The left

I'm trying to remember the last time the Left was so thoroughly enamored with their candidate. Every media outlet, pundit and pol is downright smitten with the very idea of Obama. Of course the Left loved Bill Clinton (and, for awhile, even loved his wife) but this type of adulation is surely unprecedented. Along with such puppy love comes a total lack of scrutiny of any of his policies or proposals. It is clear that there is a teenage crush on Obama by many on the Left. But why Obama and why now?

If one goes back to the Carter Presidency, the left has been on the run since 1980. With the singular exception of 1993-94, the Democrats have taken the backseat of power for the last 28 years. Tiring of sitting on the bench, the Left has been willing to embrace any candidate they think can bring them back to respectability. They are so frightened of 4 more years in the wilderness, that they will accept any candidate that has a chance of winning. Enter Barack Obama. The Democrats sense that he is the right candidate at the right time. His policies are not as important as the fact that he can bring them the White House. A week before the election, they are flush with enthusiasm and confidence. They feel the power of a tsunami of "Change" that is approaching shore. However, they should remember that the tsunami, when it retreats, takes much back out to sea with it.

The Left has a pretty consistent policy towards regulation: More, please; anytime, anywhere.  If there's a problem, it must be the job of government to regulate.

• NYTImes, 2001: "The union officials said they feared that Ms. Chao would adopt toothless, voluntary recommendations for American corporations that would fail to prevent the 1.8 million injuries estimated to be caused each year by repetitive motions."
• NYTimes, 2001: "But labor unions and many public- health advocates say federal regulations are needed because not all corporations can be trusted to protect workers."
• NYTImes, 2003: "Politicians score easy points by railing against big government and excessive federal regulations. But a three-part series in The Times this week by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman showed that workplace safety rules are in fact far too weak, and dramatically underenforced."

This must be those harmful consequences of deregulation.

The rate of workplace injuries and illnesses in private industry declined in 2007 for the sixth consecutive year, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today. Nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses reported by private industry employers declined from 4.4 cases per 100 workers in 2006 to 4.2 cases in 2007.

And since miners are often invoked as a symbol of workplace safety problems, the record on mine safety for the past few decades...

I'm late to the game, but let me add to Patrick Ruffini's smart thoughts on this Zack Exley article about the Obama campaign's organizing and GOTV operation. It comes down to expanding the number of stakeholders - Long Tail Empowerment.   They are not just distributing activity; they are distributing responsibility and authority.  Some might call it the Army of Davids theory of campaign management.

The "New Organizers" have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so "top-down" and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or "bottom-up" organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.

This is a perfect symbol of one of the great ironies of our political environment; the Right and Left approach campaigning and organizing, both electoral and advocacy, in different ways...

• The Right has a very top-down, command and control model; Republicans centralize activity and authority within the organization.  Care about Issue (A)?  Send money, and Group (B) will take care of it for you.  Want to get involved in Campaign (X)?  Contact Group (Z) and they will tell you what they want you to do.  
• The Left is increasingly decentralizing, adopting more market-oriented organizational models.  They are not directing activity, but providing the tools for self-directed individuals to conduct their own activism.  The Left is creating an army of spokesmen, an army of organizers, an army of stakeholders - a Movement.

I believe a great deal of this is attributable to the state of each Movement.

• Consolidation: The Right is behaving like a company within a declining industry, which focuses on increasing market share, rather than expanding the actual market itself.  Declining industries are defensive, seeking tradition and efficiency rather than innovation.  The Right - and the Republican Party - is trying to manage the decline by consolidating successes and attacking their opponent to limit the Left's market share.
• Expansion: The Left is behaving like a company within an expanding industry, making speculative investment to build for market growth, for competitive advantage within the emerging market. The Left is playing offense, innovating.  The political pendulum is swinging their way, and they are working to turn that momentum into permanent infrastructural gains.

The Left is outraged that Sarah Palin was critical - even (gasp!) negative.  It's quite insincere, of course, but that's what they're trying to sell.  Naturally, the media is playing along. 

Shove this back in their face.

Obama’s speech includes more negative attacks than Palin’s. [...] If one compares Palin’s speech to Obama’s, it appears to me that they used similar amounts of sarcasm (not much), but Obama made considerably more extensive negative comments about McCain and Republican administrations than Palin did about Obama and Democrats.

David Sirota makes an interesting observation at Open Left about Moveon.org declining to get very involved in the Democratic VP selection...

In effectively OK-ing the VP nomination of a politician who has consistently voted against Moveon's organizational mission, the Moveon leadership lets us in on the secret that I reported in my book: namely that Moveon today operates first and foremost as a partisan appendage. Instead of using the VP question - and the presidential election as a whole - as an instrument to build the antiwar movement, Moveon's quote suggests the organization is willing to go along with almost anyone Obama chooses, regardless of how their career has undermined that movement, regardless of whether Bayh's backers are citing his potential nomination as proof that the Democratic Party should reject the movement Moveon purports to champion.

As Pat Buchanan said, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”   It will be fascinating to watch how the Progressives react as they shift from storming the castle and turn to the business of actually governing the castle.

Since the Democrats are not attempting to change the fundamental systemic flaws in government, their base will either become alienated or compromised.  I suspect we'll see more of the latter.

Now that it's politically convenient for them to do so, the Left is divining racism in every tea leaf.  Kremlinology lives again, but this time it is directed at Republicans.  And practiced by jerks. 

The only way to deal with this is ridicule.

(via Atlas Blogged)

I’ve often talked about how the Left is building infrastructure that moves messaging, money and mobilization outside of the traditional Democratic establishment. Here’s another perfect example. With Swing Semester (501c4) and Swing Semester Civics (501c3), the Progressives are redeploying the Clinton and Obama campaign’s tremendously successful youth organizing efforts from Party campaigns to ideologically progressive organizations...

Swing Semester 2008 is the nation’s first political immersion program. We provide a bridge from interest to action for college students, recent graduates, and other young people who care deeply about their country and want to be a part of American history even as they study it. This September, over 250 passionate young people will venture out to eight cities in “swing” states for 10 weeks of intensive electoral work. They will live with host families, work in field campaigns, and engage in critical thinking to better understand their country and themselves.

Swing Semester 2008 is an investment in the most important asset of the progressive movement – its people. In the short run, our participants will knock on almost 2 million doors in the nation’s most critical swing states. Our greatest impact, however, will come from guiding hundreds of young citizens and committed families through an experience that will challenge, deepen, and energize us all for a lifetime of civic engagement.

Building that kind of infrastructure allows them to create an alternate power structure and whip mechanisms that influence the direction of the Progressive Movement and the Democratic Party.

What’s more, that are taking many elements that traditionally belong to Party-focused entities (e.g., campaigns and Campaign Committees) and creating independent, ideologically-based versions of them, moving power from the Democratic Party bureaucracy (which exists to elect Democrats, not to be “progressive”) over to the Progressive movement.  This movement of messaging, money and mobilization outside the traditional Party establishment changes the incentives of politicians from “obey the Democrat’s rules” to “obey the Progressives rules”.

The result – both risky and potentially rewarding – will be a Democratic Party much more responsive and submissive to the Democratic base and the far Left.

Note: 501(c)4 groups are allowed to “engage in political campaign activity”, but that cannot be “the organization’s primary activity.”   However, the Swing Semester program ”runs from September 2nd through November 7th, just after election day” and only in potential swing states.  It’s difficult to see how political campaign activity is anything but their organization’s primary activity.

Ezra Klein makes an important, oft-overlooked point:

One of the really interesting things about the blog The Next Right is how closely it echoes liberal laments from early-2005. But where liberals were sadly marveling over the Right's physical infrastructure (Heritage, Fox News, the Olin Foundation), now conservatives are staring up at the Left's electronic infrastructure. But the complaints are much the same: They pay people to do things! They're more ruthlessly efficient! They're more tightly connected with each other! It always makes me think of an interview Bill Kristol gave to Jon Stewart, where he said something like, "don't worry Jon. The worm will turn. It always does. We look good now, but I'm here to tell you, just wait.

I actually think the Republican Party is in a position very similar to the Democratic Party circa 1995 - alienated from its own base, struggling to maintain whatever power it can, but without an agenda that really resonate with the public.  And, like the Progressives in the late 90's-early 00's, the Right is increasingly unconvinced that the Republican Party really has the ability to advance its goals. 

That said, this 2005 American Prospect story by Garance Franke-Ruta about the right wing blogosphere is an amusing time-encapsulation of Klein's point...

But unlike traditional news outlets, right-wing blogs openly shill, fund raise, plot, and organize massive activist campaigns on behalf of partisan institutions and constituencies; they also increasingly provide cover for professional operatives to conduct traditional politics by other means -- including campaigning against the established media.

And instead of taking these bloggers for the political activists they are, all too often the established press has accepted their claims of being a new form of journalism. This will have to change -- or it will prove serious journalism's undoing.

The Leftosphere is now everything she had alleged the Rightosphere to be in 2005.  And Garance Franke-Ruta now works for "the established press".

An excellent disection of the three factions of the Left over on American Thinker:

By this means, Obama can be cornered. He does not like being cornered. As the last few months make clear, he does not take it well. Corner him enough times, and his facade will crack, his image as a genial Starbucks and Whole Foods lefty will lie in tatters, and his adherence to the cold and crazed doctrines of the core left will be exposed for what it is.

And so this will be our task for the next year: cutting through the congenial fluffy leftism and cornering Obama on his hard left positions. So far it's been fairly easy, the hard part is getting it air time on tv.