Political Brains
by digby
I have always liked Drew Westen and I appreciated his book for making a good case that winning elections required appealing to emotion. The successful Obama campaign was a testament to his theories. People were hungry for inspiration and they got it in Barack.
But I never agreed with him and some other advisers, that people didn't also need to vote on the basis of substantive political argument. If you don't ground politics in ideas, it's nothing more than show business (or religion.) And while the Republicans are great showmen, they very definitely ground their politics in ideology. They sell it with emotion, to be sure, and it's completely incoherent when you scratch beneath the surface, but it's there. It's what they call "principle" and it brainwashes people to sell out their own self-interest without knowing they are doing it. (I don't know how many dittoheads are out of work, without health care, or losing their homes, but I would imagine there a more than a few who hysterically called their representatives in high dudgeon over something that could help them personally.)
Anyway, there is a consequence to refusing to fight campaigns on ideology and present those ideas as a cogent set of political principles. Right now, the Democrats are basically assuming that people are hurting enough to find the Republicans reprehensible for trying to obstruct the help they need. That's a pretty risky strategy.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that Dr Westen doesn't see what's happened, because he certainly does:
What are the lessons learned-for Democrats, for Republicans, for Obama and for everyone else? Plus Judd Gregg's withdrawal.
The major lesson learned is that the Democrats have just succeeded in taking a mandate, a landslide presidential election, and a super-majority in the House and Senate and handed over all power to a legislative tribunal consisting of three moderate Republicans in the Senate (and perhaps Joe Lieberman, whose face was prominently displayed on television over the last couple of days), who are now in a power-sharing arrangement with the President of the United States and the majorities of both houses of Congress. They are now in the position to scuttle, alter, or place limits on any legislation the Obama administration proposes, and to funnel the goals of the residual conservative Republicans who remain in the House and Senate into any legislation by saying, “Sorry we won’t vote for this if you don’t do x, y, and z,” which will generally be the policies that brought us into the crisis we’re in. Instead of Senators Collins, Snowe, and Specter being where they were two weeks ago, on the ropes, having to worry every day about their re-election in their states, which voted for President Obama and the change he promised, they are now in the position to tell the President what he can and can’t do over the next four years, and the White House has just assured their re-election by giving them so much positive press, power, and air time. When Republicans held less than 60 seats in the Senate and wanted to push through legislation, right-wing judges, etc., we never heard about how they lacked the 60 seats to pass whatever they wanted.
They played hardball, telling Democrats that if they dared to even consider a filibuster they would use the “nuclear option,” and Democrats curled up in the fetal position and waited until the Republicans had so badly damaged the country that the American people simply couldn’t vote for them anymore, and said, “We want the other guys.” Well, the other guys are in now, and they seem to have convinced themselves that they have neither the power nor the mandate to do the people’s business the way the people asked them to do. For those Americans who thought they might see things like comprehensive health care reform come out of this Congress and this Presidency, good luck. Unless the Democrats dramatically change course or the new President puts his foot down and reminds the American people who they voted for, any new legislation will have to pass muster with co-presidents Collins, Specter, and Snowe, and their shadow cabinet of Cornyn, Boehner, Shelby, and McConnell. The new co-presidents will not be able to do the kind of damage their party did over the last eight years, but they will be able to prevent the Democrats from fixing it—and to allow the radical conservatives to say “I told you so” in two years and take back large swaths of the House and Senate. If somehow this stimulus package succeeds, they will be able to claim that it was their changes, their tax cuts, and their “fiscal restraint” that worked.
I agree, of course. But I think the American people thought they were voting for someone who could magically change Republicans into partners. And that invited the Republicans to prove them wrong.
*I should also say that I recognize that the shallow nature of our political discourse is the fault of the media --- and, yes, the people themselves. But Democrats do themselves no favors by looking for magic bullets. What Westen (and Lakoff before him) prescribed was invaluable. But they were never adequate. Ideology matters and the Democrats have to explain theirs and attack the Republicans'. I honestly don't know why this is news to anyone. That's politics.
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