A jeffbinnc Golden Oldie
From Aug 15, 2010. Original HEREIn compiling the news for this weekly feature on OpenLeft, I find myself straddling two practically parallel worlds of education and the progressive left. And unfortunately neither understands the other very well. You would think that because Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the truly landmark events in the progressive movement, that there would be a permanent synergy between these two communities. But even though the Wall Street Journal seems to believe that teachers and the Democratic Party are grand partners in a money laundering scheme, the reality is that there is disconnect and dysfunction between these two communities that is readily obvious and sorely debilitating to each.
In the world of education, there's a peculiar language that seems impenetrable to outsiders: i3, RTTT, CMOs, Response to Intervention, differentiated instruction. Sides are taken over issues that seem only tangentially related to mainstream news. And not only is "politics" rarely brought up, but any kind of left-right polarity resembling the political world seems sketchy at best. For a profession that you would think would epitomize a progressive outlook - that of cultivating the minds and souls of future generations - educators only occasionally refer to the existence of something "progressive" about their calling, and when they do, it is obscured in some hazy academic debate that happened a long time ago in a university far, far away.
In the progressive left, education is rarely a point of discussion among prominent bloggers and pundits, and when it is, the discussion is usually uninformed or not particularly, well, progressive. A quick glance at the dkosopedia entry for "education" gives you a pretty good idea of the sad state of the progressive left's knowledge of education.
Furthermore, even when the two separate worlds of education and the progressive left intersect, which is all too rare, the cross-over tends to benefit neither.
Why does this matter? It matters to educators because today, more than any other time in recent history, they find themselves to be reduced to pawns in a political war not of their choosing. Unable to practice their profession to the standards they would hold themselves to, fearful of the future of their livelihood, and saddened by the sight of underserved children forced into test-taking factories, they find themselves powerless and without a strong political base to push back against the Washington Consensus that is ruling their world. It matters to the progressive left because how can it profess to be a legitimate force for positive change if it's willing to turn its back on the nation's children - which I've been maintaining in Left Ed that it currently is doing.
Events this week provide the perfect examples of what I'm talking about.
Even though I worry a lot about climate change, and was as horrified by the BP spill as any incident in recent years, I have not written much at all about environmental issues. I don't like to write about things that I don't know a fair amount about, and my focus in my work has always been politics and economics, so that is mostly what I write about. However, I feel compelled to drop a note about the controversy that has flared up the last couple of days, in part because it does relate directly to something I do have experience in, which is how White Houses operate.
I'm not going to spend time on the technical details of the working paper from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. That paper suggests that the administration vastly underestimated the amount of oil going into the gulf in spite of contrary information from scientists using other methodologies. The traditional media, which loves to assume the worst, has written stories implying the reasons for this was that the White House wanted to cover this data up. Robert Gibbs gave this response yesterday:
MR. GIBBS: Look, I think it is important to understand that our response attacked the oil spill in an unprecedented way. It was the largest environmental disaster that we have ever faced and we attacked it with the largest federal response. We did all that was humanly possible in the most challenging of environments.
The report that NOAA sent over did not include in its modeling -- it's not a flow-rate document -- in its modeling did not include any activity that was being done, as I just mentioned a minute ago, to mechanically recover, skim, to burn, to disperse, to boom oil from spreading along the coast and up the Eastern seaboard, which we now know it didn't do.
No information was altered. No information was withheld. And nothing in the report had anything to do with the robust response.
OMB is a regular part of a process that reviews government documents before they're released. NOAA, as we put out in a statement yesterday, understood that the analysis did not include that, went back and included that, and that report was released and is on the Internet for anyone to read today.
Q Okay, but -- so OMB did deny a request from NOAA, just not that request?
MR. GIBBS: OMB sent the report back to NOAA to include that in the 500 different modeling analysis that were done on shoreline impact. That report is on the Internet now for people to look at. The worst-case scenario -- and if you look at those maps, the worst-case scenario was oil off the coast of what looks like probably the Hilton Head/Charleston area in South Carolina, which is, as you know, several hundred miles, maybe a thousand or so miles from where the oil actually did get to because the response prevented it from spreading.
Q One of the fundamental points that the working documents make is that the optimistic expression of information from the administration showed the government was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid. Was it either of those?
MR. GIBBS: This was an unprecedented environmental disaster met with an unprecedented federal response, which prevented any of the worst-case scenarios to coming to fruition. It prevented the spread of oil along the East Coast.
When we had information, we gave it to the public. That was -- that has always been our charge. We were -- throughout this process, we got better information. When the rig exploded and the blowout preventer failed 5,000 feet below the ocean, nobody could see what was happening. Through the course of several months, we got better information. We got cameras 5,000 feet below the surface. We enhanced the video that we saw. We were able to do more three-dimensional modeling. And then we directed, at Secretary Chu's insistence, BP to install pressure monitors at the site to get the best available data on the flow rate. And that's what we did. We always sought to provide the best information as we were engaged in the most robust federal response that we've ever seen to an accident of this magnitude ever.
I am quite inclined to believe Gibbs on this one, because I look at it from the perspective of what would benefit the White House short and long term. At the time all this was going down, there was a confusing swirl of facts and a high urgency crisis going on. There was no benefit to the White House to downplay the problem, and it would have been silly for them to try: everybody understood that this was a huge deal- environmentally, politically, and in every other way. If anything, it seems to me like the White House would be trying to underscore how monumental the challenge was. Look at it this way: if the spill got solved fast, even if it was a huge disaster, they get all the more credit. If the problem dragged on, which is what ended up happening, they get less blame if the public understands just how big a blowout this was.
Here's the other thing: everyone who has served at a White House knows that on something with this level of media and political scrutiny, it does not pay over the long term to gloss over or minimize problems, because if you do it will be found out.
The Obama White House had no political incentive at the point in the crisis being discussed. What was happening was a thousand different scientists from dozens of agencies were desperately and urgently trying to figure this out, and estimates were all over the place. As Gibbs indicated, even the reports being sent over from agencies like NOAA did not include certain kinds of things in its modeling that were being included in other models. It is not surprising that one set of scientists might get their nose out of joint because their numbers weren't the ones being used at that particular point, but there certainly doesn't seem to be any ill intent on the part of the White House on this one.
Now was the White House response to the BP spill overall perfect? Of course not. I wish they had been more aggressive with BP from the beginning. But this draft report from the commission strikes me as a tempest in a teapot. I'd love to hear from those of you who know more about the science here than I do if you think I'm wrong, because like I said I am always uncomfortable venturing into an area I don't know much about. But on the political motivations of the White House, I feel pretty confident I'm right.
On Thursday, Sam Stein wrote a piece at HuffPo, "'Professional Left' Saga Says More About Media Than Obama". I think that headline overstated it--or perhaps, oversimplified it--but the article had a very good point: The media environement is continuing to shift and that shift is getting away from Obama. Here's how Stein put it in his lede:
Last week's feud between White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and the so-called "professional left" did more than just open a window into the fraying relations between the president and his base. It provided one of the sharpest illustrations to date as to how an ever-changing news culture has challenged even the most press-savvy of operations.
As Stein lays it out, the cable is becoming increasingly more like the internet, and the Obama Administration is falling behind the curve. I think it's pretty good narrative, but I would argue that there's a good more depth that could be added.
As part of his story setup, Stein notes that the Obama campaign posture of pretending to ignore the media was a ruse. What's new now is not that they're suddenly breaking character and paying attention, but that they're so clumsy and behind the curve:
Increasingly, press veterans say, the content aired on cable resembles material traditionally found online. No longer is the focus on securing interviews with top officials or reading the day's top stories. Rather, value is found in breaking news and hosting debates that draw an audience.
"Cable has traditionally been talent-driven," explained MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan, a chief purveyor of the new news structure. "Fuck the talent, pardon my language. But if you have the audience you win. I'm not talking about economics even. I'm talking about the soul of the show."
....
What's resulted from this orderless environment is the type of news coverage that has drawn the White House's ire, whether it consists of horse-race chatter or rumor-mongering. On Thursday, Pew Research produced a poll showing that of the 20 percent of the public who think the president is a Muslim, 60 percent said they learned as much from the media....
Even at MSNBC -- a network ostensibly more aligned with the administration on philosophical matters than its two competitors -- the story lines have been difficult for the administration to take. Over the past few weeks, there has been a consistent drumbeat of progressive displeasure over the job the president is doing. The topics and tone tend to reflect the type of copy published on the web and, not surprisingly, it has been an online story that often leads the news.
For the past few weeks, Cenk Uygur has played a pinch-hitter role for MSNBC, guest hosting for anchors and doing panels for daytime programs. Both he and others have described his style as "rants" -- the type of opinionated news reporting and analysis that is meant to entertain or infuriate viewers depending on their disposition. It's an approach that has pushed the envelope editorially. But it's also one that the brass seems comfortable with.
"We are getting great ratings," Uygur explained to the Huffington Post.
That's 100% in my book. And it dovetails with the substance of some critical things I've said in the past about improving MSNBC (more on that below). But as a dyed-in-the-wool believer in overdetermination and multiple causation, I'd go even farther: The liberal blow-back he's getting right now is not only a product of a shifting media landscape--though it most certainly is that, in part. But it's also a direct result of Obama's decision to play the left from the beginning. He could have genuinely embraced the progressive online community, instead he opted for a very clever strategy of co-option. Whether by temperament, ideology, sociology or simple calculation of political power, Obama decided to ditch his whole transformation change shtick, as Larry Lessig so perfectly nailed it (and as I quoted him previously in Why Gibbs' hippy-punching incident is pivotal, not trivial):
There was a superficial incoherence to Gibbs' hippy-punching, but that only masked a deeper incoherence. The superficial incoherence was (a) essentially dissing the "professional left" as elitist, out-of-touch & politically irrelevant while (b) blaming it for bringing Obama down.
But the deeper incoherence is Obama's own political philosophy, strategy, and ideology. He'd be fine, it could at least be argued, if he was up against Eisenhower-era Republicans like his grandparents and their friends. But no sane person in the world thinks that he is. And since he's not, everything he does is taking place in a sort of an Alice-in-Wonderland world. If he wants to lash out and blame "the professional left" for this, that's fine. But it doesn't tell us anything about anything except him--and how he blameshifts for his own failure on his own terms, the terms of a would-be "transformative reformer" out to battle special interests and return sovereignty to the people--something he obviously has not done.
Indeed, this supreme act of hippy-punching--barely more than two weeks after his supreme make-nice video message to Netroots Nation--seems like nothing so much as a declaration of Obama's own intransigence and unwillingness to face reality. He may be much more sophisticated, in language at least, but he's just as much close-minded to unwanted input as Bush & Cheney were, and Gibbs' hippy-punching was intended to triple underscore that in neon red magic marker, even as he overly denied it.
The very fact that Gibbs is outraged by Bush/Obama comparisons shows how significant they are. A stuck pig squeals. Like Bush before him, Obama would rather fail spectacularly on a global scale than admit his failures so far and take fundamental corrective action.
Of course it's not just progressives that Obama is disappointing, but it's convenient to pretend it is so. However, the unemployment rate, the mortgage foreclosure rate, and the state-and-local government layoff-and-shutdown rate are all far too high for that to be true. And it's not just "the professional left" that's being ignored. It's just about everyone outside of K-Street, including veterans.
It's certainly not fair to criticize Obama for not being a Lefty. He wasn't ever a Lefty. He didn't promise to be a Lefty. And there's no reason to expect that he would ever become a Lefty.
But Lefties (like me) who criticize Obama are not criticizing him for failing our Lefty test. Our criticism is that Obama is failing the Obama test: that he is not delivering the presidency that he promised.
When Candidate Obama took on Hilary Clinton, he was quite clear about what he thought about the way Washington works. And he was quite clear about why he was running for President. As he said:
[U]nless we're willing to challenge the broken system in Washington, and stop letting lobbyists use their clout to get their way, nothing else is going to change. And the reason I'm running for president is to challenge that system.
Read it again: "The reason I am running for president is to challenge that system."
....
Obama's strategy as president has not been to "change the way Washington works." Rather, he has pushed reforms in the same old way, with the same old games.
Lessig does a masterful job of pounding this simple point home. But I'd be deeply remiss not to further connect Lessig's point with one made by Chris as culminating point of his post-2004 elction analysis ("Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition"): The key to building an enduring progressive coalition is to unite self-identified liberals with self-identified reformers, whose primary concerns lie with opening up government and making it more accountable. And this is Obama's greatest failure: a failure to deliver on the actual substance of non-partisan openness and good government.
In compiling the news for this weekly feature on OpenLeft, I find myself straddling two practically parallel worlds of education and the progressive left. And unfortunately neither understands the other very well. You would think that because Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the truly landmark events in the progressive movement, that there would be a permanent synergy between these two communities. But even though the Wall Street Journal seems to believe that teachers and the Democratic Party are grand partners in a money laundering scheme, the reality is that there is disconnect and dysfunction between these two communities that is readily obvious and sorely debilitating to each.
In the world of education, there's a peculiar language that seems impenetrable to outsiders: i3, RTTT, CMOs, Response to Intervention, differentiated instruction. Sides are taken over issues that seem only tangentially related to mainstream news. And not only is "politics" rarely brought up, but any kind of left-right polarity resembling the political world seems sketchy at best. For a profession that you would think would epitomize a progressive outlook - that of cultivating the minds and souls of future generations - educators only occasionally refer to the existence of something "progressive" about their calling, and when they do, it is obscured in some hazy academic debate that happened a long time ago in a university far, far away.
In the progressive left, education is rarely a point of discussion among prominent bloggers and pundits, and when it is, the discussion is usually uninformed or not particularly, well, progressive. A quick glance at the dkosopedia entry for "education" gives you a pretty good idea of the sad state of the progressive left's knowledge of education.
Furthermore, even when the two separate worlds of education and the progressive left intersect, which is all too rare, the cross-over tends to benefit neither.
Why does this matter? It matters to educators because today, more than any other time in recent history, they find themselves to be reduced to pawns in a political war not of their choosing. Unable to practice their profession to the standards they would hold themselves to, fearful of the future of their livelihood, and saddened by the sight of underserved children forced into test-taking factories, they find themselves powerless and without a strong political base to push back against the Washington Consensus that is ruling their world. It matters to the progressive left because how can it profess to be a legitimate force for positive change if it's willing to turn its back on the nation's children - which I've been maintaining in Left Ed that it currently is doing.
Events this week provide the perfect examples of what I'm talking about.
On Wednesday, virtually the entirety of Rachel Maddow's show was devoted to an annihilation of Robert Gibbs. It was carried out by almost entirely ignoring Gibbs himself, and instead focusing on the reality that Gibbs and Obama desperately want everyone to ignore.
Of course, there is so much reality Gibbs and Obama want us to ignore, it would have been impossible to cover it all. So Maddow focused on just one aspect, an aspect in which the gap between promise and performance is particularly striking, and particularly inexplicable: the foot-dragging over the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", during which the careers of hundreds of GLBT military personnel continue to be destroyed for no reason.
Maddow did separate segments on three different service members, and she finished her program with the following segment (short transcript excerpt below):
On tonight's show you met U.S. Army Captain Jonathan Hopkins, Catherine Miller and Lieutenant Colonel Victor Ferenbach who are having their careers ended.... Why are we kicking people out while we are waiting for the views of the Commander in Chief, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If you are changing the policy soon why not hold off the ruination of lives under the policy now? Why not? I'll tell you why. Because that would take some political capital. That would take guts. And liberals, according to this White House, ought to be drug tested. Stop complaining and be happy for what you have. Lieutenant Dan Choi, Colonel Ferenbach, SBT Hopkins, they are expendable. Watch their careers destroyed, but stop complaining about it.
Barack Obama is a moral coward. And Robert Gibbs is his would-be enforcer.
They are not our leaders. They do not represent us. They represent tokens of appeasement from a power structure that has no use for any of us. And certainly no morals, no decency, no honor.
There is a tendency--an understandable one--to see this whole Gibbs affair as a tempest in a teapot. And in one sense, it most surely is. What matters isn't what one administration official--even the Press Secretary--says in one interview. What matters is what the Administration does. But what Gibbs said matters precisely because of how it brings into focus all that the Administration has done--and all that it has not.
This Administration is a failure by choice. It has not been defeated by its enemies, but by itself. By its own actions--and more tellingly, by its own inactions, its failure to act, or even to think of acting. It is a victim of its own lack of imagination as well as its lack of courage.
Oh, sure, one can argue that it's not a failure at all. That it's doing exactly what the ruling class wants it to do. But though true in one sense, that's utter bullshit in another. FDR was hated by the ruling class. But he saved their bacon by going against their petty, narrow-minded, self-destructive instincts. Obama is destroying America--including America's ruling class--by not standing up against the self-destructive passions of the moment. Heck, he can't even speak out for the First Amendment against hypocritical clowns like Newt Gingrich.
We are in a fight for the soul of America, as well as the soul of the Democratic Party. And although those who stand against us have a great deal of organizational power, they are losers at bottom. They are liars and cowards. Their vision of America is a sham and a disgrace. And they are condemned by all the minute particulars of what they have done and not done in our names.
Shame on them all. And shame on us, if we let outselves be cowed by them.
From the sound of Gibbs's comments this morning, I'm fairly sure he wasn't speaking out of school yesterday. They're working the refs. I would guess they see some evidence of creeping Maddowism among the Village cognoscenti and the big liberal donors. I would also guess that it's going to have some effect, at least in the short term. Certainly people like Ruth Marcus will be well rewarded for drawing the proper lines.
And what is Maddowism? Well, not falling for the shiny object routine, for one thing. As in seeing that the story was the the run-amok war, not the run-away general. They're trying to get back on track with Patreaus reinstituting the Forever War, and they definitely don't want more Maddow-style coverage on that front, or any other one, thank you very much.
More basically, Maddowism is not Joe Kleinism. Your typical Versailles liberal doesn't actually stand for anything, and mostly just exists as a foil for conservatives. Hence, Joe Klein => Joke Line.
The need of the Democrats to respond to this formidable organizational machine encouraged them to adopt a more accommodative stance toward business. And business money did flow to Democrats, though in different ways and for different reasons. If money to the GOP was an investment, money to Democrats was a form of insurance. Revealingly, the money went largely to individuals rather than to the party as an organization. It was destined for the powerful and "moderates."
What we're talking about, quite simply, is the difference between "reality" as defined by the top 1% or 0.01% of the income pyramid and reality as defined by all of us: The reality in which thousands of street lights are being turned off all across America, tens of thousands of teachers, cops and firefighters are being fired or furloughed, and roads are de-paved and turned into gravel.
In short, the enemy isn't you and me, dear reader. We just don't matter that much. The enemy is reality itself, and the only way to keep it at bay is to intimidate those who might carelessly start to talk about it. Krugman's been doing it for years, and he's not about to shut up. Now Arianna Huffington has a new book coming out, and she's using her formidable website to draw attention to it: Third World America: Chronicling the Assault on America's Middle Class...and the Solutions.
In the Barack Obama/Robert Gibbs/Joke Line world, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are "Great Americans" precisely because they helped gut around $100 billion of stimulus funds that would have helped state and local governments stay afloat. It was called "buy-partisanship"
But in the Paul Krugman/Arriana Huffington/(and, increasingly) Rachel Maddow world, not so much. In that world--the real word--what matters is the real world, not the make-believe milkmaid & shepard fantasies of Versailles.
And that is the enemy that Gibbs was lashing out against.
You don't get a whole lot of credit for passing the largest undersized stimulus program that failed to halt the collapse of American civilization. Even Gibbs knows that. Heck, even Obama does.
As White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs attacks progressives for comparing President Obama's polices to George W. Bush's, we look at a new ACLU report on how the Obama administration is permanently enshrining into law many of President Bush's most controversial policies. The report, "Establishing a New Normal," warns: "There is a very real danger that the Obama administration will enshrine permanently within the law policies and practices that were widely considered extreme and unlawful during the Bush administration."
So, in one sense, at least, worse than the Bush Administration.
Today, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has stood by his remarks about lefties criticizing the Obama administration:
Taking the podium after a day off to tend to a sore throat, Gibbs said he has not reached out to any Democrats to discuss his remarks, in which he chastised liberals for wanting to "eliminate the Pentagon" and pursue Canadian-style health care reform. Nor, he added, has he talked to the president about the matter.
On November 7, 2003, a strange new group no one had ever heard of called "Americans for Jobs & Healthcare" was quietly formed and soon thereafter began running a million dollar operation including political ads against then-frontrunner Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. The commercials ripped Dean over his positions or past record on gun rights, trade and Medicare growth. But the most inflammatory ad used the visual image of Osama bin Laden as a way to raise questions about Dean's foreign policy credibility. While the spots ran, Americans for Jobs-through its then- spokesman, Robert Gibbs, a former Kerry campaign employee-refused to disclose its donors.
I don't expect someone with such a past to apologize for slagging the left-wing of the party. Or, if they do apologize, I don't expect them to mean it.
However, it is stunning to me that the most prominent staffer responsible for outreach from the White House "said he has not reached out to any Democrats to discuss his remarks." Really? Gibbs didn't talk to a single Democrat about saying something that pissed off a lot of Democrats? And he is in charge of maintaining the White House's message?
As Mike wrote earlier today (and I encourage you to read his article if you have not already done so), this is pure outreach fail. Even if you are a huge Obama supporter who thinks that the lefties criticizing Obama are just a bunch of naïve, whiny brats, and that if Democrats get clobbered in 2010 it will be entirely the fault of said brats, then you should still be in favor of reaching out to them. That is, you should be in favor of reaching out to them, unless you are cool with Democrats getting clobbered in 2010, as long as the whining brats get blamed for the clobbering.
If you want to keep your coalition together, you have to do the outreach, even to members of the coalition you hate. And, right now, liberal support for Presidnet Obama is not where it needs to be. Even if you dismiss the Gallup polling, whose enormous, unparalleled subsample of liberals shows President Obama at 74% among the group, even the 85% approval rating the President has among liberals in other polls is not high enough (click here for a further discussion on President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals). Back in 2004, John Kerry got 85% of the vote among liberals, and that was not enough for victory. Democrats need very, very high numbers among liberals to win nationally. As such, those who want to win nationally need to be willing to engage in actual outreach to them rather than just standing by their insults.
For reference, Obama and the left, part 432 can be found here
The progressive community and the Obama administration are once again in a firefight, this one started by White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. There has been and will be a huge amount of commentary on this in the blogosphere and the media in general over the next few days, and Gibbs' quote will go right up there with the infamous "left of the left" quote during health care, Rahm's infamous "f'ing retarded" quote (he apologized afterwards to advocates for those with mental disabilities, but of course not to progressives), the locker room gloating "organized labor just flushed $10 million down the toilet" quote, and a variety of other random insults that progressives have to chew over.
Thankfully, Gibbs has released a statement pulling back from that interview, and I am assured by friends at the White House that this is just "Robert being in a bad mood", etc. Happy to hear it, and I am willing to give the White House the benefit of the doubt (which I know may not be very popular among many folks in progressiveland). I also am happy to give this Administration credit where credit is due, and they do actually deserve some.
Given the economic straits we are in, the stimulus was too small, and had too many tax cuts in it, but it is still the biggest jobs bill in American history, and the biggest investment in public goods (schools, teachers, roads, bridges, clean energy, firefighters, cops, broadband, etc.). The health care bill had big flaws, including the lack of a public option, but Obama succeeded at extending coverage to virtually everyone and reining in major insurance abuses (on pre-existing conditions, lifetime caps, etc.) when every other President before for a hundred years had failed. The financial reform bill didn't break up the banks, but we won very significant victories in reining in the financial sector, and went the right direction on financial regulation instead of the wrong direction as we did in the last four Presidents' tenures. The federal budgets Obama submitted have been the most progressive in many way s at least since 1993, and maybe since the 1960s. We won a major victory on, and expansion of, the student loan program for college students. Tobacco is regulated by the FDA for the first time. The equal pay law got passed, S-CHIP got expanded, the hate crimes bill got signed, unneeded weapons systems got eliminated. And Obama has at least pushed for other big legislation on climate change, immigration reform, and more jobs programs, even if he didn't succeed at everything.
It hasn't all been perfect, far from it, but Obama deserves enormous credit for wading into these big fights, and with persevering on some of the toughest, like health care (where his chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel wanted him to back down and give up.) If I were in the Obama White House, I might be feeling a little irritable myself at the lack of credit I was getting.
Were you waiting for the "but"? Well, you can find it in the extended entry.
The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."(...)
Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington "in America," and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.
Oy, on many levels.
If the White House really doesn't think it has any problems among self-identified liberals or progressives, and that all the complaints are coming from a grasstop elite, it needs to look at the data again. From 2008 to 2010, President Obama has suffered far more erosion of support among self-identified liberals than among self-identified moderates or conservatives:
In 2008, according to exit polls, 89% self-identified liberals voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberals has averaged 74%. That is a decline of 15 points.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 60% of self-identified moderates voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating among self-identified moderates has averaged 54%. That is a decline of 6 points.
In 2008, according to exit polls, 20% of self-identified conservatives voted for President Obama. Over the past four weeks, according to Gallup, President Obama's approval rating has averaged 24% among self-identified conservatives. That is an increase of 4 points.
So, according to Gallup, disapproval among self-identified liberals accounts for the majority of President Obama's approval rating underperformance compared to his 2008 vote share (from the perspective that the smaller decline among moderates is partially canceled out by the small gain among conservatives). If it were not for President Obama's decline among liberals, there would be virtually no difference between his 2010 approval rating and 2008 voter performance.
Maybe the White House knows that its problem among self-identified liberals is not confined to the grasstops. Maybe it is "reaching out" to liberals in this insulting manner because it figures that while it has lost more support among liberals than among any other group, those liberals are still going to vote Democratic anyway.
We all know that recently, the White House and President Obama have been getting a lot of flack from the Press Corps, and other news media.
The Huffington Post reports that Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responding to the allegation that the Obama administration "plays" to the cameras, by saying, "I think we all are. There are so many issues that we're dealing with that are hard to boil down to 20 seconds."
And when the President went to his daughter's soccer game, and didn't inform the Press Corps--the reporters got very angry.
As a student of both politics and media, and a fellow journalist, I understand their anger over the issue. They feel that it is their duty as the Watchdogs, to follow Obama's every step. It is for the sake of the American public. But in the age of the Internet, of smartphones and Twitter, the Press Corps and other traditional media are becoming less important. Why would President Obama give a press conference (heeding questions of reporters, and being analyzed in later news coverage) rather than doing a video-blog and posting it on his website? It's an easy answer. While the media believes it needs to keep the White House in check, the President and his administration find it a better allocation of time to "go public" to his supporters. This way, Obama's message isn't jumbled by the news.
Again, I'm not saying the news media aren't important, and I'm not saying I don't respect what they do. I just think it's important to understand where the administration is coming from.
From Rachel Maddow's interview tonight with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius:
Maddow: "The private insurance company writ large hasn't done a great job. That's why we want a public option to compete with them. These 18 Democratic senators want to bring that back into the fold. If that happened, would the administration fight for it?"
Sebelius: "Well, I think if it's...Certainly. If it's part of the decision of the Senate leadership to move forward, absolutely."
Wow. That's news.
What will Reid do? If it's up to Nevada voters, the answer's obvious. From reporter Jon Ralson in today's Las Vegas Sun:
Nevadans overwhelmingly against previous health care reform package, but support reconciliation, public option
Those are the results of a poll conducted for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has been pushing for a public option and its pollster, Research 2000, previously has done work in Nevada to pressure Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Research 2000 also polls in the state for the Reno Gazette-Journal. The poll.
Highlights from the Nevada poll (commissioned by PCCC/DFA/Credo):
34% support for current Senate bill (32% of Independents)
58% support for public option (61% of Independents)
55% support "reconciliation" on health care (64% of Independents)
In related news, at WhipCongress.com we've gone from 0 to 4 to 18 senators in two days on Sen. Michael Bennet's letter -- calling on Harry Reid to pass the public option through reconciliation.
Voters are watching. Democratic senators are watching. President Obama is watching. Will Leader Reid lead?
Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said the heated opposition was evidence that Republicans had made a political calculation to draw a line against any health care changes, the latest in a string of major administration proposals that Republicans have opposed.
“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”
The White House on Wednesday pushed back against reports suggesting that President Barack Obama is ready to concede that he can’t get Republican votes for health care overhaul legislation, asserting that the administration still believes a bipartisan bill is possible.
“We continue to be hopeful that we’ll get bipartisan support, and we’ll continue to work with those that are interested in doing that,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said. “The president has said countless times he will work with anybody in any party who wants to work constructively on health care reform.”
Gibbs directly rejected the contention in an article in Wednesday’s New York Times that said administration officials are “increasingly convinced” they will have to focus their effort solely on uniting fractious Democrats.
A contention based on...White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's on-the-record quote.
One could parse, and say Rahm's quote could still include the possibility of bipartisanship, but still: there's something called message discipline. The last four days have seen: statement, backtrack, statement, backtrack.
The details of AIG's bonuses are pretty appalling: 73 employees took home at least $1 million, while one person got a whopping $6.4 million. What's more, NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo proved AIG's excuse about needing these "retention" bonuses to keep employees at its Financial Products subsidiary was (believe it or not) complete and utter bullshit, since 11 of these bonus recipients have since left the company.
Now, Congress can try to rectify this situation by putting a 100% surtax on these bonuses. They can impose stricter limitations on the subsequent $30 billion bailout for AIG--if you can believe AIG is even getting another bailout! Still, this news is too infuriating to just sit back and wait for Congress to check Wall Street's ridiculous hubris.
This Thursday, March 19, SEIU and a slew of other organizations will be holding demonstrations at bailed-out banks and corporations in over 100 cities across the country, demanding fiscal repsonsibility. Sign up at TakeBacktheEconomy.org and join a demonstration in your community for a national day of protest. No more sitting around yelling at the TV screen when Obama's Press Secretary pretends like we should have any sort of confidence whatsoever in Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Enough is enough, it's time to take back the economy!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Obama desperately needs a new communications director. Either this current person in charge of this duty is seriously incompetent or Obama is simply a horrible communicator. Judging from his past performances I do not think it is the later.
I've been an open Obama supporter for a while and I will continue to support Obama all the way until he loses the primaries. It is starting to seem like, much to my chagrin, this is a virtual inevitability. The most recent events that have brought me to this conclusion are, you guessed it: his performance at the latest CNN debate and also his performances in recent interviews. In both situations it seemed like he honestly just didn't know what to say, even when he should have. Many times I could even think of better answers than what he came up with. Obviously part of the responsibility for this problem is coming from whoever in the hell is telling him what to say, what issues to bring up, how to say them, ect.
Obama has often been called charismatic but lately it has been harder and harder to notice. I'm sure running for president is extremely stressful and exhausting and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in the spotlight like that with so much at stake riding on my shoulders. That being said, it is beginning to look like he doesn't have what it takes to run for President, even though I believe out of all the choices he would be the best for this country.
I really hope I'm wrong about Obama and that really its all the fault of his communications director. Either way, this person needs to be replaced and he needs to start behaving differently and communicating differently. This needs to happen very, very soon; or this race is over before it even got started. Edwards is really beginning to look like he doesn't have a prayer.
I agree with the other bloggers who have said that the debate questions and questioners seemed to be biased and agenda driven. Most of those questions were more about playing "gotcha," at the expense of Democrats, and giving the media soundbytes they can use against Democrats. Almost none of the questions were good ones. Good questions should be about helping people discern real/important policy differences between the candidates. The audience also seemed heavily stacked in Hilary's favor; I don't think this was just Obama having bad luck of the draw and suspect it was a concentrated effort on the part of CNN or Hillary's campaign.
In closing I'd like to refer you guys to to a recent comment I made in response to a recent posting by Matt about Obama's new public statement supporting net neutrality, opening wireless spectrum, and many other things media conglomerates tend to dislike:
Call me a conspiracy thoerist if you want, but I predicted this BEFORE it happened in that previous post. I don't think CNN, who is owned by Time-Warner (large owner of broadband ISP providers), was none too happy about Obama's recent statements that Matt mentioned here:
I think they wanted payback...(or maybe just to ruin his slim chance of winning the nomination). The debate seemed totally biased against Democrats but of them all Wolf and the CNN gang seemed to be trying to make Hilary looked the least bad (don't forget about the alleged audience stacking).
UPDATE: okay... after a little bit of painless research, here is what I've come up with about Obama's communications director.
Robert Gibbs: "Gibbs, a longtime communications operative [...], has been with Obama since shortly after his 2004 primary victory. Prior to that Gibbs served as a spokesman for Sen. John Kerry's (D-Mass.) presidential bid. [...] He will be the campaign's communications director." - this was from his quick bio from the Washington Post.
Who in their right mind would hire John Kerry's communications director? The guy who, ya know, told Kerry it was a good idea for him not to fight back against the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth[iness]." Aside from that brilliant consulting, Kerry was generally a very poor communicator throughout his entire campaign. In fact he was such a bad campaigner it led me to the conclusion that there was even a slight possibility that he lost on purpose! He acted like such a douchebag it made me (I am an open lifelong Democrat and have been a staunch Iraq War critique since before it started), almost embarrassed to admit I had for him. I would have rather claimed Dean at that point in time.
John Kerry = the anti-charisma. The fact Edwards was his running mate and he failed to even deliver his home states didn't give me much confidence in his abilities either.
My orignal motive I attributed to why Kerry would intentionally lose an election is that it was because Kerry and Bush were Skull and Bones brothers and had secretly worked out an agreement that Bush would win again. Now looking at this buy Robert Gibbs that gives me a second possible motive for this conspiracy theory: that perhaps Robert Gibbs is secretly in cahoots with the Clintons and didn't want an incumbent Democrat to worry about in 08 and that now he is working to sabatauge the Obama campaign from within.
I know this is kinda far fetched and I normally don't go for conspiracy theories (I'm not a 911 truther or anything like that) but I just can't think of any other explanation for why everyone this guy Gibbs touches turns to crap. Even if this theory is correct it still doesn't explain why Obama, or even Kerry for that matter would have hired this moron.
Somebody please get rid of this guy and lets make it permanent and not let him anywhere near any other Democratic campaigns, especially Presidential ones.
p.s. here was a post written many months ago by Jerome over at MyDD about how bad this guy is, I must have missed it then but Jerome sure was proven right:
p.s.p.s. rewatching this debate now.... wow Blitzer and that woman who was walking around were both incredibly hostile toward all over our Democratic candidates.
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