Thursday, December 2, 2010

We're not the left. We're the base.



The Progressive Change Campaign Committee has a new ad up challenging Obama to live up to his pledge  to end the Bush tax cuts for the rich.  The PCCC has been urging this for a while.  But what's new here is the in-his-face tactic of airing it in Iowa, the place where Obama made this promise three years ago before going on to win the Democratic caucus there.  It was Iowa caucus-goers, in turn, who propelled Obama's campaign and launched him on his inexorable rise to his party's nomination in 2008. As Greg Sargent puts it:
This means actual voters will see the spot, the first hitting Obama from the left of the new cycle. ... The spot demands that Obama stick to his promise and not "cave" to Republicans by extending the tax cuts for the rich.
"We're bringing our ad to the place President Obama made his core campaign promise of letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire," Green tells me. "There is no room for compromise on an issue where the promise is so clear and where the Republicans are standing with the wealthiest 2% of Americans against the entirety of the American people."
Between this spot and the new one unveiled this morning by MoveOn, it's clear that the left has settled on a strategy of actively trying to damage Obama politically with the base and with left-leaning independents by painting him as weak, to force him to draw a harder line against Republicans. The left, clearly, has no intention of stopping with these efforts.
Um, no we don't, although I don't buy the premise we're trying to "damage" him.  As Talk Left's Armando always counsels, it's not wise to invest too heavily in a politician.  It's his or her ideas and policies that we should get behind, or, rather, our policies, the ones we want a leader to implement.  In the case of the PCCC's ad and other forms of advocacy from "the left," we're just trying to get "our" politicians -- the Democrats -- to do what we voted for them to do, and  now pay them to do and hope and expect that they will do.  If that means putting pressure on Obama, that's what we'll do. If that means embarrassing him among voters he'll need a second time around, we'll do that, too.  If it means running through the streets naked -- well, I'll get back to you on that.  But damage him? Putting aside the dubious ethics and mean-spiritedness that implies, what good would that do us?  We need him to be strong and forceful, so he can make "our" case with others not already on board.  If he's damaged, he'll be useless.  You could make the case, actually, that he's already damaged and we're just trying to "fix" him -- not the GOP way, silly -- so he can carry out our plans.  You know, the ones he promised he'd do.  I don't care how or why he does the right thing; I just want him to do it.

I also think it's wrong to say we're "painting him as weak." He is weak. That's evident. Anyone can see it. The Republicans certainly do.  I always picture Republicans off in their cave, or wherever they plot their evil moves, laughing and marveling at how easy Obama is to roll.  

If anything should rile his anger, it's this. And if anything moves Obama to action, it's his own sense of pride and self-preservation.  Again, whatever works, baby.

But while "we're" at it, I don't think it's useful to use the term "the left," particularly by a blogger presumably in that category. What is considered "left" these days is probably closer to what used to be called the center.  But the goalposts have moved so far right, what is now considered "center" is really "right," and what is now called "right" has lurched into wing-dingery, middle-fingery territory.  The media uses "left" to connote a scary fringe too loony to listen to. But we weren't too scary back in '07 and '08 when Obama rode our cheers and dollars and votes into the Democratic convention, and then the White House.  We weren't his foil back then; we were his base.  And if there's a cardinal rule of elections, particularly midterm elections, it's: Don't Piss Off Your Base.

He did, and lost big on Nov. 2.  He has two more Novembers to get it right.

But I'm not hopeful.

1 comment:

  1. Great post. I thought the same sort of things about "weakening" Obama through these tactics. Obama is weakening himself, we're raising the flags to alert him to this. If you see someone trying heroin out, are you "weakening" him by telling him of the dangers? If a year later he's still using, are you painting him as an addict when you hold an intervention?

    And how is using someone's promises in an ad an attack or insincere? It is what he promised us when he was elected. Should we not hold him accountable? Sure he's had some successes, and good for them, but he's failed to live up to many of the significant promises he made during the election... promises he TOLD us to hold him accountable for.

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