Not a pretty sight, the cleanup, after the Unity
Pony dropped another steaming load down in Austin. Pravda on the Potomac did a post mortem — and how appropriate that phrase is, eh? BTD sums up:
I have long been (at one time my view was pretty universally held in the Netroots) an advocate of a politics of contrast and definition and for negative branding of the Republican Party. Obama’s Post Partisan
And demonstrating that the unwillingness to fight was not merely stylistic, but substantive as well for Obama, he did a 180 on FISA Capitulation. But the fact that Obama is practicing a brand of politics that the Netroots once vehemently disagreed with, including the adoption of blatant Hoyerism on FISA, is no longer of importance to the Netroots.
Personally, I do not see how the Netroots regains its previous focus. No doubt that many bloggers will transition into the Media and do quite well for themselves. They may even win a substantive argument or two. But the idea of Fighting Dems, of politics of contrast, of negative branding - that is over. And not a shot was fired by the Netroots in the battle.
I do not think it is possible to go back to arguing for a contrast approach after you have unquestioningly cheered on the candidate who stood for the exact opposite of it. The Netroots has been coopted. It is now an effective cheering section for the Democratic Party. But little else.
They folded like deck chairs.
And you will notice I floated the image right. The stripes are a pretty shade of blue, though, aren’t they? Reminds me of Norway, for some reason…
Maybe if I had the mad skillz, I could add a little pr0n-ish soft-focus, a caption in Gotham…
Front page
Avedon Carol noticed the same thing
Obama traveling with Hagel. Notice how many diaries at Kos actually tout Hagel, Powell, and other republicans as VP or cabinet people?
Stealth class issues
I thought it was interesting — in light of our recent attempt to focus on class issues — to find the following in Pravda-on-the-Potomac’s NN article:
As in any community, as in many high schools, Netroots can appear both self-segregating — black bloggers at one table, Latinos at another and gays at the next — and not diverse enough. After the Q&A session with Pelosi, in which the first questions asked were about impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the FISA bill and abstinence-only education, some black bloggers complained that they weren’t enough questions about rising gas and food prices.
Notice how the reporter frames the issue as one of diversity. There are lots of wrong things about this: the disappearance from public discourse of non-black poor people and non-poor black people, which hurts both poor people and black people, is bad; but even worse to my mind is the way any political force for change on economic issues is rhetorically folded into identity issues. At its most simplistic, this leads to the (probably unconscious) Obamaite hope of “we’ll vote in the black guy and all those pesky social justice agitators will just go away.”
Actually, it's worse than that...
… “any social justice activists that remain pesky are racists, unlike us.”
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
But, but. . .
McCain is so bad.
Seriously, what many Obama supporters don’t appreciate about Obama skeptics is that they feel an Obama election would validate the gross nature of the primary as well as weakening the progressive movement as a whole, in part for the reason discussed here. In this mode of reasoning McCain is really no worse than Obama and Obama’s real flip flops in such a short time, you have to have hope to believe what he says about anything.
Honestly, the requests (from the left) and intimations that media critique are boring or not worth discussing is one of the more scary aspects of this whole primary season. We are the last boundary against unchecked media power. What happens when there are no more boundaries? More Floridas (and RBCs)? More War? More Enrons?
The Obama Party
This is not the Democratic Party. There is no “movement,” either. The whole point is to elect Obama and advance Him.
I can’t shake the feeling that neoconservatism will be further entrenched, not rollbacked during an Obama administration (The rights of women and girls will be the canary in the coal mine—as always, during the rise of authoritarianism). I don’t believe we’ll have any effective leverage with Obama; the so-called “left” has been hijacked. I feel like we’re in the wilderness again.