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):
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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.
There were good reasons, of course: The outside forces of change weren't really ready yet. However much they were key to getting Obama up and going, he got more of his money from high-dollar insiders... particularly Wall Street. And the proof was in the pudding: When Obama cut off progressives with virtually nothing to show for it, while doing deal after deal with the very insiders and lobbyists he had previously railed against, he suffered virtually no penalty at all. Indeed, he had a solid legion of "liberal" apologists, ready to attack any critics.
The only problem was that this a terrible miscalculation on Obama's part. Yes, the outsider progressive forces weren't ready to win on day one. But they had tremendous passion and momentum on their side. Once in office, Obama didn't seem to think he needed that--or else that he could turn it off and on as needed when the time came. This was related in part to Obama's assimilation into the culture of Versailles, and his visible disdain for the online community except as he was able to reshape it (and even then, he was quick to ignore it when it told him things he didn't want to hear). But this meant, in effect, siding with the failed Versailles establishment, and against the outsiders, whose energy and support had been fundamental to his rise.
What made this such a bad choice was the truly stupendous scope of establishment failure: 9/11 and the entire illogic of how we responded by doing almost everything bin Laden could have asked for; the economic crisis, also responded to in a manner that only made things worse; the health care crises and the climate crisis, both trivialized and turned into further opportunities for massive subsidies for the very people who caused the problems in the first place. It was not an auspicious list. But as long as reality was not part of the the game, as long as it was just Dems vs. Reps, it could work out just fine. And that's the way Obama & Co. expected things to stay. The left would only rarely and belatedly get a hearing. Reality would never be a factor in policy decisions or political debates. Progressives would suck up, no matter what the cost.
But as time went on, this strategy increasingly started falling apart. The "brilliant" shift from "winning" the health care fight to giving away off-shore oil drilling in hopes of another illusory grand bargain blew up unexpectedly in the real world, at BP's Deepwater Horizon. The gays would not go away--and neither would the Hispanics. Then came General McChrystal meltdown--which Rachel Maddow perceptively pointed out was a fundamental policy problem, not just a personality one... and then went all the way to Afghanistan to prove, not just in a two-day visit there, but in two weeks of follow-up reporting as well. This was the broader shift underway (with Maddows role undergoing a shift as well) at the same time that the political price for the drastically undersized stimulus finally started to come all-too-visibly due.
In short, Gibb's explosion was well and truly over-determined at the policy-fuckup level. But all these policy fuckups had a common root in Obama's decision to double-cross his base. So long as he could continue to fool them into still supporting him, as long as he could strong-arm them while claiming he was really on their side, but too weak to deliver, his balancing act could continue indefinitely... or so he believed. But while all the forces were shifting, slowly as outlined above, the media environment was shifting as well, as Stein described it. Neither shift alone might have proved so threatening to Obama, but they were not alone. Indeed, they were deeply interconnected--and connected as well to the promise that Obama had made, embodied, and then abandoned.
We face a very rough couple of months ahead, whatever the outcome in November. And whatever that outcome is, we face a very rough couple of years after that. But make no mistake, the Obama effort to silence and sell out the left has failed, not because of the left, but because of reality. The left was just there when reality happened, saying, "Look! Look! Look!"
And to our credit, for the most part, we just didn't stop pointing and shouting.
And we're not about to stop now.
Addendum
Last September, I wrote a piece, "Making Maddow's Show Better", which began thus:
I began with the thought of how much better Maddow's show would be if she relied on Digby regularly instead of Anna Marie Cox. Then I thought of something even better, from a movement-building point of view. What if she drew on a much wider range of blogging talent for critical perspectives, helping to raise the visibility of a wide range of progressive voices? Why not a daily bloggers panel to discuss a particular issue? It would be pretty easy to scan for top posts on a subject any given day, and select participants to present their views.
The underlying idea of that post was shifting the nature of cable news coverage, to make it less dependent on Versailles, and more reliant on outside critical voices. That's the process that Sam Stein was writing about--even though the primary mechanism he writes about is different. But the needed shift is far larger than any one mechanism and--as I've just argued--is also intimately connected to the issues that Versailles has not just ignored, but denied.
They deny. We decry.
That's our job. And we're not about to stop now. |
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