If you're looking for an early bet for the top story of 2010, bet on the story being the Internet Revolution, because after years and years of anticipation and progress, the next two to three years are when we are going to see the Internet become what we all thought it would be.
Arianna Huffington's spot-on post yesterday about our country's broken financial system led with the sentence "The window for reform is closing." Which is word for word what Elizabeth Warren said to me in a conversation we had a few days ago. For all of the incredible power Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase have, their Achilles heel is momentarily exposed because of the incredibly anger the American public justifiably has at them right now, and there is a window for at least some progress on this.
There is, ironically, another reason for urgency as well: as Arianna and I and others have noted in multiple articles in recent weeks, the big Wall St. traders are back to their old tricks, business as usual pure and simple. And those tricks are exactly what brought down our financial system over the last couple of years. With our economy in such fragile shape, their recklessness endangers us greatly. I've heard people say that if we don't fix the problem, we could be in danger of another financial meltdown 10 or 20 years from now, but that way understates the problem. With our economy as weak as it is, we could see another financial crisis next year, not 10 or 20 years from now.
The remarkable thing about all this is that the reforms the White House has proposed are so modest. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency is a commonsense, reasonable proposal that even the Republicans I know from the financial industry think makes perfect sense. For an old lefty populist like myself, I don't think it goes nearly far enough. But even this moderate policy is running into a violent assault by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and the American Bankers Association. If something this reasonable is opposed by these guys, it's a sign of how far out on the ledge these companies have gone in pursuit of making billions by unregulated gambling and chicanery.
The window is closing on financial reform, and the window is closing on health care reform. These are easily the biggest political tests of Obama's Presidency, those that will determine whether his Presidency is going to be a success. A President can come back politically from early failures on big issues, as Bill Clinton did, but if they lose the big early battles, they generally don't try to do anything big or ambitious again.
I wrote in my book The Progressive Revolution about how the pattern of American history is that every so often, the window to create big change comes open for a while, that the combination of crisis, leadership, and political movement make it possible to really make big positive changes in our country. That window is open right now, and President Obama, to his credit, is trying to keep it open by doing some big and important things. But if he gives up the fight and caves in to special interest lobbyists, or if Democrats in Congress don't back his play, or if the reform movements on these big issues can't deliver grassroots strength, then the window will slam shut. That would be an immense tragedy, because this country desperately needs some big changes, and because the Republican opposition to Obama is going down such a dark path.
This country has been very lucky for much of its history. But if we can't fight through the special interest muck and deliver big change soon, I fear that our luck could run out. The economic and political storm are gathering in the sky, and we can't afford to do nothing to change the dynamics.
I have been in the battling-the-rich-and-powerful-on-behalf-of-the-poor-and-middle- income business for a very long time now (almost 30 years), and it can get pretty discouraging at times. For one thing, in some news that I am sure will be shattering to you, the rich and powerful have a lot more money. And they have seemed to have a lot more political friends over that era than do the poor and the middle income folks combined.
But hope rises anew from time to time, and there are encouraging signs. The most obvious one, of course, is that we have a President and both houses of Congress led by center-left politicians who will be with the poor and middle income quite a bit more than their predecessors in the Bush White House and the Republican led Congress - not always, of course, but more than the last set of politicians. But my hopes are rising for a lot less visible reasons than that.
More on what those reasons on in the extended entry.
How is it that despite adulatory media coverage, long lines of volunteers at his campaign offices, and Americans deeply unhappy about the direction of the country, Barack Obama is rapidly losing support - and control of the agenda - to John McCain?
It's because Obama has reverted to the whiny, wimpy style that nearly allowed Hillary Clinton to wipe him out in September, 2007 - until he found his backbone and actually started to stand up for himself.
When McCain launches volley after volley of attack on Obama's policies (with photos of Paris and Brittany thrown in to get the media's attention), what's Obama's response? To ride in on his My Little Pony and cry because McCain is - how low! - criticizing his policies and questioning his capacity to lead in a mildly creative way.
This self-righteous simpering might make Obama supporters feel like he's "changing the tone" of politics, but it's not doing anything to stop his slide, shape the debate, or answer the legitimate question the McCain campaign keeps asking: is Obama actually ready to lead?
So far, Obama's response is to give McCain's advisers exactly what they want: McCain attacks, Obama complains about the attacks and then capitulates on everything from illegal wiretapping to offshore oil drilling. Obama is once again caught up in the great Democratic myth that voters make up their minds by carefully calibrating which candidate's issue positions are closest to his own (a major topic of my book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party).
Newsflash, Obama: To most voters, campaigns are not an egghead mental Olympics between two walking policy platforms. They're primal battles that test how candidates respond under fire. And for the last several weeks, Obama has been failing that test: crying about McCain's attacks and then surrendering. To most voters, this sends a simple message: if Obama can't stand up to a babbling incompetent like John McCain, how is he ever going to stand up to the oil executives, the health care lobby, or, for that matter, Osama bin Laden?
that there's a cautiousness bordering on paranoia in the Obama camp. Unsettled by the he's a Muslim emails campaign, Jeremiah Wright, the attacks on his patriotism, they place debunking these attacks above all else.
I hope he's right, and that I'm just being paranoid, too. But I think it's important to attempt a theoretical understanding of why Obama might be really committed to a path that repeatedly puts him sharply at odds with us. No one would be happier than me to discover that this analysis is not necessary. But the past two weeks argue fairly strongly that it is.
To that end, here I want to tighten up the analytical foundation behind an important link in this argument. In that diary, I quoted approvingly from a column by Arianna Huffington, on the practical folly of the direction that Obama was taking--a column that was attacked by one commentator, kanzeon, starting here with an ad hominem attack on her:
Obama hasn't shifted his strategy. Arianna is smart enough to understand that.
She's an old Republican who hated Clinton and wanted to exert her power. So she played along with Obama's game.
Despite his hamfisted approach, kanzeon is taking on a soft target, since Arriana is not fully articulating the background of her argument. Rather than get into an argument about she wrote, I want to go back to the underlying source, which I know that Huffington knows well, and that is the work of George Lakoff.
While Lakoff has repeatedly praised Obama for his intuitive understanding of framing, he has written analyses that can enable us to make our own judgments and analyses of how Obama may be failing in particular ways--particularly right now. That, in turn can help us refine our understanding of how Lakoff's analysis can both be refined and integrated into a broader framework of political analysis. All this I explain and explore on the flip....
Arianna Huffington has a brilliant piece up skewering Obama's move to the center in no uncertain terms:
In a Los Angeles Times article detailing Obama's attempts at "shifting toward the center," Matt Bennett of the centrist think tank Third Way says that Obama is a "good politician. He's doing all he can to make sure people know he would govern as a post-partisan moderate."
But isn't being a "good politician" as it's meant here exactly what Obama defined himself as being against? Instead of Third Way think tankers, Obama should listen to this guy:
"What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics -- the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems.... The time for that politics is over. It's time to turn the page."
That was Barack Obama in February of 2007, announcing his run for the White House. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington," he said that day, "but I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change."
....
The Obama brand has always been about inspiration, a new kind of politics, the audacity of hope, and "change we can believe in." I like that brand. More importantly, voters -- especially unlikely voters -- like that brand.
....
Realpolitik is one thing. Realstupidpolitik is quite another.
In fact, she makes the case so clearly and compelling that one is simply forced to take the next logical (even if unthinkable) step: Obama can't be as stupid as this. He has to know what he's doing here. Which means that he is intentionally trashing his brand.
I know Matt has pitched this to you below, but I just want to also add my two cents. Just like with Cliff's new book out on McCain, we have an opportunity to push more progressive voices onto bookshelves filled with Coulter and Hannity books, get Arianna on TV, etc. Every time we put a progressive political book on the bestseller list, we put more pressure on the traditional media to cover our point of view. In our current media environment, we have the chance to make a huge dent if each of us gets a copy (or gets our mother, brother-in-law, co-worker, etc. to buy a copy). Arianna is a truly remarkable woman who does important work on the Huffington Post and one of our best strategists and leaders. Please, dig deep into your pockets (or your pockets for birthday gifts) and get a copy. This is a kickass book!
I've been going through Arianna Huffington's latest book Right is Wrong, in which she argues that an extreme right-wing cabal has hijacked the national agenda with the aid of a compliant media. As with Glenn Greenwald's superb Great American Hypocrites and Media Matters's Free Ride, there is a coherent discussion of the way that the press enabled a truly grotesque set of right-wing actors. We know the drill. It's health care, torture, the war on science, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, the economy, Iraq, xenophobia, etc.
It's a pretty well-understood story at this point, at least within our world. The alliance between a complicit media and a rabid right-wing is the key link making our country less safe and letting a lot of wealthy right-wingers screw over most of the public. It's not even hidden anymore; while this happened too late for publication of the book, John Stauber of PR Watch has pointed out that it is illegal to use taxpayer money to propagandize via the media, yet it happened. That pattern, repeated over and over again, is what courses through Arianna's book.
We can't push this enough times or through enough outlets. Big media cartels and the lunatic right-wing and their candidates like John McCain simply dominate our politics, but their dominance can be ended if their false and grotesque narrative choices about America are challenged clearly and aggressively through our blogging, our email work, our books, and brave journalists and politicians willing to work through smart and effective campaigns.
I've known Arianna for years, and it's quite clear that she is an incredibly savvy operator and institution-builder around progressive principles. What Markos has done for progressive activists, Arianna has done for media elites, which is to build a bridge for the dissemination of opinions and information that are critical and signficant and need to be mainstreamed.
She's done that with books and most recently her media organization. And she's doing it again with Right is Wrong.
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