A couple of days ago I noted that CBS was the only news company that went to the trouble of hiring a professional aerial photo analysis company to estimate the size of the Beckapallosa last weekend and that the estimate CBS received was that only 87,000 people (plus or minus 9,000) had actually attended.
Even ignoring the estimates of the Beck rally’s own organizers and participants, (which were based upon a combination of divine revelation and a handy, unlimited supply of zeros) 87,000 did seem a awfully low number just based on eyeballing the main long distance crowd photos in the press and comparing them with previous demonstrations. But, on the other hand, the photo company’s methodology was the absolutely accepted standard for doing this kind of estimation and several different specialists used the aerial photos to provide independent estimates which were then consolidated into the final figure. I speculated that the explanation might lie in how densely packed the crowd was, which could not be judged in long distance photos, but without additional background information from the photo analysis company the discussion was at a dead end.
Well, the company has now released more information about the estimating procedure – including 400 aerial photos – and it appears that the 87,000 number is indeed very solidly grounded. You can read the details here but the bottom line is that the analysis followed the accepted procedures for this kind of analysis and the company has made their raw data public. From a scientific standpoint, their work is on solid ground.
But the really fascinating fact in the new information is this: this same company was used to estimate the number of people who attended the Obama inauguration. Their estimate at the time — 800,000 — was attacked by many Obama-boosters as far too low but was embraced by the right as the scientific gold standard.
And here’s the critical thing. The company used precisely – precisely — the same methodology to estimate the size of the Beck rally that they used to estimate the size of the inaugural crowd. So even if one wants to question the exact accuracy or precision of their photo analysis methods, they will still produce an extremely good relative comparison between the attendance at the two events.
So, as the saying goes, “just do the math”. The Glen Beck rally, whatever its exact absolute size, turns out to have been just 11% of the size of the inaugural crowd.
It is obviously a pointless task to try and argue about this with the Beck-o-philes themselves. They will undoubtedly discover the dark hand of ACORN, SIEU “thugs”, nuns overly influenced by John Paul II and probably Woodrow Wilson and Mahatma Gandhi in intimidating the photo analysis company into distorting its data.
But a solid, empirically based estimate of the attendance at the rally is indeed important for Democrats because it provides a measure of the organizational and mobilization capabilities of the FOX news/Freedomworks/Americans for Prosperity conservative machine. The 87,000 people they bussed in or provided parking arrangements for at last weeks’ rally was actually very close in size to the attendance at the 9/12 rally last year. It suggests that, despite an entire year of continual and increasingly monstrous progressive outrages against the very fabric of human decency and civilized life, their ability to mobilize their base has not dramatically grown.
Except, of course, in one place – in the lyrical expanses of conservative press releases, where the mundane constraints of empirical data are effortlessly transcended by the miracles of faith-based crowd estimation – the delightful realm where, as in Neverland, Oz and old Disney flicks, “just wishing makes it so”.
james.vega
It is difficult not to contemptuously dismiss Glen Beck’s attempt to co-opt Martin Luther King into a supporter of right-wing conservatism as just one more piece of evidence for his lurid concoction of delusional megalomania, clinical paranoia and boundless self-pity. But, unfortunately, many Americans too young to remember the 60’s only know three or four sentences from King’s “I have a dream” speech and can therefore easily be cynically manipulated into believing virtually any nonsense imaginable about King’s outlook and philosophy.
But what did King actually think about the right-wing conservatives like Glen Beck of his own era? Well, for a start, here, taken from chapter 23 of his autobiography is what Martin Luther King said about Barry Goldwater during the 1964 election:
It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States.
In foreign policy Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation.
On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. The issue of poverty compelled the attention of all citizens of our country. Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated.
On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand.
In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.
While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.
If there was ever a fine opportunity for progressives to make Glen Beck’s followers stop and think for a moment, it would be to upload this quote to every Tea Party discussion site in the U.S. and watch them try to figure out a way to reconcile the absurd mass of contradictions into which Beck’s cynical distortion of history has plunged them.
Martin Luther King’s philosophy — easily available in his five books and dozens of collections — is the most powerful and majestic refutation of right-wing conservatism penned in 20th century America. If only — if only — conservatives would really stop and read what that great man actually said. That, indeed would be a magnificent “Dream” for today.
In the aftermath of the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 Dems widely bewailed the superior “message discipline” of the Republicans. The GOP was credited with successfully guiding its members to focus on a small number of clear slogans and themes while Democrats tied themselves in knots.
In consequence, one key theme of a recent strategy meeting about the coming elections between Senate Democrats and senior staff and the Obama White House was that “there will be intense emphasis on keeping all candidates, offices and parties coordinated on the same message”
To reinforce this, wallet cards with the core Democratic message were distributed:
Democrats are on the side of the middle class. We are fighting to cut taxes for small businesses and middle-class Americans, end tax cuts for CEOs who ship American jobs overseas, and create clean energy jobs that can’t be outsourced.
Republicans are on the side of Wall Street bankers and CEOs. They support tax cuts for corporations who ship jobs overseas. But their economic policies failed under President Bush. Millions of people lost their jobs, the deficit exploded and the middle class got hammered. Now they want to return to the same failed policies of the past. We can’t afford to go back.
While most democrats would agree with these statements, however, the simple fact is that they do not constitute a message campaign – they are, at best, an executive summary or thumbnail statement of a message campaign. Even when supplemented with bullet point descriptions of key Democratic policies (“end tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas”, “defend social security”) they still have almost none of the personal engagement or emotional power that a properly designed message campaign is expected to contain.
A serious political message campaign has to have at least four key elements – a narrative, a metaphor, a “case” and a rallying cry.
• The narrative tells a story that defines the “good guys” and “bad guys”
• The metaphor creates a vivid, visual image
• The “case” presents the core argument
• The rallying cry delivers the call to action
Let’s look at this year’s Republican message campaign to see how these four elements are handled:
• The Narrative — Barack Obama is a radical with a mysterious past. He was elected by a fluke and quickly began attacking basic American values and institutions. His actions have generated a vast grass-roots rebellion of ordinary Americans.
• The Metaphor – organized around the metaphor of the “tea party”. This highly visual symbolism pictures conservative Republicans as the modern embodiment of the original colonial patriots and contrasts them with an image of Obama as a would-be dictator like Hitler or Stalin.
• The Case — the struggle over Health Care Reform — both the conservative interpretation of the provisions of the act and their perception of the process by which it was passed — provide the overarching “proof” of the crypto-totalitarian and anti-democratic nature of the Administration’s agenda.
• The rallying cry — “this election will be the epic, decisive battle that stops the liberal/socialist juggernaut in its tracks”.
Most Dems first reaction to this outline will be a sense of frustration that they have been offered nothing comparably compact and organized as an alternative Democratic message campaign. Quite the contrary, in the major pro-Democratic political magazines, websites and forums, the majority of the commentary has revolved around a heated debate over the narrative of progressive “disappointment” or even “betrayal” by the Obama administration.
But, in fact, there is actually a very solid and workable Democratic message campaign, one that is “hiding in plain sight” as it were. It is being presented in the partisan speeches Obama has begun to deliver across the country. Those speeches contain all four of the key elements of a political message campaign that are described above.
The exposure of the dishonest manipulation of videos first released on Andrew Breitbart’s websites has been widely and properly applauded as a major setback for the hard-right. In the future it is extremely unlikely that the mainstream media will again blindly publicize heavily edited video clips without demanding to see the complete video behind them. Even conservative commentators – who were deeply humiliated by having to publically apologize for having committed legally actionable defamation of character on national TV – will hesitate before trusting Breitbart’s propaganda materials again.
But Democrats should have absolutely no illusions that this setback will lead to any overall moderation of the fierce and bitter attacks that have been directed at Obama and the Democratic Party since last spring. Quite the contrary, Dems should seriously prepare for the possibility that even more intense and dangerous tactics will now be employed.
The reason is that the deliberate editing of video to create a false impression is actually just one specific tactic in a larger arsenal of methods that political extremists believe to be entirely justified. As an April, 2009 TDS strategy memo noted, the defining feature of modern political extremism is the vision of politics as literally a form of “warfare” and political opponents as actual “enemies” who must be crushed. Although many political commentators routinely use these terms as metaphors in writing about political affairs, for political extremists they are seen as entirely literal statements of fact.
From this point of view many tactics that most Americans consider utterly unacceptable and indeed essentially criminal come to be seen as entirely logical measures that are required by the urgent demands of the bitter political “war”. The exposure of any one particular tactic does not challenge this underlying perspective. On the contrary it simply increases the urgency for developing alternative tactics that the evil “enemy” does not yet anticipate.
As a result, Democrats should be seriously prepared for the possibility that they will soon encounter tactics such as the following:
1. Staged events — there is a disturbingly thin line that separates wildly exaggerating the influence of tiny fringe groups like the New Black Panthers – as the conservative media has done in recent weeks – and directly encouraging or financially rewarding fringe groups to engage in offensive or illegal acts that can then be filmed and presented as spontaneous. Covert subsidies to radical fringe groups were employed in the 1960’s to disrupt and discredit Civil Rights demonstrations and in the 1930’s specialized anti-union firms commonly employed undercover agents to masquerade as union supporters and then create violence during strikes in order to provide the justification for sending in state troopers or the National Guard. A chilling echo of this tactic was recently hinted by a professional conservative activist in a Playboy magazine article when he noted that “creating mayhem is not limited to dealing with the press. We’ve quietly acquired Service Employees International Union shirts to wear at tea party rallies…” The potential threat is obvious.
2. Burglary or criminal trespass to obtain documents or other information –this tactic also has a long history, including the famous 1972 Watergate burglary of Democratic Party headquarters by Nixon’s “dirty tricks” squad and the recent abortive attempt of Breitbart’s protégé James McKeefe to install wiretapping devices in the office of La. Sen. Mary Landrieu. Most major foundations and non-profit organizations as well as political candidates and organizations have substantial amounts of information whose privacy they are legally and morally obligated to protect and whose disclosure can substantially cripple their operations. Any such information presents an extremely tempting target.
3. The sabotage, destruction, misuse or theft of valuable political files such as voter contact lists and contributor lists –– there are actually three different varieties of this tactic (1) the complete destruction of files (2) the misuse of files (for example, by mailing false messages that provoke discord between political allies) and (3) the subtle corruption of files to render them useless or largely ineffective.
4. Physical intimidation – there is an important distinction between protests that use civil disobedience based on the principles of non-violence and actions that are aimed at physically threatening and intimidating political opponents. In the 1980’s, for example, many anti-abortion protests carefully confined themselves to non-violent methods while other groups clearly planned their protests to physically threaten and terrify both clients and health care workers in the clinics they targeted.
As the elections draw closer, it becomes increasingly obvious that – within the general “enthusiasm gap” that is so widely discussed – there is one specific kind of intensity and passion that is painfully missing in the Democratic community.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, for me that missing ingredient came dramatically into focus. The celebrations brought back memories of family gatherings many years ago, listening to the stories told by veterans of WWII, most of whom had fought in the Italian theater of operations.
They were tough, no-nonsense men, hardened by both a lifetime of hard work and the experience of war and who spoke with deep cynicism about aspect after aspect of their wartime experience.
The equipment -“The first thing we did when we hit the beach was bury most of it. It was too God-damn heavy and it got you killed. You buried it the minute you hit the beach, and then dug it up for inspection”.
The officers – “They were all a bunch of rich boys who had never worked a day on an assembly line or climbed on high steel. They were as tough as rubber nails and a dumb as a newborn baby”
The Bazooka – “a real piece of s**T. If you got real close to a panzer tank, the best you could do was give the German tanker an earache when the shell bounced off the hull”.
The U.S. Sherman Tank – “The armor was so thin, if you had to sneeze you could pull off one of the f***ing armor plates and blow your nose in it”
The strategy – “The Brass did everything by the book. The trouble was that the Germans had all read exactly the same god-damn f*** ing book and were ready for us every time.”
The campaign – “If the country had been any narrower we would’ve had to walk sideways. The Germans didn’t even have to aim their God-damn guns, they could just point anywhere south and fire.”
And so it went for hours at a time. Surprisingly, they had little hatred for the ordinary Italian and German soldiers that they had fought. The enemy soldiers were just “dupes” who had been “suckered” by the “big lie” propaganda. Far more time was devoted to criticizing every single aspect of the how the “Brass” had conducted the war.
But at the end of every one of these sessions, they would always suddenly pause and say with a sharp, chilling intensity to the young people who were listening – “but, don’t ever get me wrong. It was worth it and I’d do it all over again In a minute– because those bastards had to be stopped”
That’s the spirit that’s painfully missing In the Democratic discussion today. That crystal clear, hard, fierce and ferocious sense of determination. That cold burning anger. That elemental sense of total commitment and passion. What’s missing today is a clear understanding that – whatever opinion one may have of Obama, or his strategy, or the candidates, or the campaigns, or the issues, or the way things have gone, or how they could have gone better, or why things were done wrong or a thousand other matters – there remains one transcendent, overarching reality.
What the Republicans have done in the last year and a half goes beyond politics and beyond partisanship. They have embraced a politics of extremism that goes far beyond anything in the Republican tradition -including not only the era of Ronald Reagan but even of the Buckley and Goldwater right. They have chosen a cynical submission to an extremist ideology that is not only wrong but dangerous, venomous and vile.
Democrats can complain and second guess and criticize as much as they want this year but the hard reality is that we do not have the luxury of indifference or discouragement.
For Democrats, there is no choice.
This Republican assault cannot be ignored, minimized or accommodated.
They have to be stopped.
Almost all the discussions of the “enthusiasm gap” in recent weeks have tended to define the problem as the low level of enthusiasm among Democrats – a perspective that tends to suggest that “disappointment” with Obama is probably the major cause. From this perspective the most direct response would appear to be for Democratic strategists to try to challenge and refute this perception – to argue, in effect, that “Obama is really better than many Democrats seem to think he is”.
But, in fact, Democratic enthusiasm only appears as dramatically low as it does in this non-presidential election year (when turnout is far below election years in any case) because it is being compared with the unusually high level of Republican enthusiasm. This alternate way of viewing the issue leads to a very different set of conclusions about the strategy Democrats should use to combat the problem.
The key fact is that Republicans and conservatives do not see this race as anything like a normal off-year election. Instead, it is for them a decisive battle in a life-or-death existential struggle — a no-holds-barred campaign to bring down Obama and reverse the 2008 election. It is a vision of politics as a bitter ideological and social war and conservatives as an army on the march with a vast overarching objective — to “take back our country” from the forces that have literally stolen it from its rightful owners.
At the heart of the current conservative/Republican coalition is a powerfully energized conservative social movement – one with very strong and widely shared military and paramilitary overtones. This generates a high level of what in military terms is called “morale” – a powerful mixture of passion, commitment, élan, fighting spirit, camaraderie and group cohesion.
Among the core conservative activists themselves this high level of morale has developed in the course of work and collaboration. During the last year and a half friendships were formed, afternoons and weekends were spent working together on projects, successes and failures were shared, all of which built team spirit, optimism and a shared vision of heroic struggle against a uniquely evil, dedicated foe. This energy and enthusiasm was then propagated out into the comment threads of conservative blogs, the discussion groups on Tea Party websites and through e-mail chain letters passed virally among families and social circles. This process has established and disseminated an essentially warlike and combative tone to the 2010 Republican campaign that easily meshes with the similarly combative programming of Fox news and talk radio. The resulting mixture has then been transmitted again and again to a large portion of the Republican electorate.
There is simply nothing comparable to this psychology on the Democratic side. Large numbers of the voters who comprised the Obama coalition in 2008 simply do not see the 2010 elections as a vast do-or-die battle between two contending political armies struggling for control of the country and the future of America. They see it as a conventional off-year election where a patchwork variety of opposing candidates with different philosophies compete for office. As a result they simply do not have the high morale and fighting spirit of conservatives and Republicans. The broad and unifying “yes we can” spirit that was created during the 2008 campaign dissipated soon after the election. The massive Obama for America online organization sharply narrowed its focus to building support for specific elements of Obama’s agenda while other progressives redirected their efforts to promoting specific progressive issues and causes – a focus that frequently brought them into conflict with the administration. Both of these trends substantially diluted and dampened the broad “yes we can” unity and enthusiasm of the 2008 campaign.
The inevitable result was lowered morale, a literal demoralization of the Democratic base that is expressed in three distinct narratives
• That Obama has been a disappointment to his supporters and that not bothering to vote is therefore a logical reaction.
• That the Democratic candidate in a particular district is insufficiently progressive or otherwise unappealing and that not voting for him or her is therefore a reasonable reaction.
• That Washington politics is hopeless and that there is consequently no reason to participate in a useless exercise.
All of these reactions reflect a shared mental model of 2010 as a typical election and not a major and coordinated conservative assault on Democrats in a bitter ideological war. It is this notion of “2010 as just a normal election” that Democratic strategy must first and foremost challenge.
In recent days an important discussion has emerged among progressives about the proper strategy for the progressive movement. As Bill Scher, the Online Campaign Manager of the Campaign for America’s Future described it:
“The progressive community is somewhat divided between the folks who think Obama is doing everything he can against a broken political system and the folks that think he’s not doing enough, and that we need an independent force to push him…Are we the wingman of the Obama Administration or an outside pressure force?”
This question was expected to generate a spirited debate among progressives at the America’s Future Now conference held in Washington this week but, interestingly, the anticipated conflict did not materialize. Instead, there was a widespread consensus that – regardless of their specific evaluation of Obama – progressives were agreed on the need to build an independent movement capable of both supporting or challenging the administration as any particular case required.
As AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka put it, progressives need to be a “troublesome ally” of Obama. Campaign for America’s future co-director Robert Borosage described it as being willing to go “off the reservation” and organize independently.
The general agreement on the urgent need to build a vastly strengthened, independent progressive movement –regardless of one’s precise view of the Obama administration – reflected an extremely wide general consensus among progressive bloggers, organizational leaders and grass-roots activists across the county. Even progressives who are very firm and enthusiastic supporters of Obama did not see support for an enhanced, independent progressive movement as representing a conflict with their generally positive assessment of the Administration.
Yet, although this support for an independent progressive movement would appear to represent a distancing of progressives from Obama, in two critical respects the movement remains excessively defined — and limited — by the way it relates to him and his administration. The progressive discussion is based on two underlying assumptions– both of which need to be re-examined:
The first assumption is that, in some sense, it is the weaknesses or failures of the Obama administration that have created the urgent need for progressives to build an independent progressive movement. In many commentaries a substantial list of disappointments or compromises by the Administration are offered as the primary evidence that an independent movement is necessary.
There are two problems with this way of framing the issue. First, taken to its logical conclusion, this kind of argument suggests that an independent progressive movement might in some circumstances actually be unnecessary – if Obama had just kept a sufficient number of his campaign promises, progressives would be able to wholeheartedly support him and an independent progressive movement would not be required. Second, it leads both Obama and progressives to become perceived and defined as failures – Obama for not living up to his campaign rhetoric and progressives for not being able to make him do so.
The second assumption is that the agenda of the progressive movement will continue to be defined primarily in relation to Obama’s political and legislative objectives. The progressive position will represent a challenge from the left, but it will still be framed as a response to the administration’s initiatives rather than presented on its own terms and in relation to its own long-range objectives.
This is too narrow an agenda for an independent mass movement – a social movement needs a set of objectives larger than the goals and initiatives of any single administration.
These two assumptions will impede and limit the effectiveness of the effort to build an independent progressive movement. They need to be reconsidered and revised.
Although they offered significant positive signs, the elections this Tuesday were not in any way a decisive victory for Democrats. What they did represent, however, was a very powerful and substantial setback for the bitter extremist campaign that was launched against the Dems more than a year ago.
Some fierce opponents of Obama and the Democrats were elected in Republican primaries on Tuesday and a group of moderate Republicans fell to challengers from the right even as progressive Dems had a good night and Dems won the single partisan election. But something deeper was also going on. Years from now these primary elections may very likely be seen as the moment when the furious advance of a bitter and determined conservative political assault reached its limit and ground to a halt. This Tuesday was the day when the arrogant claims that the vast majority of Americans were so ferociously and bitterly opposed to the Democratic agenda that they would swamp the political system with their fury were revealed to be hollow. It was the day that the social movement that Republicans had described as unstoppable found itself stopped and the citizen army that conservatives declared invincible encountered opposition that it could not overcome.
Let us be very clear. Millions of Americans sincerely believe that health care reform and the entire Obama agenda is profoundly misguided and they have every right to their view. They have a right to insist on that limits to government are more important than needed social legislation, that balancing the budget is more important than creating jobs and to vote and speak in support of their beliefs.
But what Democrats have faced for the last year has not been a normal political conflict, but rather an assault modeled on a military campaign — an attack conducted in the language and spirit of warfare. The defeat of the Health Care Reform bill was to be – in Jim DeMint’s memorable phrase – “Obama’s Waterloo.” The fierce conservative resistance to his plan would resonate with Americans like a modern-day version of the Alamo, or the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and lead to a stunning, catastrophic defeat that would not produce a renewed and sincere search for compromise but rather a body blow to the democrats that would break Obama’s spirit and doom his agenda.
The entire Republican strategy of the last year has been based on inflaming the passions and mobilizing the energy of the base and yet, as E.J. Dionne noted this morning, “what we didn’t see is a huge Republican surge that the “enthusiasm gap” registered in many of the polls might have suggested.”
Let’s face it. If the demented hysterics of the last year have not succeeded in creating a mobilized, energized “new” conservative electorate rising up against Obama and the Dems, there is little reason to think that anything that will happen between now and November will suddenly do the trick.
The Republicans needed the electoral equivalent of the windmill scene in Frankenstein yesterday– and they didn’t get it. As Sherlock Homes would have put it, it was “the dog that did not bark”.
Writing in a Washington Post op-ed he says:
On the one hand:
Most important, tea partiers must remain distinct from both political parties. The GOP would like nothing better than to co-opt the movement and control the independent conservatives who are its members.
…But we must keep in mind that perhaps the single biggest mistake of the conservative movement was becoming an appendage of the Republican Party.
… Remember that most conservative leaders and organizations in Washington were silent when George W. Bush and congressional Republicans were expanding government at a record-breaking pace.
Even today, too many conservatives are willing to overlook the fact that the GOP’s leaders in Congress, Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner, were willing accomplices of Bush’s spending policies and that Mitt Romney was for Obamacare before Obama was.
But on the other hand:
… If conservatives fall into the third-party trap, they will split the right-of-center vote, thereby guaranteeing the left’s control of America for at least another generation. The opportunity of a lifetime will have been wasted.
The tea party electoral strategy should be simple and consistent: We must run principled conservatives in the primaries and then throw our support behind the most conservative major-party candidates in the general election.
OK. Everybody got that? Like the man says, it’s “simple and consistent”
“Don’t become an appendage” to the Republican Party
“Remain distinct” from the Republican Party
“Don’t allow [The Republican Party] to co-op you”
Don’t forget their many betrayals
…but, oh yes, vote for them – all of them — in November anyway
It’s sure lucky that Viguerie clearly labeled this strategy the “simple and consistent” one. I’d hate to see what the inconsistent one looks like.
