The bulk of your "A list" progessive bloggers are now between the ages of 30 and 50. Many blog readers also fall into this age range. Those of us in this demographic are too young to have personal memories of progressive political power. There was some of that in the 1960s according to what I've seen on the History Channel and in books but I've never felt it.
This age group is also too old for unfettered idealism. Our political memories include the dark Bush-Cheney years, the "pragmatic" Clinton years (and an impeachment) and, for some, the Reagan-Bush years and the less-than-successful Carter years. There may be some idealism still lurking inside but it's, well, fettered idealism.
And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, your thinking can become limited by what has been rather than what could be. I think that, in part, explains the persistence of voices, even in Democratic circles, underestimating the chances for real progressive change. Today Nate Silver is acknowledging his error on the chances of success for the public option (though he noted, presciently, that is wasn't a done deal yet). As usual, Nate is trying to be reality-based when making predictions. He has not been alone is expressing pessimism on the public option's chances.
I would suggest to Nate and other empiricists that the ground has shifted and if you want to be reality-based you need to appreciate the new terrain. I'll describe this inside and offer what I think are reality-based reasons for embracing optimism for a progressive future.
At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver broke down the top ten reasons the public health insurance option is gaining momentum.
In a game of "rock, paper, scissors, bloggers, Washington Post," bloggers/online activists definitely trump Washington Post!
The full list (drum roll please)...
1. The tireless, and occasionally tiresome, advocacy on behalf of liberal bloggers and interest groups for the public option. Whatever you think of their tactics -- I haven't always agreed with them -- the sheer amount of focus and energy expended on their behalf has been very important, keeping the issue alive in the public debate.
2. The fact that the CBO thinks it will save money.
3. The seeming inevitability of health care reform, which neuters the voices of those who aren't opposed to the public option per se so much as the entire project of health care reform.
4. The fact that the locus of power has shifted from the Gang of Six -- Bingaman/Conrad/Baucus/Snowe/Grassley/Enzi to the Group of Six -- Pelosi/Dodd/Obama/Reid/Baucus/Snowe.
5. The "innovation" of the opt-in/opt-out family of compromises, which have more liberal "street cred" than co-ops or triggers and are potentially also much more politically advantageous.
6. The fading from memory of the tea party protests and the "government takeover" meme.
7. Polls in myriad swing states and swing districts showing the public option is reasonably popular in these regions.
8. Constituent letters and e-mails.
9. The insurance industry's "senior moment": forgetting that this isn't 1993 and that the shelf life of a misleading study would be measured in hours (rather than days or weeks) and would damage its credibility in the process.
10. The Washington Post's somewhat bizarre decision to make its poll showing support for the public option its lede in yesterday's paper, even though public opinion has been fairly steady on the issue for months.
In the words of one of Nate's commenters, "Great, simple article. Loved it."
Speaking of progressive group pressure, I made my first appearance on Rachel Maddow Wed night talking about the PCCC's new ad pressuring Harry Reid. Wuddyathink?
6:50pm - I finally found a minute to sit down and type up some thoughts on my first trip to Netroots Nation. We are close to done with day 1 of filming. We filmed 8 panels, interviewed a handful panelists, and are prepping to film President Bill Clinton's keynote address. Below, you will find a play list of day 1 coverage, including interviews with Greg Dworking (DemFromCT), Nate Silver, Congresswoman Donna Edwards, Monique Hoeflinger, and Michael Wilson:
I promised that I wasn't going to put much more work into estimating crowd sizes for yesterday's tea party events, but here is one last update. The important thing is that we now have a credible estimate for Atlanta at 15,000 persons; we were previously relying on an estimate of 7,000 that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had initially made yesterday evening but then pulled back upon.
It's not surprising that Atlanta had the largest turnout (in fact, the largest turnout by far, according to our collection of nonpartisan estimates). Turnout was much higher in state capitals than in other cities, and seems to have been much larger in the South than in other regions of the country. Atlanta, being by far the largest Southern state capital, therefore did very well
Are the Republicans Going Galt? by Nate Silver @ 1:36 PM
Are Republicans turning into libertarians?
Last week's Tea Party protests had their origins in the libertarian movement. Although many conservative groups were eager to co-opt their purpose, the core of the message -- anti-tax, anti-big government -- was about as libertarian as it gets. Participation in the rallies was also proportionately quite high in areas like New Hampshire and the Interior West, which are traditionally more sympathetic toward libertarian concerns.
As I'm sure you all know, Nate Silver did a post which has been pretty widely circulated, with a fair degree of applause, and I want to address it here. For this post is a most cleverly presented repackaging of an all too familiar attack against the progressive left, and it needs to be discarded.
Silver begins his post with a seemingly academic attempt to define progressivism into two distinct categories - "rational progressivism" and "radical progressivism". He even does a nice chart to organize each and their constituent characteristics into a neat dualism:
In my previous diary, "Nate Silver Redux", I wrote about a "Composite Index" of the long-term national spending items on the General Social Survey underlying Obama's "progressive" policies as identified by Nate Silver:
The Composite Index
If we combine all of the above questions that were asked of the same people (split samples were used, so we can't include all the tables), we have seven spending items we can combine with a distribution of support that looks like this:
Spending Composite Index--Seven Items
Spending?
Progress- ives
Center- Left
Center
Center- Right
Conserv- ative
1: "Too Little"
87.3
83.9
71.8
69.2
50.0
2: "About Right"
8.7
9.0
15.5
16.6
15.2
3: "Too Much"
4.0
7.4
12.4
14.0
34.8
4: Lib Index
95.6
91.9
85.2
83.1
59.0
5: #1 + #2
96.0
93.0
87.3
85.8
65.2
Change in #4
--
3.6
6.7
2.1
24.2
Change in #5
--
3.0
5.7
1.5
20.6
What we see first in this table is a relatively slow gradation from progressive to center-right, followed by a sharp drop off among conservatives. The liberalism index only declines 12.5 points from progressive to center-right, but then plunges 24.1-almost twice as much-from center-right to conservative. The drop-off in total support (#1 +#2) is smaller, but the ratio is greater: a 10.2 point drop from progressive to center-right, followed by a 20.6 point drop (more than twice as much) from center-right to conservative. By both measures, conservatives are outliers.
But there's an interesting additional twist to this story....
Last weekend, I was trying to lay out the foundations of an argument that we need to understand the tension between Obama and progressives in terms of hegemonic power. On the one hand, in "Digby, Hegemony and the Policy-Personnel Debate", I argued that Digby was mistaken to say:
Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn't ask for anything.
Rather, Obama really did have something in the way of a progressive agenda to offer, as Nate Silver had argued-although Nate overstated the case for how progressive that agenda was, as I argued in "Nate Silver's Curious Categorization of Obama's Policy Agenda". In the Digby diary, I laid down the bottom line to my argument:
progressives need to learn about political power. They need to learn about building it for the long term. They need to learn about investing in building power over the long haul, as opposed to simply spending wildly to avoid being utterly crushed in the next election. This is what hegemonic struggle is all about: building power across a range of institutions, so that their normal functioning produces the sorts of outcomes you want.
Obama has, quite simply, been responding to who's got the power, and how those with power define reality. That's my argument. And to change how he acts, in making further appointments as well as substantive policy, we have to change the hegemonic equation.
This week brought us yet another classic example of the difference between the rightwing propaganda model and the center-left reality-based deliberative approach to the world, its problems, puzzles and issues. On Tuesday, Nate Silver at 538 wrote a diary about an apparent push poll designed to push the (product as well as propaganda) line that Obama won the election through the ignorance of his supporters. Nate followed up with a second diary, containing an interview with the propagandist involved, John Ziegler, who quickly lapsed into ad hominem attacks and vulgar invective. After a pause, Nate posted a third diary, reflecting on the exchange and exploring the notion that the propagandist's background in talk radio reflected something fundamental about how movement conservatism had lost touch with the art of persuasion.
It's a fascinating--not to mention hilarious--series of posts, which is highly recommended for those who missed it. But I thought it could benefit from a bit of contextual comparison. This poll was created and conducted to push a particular thesis, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Rather, the problem comes from a lack of honesty and intellectual seriousness. And, of course, there's always the projection factor. Because, of course, it's looooong been the case that conservative voters and/or candidates who have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
All these points are amply illustrated by simple comparison with an October 2004 report from the Project on International Policy Alternatives (PIPA), "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters" (pdf). In PIPAs findings (discussed on the flip) it was the Bush supporters who were significantly detached from reality. Quite unlike the propagandist in this case, the misperceptions flowed directly from the core of major, consequential and/or long-standing policy debates, and relevant questions were culled from polls that had a much broader initial purpose. A main poll sharpened the focus on the issue of divergent perceptions, but this poll built quite logically on the polling preceding it. While PIPA has always been concerned with the relationship between attitudes and perceptions, it has been much more interested in understanding and exploring how false perceptions impact and/or reflect opinions and attitudes, rather than leading off with blame. Indeed, PIPA is quite aware that it's usually impossible to tell whether the misperceptions lead to questionable positions, or whether the positions lead to the misperceptions.
The news that Obama and McCain are in a virtual dead heat is the cause of much consternation among my friends in the political blogosphere today, for good reason. Obama is the better candidate, he's running the better campaign, he's got more money by far--so why is he still struggling when he should be putting the boots to McCranky and be done with it?
Nate Silver from the LA Times has a decent explanation for why this is, but the core question remains: Why is McCain still exploiting his reputation as a moderate, when he's clearly anything but?
I found what I think is the answer in Malaysia, of all places, and that country's struggle between its political establishment and an oppositional force organized and propagated on the Internet.
This is the nucleus of a project or research idea for American Blogger - but it's also a topic on which the Open Left community can likely provide a great deal more insight than I. Here's what I'm thinking about:
Thanks especially to Chris Bowers' and Paul Rosenberg's interests and expertise, on Open Left we've seen a strongly data-oriented approach to political forecasting, strategy, and activism.
Folks like Chris and Paul have mined the internet for data, and this data shapes their political analysis, supports their arguments, and lends credibility to their political commentary.
They and others have aggressively 'trawled the tubes' for publicly-available datasets about American political knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors; demographic and geographic information; financial data; polling breakdowns; and more.
This body of data is foundational to the good work done in the progressive blogosphere - especially here at Open Left and at fivethirtyeight.com. And though this data is being put to great use by some, the unwashed majority of us don't give much thought to where it comes from and to whom it is available.
As a response, I propose that we develop a "Progressive Data Bank":
a place where many types of relevant raw data, basic analysis, and guidance on how to use and apply this information, can all be shared broadly, to democratize the enterprise of political analysis and further a wide range of progressive aims.
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