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.
The Political Foundations of A Liberal/Reform Coalition
In Part 1, I introduced Chris's idea of A Liberal/Reform Coalition, which he introduced in his post-2004 election diary, "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition". In that diary, Chris identified a non-ideological reform-oriented segment of the population, which has shown up in third-party presidential campaigns since the Populist era, which he talked about thus:
This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform. Pulling this off will also require dismantling the Great Backlash narrative of oppressive liberal elites, and replacing it with a narrative about conservatism being a force that relies on pure theory, faith-based worldviews, and that supports status-quo institutions such as corporations and the media.
In this diary, I want explore what it would take to actually do that, focusing on a few key foundational thrusts.
Millennial Foundations
To begin with, I want to argue that the Democrats have already started down the path Chris suggests, albeit not fully consciously. The Dean campaign was the start of this, and Dean's implementation of the 50-state strategy--which Chris also talked about in a couple of related posts at the time--continued the process. What's key to this was/is creating a vibrant grass-roots political culture in which ideas and initiative can come from below--and, indeed, are encouraged to do so. And the evidence of the success of this can be seen in a recent Pew report, "A Pro-Government, Socially Liberal Generation: Democrats' Edge Among Millennials Slips". This report shows both the enormous potential support among Millenials, as well how Obama's status quo presidency has undercut this support. It's my contention that the significant difference between Millenials and earlier generations you'll see in the chart below is due in large part to their shared perception of the liberal/reform coalition as logical political development--as already demonstrated by the Dean campaign and the 50-state strategy.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of this can be seen by comparing the ideological self-identification of Millennials to other generations:
The difference here is simply astonishing. Even the electorate the gave LBJ a 60-40 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater was significantly more likely to identify itself as "conservative" rather than "liberal" by a margin somewhere between 3-2 and 2-1, a range that the conservative/liberal ratio has stayed within ever since then. Of course, this has been counterbalanced by the fact that a large number of self-identified conservatives actually support liberal policies, particularly on core New Deal social spending issues. But the more that politics revolves around identity, the more this ideological ratio has favored conservatives. With Millennials, this is no longer so. The identification ratio hovers around 1-1 instead.
Immediately following the 2004 election, Chris engaged in nearly month-long period of analysis and reflection, which culminated in a post "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition". In it, Chris proposed a very different direction from that of a liberal/libertarian coalition along the lines proposed by Markos (in his Cato Institute "Libertarian Democrat" article) and others. Instead of aligning ourselves with anti-government types, Chris argued we should align ourselves with government-reformer types--voters who could be anti-government in some ways or circumstances, but who were just as much reachable by a messages of reform, transparency and openness. Howard Dean took the party in a promising direction with his 50-state strategy, nurturing the grassroots s never before, and Obama campaigned by appearing to stand for more of the same. But by aligning himself with Wall Street & other insiders, Obama has drastically undercut the logic of the direction Chris laid out, even as libertarians have turned sharply against him, as others, such as Ed Kilgore ("Liberals and Libertarians Finally Break Up") have recently noted. Chris was right on target, I argue in this diary, and to get out of the hole Obama & the Democrats have dug for themselves, we need to get back to the strategy that Chris proposed. It's going to be harder with Obama working against us--no question about it. But it's far and away the most realizable political path forward over the long haul. Let's look at the argument in more detail.
The Potential of A Liberal/Reform Coalition
Specifically, in "Eureka!" Chris wrote:
I believe it is possible to break the majority Republican coalition, which is primarily an ideological coalition of conservatives against liberals, and create a majority Democratic coalition that will last for at least two or three decades, by liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological (and thus has a strong tendency to support major third-party efforts). While it is currently non-ideological, this segment of the population, which has existed in large numbers since at least the 1880's, has an outlook on politics that is far more closely allied with liberalism than conservatism because of its emphasis on reform. It is, to put it one way, latently liberal. This segment of the electorate can be swung toward the liberal camp, thus breaking the Republican majority coalition, if the pragmatic, non-dogmatic, reformer, anti-status quo, entrepreneurial aspects of liberalism are foregrounded and turned into a national narrative and platform. Pulling this off will also require dismantling the Great Backlash narrative of oppressive liberal elites, and replacing it with a narrative about conservatism being a force that relies on pure theory, faith-based worldviews, and that supports status-quo institutions such as corporations and the media.
More specifically, Chris presented a series of seven maps of significant third party presidential vote strength:
