw to much attention to your record? [I think you can guess my answer]

It isn't enough for Hillary Clinton to have specific examples to point to to refute these kind of charges. She has to tout those examples enough that potential critics will already know about them. The key word here is "stand". It means more then just voting the right way on an issue or sponsoring a particular form of legislation. It means being out their and pushing the stance enough that it becomes ingrained in peoples subconscious.

Hillary has an image problem when it comes to the question of her commitment to liberal/progressive causes. A lot of people simply don't know where she stands on them. If she does have a strong record on these matters then why is it so hidden from so many people?

That's why I am uncomfortable with the prospects of her candidacy. I'm tired of supporting Democrats for whom I am required to do intense research before I can answer the question, "What does she stand for?" Even the most casual of Bush supporters can answer that question without hesitation. That is one reason he is such a formidable political opponent.

Is that so much to ask for?

Ballet Dancers and Bulldozers

Markos has an op-ed in the Washington Post that describes some of the problems Hillary may have in winning the nomination in 2008. There is a diary discussing it on DailyKOS already. I recommend both.

Here are my thoughts.

For the last 30 years the Republicans have engaged in a very successful operation of placing landmines all over the political landscape, all designed specifically to blow up Democrats. Democrats know this and try to compensate for it by learning how to avoid those landmines. They cross the field by hops, skips and jumps. They perform a kind of ballet that looks comical to the observer who isn't aware of those landmines.

It is that comical ballet that hurts the Democrats most because the voters don't elect people based on their dancing ability. They just laugh.

We don't need another ballet dancer in 2008. We need a bulldozer! Something big and strong that will roll over the landmines and clear a path for other Democrats to cross the field with ease.

Howard Dean did this with partial success in 2004. He cleared a path through part of the minefield before blowing a track. Others have managed to build on his work, proving that his efforts were not worthless.

Bill Clinton was not a bulldozer. He was just the best dancer the Democrats ever had. He made it look easy and people marvelled at that, even if they still sniggered.

Reagan and Bush Jr. are bulldozers of the biggest sorts. And that is the greatest reason for their success. Bush's problem is that he is a bulldozer that runs over his friends as well as the mines he is supposed to be clearing.

Gore and Kerry both ran as dancers ... and fell on their faces.

Unfortunately, Hillary shows all the signs of being yet another ballet dancer (though nowhere near as good as her husband). She needs to prove to Democrats that she won't be just a dancer. She needs to demonstrate her bulldozing abilities. If she can't, she shouldn't get the nomination.

More Gossiness

Thinking about this more I can't get over the strange way in which the Porter Goss resignation happened. Traditionally when a high level staffer leaves (or is forced to leave) there a procedure is followed: (1) a convenient, non-controversial reason is given for the leaving ("spend time with the kids, etc.") and (2) a replacement is ready to go almost immediately. Also, there is often some preliminary leaking of the announcement in order to ease the story into the newstream consciousness.

When these things don't happen then you have to wonder if something else is going on.

Reading up on the information available here's my personal speculation: Goss saw the writing on the wall and decided to get out on his own terms instead of the terms of others. He knew the Foggo (and the unnamed "key staffer") were going to be major embarassments to him, even if he himself had nothing to do with Hookergate. He knew that there was machinations going on behind the scenes to undercut him. He knew that his importance was seriously undermined by the elevation of Negraponte as Director of Intelligence.

Now he could have just waited for the traditional process to unfold. But Goss may have just made a unilateral decision to leave and leave NOW. Thus the resulting scramble we saw at the White House today.

Remember, this is all speculation and will be disavowed by me the second contrary information becomes known.

This blog post will self-destruct in five seconds.

Did Hookergate bring down Porter Goss?

Not necessarily, says Larry Johnson. At least not directly in the sense that Goss was himself involved in that scandal.

However, it is possible that Goss suffered from "guilt by association" because of his connections to the #3 man at the CIA, Dusty Foggo and as yet unnamed "key staffer".

A former CIA buddy tells me that Porter's main problem, however, is a key staffer who is linked to both Brent Wilkes and the CIA's Executive Director, Dusty Foggo. My friend also said that it is highly likely that the Goss staffer did participate in the hooker extravaganza. Goss, politician that he is, probably recognized that even though he did not participate in the sexual escapades and poker games, his staffer's participation created a huge problem for him that would be difficult to escape.

So who is this "key staffer"? Hmmm?

Legacies

Christy Hardin Smith:

... We�ve hit a point where people are thinking about the Bush Administration in terms of a "Hump Day" for the whole country � we�re past the "Wednesday" of his presidency and headed toward the weekend, when we all celebrate and then start anew with someone fresh.

People are already thinking past President Bush, but he�s hunkering down and hoping that nothing else bad happens between now and then. He�s already thinking past himself, too. Well, isn�t that helpful and productive? And we�re�what�treading water until then, hoping that no more sharks are circling, until the rescue boat can come and fish us all out of the drink?

Josh Marshall:

�he [George Packer in the New Yorker] describes the president�s strategy as "muddling through the rest of the Bush Presidency, without being forced to admit defeat, until January of 2009, when the war will become a new President�s problem."

This really is the issue. Brazen it out, burn off men and money, not admit there�s any real problem and then pass it off on the next guy who will take the blame.

The president lacks the courage to change course. The whole country is paralyzed by his cowardice.

Atrios:

This is true, but many other people are paralyzed by their own cowardice. It�s apparently okay in official Washington for there to be a nation whose leader thinks words speak louder than actions, that an impudent comedian is more offensive than the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, and that 2-3 dead American troops per day is barely worthy of notice.

One keeps imagining that the grownups will finally wake up and try to change things, but if the last decade has taught us anything it�s that if there are any grownups in Washington no one bothers to listen to them anymore.

I've noticed in the past that there is a kind of group subconscious within the blogosphere; where ideas mix and percolate and then suddenly emerge in multiple locations in what appears to be a coordinated fashion. I say "appears" because I don't believe this happens intentionally. It's just that great minds like Atrios, Josh and Christy, when given much the same information, produce much the same conclusions(*).

I'm also strangely reminded of Nancy Reagan. I don't think she gets near enough credit for being the smarts of her husbands administration; especially when it came to managing his second term in office. Nancy seemed much more mindful of the second term effect. It is during their second terms that Presidents are often bogged down by scandal and short-timers disease and thus leave a sour legacy. Nancy didn't want that for her husband, so she convinced him to make a major effort to bring about a rapproachment between The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. She realized that leaving behind a positive legacy would require her husband to make a dramatic shift in his way of dealing with the Russians. No more "Evil Empire" talk.

Richard Nixon was attempting much the same thing when he went to China. It's just that his 2nd term scandal was so huge that it overwhelmed his efforts. Nancy and Ron managed to keep Iran-Contra from having a similar dampening effect on their efforts.

Clinton tried it as well with his work in Kosovo and in trying to bring about a lasting solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The former was moderately successful. The latter effort was a bust. But at least his efforts did manage to put the whole Lewinsky mess behind him (mostly).

If Laura ever tried to convince George to change his ways he would probably end up driving his car into the White House garage door.

BTW, Atrios has it right that Bush's is not the only cowardice on display in Washington. Virtually the whole establishment is afraid to point out the obvious. Why? Perhaps, like me, they are cynical that Bush would ever listen to suggestions for making a major change of course. Perhaps, like me, they think he would react negatively to that suggestion. Perhaps, like me, they are afraid of what he might do if pushed.

In their minds it may just be better, as Chrisy suggests, to wait for the weekend and start fresh again on Monday. Unfortunately, the rest of the world can't afford to wait.

(* - An analogy: One way to make cars more efficient is to reduce wind drag. The laws of physics are the same everywhere. So different automobile manufacturers, using independent wind tunnel experiments, will produce similar looking cars. This is why so many compact and sub-compact cars in the early 80s looked so much alike.)

Blogging = Talkies

I don't much abide with blog triumphalism. There is nothing in the blog form that makes people who practice it inherently superior to practicioners of other forms of communication.

But, having said that, I agree with Greg Sargent and Jane Hamsher that what we are seeing in the recent spate of tut-tuts from establishment media figures, like Joe Klein, over the "cesspool" that is the blogosphere is primarily the realization on their part that they are facing serious competition from a whole group of fresh faces who "don't play by the rules".

Like the silent film stars of old whose careers were destroyed by the advent of movies with sound, today's establishment pundits and journalists are seriously worried that blogging represents an existential threat to their livlyhood.

They have good reason to be worried. And, for most of them, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Free Internet = Sesame Street?

The Republicans are nothing if not consistent. They consistently overreach and fall in holes they themselves dug(*). They did it with impeachment. They did it with Terri Schiavo. They did it with Immigration Reform.

Now they may be doing it with Net Neutrality.

Matt Stoller finds that some candidates are starting to use the issue in their campaigns against supporters of the effort to hand the Internet over to Comcast and Verizon. And it may just work.

Which brings to mind another example of Republicans putting their foot in it. Back in the 90s the Republicans under Newt Gingrich targeted PBS for destruction. They have never liked the idea of public broadcasting, not least for the fact that it puts on programs that they just don't find acceptable.

The problem was the people like PBS. Especially its children programming. Thus it was easy for supporters of PBS to frame the Republican attack as being against Big Bird, not McNeil-Leher.

It's nice to see that there are some Democrats who recognize the potential political value of this issue.

(*) Unfortunately, Dems have a bad habit of helping them by throwing them a rope.

Late Bloomers

Digby:

I suspect that many others who are engaged in the netroots like me became radicalized in their 30's and 40's by a Republican Party that started to behave as an openly undemocratic institution. Why so many of these establishment Democrats and insider press corps aren't exercised by this after what we've seen, I can't imagine. Perhaps they just can't see the forest for the trees. This past decade has not been business as usual.

Count me in as a late blooming radicals. I've always been interested in politics, but primarily as a spectator sport. I voted, but that was the extend of my political activity.

Things started to turn for me during the Clinton years. In the early going the news was full of stories about the corruption in the Clinton administration (Filegate, Travelgate) and before it (Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones). But for all my skills at political observation, I was damned if I could see the fire that was supposedly producing all that smoke. No matter how much I examined them, the allegations against Clinton and his administration just never seemed to add up. There may have been grounds for suspicion. But the kind of heated rhetoric I was seeing just didn't seem to match up with that suspicion.

It wasn't until I read Gene Lyon's "Fools for Scandal" that I got an inkling of what was going on: the reason I couldn't see the fire was because it wasn't there. What we had instead was a Vast Right-Wing Smoke Machine (VRWSM) and a press so eager to find something to pin on the Clintons that they would jump at the least promising of leads.

I've come to understand that the scandals of the Clinton years only make sense if you realize that those who thought there was something to them wanted there to be something to them.

Then came Lewinsky...

Then came the smearing of Al Gore and the puffing up of George Bush...

Then came the stolen election of 2000...

Then came the Bush administrations failure to prevent 9/11...

Then came the Bush administrations drumbeats for war...

Then came the Democrats failure to put up even a token sign of an opposition...

Then came the smearing of John Kerry...

After that, who wouldn't be radicalized?

As I said before, the suggestion from people like Mike McCurry and Joe Klein that we "political neophytes" don't appreciate what it means to lose is laughable on its face.

We appreciate it and we want to do something about it. It's people like McCurry and Klein who have become acclimated to defeat. It's people like them that will have to get out of the way for people who actually want to win.

Learning from losing

Chris Bowers appropriately rakes over the coals the establishment Dems who think the netroots are arrogant because they don't know what it is like to lose and therefore haven't learned the pragmatic lessons that losing can teach you. The assertion is laughable on its face:

The netroots were basically formed out of a long series of losses by progressives: the Clinton impeachment (MoveOn.org), the 2000 Florida recount (Talking Points Memo, the first major progressive blog), the conservative exploitation of the charged atmosphere following 9/11 (I know that was the case for me), the war in Iraq (the rise of Dailykos and of Howard Dean's campaign), Howard Dean's campaign (DFA and a huge percentage of the netroots and new internet consultants, not to mention the Silent Revolution). Losses have consistently built and solidified the netroots. Progressives getting slaughtered while conservatives get away with murder are what formed this movement. The entire reason why the progressive netroots are so much more popular and powerful than the right-wing netroots are because we are lacking in useful alternative avenues to express ourselves and find representation within the broader political ecosystem. The netroots is born from progressive defeat, which perhaps somewhat explains why we stopped growing in September 2005--the exact moment when approval ratings for Bush and Republicans once and for all feel through the floor. I have said it before, and I will say it again: if "leaders" of the Democratic Party and progressive movement do not like the rise of the progressive netroots, the number one way to stymie its growth is to start winning campaigns. We wouldn't be so pissed off, active, and into "do-it-yourself" mode if we were winning. The netroots know what losing is like, and we have had enough of it.

The difference between the establishment Dems and the netroots is not their experience with losing but what they have done with that experience.

The establishment Dems have adopted a finessed strategy of avoiding conflict in order to please a mythical middle, the middle that is waiting for the great uniter to speak to them, in order to win it over into its 50%+1 coalition.

The netroots have adopted a strategy of changing the dialog in order to persuade the true middle, the middle that doesn't really think that much about politics nor does it want to, that what we have to sell is better than what the other guy has to sell, in order to win it over into our 60%+1 coalition.