Political Enthusiasm
Sam Rosenfeld asks a very good question. Why aren't the elected Dems using the Roberts nomination to make our case for the future? There is no margin anymore in giving the Red State Dems "free" votes on anything because the Republicans have shown time and again that there is no reward for "good" Democratic behavior. I would hope that Reid is whipping the caucus to give Roberts as small a margin as possible. But, there's more to it than that. There is opportunity in losing by making a well defined case against the politics, philosophy and policy that Roberts so clearly represents. I've seen no signs as yet that the Senate Democrats are going to exert even the smallest amount of political intensity to that job.
Acknowledging that Roberts nomination is almost sure to be confirmed, Rosenfeld says:
What remains continuously puzzling is the binary logic Democrats insist on applying to situations like this, wherein either a full substantive victory or the complete evaporation of political energy seem to count as the only possible alternatives. On this issue as with many others, there remains a weird disinclination to focus party efforts on using substantive defeats over actual policy outcomes (which are largely foreordained anyway for the minority party) to highlight contrasts with the GOP and forge a message for future electoral battles.
On the one hand, Roberts’ confirmation is essentially a lock, barring unforeseen developments during the hearings. Outside advocacy groups have their own interests to attend to and their own reasons for demanding opposition to the nominee, but for Senate Democrats, an active push to block Roberts doesn’t really make sense. On the other hand, there truly is little substantive justification for Democrats to actually endorse this nomination. So why do it?
As Matt wrote last month, “being in the minority comes with a few advantages -- first and foremost among them a release from the obligation to think realistically.” It shouldn’t be impossible, with creativity and coordination, to make the principled argument against Roberts part of the case for sending more Democrats to Washington. And it’s a bit distressing that throughout the coverage of base-party tensions over strategy on Roberts, this never seems to come up as an option worth considering.
This seems to me to be a Dem weakness across the board. If we can't win, why bother? (A corollary to this is, "if it's risky we shouldn't do it.") I suspect this is a matter of psychology --- some of it a holdover from the 60's, as we've discussed before --- and some of it an unwillingness to admit that the political minority and we are playing a different game. Yglesias' point is important. When you don't have the responsibility of governance (and particularly when the majority goes out of its way to govern in a purely partisan way) you are much freer to operate from a totally political standpoint.
It seems that many Democrats find that cheap or disreputable. But what it is, is opposition politics. Because you have no real power to enact your agenda, the strategy should be to frame the opponents agenda in the most offensive way possible and present an alternative that could not be passed today in either governing coalition but for which you would like to build a consensus over time.
I think that the Roberts nomination should be opposed on the basis of his active hostility to a right to privacy. Others may differ --- he's absurdly business friendly and anti-environmental, so a case can be made against him on that. In fact, he's pretty much everything loathesome I can imagine in a judge, (except that he is not anti-intellectual and he's obviously well qualified for the job.) But we should find a philosophical issue or two that we believe really define the difference between the two parties and begin to inculcate that difference in the minds of the electorate.
It's risky because we have no assurance that people will always agree with us. But that risk aversion is our biggest problem. We seem to think that we can be all things to all people and we just can't. So, we need to stake out a claim and work to bring some people over to our side. That takes time and effort and a willigness to use every opportunity we have in front of the cameras or on the op-ed pages to make our argument to the American people.
PM Carpenter recently discussed Newt Gingrich's recent call to arms in just these terms and clearly illustrates why the other side wins (barely) even though they are not really supported by the people on the issues themselves:
[Newt says] “Our core pattern should be ‘there is a BIG difference [between left and right] and it is a fact….’ We must then take such key facts to immediately illustrate a large vision; we cannot remain in arguments at the detail level.”
If you’re a conservative, odds are you won’t admit what Newt just admitted. If you’re a liberal, you’ll smile at what Newt just admitted, which is that conservatives cannot successfully debate liberals because the details that underlie most debates tend to support the liberal position, not the conservative. If the details supported Newt’s side, rest assured he would be touting the marvels of the fine point.
His outline of political action was also a resoundingly open call to demagogic arms. The “core pattern” he mentioned means, in translation, to repeat, repeat, repeat the “BIG” differences without ever substantiating the conservative arguments behind them. In fact, there should be no conservative arguments - just catchy slogans that appeal to those uninterested in inconvenient details. It’s not the “Big Difference” that Mr. Gingrich stresses as the advisable course of action. It’s the “Big Lie.”
That is the game they have been playing for 25 years and they are winning with it. And it's more than just the fact that they can't win the substantive argument. It's also because they've learned how to define themselves in big, philosophical terms and they successfully used their public platforms throughout their years, in and out of power, to project that definition. They never miss an opportunity.
I don't suggest that we adopt their dishonest demagoguery, but we do have to learn how to counter this effectively. Having wonky analytical arguments may be good for policy (and I hope we will always do this) but politically it's disasterous. Clearly, the public doesn't want to hear the details. If they did, they'd study the issues and vote for the party that most closely aligns with their interestsd --- and the Democrats would have a majority. They want a vision.
We will probably not win on Roberts. The nuclear option is very unlikely to be triggered unless Bush nominates a total nutcase --- and since the bar for that has been set lower than Janice Brown, I don't think it's possible. That's the sad consequence of not winning the presidency or the Senate in the last election. But it doesn't mean that we can't use these occasions to build for the future and make our case. Just because we can't win it today doesn't mean that we don't have a responsibility to lay the groundwork for winning tomorrow. Are these politicians so spoiled that they simply refuse to stage a tactical defeat, even for a higher purpose?
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