| The first is that I think the book suffers from faults I think tend to be endemic to books by traditional journalists in national politics. In particular, I have three criticisms in this area:
1. Cynicism. Bai tells some very funny stories, and there is certainly a reason to be cynical about some of the things he is describing, but from my own personal experience, I know that most of the people he describes in the book are smart, passionate, well-intentioned folks. Yeah, they make mistakes, and yes, they sometimes battle each other over power. But Bai, like so many other reporters in the modern era, paints overly negative portraits of good people, sometimes writing as if their passion is ridiculous or their ideas are trivial.
2. A love for his best sources. One of the most disturbing things that strikes me when reading books by big media journalists about the inner workings of the Clinton White House is how different some of the meetings were in the book to the meetings that I was actually in on. Certain people described in those meetings seemed so much more clever, more insightful, braver, funnier, etc. than I remembered. And others' roles, usually the ones arguing the opposite of the clever-sounding staffers, were downplayed or even distorted. And then I came to realize that all of this was happening because the reporters were rewarding their best sources. Is some of that just natural? Yeah, I'll grant that. But it still bothers me when I read it in books describing situations I know pretty well. Bai's book was in keeping with this tradition: his best sources were the good folks in the story, while just about everybody else he wrote about he tended to be pretty damn cynical about (see above).
3. It's all about the stars. I know we're in a winner-take-all culture, and maybe to sell books in general you have to focus on the best-known personalities. But again, it's a longstanding problem I have with a lot of traditional journalists that their focus tends to be almost entirely on the biggest names. This again felt like the case here. In the Democracy Alliance, there was a ton of information about founder Rob Stein, deservedly so. But Kelly Craighead (to take just one example), the calm, steady presence who helped hold the entire organization together at times when it was on the verge of completely melting down, got one throw-away line at the end of the book. In terms of bloggers, Bai spend a lot of time profiling Jerome and Markos, again deservedly so. But the brilliant Digby didn't get a mention, nor did John Amato and Crooks and Liars. Atrios got one, I think. Jane Hamsher and Firedoglake got a couple of quick mentions, both of them negative. Stoller and Bowers, who in my own obviously biased opinion, have done so much to organize the blogosphere, a couple quick mentions, one a very cynical one about Matt. Very few other bloggers, even some of the most influential, got even a mention. And never a mention of the whole network of great state and local bloggers.
Outside of these traditional journalist tendencies, the other major concern I had about The Argument was Bai's own argument that he makes throughout the book, which is essentially that all this talk of tactics and strategy wasn't going to be successful unless the Democratic Party came up with a fundamentally new (and different) agenda for the 21st century. What he seems to be saying is that all the things the Democracy Alliance is funding, all the new energy and resources netroots activists are bringing to the table, won't amount to a hill of beans. He approvingly quotes Simon Rosenberg's classic (and wonderful) line, "Like two heavyweight boxers stumbling into the 15th round of a championship fight, the two great ideologies of the 20th century stumble, exhausted, tattered, and weakened, into a very dynamic and challenging 21st century," but apparently doesn't think that all of the discussion about movement-building matters very much until we forge that shining new philosophy.
I think Bai's argument is an interesting one, and there is some merit to it. We are living in a very different world than the one that spanned the New Deal, and to be spending most of our political capital and message-making in defense of New Deal programs will not work either politically or policywise in the long term. Progressives' great task in terms of governing and politics is building a new agenda that relates directly to the opportunities for openness and community that the information age brings us, and faces up in a bold way to looming crises in front of us, especially climate change.
He's obviously right that it is our anger at Bush that has united us far more than any bold new agenda, but I also think he overplays his hand on this argument. It feels like he went into the writing of this book determined that this would be his main point, and used the natural-born cynicism of a traditional media reporter to carry him past anything that got in the way of that main point.
I also think, more fundamentally, that history is pretty clear that presidential candidates and political parties rarely, if ever, win elections, let alone re-align the country, because of their bold new plan for re-shaping the economy- in fact, I'm a history buff, and I'm having trouble thinking of such an election. As radical as W has been, he didn't run as a radical, he ran as a "compassionate conservative." Reagan ran as a conservative, but spent most of the 1980 election reassuring people he wasn't crazy. FDR didn't run in 1932 on a bold new agenda- in fact, what he told people was that he would just keep trying stuff to solve the depression until something worked. McKinley won his historic 1896 election by staying home and not saying anything to anybody. Lincoln won in 1860 by continually reassuring voters he would try his best to be conciliatory toward the South.
The other thing in this argument I got tired of was that everything has to be NEW! Bai reminds me of a John Breaux-style politician who decides what he's for on the basis of whether or not it's a compromise. If it's a compromise, it must be good! Bai has the same attachment to policy needing to be new. The problem with this is that not all programs suck- Social Security may need to be tweaked here or there, but it remains overwhelmingly popular because it actually works pretty damn well.
None of this is to say that progressives don't need an agenda far more in tune with the 21st century. But Bai's cynicism about tactics, strategy, and building a movement over finding that new vision is overdrawn to me. Movement-building and winning elections matters, too.
Look, for all my criticism, this book is a great read and a must-read for anybody who cares about building a progressive movement. The stories it tells are important, and the issues raised are worth grappling with. I just wish Bai's natural biases and tendencies as a traditional media journalist didn't come out so strongly, and that he didn't get so carried away with his own argument about Democrats needing a vision that he let it influence his story-telling so strongly. |
