I have a real problem. I have all these great ideas for posts (at least, I think so) and no damn time to write them. The last few months before a Presidential year general election are always really intense, and this year I'm writing a book and helping launch the big new health care coalition, too, so I am completely crazed. Apologies for not writing much lately.
I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the idea of building a bigger movement.
A Presidential election year, once we get into the general election season, is generally my favorite time of life. The passion, intensity, feeling of common purpose, sense of focus, sense of hope for a new beginning, the unusual interest in politics in general- it all makes me happy. But there's always some really annoying stuff, too.
This year one of the things that has been getting to me is the number of people who are either mindlessly hopeful or relentlessly cynical. The folks on both extremes seem to be especially vocal this year, perhaps inspired or particularly set off by Obama's charisma.
While I'm grateful that the last primaries are finally happening today, I am also feeling kind of nostalgic. This has been a strange and wild ride, and while there's been a lot of irritating and painful things that have happened along the way, it's also been pretty exciting overall. I'm referring in part to all of the usual stuff that Matt and Chris and many others have references multiple times- millions of excited new registrants and voters, the history-making aspect of having an African-American and a woman be the two finalists, etc.- but also to the unpredictability of the whole thing.
When this campaign started, Hillary Clinton was expected to win easily and quickly in a boring campaign because of her superior money, organization, and positive name brand. Think about that: not a single one of those things happened. She didn't win, the campaign was the most hard-fought Democratic campaign in modern history, it was fought to the very end, nothing about it was boring, she didn't have as much money or as good an organization, and the Clinton name brand took a serious hit. Nothing turned out the way we thought, and I'll add one more thing into the mix: in spite of all the problems, she also turned out to be a far better campaigner than anyone, including the people who said she was the inevitable nominee, thought she would be.
This has been easily, by a huge margin, the most fascinating primary campaign ever. Now we'll have another wild ride in the general election. The political junkie in me is feeling very happy these days.
I mentioned this in a post the other day, but I wanted to add some more thoughts about it: I don't think when Hillary decides to get out matters very much at all. All the media obsession with "will-she-stay-or-will-she-go" is just another long line of media obsessions about things that don't matter very much. The trickle of superdelegates to Obama is soon going to become a river big enough that he might have a majority even before the final primaries are over on June 3rd.
The only thing that matters now is not when but how she chooses to get out. It is my fervent hope that this horrible-sounding "Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening" quote was just a tired fumbling of words, not intended to sound as rotten as it did. I know that the Hillary that I came to like and respect so much in my years at the White House never would have said such a thing. But if quotes like that signal an intent to end on a slash-and-burn note, it will hurt Obama and the party badly. It will also permanently and irrevocably tarnish the Clinton legacy and reputation for all time.
I know there are some of you who think that has already happened. I don't. It's been a very tough campaign, and I haven't liked a lot of her tactics, especially over the last few weeks, but if she winds this campaign down gracefully, and then does everything possible to help the ticket win, as far as I'm concerned, that will earn her the gratitude and respect of Democrats and progressives. But if that quote signals where she's going in this endgame, she will earn the permanent enmity of most Democrats and progressives, and history will not treat her kindly either.
The debate on this blog about whether anything has really changed in the Presidential race is interesting, although it doesn't really matter a lot at this point- either way, this thing is now done. My own view is that had Hillary won Indiana big and pulled off a big upset in North Carolina, it wouldn't have changed the basic pledged delegate math, but it sure would have spooked a lot of superdelegates, and it would have kept alive the negative media frame on Obama, so this really was her last chance. You can stick a fork in it.
The media and many political junkies are now bound to be fascinated by the how long will-Hillary-stay-in story. In my view, like the did-last-night-change-anything-debate, that is also pretty close to irrelevant. When you have no chance of becoming the nominee, even your attacks lose their punch because you don't have the same credibility: it's a little like Huckabee in the last few weeks of the GOP campaign- people just weren't paying much attention to what he had to say, and even when he won states, it didn't matter much anymore. Hillary Clinton is obviously a bigger name than Mike Huckabee, but the credibility factor will still erode the power of her attacks.
So here is what I now hope will happen:
1. That the Obama campaign team really have a new focus on putting together their general election team and strategy quickly. One of the things that really killed us in the 2004 election was that the Kerry campaign was so painfully slow to put together their general election staff, operation, and overall strategy. Weeks literally dragged into months without major decisions being made, and all the while Bush was moving into full attack mode. It was incredibly harmful.
The Obama folks need to be very focused on gearing up their operation now. If the primary team needs vacations, fine, put people you trust into planning mode. With our long-drawn primary, this needs to happen now.
2. That the Clinton people need to get used to the fact that Obama is the nominee. All the hyperbolic "he can never win the general" and the "it's not fair" stuff needs to stop right now unless you want a 100-years-in-Iraq, pro-life, pro-Roberts/Alito Supreme Court, 22% lifetime LCV rating, economic right-winger as President. To spend any time or energy at all nursing your resentments is the most fundamentally selfish thing you can do right now. I hate losing elections, I know how badly you feel, and how hard it is, but there is too much at stake to be selfish right now.
3. That all the avid Obama people who have been so obsessed with beating Hillary pat yourself on the back, and then get the hell over it. You've won the first round, get ready for round 2 because just winning the primary doesn't count for anything in the end. Gloating feels great, but it doesn't help Obama in any way, so put off gloating until he's actually won the real election. Keep giving to Obama, but help the DNC and VoteVets and other groups that are working on beating McCain, too. And be a big person, and reach a hand of friendship to all the Hillary people who you have been saying mean things to for a year now. We need them.
I know all of this is obvious, so apologies for that and for the preachy tone, too. But I just had to say it. We have a candidate. Now let's figure out how he wins.
There's a big upside and a big downside when campaigns like this year's Obama campaign choose to run (at least in part) on the idea that they are trying to change the tired old petty politics of negativity. The advantage, which Obama's campaign has used effectively, is that whenever your opponent attacks you, it makes them sound even more negative and petty than usual. The disadvantage, though, is that when it comes time to hit back, it's sometimes hard to do it without seeming petty yourself.
That is the dilemma facing the Obama campaign right now. They are getting beaten up pretty badly right now by the combination of the Clinton campaign, the McCain campaign, and the traditional media. Their response to this barrage of punches has felt slow and defensive. I think there are multiple reasons for this- they are trying to unify the party and don't want to bloody Hillary too badly, they are fighting the battle on three fronts simultaneously, etc.- but I think the biggest reason is that sense of trying to figure out how to fight back given all their rhetoric about wanting to run a positive campaign.
I would remind my friends in Obamaland that it does not matter who starts the attacks in terms of getting the blame for being negative. I've been involved in races where the opposition did nasty personal attacks for two months without a response because the Dem candidate had no money to answer back, but the Democrat still got blamed for being more negative than the Republican. Why? Because the negative ads gave voters such a bad feeling about the Democrat that they assumed the Democrat was the bad guy in terms of negative campaigning. Once the voters start viewing you badly, they will think you are just as negative, or more so, than your opposition.
Obama has to show that he can not only take a punch, but punch back. The way to go this given his new kind of political message, though, is to punch back on the big issues that matter. Doing petty little personal attacks really doesn't work given Obama's message, but responding strongly about the big issues that matter can. Obama should not hesitate to confidently, aggressively go on offense, but do so about the things that people actually care about, not the politics of the petty. That will show that he does have a different approach to politics than most of what passes for political debate.
I haven't written much about the Rev. Wright thing because so many people have taken this topic on ad infinitum that there hasn't seemed much new to say. But with him doing his media tour thing, I thought I would weigh in on a topic not that much covered in the progressive blogosphere, which is the nature of ministers and their sermons. I only go to church these days when I am back home in Lincoln, but as the grandson and brother of Methodist ministers, and the son of the lay (non-clergy) leader of the Nebraska Methodist Church, this is a topic I know something about- at my family dinner table, if the topic was politics, you could take even odds on whether we were talking regular politics or church politics.
My minister brother and I were taking a few days back about the whole Wright thing, and he commented, "I sure wouldn't want my parishioners to be held responsible for the stuff I've said in my sermons." And that sentiment is true for every good minister I know of. What I was always told growing up was that a minister's job was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Bad preachers speak in mushy truisms watered down to the lowest common denominator. Good ministers stir people up, challenge their congregants' assumptions, make people uncomfortable. They should serve, in the language of the church, a prophetic role that speaks truth to power.
They can get away with that, if they are good at their work, by that comforting the afflicted part of their job: visiting sick and elderly people at the hospital and in their homes, doing the funeral services, counseling those in trouble. When a minister does that sort of thing, they build an unshakable loyalty that allows them to survive, say, giving a sermon in favor of gay rights in North Platte, Nebraska. There were probably five people in my brother's congregation of 300 that agreed with what he said in such a sermon that day, but they didn't fire him or quit the congregation in droves because of it. That congregation knew my brother to be a good and gentle man who had been there for all of them time and time again in the hardest of times, and so they accepted what he said in his sermon without necessarily agreeing with it. I'm guessing that if one of them had run for office in North Platte, and bee confronted with that gay rights sermon by my brother, they would have said about what Barack Obama did of Jeremiah Wright- "Well, I didn't like what he said, but that man performed my marriage and baptized my children and brought me closer to my faith, so I'm not going to walk away form him personally."
Good ministers say dramatic things, stir things up, and push people hard to look at what they believe and how they act. That's their job. To hold their congregants accountable for every word they say in a sermon is absurd, and shows the people who attack them for such that they don't understand religion very well.
It's remarkable how many big vulnerabilities McCain has, including but not limited to:
-His 100 years in Iraq comment
-His "I don't know much about economics" comment in the face of our economic downturn
-His age
-Stories about his temper
-His incredible hypocrisy regarding lobbyists, contributors, and favors done for both
With the economy in the toilet, the situation in Iraq flaring up again, 81% of Americans thinking we're on the wrong track, a dispirited and uninspired Republican base, and with only a quarter of the country willing to call themselves a Republican, McCain should be easy to beat.
Don't believe all the crap being thrown around about all the reasons why either Obama or Clinton (depending on who the candidate is making the case) can't win in the general. There are only two ways we can lose this race- although unfortunately both of them are very real problems right now.
The first, of course, is if this nomination fight gets so ugly that it spins out of control so much that there is no way for the divisions to heal. I don't think we are there yet by any means, but we could get there.
The second is that if, in the midst of the nomination battle, the Democratic Party and outside efforts (including organizations and the blogosphere) are unable to successfully define John McCain on our terms. This is a huge fear of mine simply because the big progressive donors who would normally support these kinds of efforts are really kind of checked out right now- they are frozen by the nomination race, not sure if they want to play if their candidate doesn't win. They also seem, in my conversations with them, appallingly mellow about the prospect of McCain, saying they don't think he's so bad compared with the other nominees the Republicans could have had.
McCain is a bad guy- so pro-aggressive military action it is truly scary- and just as conservative as Bush on the economy. We need to get this message out about him both to the public and, it seems, to our own donors. The odds are in favor of us winning this race, but we are a long way from resolving these big problems on our own side of the aisle.
This will probably come as quite a surprise to those of you who read my recent post criticizing the Clinton machine's hardball tactics, and specifically referencing Carville's Judas attack of Richardson. However, I really liked James' column in the Washington Post where he defended his attack. I know, I'm confusing the hell out of you. Let me explain.
It's not that James convinced me he was right to make that kind of nasty attack, I still didn't like it. But I do really respect the argument he is making.
What James is saying is that in his values system, loyalty is the thing he values most. Richardson owes the Clintons a lot, they've always been good to him, and he owed them more loyalty than to endorse Hillary's opponent.
I understand the argument, and I too prioritize loyalty above a great many things. Without loyalty to your own- your family, your friends, your team, your faith, the people who have done well by you, the people you've worked for, and those who've worked for you- community and mutuality are destroyed. You sure as hell can't build political power, or a long-term movement, without it. I have felt the pull of loyalty to the Clintons as well, and I would have handled myself this political year in a very different way if I hadn't felt that way. I wrote many good things about Hillary over the last year because I believed them and out of loyalty. I have given her the benefit of the doubt many times when I felt uncomfortable with what she was doing. I have defended her against many attacks. I gave lots of advice to Clinton campaign people in Iowa, and nationally, and hooked them up with smart people I thought they should know. I took calls at 11:00 PM on a Friday night and agreed to try to help them out of a political jam in Iowa. And I stayed neutral for a long time after my heart started to move to Obama.
But as loyal a person as I am, and highly as I prioritize loyalty in my value system, I ultimately endorsed Obama at the point where I thought Hillary's campaign was going down a destructive path, a path that I fear will destroy our chances of beating John McCain this fall. Loyalty is one of my most important values, but in the end it was trumped by other things. It was trumped by the sense that for the good of the party, the country, and the world, John McCain has to be defeated, and Hillary's campaign is leading us away from that goal.
I have always thought that, for a good person raised with solid values, the most difficult moral choices have nothing to do with the obvious good/evil kinds of things. I have never been tempted to steal money or sell out to corporations I hated or commit violence to my enemies. Those calls are easy. The tough moral choices are when you are faced with competing things that are good are like this: is it more important to get important work done, or spend time with friends and family? Is it more important to swallow my pride when a rich person I'm trying to raise money from for a good cause says something I disagree with, or better to be honest and direct even when I know I'll lose the money? If I have to make a choice between spending time on one important issue vs. another, which do I prioritize? Is loyalty to people who have been good to me more important than following what I think is the right path politically? These are the things I really find myself wrestling with.
I made a choice that was painful to me, but one that I'm comfortable with. I have no idea what Richardson's inner values system is, but I suspect he did the same thing. James has chosen loyalty above all else, a path I understand and respect, but one I ultimately couldn't walk down.
No, I'm not talking about the daily Bush/McCain festival of fear about the scary terrorists. And, no, I'm not talking about the 3 AM phone call ad, either.
I'm talking about how many people I know, many superdelegates among them, who are scared to publicly support Obama because of the Clintons' well-known penchant for vengeance.
There are plenty of people in the Democratic Party who think Hillary Clinton would make a better President, and/or a better general election candidate, than Barack Obama. There are also some folks who endorsed Hillary early on, and believe you have to stick with the candidate you endorse until the bitter end. There are even a few, although the number is shrinking daily, who still have not genuinely made up their mind. And some superdelegates in the remaining states want to wait for the voters in their own state to vote before they declare. But there are very few people I talk to who think Hillary can win without an utterly divisive fight that will likely tear the party apart. They know that from the perspective of what's best for the party, it's time to endorse Obama.
What those remaining undeclared folks are telling me in private, though, is that they hope the race will play itself out and Obama will emerge as the clear winner so that they don't have to piss the Clintons and their machine off. They don't want the Clintons and McAuliffe and those donors who signed the letter to stop raising money for them. They don't want Carville and Wolfson to call them a traitor. They don't want all the behind-the-scenes trashing that they know will come.
I am encouraging my friends to come out of their political closet. If all the superdelegates and other influential friends that I have talked to who believe that the best path for the party is for Obama to win a clear victory would come out in is favor, this thing really would be over.
I hope this doesn't start another big flame war- I almost didn't write it because I am so tired of people attacking each other over this primary race. But I thought it was important for people to know what I'm hearing from people.
Back in the fall of 1986, when I was still living in Iowa, I was doing one of my periodic trips to Washington, D.C. for national meetings, and I dropped in to see my mentor and friend, Paul Tully. Paul is a remarkable old-school political organizer who has trained a generation of Democrats on how to do their politics. Paul had been a Bobby Kennedy organizer, and worked for progressive candidates and causes up until his tragic death of a heart attack weeks before Election Day in 1992. I told Paul that on my next trip to D.C., I would want to get his advice on the Presidential candidates, since I was living in Iowa, and I would want to get involved early in the primary. "Better do it now," Paul said. "By then, I might have picked a candidate, and at that point I will no longer be able to offer objective advice to you as my friend. Once I'm on a campaign, I'm an animal who will only be thinking of how my guy wins."
I have always remembered that moment, especially in times like right now with an ugly primary fight going on. People who should be, and sometimes are, friends; people who agree with each other on virtually every issue; people who share all the same values- they become animals to get their candidates elected.
Now, animals is not a pejorative term in my view. I like the passion this campaign has invoked, that feeling that people are fighting hard with everything they've got. And politics is a contact sport, so I don't mind folks going at it in an aggressive way.
I've also seen my share of tough primary fights over the years. Compared to the all-time bloodiest I can remember, McGovern-Humphrey in 1972, Carter-Kennedy in 1980 and Mondale-Hart in 1984, this one still is relatively mild. We also have the advantage that, unlike those other three primaries, as I've written about here, while activists and insiders are going at it pretty tough, most Democratic primary voters still like both of these candidates.
Having said all that, though, I will admit that I am starting to get worried. The stakes in this election are just too big. Nothing is ever a done deal, because the right-wing and the mushy conventional wisdom middle have so much power in this country, but if we get more Democrats in the House and Senate, either Clinton or Obama as President, we at least have a shot at:
-Starting the process of healing the planet from truly disastrous climate change
-Getting most or all of our troops out of Iraq
-Getting health insurance coverage for everybody
-Stopping a further economic meltdown
This is too important for the partisans in this primary process to destroy their relationships with each other, and it's way too important for the losing side to take their ball and go home.
Let's have this debate in our party, but let's do whatever we can to keep the temperature down.
I haven't done any commentary on Obama's race speech. I was one of many that was really impressed by it, but I figured that since everybody else was commenting on it, there was no real need for me to do so. I was struck, though, but this piece on AlterNet from Drew Westen (full disclosure: Drew is a friend, and a collaborator on a major project I'm working on). It's a hell of a smart post. I was especially interested in Drew's argument that Obama had shown the guts to go where all of her Democrats had feared to trend. The money quote:
Does he have the courage, capacity, and cojones to lead? Yesterday, he led us as a nation, and he showed a firm, steady, and unflinching hand. Not only did he utter words most Democratic politicians don't speak in polite company but should have spoken years ago, but he refused to take the low road -- to denounce and cast aside someone who clearly matters dearly to him simply because he had become a political liability -- displaying both courage and conviction.
Obama is a fascinating candidate. He has at times, as I and others have complained, seemed to follow too cautious and careful a path. At other times, though, he has gone against conventional wisdom, and then not backed down when attacked- for example, on negotiating with foreign leaders we don't like. On this speech, as Drew says, he showed a lot of guts and threw caution to the wind.
I am certain that I will have moments, probably quite a few of them, when I am frustrated by candidate Obama's, and then hopefully President Obama's, being more cautious than I would like him to be. But if this speech is any indication, when the chips are down and it really matters, he may well be bold and gutsy. At least at times, he may finally break through the Democrats' culture of caution.
Arianna Huffington and I were talking at the Take Back America conference, and she encouraged me to write a follow-up post about the decision I made a couple of weeks ago that I thought I would not end up making in this primary campaign: endorsing Barack Obama. I did so on March 5th, the day after the Ohio and Texas primaries.
It's not that I didn't like Obama. I've actually known him for awhile and liked him very much- certainly I had been inspired by him like so many others. But I had been very much intending to stay neutral in this campaign for a couple of reasons.
The first was that for all my years in Presidential politics (I've been directly involved in five different Presidential campaigns since 1984, and have been involved in a variety of independent expenditure efforts in 2000 and 2004), I haven't been involved in the primaries since the 1988 cycle. I have always been a lot more focused on beating Republicans rather than on Presidential primaries, and on building the broader progressive infrastructure. Because there don't tend to be huge issue or ideological distinctions between the leading candidates, as in this election, it has always seemed more important to me playing a broader building and uniting role in the party and progressive movement than getting into the intense flame wars that always seem to accompany these primary fights (God knows I've been exhausted by the flame war accompanying this one for quite a while).
The second reason was, as I wrote in the March 5th post and in several other posts over the last year, that I have a very high regard for and loyalty to Hillary Clinton. I was a senior staffer in Little Rock in the 1992 campaign, and a Special Assistant to the President in the first term of the Clinton administration, and in that role I had worked very closely with Hillary, especially on the health care fight. I have a great deal of affection and respect for her from those years, and feel a great deal of loyalty to her for all her kindness and friendships for me over the years. I had strongly disagreed with her on the war and on some other issues over the years, but that has not diminished my respect for her.
So I was determined to stay out of this fight. But the fight in Texas and Ohio changed all that for me. Not just because I was appalled at the Republican reinforcing fear thematic that Hillary used to win, but because there is no path for Hillary to the nomination at this point except an ugly, ugly path. Given the delegate math, she can only win this by a combination of fear-mongering attacks and behind the scenes deals with superdelegates. That would be terrible for our party, and for the entire progressive movement.
The reaction since my endorsement post has been really interesting. No surprise at all, I got shots across the bow by people connected to Hillary's campaign about my name being mud, etc. Hey, it's politics, I get that and expected it. But I have been surprised by the number of Hillary supporters who quietly said to me, "I've picked my candidate and I'm with her until the end, but I admire what you wrote, because there is no way to a win without it getting really ugly." And even the most ardent Hillary supporters- the ones who say things like "well, yeah, but Obama's been negative, too" or "hey, politics is a contact sport"- cannot spell out for me a path to the nomination for her, absent a big mistake by Obama, that isn't profoundly divisive.
Because of my personal ties to the Clintons, this was one of the toughest decisions I have ever made. But every day that goes by makes me more convinced that it was the right thing to do.
I've been having some thoughts about Obama's rhetoric concerning progressives, the progressive brand, and progressive institutions. As has been documented by Chris, Matt and others, Obama has developed a strategy of distancing himself from progressives. But what I'm examining goes farther than the non-ideological, post-partisan rhetoric he favors, and I believe he is directing it at two groups. I want to examine the strategy behind it, and look at the effects. Many people say it's bringing out independent and Republican voters. My contention is that this will hurt our chances of winning this election.
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