The Obama Administration's Movement-Triangulation

by: Adam Bink

Mon Oct 12, 2009 at 13:00

As Chris wrote last night, the White House called me and all of you an "internet left fringe", and declared that I need to understand that running the country is difficult. This is nothing new from this Administration, since another (or perhaps the same) WH adviser dismissed those who push for a public option as "the left of the left", and Obama himself has said he doesn't read blogs, that he found DailyKos boring, skipped the Senate vote to censure MoveOn, and on and on.

Folks in Obamaland have been hyperparanoid for some time that a vast majority of the electorate not only understands the progressive internet media and organizing space, but that it's a Very Important Issue to voters, and they will take great offense if Obama said he read a blog every once in awhile and, hey, even found DailyKos to be interesting, and even voted with 25, or about half, of his Democratic colleagues against censure. Surely, that would have made front-page headlines, inspired huge attack ads from McCain, and caused us to lose the election, Obama advisers must have thought. In reality, not so much. "How will it play in Peoria?!", Rahm anxiously thought. "What's a blog?", Peoria resident might have responded.

Simultaneously, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn has engaged in something of a week-long war this past week against FOX News, on the record. Earlier she said FOX is "opinion journalism masquerading as news" to TIME Magazine, then followed up on CNN yesterday, saying FOX is "either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party", then did an interview with the New York Times published today, saying "We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent... As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave."

Perhaps this is either another game of 32-dimensional chess from the White House- this time with the media and the electorate instead of with Republicans in Congress- but it's like triangulation is again in vogue. And this time it's 21st century style- movement-based instead of issue-based. As John Harwood said when reporting the White House comment:

we've seen and certainly Bill Clinton learned that they Democratic President can get punished by the mainstream of the electorate for being too aggressive on social issues so for now I think the administration feels that if they take care of the big issues - health care, energy, the economy - he's going to be just fine with this group.

That is actually much in dispute, since as Mike Lux wrote here, depression of base Democratic turnout- not anger from centrist voters over social issues- was the key to the losses that year. But Harwood's views are clearly echoed by this White House, which is determined to make sure it is not seen as either captive of the movement left or the movement right. Never mind that, um, the movement left helped get Obama's ass into the White House. Never mind that when a zillion of these Obama voters who report how they haven't voted since Ted Kennedy in 1980 (some even earlier) vanish if we don't get a lot of the hope-iness and change-yness that Obama promised, movement lefties like many of us at OpenLeft will be the only ones here battling to make sure we don't get crushed in Congress and at the ballot box. Never mind that the Obamaland folks' comments about blogs and the "left of the left" are actually aimed at elites, since "mainstream" voters don't care about or understand blogs or progressive movement institutions. And I have yet to find data or analysis of any kind demonstrating that other stupid things to smack the left that Obamaland has done- for example, his random editorial board interview praise of Reagan- was a significant contributing factor to his election, or even noticed by "mainstream" voters.

I'm glad that the White House is engaging some kind of war with FOX News, and I know that I, many of my blogging colleagues, and many of you here in our internet left fringe have thick skins. But there are limits to the bullshit, both in rhetoric and in policy delivery. And why the White House chooses to do stupid little things like this without any perceptible reward from voters is beyond me.