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Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: January 2007

Faulty Radar

by , January 18th, 2007 10:25 AM EST

If you stay in politics long enough, you’ll have the wonderful experience of finding yourself reading a “news”‘ story that you infallibly, personally know to be utter crap. That happened to me yesterday when I followed a link at DailyKos to an “exclusive” story at Radar Online entitled: “DLC Shakeup Comes To Fruition.” Written by a Jeff Bercovici and posted last Friday, the piece suggested the DLC had forced Gov. Tom Vilsack out of its chairmanship because it favored Bush’s Iraq plan and Vilsack opposed it:

But while Vilsack’s statement cited “the precedent established by former DLC Chair Bill Clinton,” who resigned in advance of his 1992 White House bid, a Washington source says there was an additional factor in his departure: the widening rift between Vilsack and DLC’s permanent leadership over what to do about the crisis in Iraq.Al From, the group’s founder and CEO, and Will Marshall, head of its policy arm, have called for an escalation in troop levels, while Vilsack has spoken of his “fundamental opposition to leading more troops into harm’s way in Iraq.”With President Bush outlining a plan to send fresh forces to Baghdad this week, the divergence of thinking was at risk of becoming untenable, says the source. “Vilsack and the DLC talking heads have been heading in different directions on this for some time,” he adds.

There are only two problems with this “story.” The first paragraph is absolutely wrong, and so is the second. No one at the DLC “called for” an escalation in troop levels in Iraq, or supports Bush’s plan; the same day Bercovici posted his story, in fact, the DLC put out a New Dem Dispatch opposing the escalation. And Vilsack’s resignation was decided upon, by him, in November, when he decided to run for president; as a courtesy, he simply held off announcing it until the DLC had time to decide on a successor.Presumably the author of this “exclusive” could have learned all this with a phone call, instead of relying on one of those unnamed “Washington sources” who in this case didn’t know his butt from page eight.So who cares? Nobody but me, probably, and even I wouldn’t be writing about it if it hadn’t popped up in a major blog site. When a BS story gets linked to and repeated a couple of times, it might as well be fact. So it’s occasionally worth the trouble to shoot one down.

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Minding Our P’s and Q’s: Professionals, Portability and Quality

by , January 17th, 2007 7:47 PM EST

By David Kusnet
Jim Grossfeld is performing a real service by urging the unions, the Democrats, and progressives of all kinds to reach out to technical and professional workers in ways that make sense to this large and fast-growing constituency.
Grossfeld rightly urges the unions and their Democratic allies to understand that professional and technical workers want new kinds of supports — from education and training to portable health and pension benefits — to make their way in a churning economy. He’s also right on target when he urges organizers to transcend the stereotypes that unions are confrontational, resistant to change, oriented only to blue-collar and low-wage workers, and uninterested in partnering with management.
These points are well-taken, but it’s been a long time since they represented “apostasy” for organizers from the most successful unions or strategists for Democratic candidates who don’t remember Labor Day rallies in Cadillac Square. Are today’s unions unattractive to professional and technical workers because labor preaches class struggle, while white-collar workers are aligned with management and adverse to conflict of any kind? It’s not that simple any more, and professional and technical workers’ attitudes are evolving in complex and fascinating ways. So here’s a slightly different analysis — call it Apostasy 2.0:
Almost everything Grossfeld writes about white-collar workers is true — and so are some other things. In an uncertain economy, growing numbers of professional and technical workers are indeed concluding that they need some stable institutions on their side, from employee organizations to programs providing health insurance, continuing education, and retirement security. But there’s also something else at work: The idealistic concerns that used to make professionals identify with management now are pushing many of them in different directions. Professionals, technicians, and skilled workers of all kinds have always been dedicated to doing the best work for the people they serve. As long as the demands of their employers, the standards of their occupations, and the needs of the public all appeared to be in harmony, professional and technical workers were reluctant to challenge management. If they organized, it was as members of their occupations, not as adversaries to their employers.
But now, just as job security is becoming problematic, so is quality work. Doctors and nurses find their professional judgments are second-guessed by hospital administrators with corporate mentalities. Newspaper reporters are told to avoid in-depth stories. Software writers are required to rush their products to completion. Tenured professors are being replaced by part-time faculty.
These threats to professionalism are making professionals more open to organizing, to challenging management, and (as recent election results revealed) to supporting contemporary forms of populism. Historically, professional and technical workers are most likely to unionize when they believe that the quality of their work, as well as the security of their jobs, salaries and benefits, all are in jeopardy. Since the 1960s, teachers concerned with unmanageable class sizes, social workers upset with swollen caseloads, and other beleaguered public employees organized unions and even struck, often with slogans like “Teachers want what children need.” Nurses and other health care workers have organized against threats to patient care, as well as their own pay and benefits. More recently, engineers and information technology workers have begun to organize — and the engineers and technicians at Boeing even staged a successful 40-day strike — over professional issues as well as economic concerns.
As this recent experience suggests, professional and technical workers build organizations that address their aspirations for doing quality work, as well as navigating the new economy. Both concerns are crucial, and unions and Democrats should take note.
First, as Grossfeld correctly emphasizes, unions should emphasize and enhance their efforts to assist workers who are moving from job to job and need to learn new skills, acquire new credentials, and maintain their health insurance and retirement security. As William Safire, of all people, once advised me, unions and Democrats should use the word “security” less and “portability” more.
As they retool their services as well as their sound-bites, unions can look to many models: The craft unions pioneered apprenticeship, skill upgrading, and credentialing for skilled construction workers, as well as multi-employer pension programs for workers who move from contractor to contractor. Public sector unions like AFSCME, AFT, and SEIU created career ladder programs to help low-wage workers qualify for higher-skilled jobs. The talent guilds in broadcasting, the performing arts and the specialized fields of translating and interpreting run job referral programs (The phrase “hiring hall” doesn’t appeal to white-collars). CWA sponsors training and credentialing programs for telecommunications workers. And professional associations and professional unions set professional standards and stress professional development.
Second, these workers expect their organizations to advocate — and even, to use that dread word, “fight” for — their concerns about quality work. After all, people become teachers, nurses, journalists, computer programmers, and aerospace engineers because these careers are their callings in life. They want to be proud of their work.
Since the late ’70s, I’ve heard professional and technical workers express their concerns for the people they serve as well as the paychecks they earn. Working in organizing campaigns for AFSCME from 1976 through 1984, mostly in white-collar units, I heard social workers, employment counselors, psychologists, nurses and other professionals complain that they weren’t afforded the time, the resources, or the discretion they needed to serve the public properly.
Fast forward to 2000, when I researched and wrote a report about professional and technical workers for the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank founded by the AFT. I interviewed nurses in New Jersey, aerospace engineers at Boeing, and temporary workers at Microsoft, and profiled the innovative organizations that they had founded, all of which meld the services and appeals of professional associations and modern unions. These studies accompanied national surveys of teachers, engineers, nurses, and information technology workers, conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates.
Our research and similar studies confirm the importance of quality work as an issue that inspires professionals and technicians to organize. In their surveys of the four occupational groups, Hart Research Associates found that three of five of those who said their profession was getting worse–but only about a third of those who said their profession was improving–wanted to found a union or some other form of employee organization. Similarly, in a 1997 survey of 1,500 non-union professional and technical employees by Cornell University Professor Richard Hurd, these white-collar workers said the most important issue on the job was threats to their ability to exercise professional judgment.
These findings suggest that today’s professional and technical employees take a more complex view of their jobs, their employers, worker organizations and workplace conflicts than earlier generations of white-collar workers. In my own interviews with aerospace engineers, software testers, and nurses and other healthcare workers, I found an anxious ambivalence that could be summed up in three paradoxes: 1) They love their work, but not their jobs; 2) They believe they care more about the organizations where they work than the people who run them; and 3) They will “fight,” if necessary, but not just for themselves. Each paradox creates an organizing opportunity:
Paradox #1:Professionals are committed to their callings — teaching, nursing, creating software, or designing airplanes, to name a few. But, while they enjoy the actual work that they do, they are less satisfied with the circumstances under which they do it — in other words, their “jobs.” For instance, a software tester told me, “I love my work. The only thing I hate is Volt [one of the staffing agencies that Microsoft uses to serve as the nominal employers for its temporary workers].” Unions should offer professionals the opportunity to improve their jobs so that they once again feel fulfilled by pursuing their callings in life. As a New Jersey nurse told me

Three or four months ago, I had a night that reminded me of the ideal nights a long time ago. There were three or four patients, all stable. I spent a lot of time with one. When I got home in the morning, I said to my husband, ‘I remember how it feels to give good patient care.’ This is what I went into nursing for, this is why I unionized.

Paradox #2: Nurses and other health care workers whom I’ve interviewed at several hospitals in New Jersey told me the same story: The old management cared about people; the new management cares about money. Engineers at Boeing told a similar story — the company had started shortchanging research and even testing, and they feared that Boeing might get out of civilian aviation. When the engineers struck, they had an unusual slogan on their picket signs — “On Strike for Boeing” — because they believed they were more loyal to Boeing’s mission and traditions than top management.
Paradox #3: Of course, professional and technical workers don’t want to walk off their jobs, except as a last resort. That’s partly because they don’t want to miss a paycheck or have a hostile workplace (who does?). It’s also because they are so dedicated to their work and the people they serve. Thus, nurses strike over patient care, not just their own paychecks. As for the Boeing engineers who felt they were defending American leadership in aviation, their union leader, Charles Bofferding, told me, “They don’t like conflicts, but they sure do like crusades.” In a similar spirit, Bofferding said, “We want to cooperate with Boeing, even if we have to do it on our own.”
The concern for quality is the common denominator for all three seemingly self-contradictory viewpoints. So, if we want to promote unions, we have to stress the concern for quality — to link the q-word and the u-word.
Quality work can be the unifying theme for the two essential roles for professional unions: 1) advocating for the resources and autonomy that empower professionals to do their best work; and 2) providing the services that prepare, attract and retain capable workers in a churning economy. Progressive candidates should point to both positive features of modern unions and also present a vision of work in America that not only pays a living wage but also offers the satisfaction of a job well done.

David Kusnet was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992 through 1994. He was on the staff of AFSCME and helped to research and write Finding Their Voices: Professionals and Workplace Representation for the Albert Shanker Institute. He is writing a book about workplace conflicts in today’s America, Love the Work, Hate the Job, for the publisher John A. Wiley and Sons.

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Talkin ‘Bout My Generation

by , January 17th, 2007 4:56 PM EST

by Scott Winship
(Comments on Matt Stoller’s essay on the New Left and the netroots, cross-posted at http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/swinship/2007/jan/17/talkin_bout_my_generation)
I have a somewhat different take on what to make of the “new movement” centered on the netroots than the older—sorry, wiser—discussants that have responded to Matt thus far. As someone who at age 34 could be part of this movement demographically but doesn’t feel altogether comfortable in it, my take also differs from his. I am on the record elsewhere as believing that the netroots is ideological and ideologically liberal. Like Ed, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Matt agrees with me, given the resistance I’ve received to this argument. So let me instead focus on the questions of where the current movement comes from and where it is going.
First, I agree with Matt that the movement has grown out of the frustrations and anger of those on the left, though I think Matt only gets at part of the explanation. He is right to note that the events dating from the Clinton impeachment – including the perceived theft of the 2000 election, the perceived timidity of the Democratic Congress in 2002, and the outrages of the Bush Administration – are largely behind the rise of the netroots. But there is something else too, something that is implicit (if not explicit) in huge swaths of the Compiled Works of the Liberal Blogosphere.
That “something” – alluded to in Matt’s reference to “Democratic complacency in the Iraq debate in 2002” – is frustration with the incrementalism of the Bill Clinton years and the Clintonite wing of the Party in general. I know that Matt has recently read Todd Gitlin's magnificent The Sixties as part of his research on the New Left, and I am currently working my way through it as well. Early on, in explaining why the children of the Fifties were “lost” to their complacent liberal parents (liberal in the “Cold War liberal consensus” sense) and embraced the confrontational New Left movement of the Sixties, Todd eloquently makes an observation with much relevance for understanding today’s netroots:

In politics, nothing is so unsettling as half a success. After a catastrophe, the next generation rebuilds from scratch. After a heroic victory, they inherit the triumph. But half a success tantalizes and confuses; it dangles before the eyes a glaring discrepancy between promise and performance.

It may be true that the netroots are an older group than is often recognized – my own inclination is to be skeptical until some good data is available, and no, there is no good data yet available – but in reading the most popular writers of the “activist” blogosphere, one is struck by how often they acknowledge that their political experience goes only as far back as the Clinton impeachment. Many of the most prominent netroots activists demonstrate little appreciation for how electorally awful the years between 1966 and 1992 were for Democrats. Consider this the flip-side of Max’s complaint of ahistoricity.
From Lyndon Johnson’s blow-out victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964 through 1965, my boss Stan Greenberg notes in his Two Americas, Johnson was supported by clear majorities of the electorate. But that changed in 1966, as urban rioting and Vietnam took its toll on his agenda:

The Republicans picked up 8 governorships, including Ronald Reagan’s victory in California; doubled their number of state legislators in the South; gained a net of 47 seats in the House; and picked three new senators in the South.

To belabor the point, 1966 precedes the rise of the conservative think tanks and foundations in the early 1970s. It is only two years after Goldwater’s trouncing (so much for those “years in the wilderness” suffered by the right). The political history of the next quarter-century is clear enough: Richard Nixon wins as George Wallace peels off the Democratic South, Nixon successfully woos the Wallace voters in ’72 and destroys the last Democratic nominee to openly run as a liberal, a moderate southern Democrat squeaks out a win over a Republican incumbent who had been successively an unelected vice president and unelected president (and who represented the party of Watergate), the dark years of Reagan, the victory of George H. W. Bush on the strength of Lee Atwater’s culture-war strategy, and finally – finally – a clear Democratic win by a moderate southern governor from Arkansas. All the while, ideology and party grew increasingly aligned, swelling the Republican ranks and reaching an apogee in the 1994 election, when the GOP captured both chambers of Congress.
Clinton, of course, went on to drive liberal activists mad by failing to pass universal health care, favoring trade agreements, signing the welfare reform bill, and declaring the end of the era of big government. Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 was pushed to the left by Bill Bradley’s initially strong primary challenge, and his famously populist acceptance speech made many liberals swoon like Tipper after “The Kiss”. But when he lost – and despite the atrocious U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the various recount scenarios would have yielded different results – much of the left at least took solace in the fact that Clintonism was apparently behind them.
But Clintonism as a term for political timidity came to be blamed for Democrats’ allowing the Bush tax cuts to pass, despite the fact that electoral realities put strong pressure on Democratic senators from red states to vote for the bill. With little credibility on national security after 30 years marked by the public relations genius of the McGovernik left (the forerunners of the Kucinich-worshipping Department of Peacers of 2004) as well as the Third-World romanticism of 1970s liberals (the forerunners of the U.N.-elevating left of ’04), Carter’s weakness around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis, and the death of Soviet Communism under Reagan/Bush, Democrats in Congress were vulnerable to claims by Bush II that they were insufficiently strong on national security, and they buckled to his will. When Republicans re-took the Senate in 2002, “Clintonism” was a convenient scapegoat.
It is this lack of historical appreciation – this lack of understanding of political imperatives – and its attendant lack of patience that unites the New Left of the 1960s with the netroots today. It is the promise and peril of political naïveté—the admirable impulse that led me as a 22-year-old college senior in 1995 to hunger strike for 5 days for what I thought to be an important cause, an impulse the potential destructiveness of which is laid bare in the disclosure that the cause was establishing an Asian-American Studies program immediately rather than waiting for the university bureaucracy to vote on it.
While the New Left eventually over-reached, it did so after achieving extraordinarily important progress in civil rights and civil liberties, and it eventually brought about the end of a war that proved hopelessly unwinnable. Those victories might not have been possible with an “appropriate” historical appreciation. Can the netroots and its fellow-travelers have a similarly positive impact? The answer will depend on whether they are able to read the public mood correctly, whether they correctly judge how—and how quickly—the public can be brought along, and whether their causes are as compelling as the defeat of Jim Crow.
New Democrats—young and old—fear that the New New Left—young and old—will miscalculate in addressing each question, or worse, will not even acknowledge these are legitimate and crucial questions. (How does Matt know, for instance, that the “new movement” is a majority, non-silent or otherwise?) Like other committed Democrats, we hope for their success and will work and fight alongside them on many endeavors, but we will also point out that whatever ’60s activism achieved, it also handed the country to the Republicans for more than a generation. The netroots better be prepared to tell us what we’ll get in return this time around to justify such a result.

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The Net and the Left

by , January 16th, 2007 5:24 PM EST

There’s an interesting whirligig underway over at TPMCafe where a bunch of us bloggers are debating the extent to which the “netroots” represent a new Left-bent political movement. (My own post mainly suggests that the very nature of internet-based political discourse creates limits to its utility as an ideological vehicle, which is a good thing).But because the kicker-offer of the debate, MyDD’s Matt Stoller, conducted a drive-by dissing of the 60s-era New Left and its ultimate influence, the discussion veered off into all sorts of odd historical byways. It then exploded with a post by labor-left economist Max Sawicky, who defended the comparative value of the New and Old Lefts as compared to the Progressive Netroots. Two Max-imalist sound bites really got the juices flowing:”The ‘Internet Left’ is mostly a brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party.””The 60s left read Marx, Trotsky, Luxembourg, Lukacs, Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, C.L.R. James, Ernest Mandel, Joan Robinson, Herbert Marcuse, Michael Harrington, Saul Alinsky. What does the netroots read? Don’t Think of an Elephant?”The furor Max unleashed spilled out of the comments threads and onto other sites, where battles over the obscure legacy of various New Left and Marxist organizations rage on.It’s good clean fun. And it’s interesting to see criticism of the netroots from the left. Check it all out.

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MLK, Vietnam and Iraq

by , January 15th, 2007 12:32 PM EST

Given the raging debate over Iraq, it’s not surprising that on this particular Martin Luther King holiday, various observers are drawing parallels between King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and today’s anti-Iraq War movement. The most striking example was John Edwards’ direct evocation of King’s signature anti-war speech at New York’s Riverside Church nearly forty years ago–delivered by Edwards yesterday from the same pulpit, in which he called on Democrats to show moral fortitude by cutting off funding for an increased troop deployment in Iraq.Entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence,” King’s sermon was indeed about a lot more than the Vietnam War. And the “silence” he spoke of did not refer simply to reluctance to oppose the war–the anti-war movement was, after all, fully underway in 1967–but to those who in his view refused to see or talk about the connections between oppression of African-Americans in this country and oppression of “Asians, Africans and Latin Americans” by the United States and its allies in the name of the Cold War.From what we know of the historical context for King’s Riverside sermon, he was likely conducting a sort of two-front offensive aimed at two very different sets of critics of his leadership within the civil rights movement. On one side were those who urged him to mute his growing criticism of LBJ’s foreign policy–and even some aspects of domestic policy–as a distraction from the civil rights cause, and as a corrosive influence on establishment liberal support for that cause. And on the other side were more radical civil rights voices–e.g., Malcolm X and some of the early SNCC firebrands–who wanted to discard King’s strict policy of nonviolent protest. For King, the response to both was to underline the necessity of nonviolent social progress at home and abroad.What comes across from a reading of the sermon today is its consistent radicalism. Yes, King made some prudential arguments against the Vietnam War, including the resources it sapped from domestic priorities, the war’s disparate impact on minorities, and its essential futility in terms of conditions on the ground in Vietnam itself. But King’s real mission was a root-and-branch attack on the fundamental assumptions of Cold War liberalism. Calling the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King unsubtly suggested that his country had gotten itself on the wrong side of a “world revolution” for political and economic self-determination in which leadership had often been tacitly ceded to communists:

All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated.

The Riverside sermon is a sharp reminder that the core of King’s public ministry was the rigorous advocacy of a Gandhian nonviolence philosophy that he believed to be a practical extension of he Gospel of Jesus Christ. Reading it anew, I have little doubt that if MLK were alive and active today, he would not just be calling for a “redeployment” of U.S. troops from the Iraq civil war, but would be challenging the entire framework of the war with jihadist terrorism, including the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.I wouldn’t personally agree with him on that broader vision of world events, any more than I would have agreed with him that the Cold War was essentially the product of U.S. arrogance and militarism. But there’s not much point in honoring King’s memory without grappling with the full and (to use his own word) “disturbing” integrity of his prophetic stance.Progressives have long deplored the tendency of conservatives to selectively quote from King’s writings, and to use them to support policies (e.g., “color-blind” opposition to affirmative action measures) that arguably would subvert everything he fought for. But progressives need to beware of a similar, if more benign, temptation to quote King out of context. Citing MLK’s Riverside sermon as moral authority for demanding that Democrats support a cut-off of funding for an expansion of the U.S. presence in Iraq is a bit like citing the Sermon on the Mount in talking points for a minimum wage increase. It’s true as far as it goes, but it misses the larger points, and reduces prophecy to politics.

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Survey on ‘Surge” Recalls MLK Challenge

by , January 15th, 2007 11:06 AM EST

The 2007 Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday finds a growing portion of Americans opposed to increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. As the first poll of Americans following President Bush’s ‘surge’ address (PDF here) indicates, 66 percent of Americans oppose sending another 20 thousand plus troops to Iraq, while 32 percent are in favor. CNN notes further:

Half the respondents said they “strongly oppose” sending more troops, while 16 percent “moderately oppose.” Only 19 percent “strongly favor” sending additional troops, and 13 percent “moderately favor” the idea…With Democrats controlling Congress, Americans show substantially more support for the Democratic Party on the issue of Iraq. Just more than half — 51 percent — said they have more confidence in the Iraq policies of the Democrats in Congress, while only 34 percent said they have more confidence in Bush’s Iraq policies.

If this rising tide of dissent rings a bell, go back almost 40 years to February 25, 1967, when Dr. King had this to say in his speech “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam”:

It’s time for all people of conscience to call upon America to return to her true home of brotherhood and peaceful pursuits. We cannot remain silent as our nation engages in one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars. America must continue to have, during these days of human travail, a company of creative dissenters. We need them because the thunder of their fearless voices will be the only sound stronger than the blasts of bombs and the clamor of war hysteria.

The entire speech may be read The King Papers Project website.

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Survey on ‘Surge” Recalls MLK Challenge

by , January 15th, 2007 5:30 AM EST

The 2007 Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday finds a growing portion of Americans opposed to increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. As the first poll of Americans following President Bush’s ‘surge’ address (PDF here) indicates, 66 percent of Americans oppose sending another 20 thousand plus troops to Iraq, while 32 percent are in favor. CNN notes further:

Half the respondents said they “strongly oppose” sending more troops, while 16 percent “moderately oppose.” Only 19 percent “strongly favor” sending additional troops, and 13 percent “moderately favor” the idea…With Democrats controlling Congress, Americans show substantially more support for the Democratic Party on the issue of Iraq. Just more than half — 51 percent — said they have more confidence in the Iraq policies of the Democrats in Congress, while only 34 percent said they have more confidence in Bush’s Iraq policies.

If this rising tide of dissent rings a bell, go back almost 40 years to February 25, 1967, when Dr. King had this to say in his speech “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam”:

It’s time for all people of conscience to call upon America to return to her true home of brotherhood and peaceful pursuits. We cannot remain silent as our nation engages in one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars. America must continue to have, during these days of human travail, a company of creative dissenters. We need them because the thunder of their fearless voices will be the only sound stronger than the blasts of bombs and the clamor of war hysteria.

The entire speech may be read The King Papers Project website.

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Bush On Iraq: Nowhere Fast

by , January 14th, 2007 10:11 PM EST

I deliberately waited a while to write anything about Bush’s latest “big speech” on Iraq, because it’s generally more interesting to weigh reactions after the spin has died down and public opinion has begun to congeal. But I don’t think there’s any possible conclusion to reach other than that the whole Bush “new direction” has been a dismal and completely unnecessary flop.The speech itself was most notable in that it did not even remotely live up to the White House’s own advance billing. We were told Bush was finally and fully going to embrace the counter-insurgency strategy that so many military experts had been urging on him for at least a year. Instead, we got nothing on that front other than a ritual recitation of the barest bones of the strategy, the clear-hold-build formula (supplemented by a lame-o dollop of money to throw at unemployed Iraqis). We were told he’d admit the failure of his old policies. Instead, he allowed as how 2006 wasn’t exactly a great year in Iraq.I personally expected Bush to provide one “surprise,” by announcing some token of a political breakthrough in Iraq–a “benchmark” actually met–such as an impending deal on distribution of oil revenues, but we didn’t get that, either. And that’s a reflection of Bush’s weird and continuing inversion of the growing feeling in this country that we should withdraw sooner rather than later if Iraqis don’t begin to live up to their own responsibilities for self-government. Bush is essentially saying we’ll withdraw later rather than sooner–and maybe never withdraw–if they continue to polarize along sectarian lines. He’s not stopping or preventing civil war; he’s enabling it.For that reason, the most bizarre feature of the speech was Bush’s insistence that the whole “surge” was simply an effort to support an Iraqi government initiative to control violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province; indeed, he expressed great confidence that Maliki was finally biting the bullet and was willing to remove “restrictions” on troop operations that might involve conflict with Shi’a militias. But right up to the moment of the speech, Maliki’s staff was out there constantly saying they didn’t want or need more American troops. And if they said or did anything new to suggest a sudden willingness to mess with the Mahdi Army, it didn’t make the news.Add in the factor that the new troop deployments are not that large, and will take a while to execute, and you’ve got a formula for almost certain military and political failure. So why did Bush do this? And why all the hype?You’d have to guess he seized upon the one vaguely new-sounding thing he could do that didn’t cross the self-imposed line that has divided him from Democrats, from many Republicans, from the Iraq Study Group recommendations, from Iraqi public opinion, and from U.S. public opinion; he couldn’t bring himself to begin withdrawing troops. He couldn’t realistically get the troops he needed for the kind of big-time escalation that many on the Right favored, and that commanders in the field considered essential for an actual victory over insurgents and militias. So he went with a pallid proposal linked to overblown rhetoric.I know a large and growing number of fellow progressive bloggers have seized on Bush’s saber-rattling towards Iran and Syria, followed by several mysterious military maneuvers and one weird confrontation with Iranian embassy employees in Kurdistan, to suggest with alarm that the administration is about to deliberately widen the Iraq war by provoking Tehran and Damascus into armed conflict. I have a hard time believing that; where the hell is the Pentagon going to get the resources for a regional war?But in any event, the pallid support levels, even among Republicans, for Bush’s Iraq plan, could derail it even without even affirmative action by Congress to get in the way by, say, restricting funds. The pending “no confidence” resolution now in the works could effectively reinforce the clear judgment of voters in November.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

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How ‘Viral Video’ Can Give Dems Edge

by , January 13th, 2007 1:47 PM EST

For those of us who are a little behind in understanding the use of viral video and other new video tools in politics, Peter Leyden’ Blog at NDN provides a good introduction here. Leyden, director of the New Politics Institute, paints an interesting picture of the unfolding communications technology leading up to the 2008 elections:

Emotionally powerful, visually complex video has finally arrived on the internet – and it’s moving fast. Those in politics will need to hustle to keep up with it.
This urgency is particularly important today, because the forty-year reign of broadcast and cable television thirty-second ads is coming to a close. Among other things, the spread of digital video recorders (DVRs) like TiVo allows an increasing chunk of Americans to skip ads altogether. By the 2008 election roughly one-third of all American households will have DVRs, and the percentage of likely voters with them will be even higher.
Understanding video also requires understanding how people are accessing video. NPI Fellow Tim Chambers tells us that “by the 2008 election, more than 90 percent of the mobile phones used in the U.S. will be internet-enabled…by 2011, 24 million U.S. cellular subscribers and customers will be paying for some form of TV/video content and services on their mobile devices.” At that point mobile video services combined would have more than 3 million more users than the largest cable operator in the U.S. does today.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to visualize the potential power of such tools for creating buzz for candidates and campaigns with limited budgets. And it can cut both ways. Leyden notes that George Allen’s “macaca moment” was first publicized through “viral video” (wikipedia also has an informative entry on the term here). Leyden introduces the first installment of NPI’s new series “Re-Imagining Video” with former Hollywood producer Julie Bergman Sender’s more in depth piece on the subject “Viral Video in Politics: Case Studies in Creating Compelling Video” Readers can link to the PDF from this summary.

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