In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama"… [D]rill down into one of Washington's foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you're bound to hit Obama supporters.
And it's important to recall that this hawk/dove split and the elite/rank-and-file split have some causal interaction. Back in 2002, the Democratic establishment found itself trapped in this vicious cycle. Most rank-and-file members of congress were ready to oppose the war. But the leadership in the House and the Senate was backing it. And the campaign committees were advising challengers and vulnerable members to back it. And the conventional wisdom said that anyone who wanted to be elected president had to back it. And so were most of the media celebrities focusing on foreign policy - Holbrooke and Albright and Pollack and O'Hanlon.
My current hypothesis is as follows: for the rank and file of professional, progressive foreign policy types who were opposed to the Iraq war from the start, the Obama campaign is the equivalent of the 2002 Nancy Pelosi leadership, 2003 Howard Dean presidential, and 2006 Ned Lamont Senate campaigns were for much of the activist rank and file. However, while this rebellion is analogous to those earlier rebellions of an anti-war rank and file against a pro-leadership, the cultural gap between wonks and hacks, between insiders and outsiders, and between professionals and the grassroots have prevented it from gaining the same traction as those earlier campaigns.
I try to flesh out this hypothesis in the extended entry.
The hawk / dove and elite / rank and file casual connection that Yglesias points out seems to have been replicated in virtually every area of the Democratic ecosystem. First, by a margin of 148-110, the majority of Democrats in Congress were opposed to the war (see here and here), but the leadership, generally speaking, was not. However, rank and file members of Congress had their opportunity to take out their frustration at this situation many years ago by replacing their pro-leadership with the anti-war Nancy Pelosi in late 2002. Also, by a margin of between 10-15%, the Democratic rank and file was opposed to the war in late 2002, but, generally speaking, our Presidential candidates in 2003 were not. Once again, activists had the Howard Dean campaign as a means of scaring the pro-war Democratic leadership enough that they were forced to change at least their rhetoric, and start sounding more anti-war. The same pattern happen again in 2006 over Iraq withdrawal and anti-war campaign messaging with Ned Lamont.
Like the Democratic activist and Congressional rank and file, it now appears that anti-war foreign policy wonks were also in majority opposition to the Iraq war, but their leadership at places like the Carnegie Endowment and Brookings Institution were in favor of it. As far as the rank and file wonks are concerned, why else would so many wonks be flocking to the Obama campaign? As far as the wonk leadership is considered, consider, for example, the extreme pro-war cheerleading of O'Hanlon and Pollack of the Brookings Institution, and that O'Hanlon and Pollack are still the public face of Iraq policy at Brookings. Consider also this great document on Iraq put out by the Carnegie Institution in late 2002:
This proposal identifies a middle ground between the two existing approaches to Iraq: continue to do nothing, or pursue an overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In the lead chapter of the report, Carnegie president Jessica T. Mathews proposes "coercive inspections" in which a multinational military force created by the UN Security Council would enable international inspections teams to operate effectively in Iraq. The U.S. would forswear unilateral military action against Iraq as long as inspections worked unhindered. This "comply or else" tactic would place the burden of choosing war squarely on Saddam Hussein.
American televisions are filled with war rooms, countdowns, deadlines, and showdowns with Iraq. The almost minute by minute coverage distorts public understanding of how inspections work and creates a false sense of the inevitability of war. No decision has in fact been made. Within the administration some indeed intend the buildup as the prelude to war while for others it presents the credible threat of war that is necessary to compel Iraq's disarmament through inspections.(…)
Early in October 2002, the administration explicitly shifted its preferred outcome from regime change through war to disarmament through inspections. The policy shift was signaled at several levels, including by then Senate minority leader Trent Lott 2 and by Secretary of State Colin Powell.3 In Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 7, President Bush said that war was neither imminent nor unavoidable as long as Saddam agreed to disarm. The president has repeatedly called war a "last resort" to be used if all else fails. On December 31 in Crawford, Texas, he snapped at a reporter who said the country was headed to war with Iraq. "I don't know why you say that…I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you."
The leadership at Brookings and Carnegie were carrying water for Bush on Iraq in much the same way that the Democratic Congressional leadership did in 2002, that most Democratic Presidential candidates did in 2003, and that Joe Lieberman has never stopped doing. That is to say, they supported the war in opposition to the majority of their own rank and file. That the majority of professional, progressive foreign policy types are flocking to Obama is evidence of this. For these wonks, the Obama campaign is the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi's late 2002 victory over Martin Frost among rank and file members of the House who were upset with the war support coming from the leadership. It is the equivalent of Howard Dean's rise to prominence for progressive activists upset with an entire top tier of pro-war Democratic candidates in 2003. It is the equivalent of kicking Joe Lieberman out of the party and forcing Democrats to run on Iraq withdrawal in 2006. The Obama campaign appears to be the long-delayed, wonky rebellion against the pro-war foreign policy institutional leadership on the Democratic side.
This is basically a positive development. A rank and file foreign policy wonk rebellion against their institutional masters is long overdue. I freely admit to not even recognizing that this was a possibility until pretty much the last twenty-four hours, as I had always envisioned nearly universal support for the Iraq war among Democratic foreign-policy wonk types. As I saw it, the entire wonk operation was on the "elite" side of the "elite / rank and file" divide that also ended up as a "hawk / dove" divide within the Democratic ecosystem on Iraq. This general distrust of wonks is, I believe, shared by wonks when it comes to their opinion of hacks and grassroots activists such as myself. Something inside of me wants to see them all as elitist suck-ups to establishment power with their fingers in the wind, just as we are often viewed as an unwashed and undifferentiated horde of dirty fucking hippies. You can still see this general distrust in the way Obama often talks of the left, setting up strawmen on seculars and anti-war activists even as he received significant early support from those groups.
"The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam," he said to me on the campaign plane, "which means that either you're a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you're a Tom Hayden Democrat and you're suspicious of any military action. And that's just not my framework."
This, I think, is one of the major problems facing the Obama campaign. It has become, primarily, a rebellion against the establishment carried out in the language of, and by the people of, the establishment itself. This is why he is receiving the majority of policy wonk support, but losing significant ground within the same demographics that were the early supporters of not only his campaign, but of the Howard Dean and Ned Lamont campaigns as well. It isn't a policy gap so much as a cultural one. The language of left-wing strawmen and bi-partisan unity appeals to wonks instead of hacks, and to insider professionals instead of the outsider grassroots. This mutual distrust runs so deep, that among many people I know, including myself, the love Obama currently receives from the rank and file of the establishment has actually served as one of the main reasons to not support him.
How do we bridge this cultural gap and build a more unified progressive front? I really don't know. I agree with Mike Lux when he has repeatedly argued that the most successful periods of progressive governance have always been when the grassroots, populist agitation groups were able to work with enough establishment elements to forge real legislative change. As such, it is certainly a sign of a dysfunctional political ecosystem when a progressive establishment rebellion actually turns off the grassroots in large numbers, as evidence by the shift in Obama's support in the recent Pew poll. Even if it doesn't happen in the 2008 primaries, this is a gap that we need to overcome. Indeed, overcoming that gap was one of the founding missions of this very website. Maybe it would be a step in the right direction if people such as myself stopped assuming that all Democratic foreign policy types are finger-in-wind suck-ups to power, and if the establishment stopped using the language of left-wing strawmen to describe us. If we can't get past the invectives that rest at the heart of our preconceptions about one another, then it seems highly unlikely we will every be able to reach the final step of a progressive governing majority. What happens in between those stages is still much more of a mystery to me.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go canvass my 90% Democratic neighborhood as part of my duties as local dirty fucking hippie drum circle leader precinct captain. I'll think about this some more in so doing.
