Joe Klein speaks the truth

This quote, via Sullivan, says exactly what I've been saying here for some time:

The denizens of the left blogosphere consider themselves the Democratic Party's base. But they are not. For Democrats, as opposed to Republicans, the wing is not the base; the legions of loyal African Americans, union members, Jews, women and Latinos are. In the end, the sillier left-village practitioners are stoking the same populist exaggeration—the idea that Washington is controlled by crooks and sellouts—that conservative strategists like Bill Kristol believe will bring the Republicans back to power. The perversity of this is beyond comprehension.

I think it's impossible to understate just how pernicious this sort of idea can be to any sort of progressive change. I'll be the first to insist that the system has problems, and doing away with Senate holds and reforming the filibuster are essential to a functioning democracy. But practically all political reform is built around the hope for change. What the leftbloggers seem not to realize is that the right's tone is their tone for a reason: they don't want to change anything! But presumably left-leaning activists do, which makes the whole situation puzzling. If you want to, you know, change things, you have to project an aura of infectious optimism, an excitement about reform and a rock-solid belief that, even if it takes a long time, you can make change happen. There are many big targets that need real reform: the Pentagon, health insurance, how we use energy. Obama has so far won a small but significant victory over the first and a (presumptive) big victory over the second. That he didn't accomplish every single thing that can be done should merely be a call for more action in the future.

I ordinarily ignore the big bloggers on the left. It's true that Greenwald, Kos and the rest of them occasionally have good insights, but I just can't stand the stench of ideology that comes from those places. The Democratic Party is blessedly free of identity politics compared to the Republicans, but perhaps the one exception is the big left blogs that seem to mostly exist to identify who's a good liberal and who's not, and to devise continual litmus tests to that effect. I suspect that these activist types and much of the right are driven fundamentally by feelings of powerlessness, that all these folks have internalized that message, and that this drives visions of a Washington run by crooks and thieves and sellouts--if you feel like you are continually getting the shaft, how could you feel otherwise? Nevertheless, if the left's strategy for acquiring power is, as it seems to be, to behave erratically, emotionally and inconsistently in the hopes that Democrats are going to tremble in fear before them, they need to rethink things. At best, this behavior will merely make Democrats ignore the activist base on the left, and all of a sudden we'll have two Tea Party movements. To the extent that this is about "face", I've always felt that the ability to swallow one's pride is a very underrated political skill.

The End of Common Musical Culture

Ta-Nehisi Coates mourns it:

I'm not much for nostalgia, but one of the things that sucks about getting old (at least for me) is an end to a common musical culture. I think I have, like, one friend that's waiting to hear what TV On The Radio is going to next. But for the most part it's an individual experience. We're all our own DJ now. For better or worse.

Well, it's not just music. It's television and movies and books too. And it's mostly happening due to social trends that have been in the making for the last seventy-five years at least. At one point, music was almost entirely a communal experience. But decades of advances in making music more portable has made music far more individual than it used to be. Additionally, as with television, there are simply far more choices now than there used to be. As it turns out, lots of choices plus individual tastes is a recipe for nonpolar and idiosyncratic tastes in culture consumption. Perhaps it's obvious in retrospect.

I think it's got to be a good thing, though, that one can now easily find communities devoted to the same things you are in a way that wasn't really possible ten or twenty years ago. The internet truly is marvelous.

The point of all this

Eugene Robinson writes a concise, thorough argument in favor of the Senate bill:

For the first time, we will enshrine the principle that all Americans deserve access to medical care regardless of their ability to pay. No longer will it be the policy and practice of our nation to ration health according to wealth.

When you blow away all the smoke, that's what this fight is about. The Senate bill lacks a public health insurance option, the House bill is burdened by gratuitous abortion restrictions and the final product of a House-Senate conference will probably have both those failings. But once the idea of universal health care is signed into law, it will be all but impossible to erase. Over time, that idea will be made into reality.

Not that it will matter to the bill killers.

2000 forever?

Coates, on health care reform: "I think we're having visions of Ralph Nader."

Well said. I have been having the same feeling. I don't know what about the activist left that makes them so self-defeating, but it seems to exist to an extent that simply isn't present on the right. And I'm hard-pressed to think of a strategy more likely to lead to marginalization and irrelevance than the "kill bill" strategy that Kos and Hamsher have begun. It's not so much that all their points are wrong, though most are fatuous, but rather that its advocates would abandon a process that is only inches away from the endzone to begin an entirely new process--reconciliation--which is unprecedented in an initiative of this size, only lasts five years, and would entail unpredictable and likely damaging changes to the policy in question. It would be one thing if the bill killers were lining up former Senate parliamentarians and getting them on the record admitting that they had a case. Short of that, I'll stick with the people who know what they're talking about who say that it wouldn't work. But this strategy makes no sense whatsoever. It cannot be taken seriously because there is no way to know how it would turn out or how the bill would look like. I do believe it would have been smart for Democrats to draft a health care bill under reconciliation rules and move it along with the regular plan, as a back-up in case things got sticky, but that didn't happen and there's no reason to think reconciliation would indeed produce a better bill. The arrogance of these folks, not just in terms of procedure but in terms of policy points (suddenly they know more on the subject than their oracle, Krugman!), has been shocking. Like 2000, we're dealing with people who are sabotaging their own interests mostly out of a perceived loss of face. Left out of these conversations are the expansion of coverage and subsidies, which I always figured were very much the point of this process.

Additionally, the timing of this onslaught--i.e. coming so late in the game, and right after Lieberman extracted his necessary concessions--coupled with the contradictory nature of the complaints, can only leave one with the conclusion that most of this outrage is simply an emotional rather than a logical reaction, and one that casts serious doubt on the utility of the blogger-activist model. To be frank, the rapidity and emotionality that blogging encourages can be the enemy of smart strategy and longsightedness.

What is clear to me is that much of the leaders of the activist left are mediocrities who lack real vision and leadership. There are any number of ways the bill could have been improved, but making the fight over the public option--by far the most contentious part of the bill, as well as a minor provision--into a proxy over the entire bill, progressive activists were putting themselves at much greater risk of being disappointed. By lashing out as they did when they did, they sent a message that they couldn't be reasoned with, even by people who fundamentally agree with their argument but disagree with the particulars in this case, and by threatening to try to kill universal health care, they are effectively saying that they are willing to jeopardize the Democrats' signature issue if they don't get their way. Presumably they are trying to signal that they are not to be taken for granted, which is fair enough, but the way in which this has been executed is silly, sloppy, and likely to hurt them in the long run.

The difference here isn't between the progressive and the pragmatic left, or between progressives and moderates. It's between the ideological left (for lack of a better term, as I don't believe we're dealing with Maoists and Trotskyites here) and everyone else to the left of center. Personally, it's unclear to me what they gain from this whole debacle, though I'm sure they don't either. One halfway suspects that this is just an identity politics squabble.

On Dollhouse

Matt Yglesias is unsympathetic to Joss Whedon. He's right that cable is a better venue for him. But while Firefly was indeed a great show, Dollhouse is failing because it isn't a great show. It has gotten pretty good at times (now is one of those times), and putting the show in the 8 p.m. Friday "death slot" didn't really give it much of a chance, but ultimately Whedon has to shoulder the blame for a fundamental lack of vision pertaining to the show. It's been clear for some time that the show is at its best when its focus is on advancing the arcs at a breakneck pace. The past handful of episodes have been astonishingly good, some of the most densely packed and exciting television of the past few years. Conversely, the show is virtually unwatchable when anything else is going on. Much of the show's episodes have been "engagement of the week" shows in which some of the dolls go on (usually boring) adventures, while we spend time exploring the general ickiness of the idea of the Dollhouse.

The problem here is that that sort of thing is more scary when it's hinted at or implied, rather than rhetorically debated by characters in the show. And the show has often tried to have it both ways in wanting to show the monstrosity of the Dollhouse while trying to present us with sympathetic characters who happen to work there. Few television shows present intensely unlikeable people in the roles we're supposed to like--The Sopranos comes to mind--but there is a reason for this. Who wants to watch a show full of bad people? If you're going to try to do this, you're going to need something above and beyond to make people like it (such as a piercing look into American capitalism and family at the dawn of the millennium, like the Sopranos). And as it turns out, Whedon doesn't really have the chops to make something like this work, as his talents lend themselves to either creating likeable, flawed, human characters or completely evil bad guys. His best bad guy was The Operative in Serenity, and even he was a little fuzzy in terms of characterization.

All of these are, fundamentally, conceptual decisions that Whedon made at the show's inception and has since tried to backtrack, which has led to more than a little storytelling whiplash. The show has, at times, attempted to be a queasy weekly show about prostitution, an exploration of situational ethics and tabula rasa, an undercover show, a post-apocalyptic thriller, a show about an escaped active, a show about slavery and abuse, and a show about political corruption and upheaval. In this season, the show has been going in so many different directions that it's almost as though Whedon has given up trying to establish any sort of consistent tone or message, and it's all the more staggering considering he's had just north of 20 episodes in which to do all this. The show would have been immeasurably better had he just picked a show to do instead of radically changing the tone of the show to something he's not good at on a near-weekly basis. It has, however, had some good plotting recently and seems to have found its storytelling groove. I suppose this isn't much different from the normal shakedown period for most shows, but since Whedon's previous series was pretty much consistent and awesome right out of the box, it's tempting to want to think he's got a golden arm. Of course he doesn't. This said, Dollhouse is still much, much better than Studio 60, a real flub from a great storyteller.

Another blow against the "War on Drugs"

Needle exchange programs are no longer banned from receiving federal funds. I understand a lot of peoples' frustration that Obama is taking issues like this and dismantling the Bushian security state very slowly, but there has been slow and steady but real, if low-key. And, frankly, I'm not sure there's any other way he can take them.

Yep, that backlash sure is coming...

CNN:

"Support for the health care reform bill that Democrats are pushing through the Senate has risen six points since early December, according to a new national poll, and although a majority of Americans still oppose its passage, only four in ten agree with Senate Republicans that the bill is too liberal."

To be sure, if Democrats were passing the bill Republicans claimed they were passing, then it would cause backlash. But they aren't, and most people aren't going to see much of a change on a day-to-day basis.

This post by Jon Chait has been going around:

'Mr. Bayh said that the health care measure was the kind of public policy he had come to Washington to work on, according to officials who attended the session, and that he did not want to see the satisfied looks on the faces of Republican leaders if they succeeded in blocking the measure.'

Evan Bayh! When you've turned the somnolent, relentlessly centrist Indiana Senator into a raging partisan, you've really done something.

This strikes me as true, and it is very real evidence that the GOP's legislative strategy hasn't been very good. They've filibustered literally everything, lied without compunction, and in the process have seemingly annoyed the living shit out of every Democratic senator there is. Which makes me wonder if the GOP's intense partisanship isn't going to pay further dividends for the Democrats. Public option aside, the cost of bringing the conservaDems on board health care was fairly light. I tend to think that this was a matter of personal ideology for the conservative Democrats in question (Lieberman obviously excepted), rather than just a matter of insurance industry bribery. So, what happens if the same dynamic reasserts itself on financial reform? What if Republicans decide to use the same playbook, introduce endless delays, and yell about socialism again? I think it's a near certainty they will. But will it have the same effect of pushing conservative Democrats into the arms of the mainstream Democratic Party? It very well might. It's true that Wall Street will spend a lot of money trying to kill financial regulation, but the insurance companies spent a lot of money trying to kill health care reform and, barring some late-hour dramatics, it would appear that they've failed. Furthermore, it doesn't appear that the provisions of financial regulation should be more difficult for conservative Democrats to swallow ideologically than HCR. I can't imagine a Democrat of any stripe having a problem with a consumer financial protection agency, for example. It's true that HCR is a signature Democratic issue and literally a generational opportunity, but banking regulation has been a key Democratic issue back to the New Deal as well, of course. I have no idea what the odds might be, but it will be interesting to find out how things go.

Perhaps this is optimistic, but it is certainly possible that the end result of the endless health care debate will be a more coherent and united Democratic Party, at least in terms of its Senate cohort. And if that turns out to be the case, we'll have the Republican Party's polarization to thank for it.

They better not be frat boys pulling a prank

Thieves steal Auschwitz 'Work Sets You Free' sign

The Two Peggy Noonans

I'm firmly convinced that "Peggy Noonan" is two separate people who trade off writing conservative-oriented columns. Peggy #1 is an honest, intelligent right-of-center writer who isn't sparing of her own side. This is the Peggy who disowned Bush in 2005 and basically slammed Sarah Palin as an identity politics gamble from the start. I like Peggy #1--what's not to like? She's smart, fearless, and interesting.

Then there's Peggy #2, who is pretty much a standard-issue Laura Ingraham-style right-winger who writes the most bizarre and partisan nonsense you can imagine. She sounds just like Bill Kristol or Chuck Krauthammer, but the fact that everyone knows what she's capable of makes her somehow worse. This Peggy writes about how she fell in love with Reagan's shoe, or how it would be irresponsible not to speculate whether Bill Clinton has mob ties, or how the facts on torture should remain mysterious.

I can furnish links to all these, but what's the point? Anyone who follows politics has to have observed this phenomenon. I like to think that the Two Peggys live in the same house, forever trapped in some sort of strange merging of identities, as depicted in the film Persona. You know that it's got to be something weird to account for the exceedingly odd nature of her punditry.

I guess Peggy #2 showed up for work today:

"It is one thing to grouse that dreadful people who don't care about us control our economy, but another, and in a way more personal, thing to say that people who don't care about us control our culture. In 2009 this was perhaps most vividly expressed in the Adam Lambert Problem."

And what is the Adam Lambert Problem? (Aside from the new name of his band going forward, I hope!) Steve Benen explains:

"[I]t seems Adam Lambert is a singer, made popular by "American Idol." Lambert, who is gay, did some racy number on ABC several weeks ago; the network freaked out; and it caused a national stir for about a day and a half.

Noonan, however, sees a larger significance: 'Mr. Lambert's act left viewers feeling not just offended but assaulted.... It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it."

I don't know why, but I feel especially uncharitable to Noonan today. This is fucking bullshit, and if she were an op-ed writer for a newspaper that cared about the product it was putting out, it wouldn't have made it into print. People are upset because the economy isn't getting better and because the nine month-old health care debate is not seen as directly related to what they're going through. The growing pessimism toward Democrats and Obama's agenda aren't some sort of mystery. This is a phenomenon that occurs very often under a certain sort of situation. Both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were swept into office after their respective center-left parties failed to revive the economic problems in both countries, and when that took a little longer than people hoped, both leaders' popularity suffered. Both seem to have bottomed out around the same time: late 1982. As it turns out, the combination of high unemployment and Christmas put people in a shitty mood. And here we are in late 2009. This isn't exactly rocket science.

But Noonan, whose response to a question about Ockham's Razor would probably be something along the lines of, "No, I use Gillette," would rather connect American's bad mood to some obscure performance that most people either didn't watch or hadn't heard of or, if they did, probably shrugged it off. People just don't react the way to "shocking" musical acts now the way they did back in Noonan's heyday, the 1980s. Madonna might have legitimately shocked people back then, but after decades' worth of her imitators, shock jocks from Howard Stern to Marilyn Manson, as well as the proliferation of anger porn like Fox News, Americans have become accustomed to unparalleled levels of coarseness in our culture. It's not exactly something to be proud of, and I'd rather see a society where everyone respects each other, where everyone is honest. But I'm not exactly going to cry myself to sleep over it.

Noonan, though, seems to think that people base their moods on what goes down at the American Music Awards. Like all conservatives, she sees politics primarily as a battleground for the culture war, and she does not in fact seem to see a boundary separating them. Now, obviously, what's happening in the culture can have an effect on politics. But like the similarly misguided obsession with Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction", this act has few, if any, political implications. It has few lasting cultural implications. Reading what he did, it sounds little different from Madonna's old antics, or Prince's or Michael Jackson's, for that matter.

But this column is an excellent specimen of that species of conservative argument that says that, hey, X happened, and it was shocking. This clearly means that America is suffering from Y and Z. Therefore, Republicans should run things. I don't know what the lazy editorial equivalent for the left is--probably blaming everything bad in American society on racism and the GOP's courting of racists--but the wingnut argument is much, much more annoying. Adam Lambert has nothing to tell us about the state of the union. The unemployment rate, however, does. Most people* don't base their vote on homoerotic music performances--though considering that Prince was a huge star in the 1980s and the Republicans dominated the 80s, I can't say that with absolute certainty.

So, #2, please go home and let #1 write something next time. Thank you.

*I mean, aside from Republicans

Still "Party of Bush"?

I'm skeptical that the DCCC's strategy for the midterms is going to work. If one assumes that the deficit is going to be the key issue at that point--terrain naturally more favorable to Republicans--it seems smarter to emphasize that GOP plans to cut the deficit (like Eric Cantor's recent one) call for huge cuts to unemployment, COBRA, plus the spending freeze--aren't very pretty. And pick some good issues to go positive on, like hopefully the economy's improvement. I don't think there's much anger at Bush anymore, though there clearly should be. We're in the Obama era now. And the Democrats will rise or sink with him.