| One of the most difficult parts of dealing with Obama is his conflation of Republicans with Republican leaders. Reagan split Democrats by dissing Democratic and labor leaders and encouraging white male Democrats to vote for Republicans. It worked; while he didn't insult Democratic voters, he constantly disparaged Democratic leaders. It was and is a good strategy. After all, reversing the Reagan model, if you can convince Republican voters to vote for progressives, why not do so?
This is the essence of transformational leadership, changing people's minds about their political values. Obama does not do this, and I'm not going to constantly rehash his praise of Republican politicians and his adoption of conservative conventional wisdom; we've done that enough. The gist of the problem is that Republican leaders are by and large bad faith operators, but Republican voters are not necessarily so. Obama conflates appealing to Republican voters with working with Republican leaders in Washington.
That, however, is a different problem than the overall goal of turning more Republicans and Independents into progressive Democrats. In an argument about Chris Bowers's discussion of the Philly suburbs, Jerome Armstrong argues the following.
And its certainly, for anyone who's cared to look at who is voting, not due to partisan Democratic support that Obama has done so well. If anything, it's in spite of hardcore Democrats, that Obama has won, through inclusive organizing of Republicans and Independents. Sure, this is a good thing in the long run, but lets be honest and agree that its not representative of the type of progressive partisanship that places like DailyKos and MyDD, and the rest of the progressive blogosphere, have been proponents.
I don't get this. Partisanship is a strategy for social change. Why wouldn't a political party want more adherents? Jerome points to Chris's discussion of Reagan Democrats, and the futility of chasing them as a voting block, and argues this is inconsistent with his points about the Obama coalition. While I think Clinton's activation of the Latino base is very significant and under-emphasized in Chris's analysis, I don't get Jerome's point. Chris is arguing something very simple: old white racist men are not going to be a good part of a progressive coalition. He is not saying that current independents and Republicans in suburbs that are rapidly becoming part of a larger creative metropolitan economy aren't part of that coalition. And I frankly find it very hard to imagine that lots of old racist men are going to vote for Obama anyway.
Both the Obama and the Clinton coalitions offer some very real advantages to progressives. Don't deny Obama's real appeal to the largest generation in American history or the creative class in urban an suburban areas, and don't deny Clinton's appeal to Latino's, the largest and fastest growing minority group in the country, or women. And in all likelihood, both of these groups are going to go for the eventual nominee anyway. |
