As the stories about the Bush family’s move to a new house in an upscale neighborhood in Dallas, Texas begin to fade from the headlines, there is one fact that should not be allowed to pass without mention. It’s now increasingly clear that the Bush family is going to simply dump and abandon the so-called “ranch” in Crawford. No keeping it around for sentiment’s sake, not even for occasional week-end escapes from the big city. Nope, they are just going to sell it off and walk away.
But, wait a minute. Didn’t the hard-working, rural values embodied in that “ranch” play a critical part in shaping Bush’s character? That’s certainly what the video shown at the 2000 Republican convention said. Weren’t all those afternoons Bush spent “clearing brush” at the “ranch” the dramatic visible evidence of his continuing authenticity and spiritual bond with the “real” America even while in office? That’s certainly the spin Bush’s press people trotted out again and again during the course of his presidency. Remember all those press events with photographers dutifully snapping the pictures of Bush wiping his forehead with his work gloves to underscore his continuing ties to the rich Texas land and to all sons of toil?
But now we’re all supposed to just quietly accept that – oh yeah – it was actually all just a complete fraud and a scam. Progressive journalists did point out from the very beginning that the so-called “ranch” had been purchased in 1999, right before the Bush campaign got started and therefore had absolutely no role in shaping Bush’s character. They also noted that there were just 4 or 5 lonely looking cows around, far too few to have any practical or commercial function. Without any real cattle ranching or agriculture actually being practiced, there was really no reason to ever clear away any brush. Some independent journalists even had the temerity to note that the bales of straw lying around so authentically (presumably to feed the nonexistent herds of cattle) were artfully placed to conceal the condensers for the central air conditioning system.
As an article in the Texas Observer noted:

In 1999, using profits from the sale of the Texas Rangers, Bush purchased 1,583 acres near Waco, Texas, that he calls a ranch, despite the fact that it lacks any livestock other than four or five cows, hardly enough for a stampede or a cattle drive. In fact, according to Revolution of Hope, the 2007 autobiography of Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, Bush is a “windshield cowboy,” more comfortable roaming the prairie by Mustang than by mustang, and terrified of horses.

Most Americans, however, never got a hint of all this. For eight years the American mainstream media dutifully went along with the fraud, writing fawning captions for picture after picture of Bush with the jeans and work gloves and the sunset in the distance. No one in the official press corps had the guts to put down their foot and say plainly:

This is total bullshit. This so-called “ranch” is nothing but a stage-set designed for photo-ops. It’s no more authentic than the phony villages and collective farms to which the Soviets used to take western observers, to show them the happy, satisfied Soviet workers. We are being treated like sheep, morons and children and we’re all going along with it without a peep.

Yes, yes. I know. I did get the memo. The Obama approach is look forward and not back. But that memo applies to how Democrats should treat ordinary folks and their elected representatives. There’s nothing in the memo about giving the mainstream media a free pass for acting like PR auxiliaries to Karl Rove.
And it’s important because the Republican PR machine will be back before we even turn around. In 2010 there will be new “ranches” and fabricated biographies and Hollywood stage sets designed to portray Republicans as “real folks” and “sharing the values” of the “real America”.
But this time Democrats should be ready. We should issue a not- so- polite warning. People in the media who are too lazy, weak or submissive to stand up and challenge cynical PR manipulation when its shoved in their faces should be prepared to be treated by Democrats with the contempt and condescension that they will so very richly deserve. Allowing oneself to be manipulated by the powerful hasn’t somehow become OK in the internet age, just because a degree in journalism costs more than it used to and the private job market sucks. There used to be something called journalistic integrity. There used to be something called shame.

It’s no secret that the groups that compose the Democratic coalition have dramatically different perspectives on many issues. But on one key topic they do agree. Democrats – whether in the Obama administration, Congress or the nation – recognize that they face an unparalleled set of strategic challenges today. As a result, they urgently need to develop more productive ways to debate political strategy within the Democratic coalition.
The challenge is to figure out how to conduct intra-Democratic debates in a way that doesn’t end up in a shouting match but rather clarifies the points of contention and achieves the maximum degree of collaboration and cooperation. Productive debates between Democrats should accomplish three objectives (1) identify the areas of agreement and common action (2) identify the issues that can be clarified or settled with data and (3) agree on ways to work together in a spirit of mutual respect in areas where there are fundamental disagreements on matters of principle.
Today, debates among Dems often accomplish none of these goals. Instead, the participants end up talking across purposes and conclude in frustrated mutual incomprehension.
There is one basic, underlying problem that is often at the root of this failure. Debates among Dems frequently do not distinguish disagreements over political principles from disagreements over political strategy. The result is arguments that do not genuinely engage with each other in a meaningful way.
The controversy over Rick Warren provides a good example:
On the one hand, opponents of Warren’s participation in the inauguration tend to argue that his invitation is unacceptable as a matter of fundamental political principle. One of the most widely read expressions of this point of view was a Washington Post commentary by the usually rather conservative Richard Cohen:

…what we do not hold in common [with Warren] is the categorization of a civil rights issue — the rights of gays to be treated equally — as some sort of cranky cultural difference. For that we need moral leadership, which, on this occasion, Obama has failed to provide.

For many of these critics, Obama’s choice represents a betrayal – a totally unprincipled betrayal — of the people who supported him. Here is playwright Harvey Fierstein, for example, writing in the Huffington Post.

President Elect Obama, your victory was made possible in no small part to the votes and wallets of the gay and lesbian community along with our supporters. Turning your back on us does not make you more mainstream American. It just makes you a coward.

In contrast, many of the most widely read defenses of Obama’s choice — commentaries by Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic and singer Melissa Etheridge, for example — do not actually disagree at all about the basic political principle involved – they fully support the right to gay marriage. Instead, their arguments in favor of allowing Warren to participate in the inauguration are based entirely on considerations of political strategy.
Here is Sullivan:

In our hurt, we may be pushing away from a real opportunity to engage and win hearts and minds… I think Obama is different. I think the earnestness and sincerity of his campaign, and its generational force, have given us a chance for something new, and I fear that in responding too viscerally to the Warren choice, we may be throwing something very valuable away far too prematurely

And here is Etheridge:

Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don’t hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands.

Each side does briefly acknowledge that the other side is arguing on fundamentally different grounds, but only in a one or two sentence throw-away mention that is quickly dismissed. Here is Cohen:

I can understand Obama’s desire to embrace constituencies that have rejected him. Evangelicals are in that category and Warren is an important evangelical leader… [Obama says we can] “focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans”. Sounds nice. But what we do not “hold in common” is the dehumanization of homosexuals. What we do not hold in common is the belief that gays are perverts who have chosen their sexual orientation on some sort of whim…

And here is Fierstein:

He can call the placing of a hate monger like Rick Warren on the world dais political healing or inclusiveness or any other nicety he’d like, but I call it pandering to the lowest instinct of the worst kind of politics.

In similar fashion, the supporters of Obama’s choice generally begin by saying something along the lines of …“I do deeply and sincerely understand the anger and frustration that the GLBT community is feeling right now”…but this is quickly followed by a “But at the same time…” followed by a discussion of political strategy.
The result is a “debate” in which neither side really “debates” the other. Neither ever directly analyzes and critically evaluates the central arguments the other is offering on its own terms. The two points of view sail passed each other with barely any contact. It is, as the cliché says, like a “dialog of the deaf.”
And the problem will only get worse. In the coming period debates of this kind will multiply because many elements of Democratic coalition – – peace advocates, Latinos, young Blacks, Women, Union members — can all correctly claim that a fundamental political principle underlies their demands and that they provided significant support for Obama and therefore deserve his support in return.
What the Democrats need is a common, coherent framework for discussing these issues – a way of distinguishing arguments over the moral and political principles underlying an issue from the choice of the appropriate political strategy.

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A recent headline in Politico may have caught your attention – “Obama, team lawyered up for inquiries.” Although a sub-head in smaller type clarifies that Obama and his team “don’t appear to be investigation targets” the use of the term “lawyered up” is so strongly associated with wise-guy mafia types and urban street criminals that it’s hard to avoid the connotations of guilt and criminality. After all, “lawyering up” is what Tony Soprano tells his wiseguys to do when they are arrested and what Detective Logan on Law and Order sneers as he leaves the interrogation room (“damn it, the little punk “lawyered up” before I could grill him”) . Professional journalists – particularly if they are the individuals whose specific task is to write all the headlines and are thus responsible for establishing a consistent tone – would generally tend to avoid a term like this when they are seeking to be objective.
Of course, this is just one headline, and might be no more than an exception, but it reminded me of something that had been lurking in the back of my mind – not about Obama per se, but about Politico’s headlines that dealt with Democrats and Republicans in the days immediately after the election. While Politico had a number of headlines that used terms reflecting the disaster the elections represented for the Republican party (“dire straits”, “train wreck” “chaos” “back to square one”) they also had a number of news headlines that seemed to be providing advice rather than reporting facts (e.g. “GOP challenge: recruit outside the box”, “GOP must tone down rhetoric to woo Latinos”) Democrats, in contrast, received no similar helpful recommendations.
Again, this hardly seemed a major issue. But it made me curious enough to do a little digging. Take a look at the following group of Politico headlines from the month of December with the words “Dems” or “Democrats” in them and contrast them with headlines using the words “Republicans” or “GOP”
(Note: I’ve left out the headlines that are indeed actually neutral or that attribute words to other people e.g. “Pelosi says XYZ”. This longer list is given down at the bottom of the post)
Here are the headlines that suggest some attitude about the Democrats:
Intraparty tensions could cleave Dems
Dems embrace dynasty politics
Dems rake cash from business
Dems should be nervous about next four years
Now democrats too, must own the war
Did Democrats peak too early?
Democrats smell blood in Florida
Dems scramble to replace Salazar
Now here are the headlines that suggest an attitude about Republicans:
GOP – don’t blame us, blame UAW
GOP 5.0 – what’s next for Lincoln’s party?
GOP hopes rise, Dems hit rough patch
GOP gushes over Blagojevich arrest
GOP hopes Holder makes Dems squirm
The great (GOP) Depression
It’s hard not to notice that every single headline that communicates an attitude about the Dems is essentially negative – either explicitly or through the use of negative terms like “smell blood”, “rake cash”, “embrace dynasty politics” and “scramble to replace”
The headlines about the Republicans, on the other hand, are, with one exception, either explicitly positive or make positive contrasts between them and the Democrats. Republicans are metaphorically identified with state of the art computer programs and the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, Democrats with money-grubbers “raking in cash” and sharks in a feeding frenzy.
I’ve put the entire list of Politico’s December headlines that mention either party at the bottom of this post so you can see that the remaining headlines about the two parties during the month are either neutral or quotations.
OK now, let’s be clear. Some newspapers — like the New York Post or Daily News — very overtly editorialize in their news headlines. It’s actually a major part of their appeal. But there is something a little disturbing about a more subtle partisan tilt being inserted into headlines that will sail by most people almost completely unnoticed. It imparts a subliminal bias into the reporting of which the reader is not consciously aware.
It would be nice if Politico would clarify their editorial policy regarding their headlines. But maybe they won’t. Who knows, they might even “lawyer up” in case the Dems start “smelling blood.” Apparently that’s the way those guys talk over there.

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As Democrats look ahead to the challenges that await the Obama administration, one step they should take right away is to completely set aside any further discussion over whether or not the thing that the Bush administration’s PR team named a“ surge” either succeeded or failed. There is, in fact, no specific military strategy that is called a “surge” or that can meaningfully be described as “succeeding”, “failing” or “offering lessons for future conflicts.” Lumped together inside the term “surge” – which is essentially a public relations term and not a military term — are two specific military operations and two distinct military strategies that were actually employed in Iraq in the period from 2007-2008. It is only by looking at those actual operations and strategies that Democrats can draw any lessons for the future.
To begin with, neither of the two actions most directly related to the common-sense meaning of the word “surge” — the increase in the number of troops in 2007 and their deployment to empty houses in central urban locations rather than remote bases – can be properly defined as “military strategies”. They are both specific military operations conducted within the framework of some larger military strategy. As a result, their success, failure or ultimate value can only be determined in relation to that larger strategy
The two broader military strategies that were actually employed during the “surge” were (1) a classic military strategy that the Romans called “divide et impera” (divide and rule) and which was quite frequently employed by the later colonial empires of Spain and Britain and (2) a very specific military doctrine for conducting counterinsurgency warfare – a doctrine developed in 2006 and codified in the military manual FM-3-24- The US Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
The strategy of “divide et impera” — the notion of funding and arming one or several competing groups within a country and balancing them against each other in order to maintain social order — can be found in Julius Caesar’s accounts of his conquest of Gaul and Hernan Cortez’s account of the conquest of Mexico. It reappears frequently in the history of the later Spanish, French and British empires. The sight of an American general in 2007 simultaneously overseeing the funding and support of both the Shia government of Nouri al Maliki and the Sunni “Awakening Councils (while also honoring a tacit truce with the Shia nationalist forces of Muqtada al-Sadr) in order to control a sectarian civil war fits perfectly well within the framework of this long strategic tradition.
At the present time there is little if any serious opposition among Americans to the use of such divide et impera tactics in Iraq or Afghanistan if they can provide viable alternatives to a prolonged, high-casualty anti-guerilla campaign such as the Soviets faced in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. But history shows that these kinds of opportunistic alliances buy only very temporary loyalty. As a July 11, 2008 US News and World report noted, “Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed by the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns on U.S. Troops”

… two of the most dangerous players [in Afghanistan] are violent Afghan Islamists named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, according to U.S. officials. In recent weeks, Hekmatyar has called upon Pakistani militants to attack U.S. targets, while the Haqqani network is blamed for three large vehicle bombings, along with the attempted assassination of Karzai in April.
Ironically, these two warlords—currently at the top of America’s list of most wanted men in Afghanistan—were once among America’s most valued allies. In the 1980s, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to help them battle the Soviet Army during its occupation of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, then widely considered by Washington to be a reliable anti-Soviet rebel, was even flown to the United States by the CIA in 1985.

Providing funds and support to local tribal chieftains and warlords is a powerfully attractive alternative to having US troops become bogged down in bitter anti-guerilla warfare, but Democrats should always remember that “divide and rule” strategies also have to be guided by some viable longer term plan and ultimate exit strategy.

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Media Matters’ Jamison Foser’s has a extremely important piece on the outrageous way in which the media commentary and coverage of the Blagojevich scandal tends to imply – without any evidence – that Barack Obama may have done something wrong. As he says:

“Most telling is the tendency of many journalists to speculate that the Blagojevich scandal may ensnare Obama without acknowledging that the complaint against Blagojevich contained absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing by Obama, or that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has said, “I should make clear, the complaint makes no allegations about the president-elect whatsoever, his conduct.”
…Even worse than ignoring Fitzgerald’s exculpatory comments, Time actually suggested they are bad news for Obama:
“On more than one occasion during his stunning press conference on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald bluntly said he has found no evidence of wrongdoing by President-elect Barack Obama in the tangled, tawdry scheme that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly cooked up to sell Obama’s now vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But for politicians, it’s never good news when a top-notch prosecutor has to go out of his way to distance them from a front-page scandal.”
“Got that? Fitzgerald said there’s no evidence Obama did anything wrong. Bad news for Obama!

Foser then continues:

“…Perhaps the most striking aspect of the media’s attempts to link Obama to the Blagojevich scandal has been the volume of news reports that are purely speculative — and not only speculative, but vaguely speculative. That is, they don’t even consist of conjecture about specific potential wrong doing. They simply consist of completely baseless speculation that Obama might in some way become caught up in the investigation at some point in the future …“Associated Press reporter Liz Sidoti set the standard for pointlessly speculative news reports with an “analysis” piece declaring that “President-elect Barack Obama hasn’t even stepped into office and already a scandal is threatening to dog him.” In the very next sentence, Sidoti had to admit that “Obama isn’t accused of anything” — but that didn’t stop her from continuing to offer ominous warnings that Obama could be implicated in the scandal, interspersed with concessions that he, you know … isn’t.”

The major problem is not that the reporters are deliberately promoting Republican talking points. Rather it is that skilled (and, in fact, even utterly mediocre) PR operatives can almost effortlessly manipulate the coverage of a “scandal” by understanding the medias’ three-step process.

1. During the first 24-72 hours of a breaking story reporters and analysts are in a desperate life or death competition to inflate the importance of a “scandal” and make it as big as story as possible. (After all, nobody gets a Pulitzer or a raise for a story titled “XYZ scandal of limited importance”). Conversely, there is no penalty or downside cost to reporters and analysts for engaging in baseless speculation (In fact, if salaries were actually reduced based on the number of a reporter or analysts’ idle speculations that turned out to be groundless, the practice would quickly disappear).
2. Once the “story” is established as “news”, dramatic statements by leading Republicans or simply growing media or internet discussion of the “story” become themselves officially more “News” – justifying another set of headlines and TV teasers saying “back in a moment with new information on this breaking story.”
3. After the “big news” phase has passed, there is no tradition in American journalism or other effective pressure on journalists that will lead them to produce follow-up stories that correct the false impressions generated during the initial frenzy. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a follow-up news story – in the same front page position and the same headline size as the original stories that says, for example, “Obama emerges unscathed from Blagojevich affair – no evidence of personal involvement found”. The media simply do not consider themselves obligated or responsible for producing news stories like this in the aftermath of a media feeding frenzy. Correcting a false impression is not a “big news” story like the original misleading version.

The result of these three factors is a systematic, inherent bias that even the most clumsy partisan PR operatives can manipulate to their advantage.

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Oh well, it eventually had to happen.
For weeks now the mainstream media has been absolutely desperate to start writing the typical political stories about conflict between a newly elected Democratic president and his liberal-progressive supporters. For mainstream commentators, it’s an absolute zero-effort, no-brainer kind of story – kind of like profiles of Olympic athletes triumphing over early adversity or good Samaritans helping the needy around Christmas. The stories damn-near leap out of the keyboard and write themselves.
But this year liberals and progressive Democrats have refused to play along. Even the people the mainstream media have always trusted to give them combative, fiery quotes – Kos, Chris Bowers, the gang at Campaign for America’s Future – none of them have given reporters’ the red-meat clichés they were looking for.
To be sure, progressives have been critical of some Obama appointments – strongly and passionately so in some cases. But from the pages of The Nation to Daily Kos, Open Left and Huffpo they have consistently and carefully qualified their disagreements – noting that they were not attacking Obama’s motives or rejecting his attempts to put together an administration that could both maintain the support of a stable majority coalition and also confront the unusually difficult economic and military problems the country was confronting.
Don’t take my word for it. Go ahead and check the major writers for The Nation, Kos, Open Left, Talking Points Memo, the Campaign for America’s Future website. Sure, if you go out and cherry-pick the whole bloody internet you can find progressive bloggers and even more people in the comments threads who have thrown verbal hand-grenades, but the strong majority of the major liberal and progressive strategists have been consistently careful and measured in their commentary.
In fact, in recent weeks it has actually been possible to see the outlines of a fundamental and profoundly exciting change in Democratic thinking beginning to emerge. In the past, both centrist and liberal-progressive Democrats frequently saw each other as the chief problem and insisted that the Democratic Party could never succeed until one or the other was subordinated or even purged from the party. Disagreements over policies and strategy were redefined as proof of the other sides’ basic “corruption” or “myopic political stupidity”.
In the last few weeks, in contrast, both centrist and liberal-progressive Democrats have been converging on a new conceptual framework. There is increasing hope and consensus that the Democratic Party actually has the potential to create a broad long-term center-left majority coalition – one that that might be able to maintain a stable majority of 55 or even 60% of the electorate. If you read the recent discussions in the liberal-progressive world carefully, the argument is more and more over what the best strategies are for accomplishing this – For example, how far is it actually necessary to move toward the center on various issues to retain majority support? Is it better to try to move quickly to enact important legislation or should Obama attempt to gradually consolidate support before launching certain initiatives? What does the public really want some specific public policy to be?
These are difficult questions and they will inescapably generate powerful and emotional arguments. But these debates are ultimately arguments over political strategy – arguments that can be successfully conducted inside a broad coalition that is sufficiently in agreement on basic Democratic values and policies to maintain a cohesive political identity.
This is a profound sea-change in Democratic thinking and so it’s not surprising that it has now generated a counter-reaction.
On the one hand, for conservatives and Republicans, Democratic unity along these lines is the ultimate nightmare scenario. So it is not surprising that conservative commentators like Jonah Goldberg, Fred Barnes and a gaggle of others are inventing insults, betrayals and intra-party battles with a flair for fantasy that rivals the best of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings (Media Matters has the details here).

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For many years, beginning in the Reagan era, the most compelling conservative anti-government slogan was Ronald Reagan’s common-sense statement – “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
It was a powerfully compelling statement and one so clear as to be entirely self-evident, both as a practical truth and as a metaphor for all forms of government activity.
Well, the indispensible Paul Krugman has now penned a new and equally compelling slogan and aphorism for all Democrats who recognize the need for sensible regulation.
Writing in The New York Review of Books, he says:

…the basic principle should be clear: anything that has to be rescued during a financial crisis, because it plays an essential role in the financial mechanism, should be regulated when there isn’t a crisis so that it doesn’t take excessive risks.

This is a remarkable expression of economic common sense, one with which the vast majority of the American electorate can effortlessly agree. For the purposes of everyday political debate, however, the concept can actually be made even simpler and more general:

If some firm or institution needs the American taxpayer to bail it out when there is a major crisis, then it needs ongoing financial regulation by the American taxpayer’s representatives when there’s not a major crisis.

These notions are just as compelling, logical and as self evident as Ronald Reagan’s classic remark. Opponents of sensible regulation will mumble frantically about the “invisible hand”, “automatic equilibrium” and “the market as decentralized information processing system,” but Democrats can just calmly repeat these slogans over and over again as utterly obvious, common sense, and basically self-evident truths.
(The slogans are, in fact, quite flexible. You can croak them out sardonically like Poe’s Raven saying “nevermore “or get a group of kids to chant them like team spirit day cheers for the high school football team.)
But do be prepared. When the self-evident nature of these arguments begin to overcome all rational objections, defenders of deregulation will suddenly whip out sheets of graph paper and begin furiously drawing a variety of curved lines while simultaneously reciting incantations of the form “in an ideal free market all consumers receive exactly the goods and services they desire” and “in an ideal free market all producers receive exactly the compensation they deserve”
Linguistically speaking, these incantations most closely resemble the vespers liturgy used in many European monasteries in the late Middle Ages and the drawings appear remarkably similar to the prehistoric Nasca lines on the Pacific coast of Peru. But both, in fact, are actually verbal and graphic representations of mathematical equations whose essential purpose is to deflect all arguments based on common sense.
Fortunately, as this is the Christmas season, there is a very educational game based on these notions that can be played at holiday parties or to entertain precocious children. The game is to go through all the classic conservative economics texts like Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, Jude Wanniski’s The Way the World Works and so on replacing every instance of the phrase “the free market” with the words “Santa Claus”.
The game consists in seeing how many pages, chapters and even entire volumes one can review before finding sentences that do not make exactly as much sense after the alteration as they did before (e.g. “Santa Claus insures that everybody gets exactly what they want.” “Santa Claus insures that everybody receives exactly what they deserve”). Some people have gone through thousands of pages this way without ever encountering any difficulty.
It’s great fun, trust me. It’s rather like playing Mad Libs, only funnier.
And best of all, when you’re done you can take the books you’ve annotated, wrap them in Christmas paper and give them as gifts to any of your acquaintances who still do not accept the need for reasonable regulation of business and the financial sector.
And, hey, don’t forget to add Paul Krugman’s delicious new slogan on your Christmas card.

The rapidly mushrooming debate about the relationship between the Obama administration and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party suffers from an unnecessary lack of clarity because many of the commentators do not make a clear distinction between two very distinct ways of visualizing the issue.
The first, which might be called “the battle for the President’s soul” perspective, visualizes progressives and centrists or conservatives as engaged in a permanent tug of war to win the President’s support for their agenda. In this perspective, each cabinet appointment and each policy decision the President makes represents one more episode in a perpetual struggle to pull, pressure or cajole the President toward progressive approaches and solutions
For progressive Democrats who entered politics during and after the Clinton administration, this way of thinking about a new administration seems entirely natural and indeed almost completely self-evident. By late 1980’s most progressive movements had become increasingly Washington-focused and political campaign-oriented, in contrast to previous eras of independent progressive grass-roots organizing and mobilization. For many younger progressives, working for political candidates and campaigns was actually their sole form of progressive activity. As such, it made sense for them to feel that a victorious campaign naturally ought to deliver a very clear and explicit ideological “payoff” to progressives after the election, one properly proportionate to the effort they invested during the campaign and the degree of their success.
But during past eras of major progressive social movements – the trade union movement of the 1930’s and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s — there was a very different perspective. It could be called a “natural division of labor” point of view. A Democratic President was basically assumed to be a ruthlessly pragmatic centrist who would make all his moves and choices based on a very cold political calculus of what was necessary for his own success and survival. He might have private sympathy for some progressive point of view but there was generally no expectation among social movement progressives that he would “go out on a limb” for progressives out of a personal moral commitment to some social ideal. As a result, the most fundamental assumption of progressive political strategy was always the need to build a completely independent grass roots social movement, one that was powerful enough to make it politically expedient or simply unavoidable for the political system to accede to the movement’s demands.
In a widely read 1966 essay, “Non-violent Direct Action“, historian and civil-rights activist Howard Zinn clearly expressed this view:

“.What the civil rights movement has revealed is that it is necessary for people concerned with liberty, even if they live in an approximately democratic state, to create a political power which resides outside the regular political establishment. While outside, removed from the enticements of office and close to those sources of human distress which created it, this power can use a thousand different devices to persuade and pressure the official structure into recognizing its needs.”

This same traditional progressive movement view was recently restated in a Nation magazine editorial by Katrina Vanden Heuvel.

…it’s worth remembering another template for governing. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was compelled to become a bolder and, yes, more progressive President (if progressive means ensuring that the actual conditions of peoples’ lives improve through government acts) as a result of the strategically placed mobilization and pressure of organized movements.
That history makes me think that this is the moment for progressives to avoid falling into either of two extremes –reflexively defensive or reflexively critical. We’d be wiser and more effective if we followed the advice of one of The Nation’s valued editorial board members who shared thoughts with the Board at our meeting last Friday, November 21.
It will take large scale, organized movements to win transformative change. There was no civil rights legislation without the [civil rights] movement, no New Deal without the unions and the unemployed councils, no end to slavery without the abolitionists. In our era, this will need to play out at two levels: district-by-district and state-by-state organizing to get us to the 218 and sixty votes necessary to pass any major legislation; and the movement energy that can create public will, a new narrative and move the elites in DC to shift from orthodoxy. The energy in the country needs to be converted into real organization…
We need to be able to play inside and outside politics at the same time. I think this will be challenging for those of us schooled in the habits of pure opposition and protest. We need to make an effort to engage the new Administration and Congress constructively, even as we push without apology for solutions at a scale necessary.

The choice between this “natural division of labor” social movement perspective and the “battle for the President’s soul” perspective is important because the choice of the conceptual framework one uses has a number of very large consequences.

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