Politics Lost

by digby

Feel the magic. Joe Klein has a new book coming out in which he excoriates the rich insider Democratic consultants. Apparently, Klein thinks the Democrats should listen to rich insider Democratic pundits instead.

He writes:

Roger Ailes was right when he predicted at the beginning of the television era that in the future all politicians would have to be performers.

How interesting. What to make of the fact that two paragraphs later he says this:

…let me give 2008 a try. The winner will be the candidate who comes closest to this model: a politician who refuses to be a “performer,” at least in the current sense.

Whatever. Klein criticizing the Democratic consultants is like Charlie Manson criticizing Richard Jeffrey Dahmer as far as I’m concerned.

Eric Alterman reported on a foreign policy discussion that he and Klein attended yesterday:

It was a useful discussion with many useful tributaries and give and take with the audience and we all felt better for it.

That is right up until the very last moment when, after someone brought up the question of the whether the Democrats will be able to present an effective alternative to Bush in the next election, Joe Klein shouted out, “Well they won’t if their message is that they hate America – which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years.”

This is the man who is lecturing the Democratic party about losing politics.

He also appeared last night on Charlie Rose in an otherwise quite interesting round table about Democratic foreign policy and he refined his point a little:

I think the problem for Democrats now is this: there are some well-informed and intelligent and tough centrists, but there are challenges coming from two separate directions. One is coming from the left of the party which ever since Vietnam has assumed that any use of American force overseas is immoral.

And the more serious threat — and this threat is coming to both parties — and this is coming from below, it’s this populist threat that I think is absolutely significant in this country and this is people who just want to make the world go away — they want to pull the troops out of Iraq and not think about the consequences, who are anti-immigrant, anti-Chinese economic competition and just want to make the world go away.

That’s his analysis. The party’s big challenges are finding a way to deal with the pacifist left and the threat “from below” of the the barbarian populist hordes. What ever are the intelligent, well-informed, tough centrists supposed to do with these horrible people?

He sounds quite frightened of the Democratic voters who are getting sick and tired of being told that we should shut up and listen to people who seem intent upon helping the right use “values” and national security to bludgeon this country into accepting a religious police state.

It shows what a philistine he really is that he conflates pacifism with “hating America” which he quite obviously does. Pacifism is a respectable philosophy that has been a part of the American (hell, the Christian) experience forever. And it, at least, has some intellectual coherence, unlike this hawkish/centrist mish mash of nothingness you find among the so-called liberal hawks.

But most Democrats are not pacifists, even the liberals he seems to loathe with such a passion. Most of us simply do not believe that the United States’ security, “honor” or credibility has been well served by hardliner hawks who are in a constant state of hysteria agitating for war all the time to prove the country’s military prowess. They’ve been doing this as long as I can remember and it’s always been absurd.

The vast majority of the country supported the Afghanistan operation, as did most of the world. But the left and the rest of the world checked out over Iraq, and obviously not because we believed that all use of American force is immoral — it was because the plan was fucking hallucinatory. If there were intelligent, well-informed, tough centrists around you sure as hell didn’t find them in the DC wading pool where Joe Klein was climbing into George W. Bush’s codpiece as fast as his chubby little arms and legs would carry him. There were plenty of smart, well-informed tough liberals around the country, however, who understood that the Iraq war was a huge strategic error from the first moment the administration began doing the war dance.

Speaking only for myself, I do find the Bush Doctrine of preventive war to be immoral. Torture too. I also think it is wise to participate in international institutions and follow international law so that people around the world can have some confidence that we will not use our awesome power capriciously. Superpowers need to behave in a predictable, responsible, thoughtful, mature fashion lest ambitious enemies get the idea that we don’t have control of the situation. When we fuck up, the ramifications are huge and very dangerous. We simply cannot afford to play out starry eyed neocon experimental fantasies because the opportunity presents itself. The stakes are much too high.

This is a complicated subject and one which we all debated in the run up to the last “preemptive” war that was sold as necessary to prevent a catastrophe that was not imminent, but inevitable. We later found out the war was not only strategically unsound, as we all knew, but that the future threat assessment was based on lies.

But even if we were to accept this doctrine as being useful some time in the future (which I don’t) I think we can all agree that this administration has zero credibility. They are the last people on earth we or anyone else can trust to launch a “pre-preemptive” strike against anyone. That’s not pacifism, that’s common sense.

As for Klein’s fear of the populist hordes, well Jesus: is he really surprised that many working people are “anti-chinese competition?” What in the hell did all the smart, well-informed centrists think was going to happen when the manufacturing base was decimated and the Republicans engineered income inequality not seen since the gilded age? (And he should thank his good friends on the right for pulling out their dog-eared nativist playbook. They’ve always found it’s more convenient to blame the local brown foreigners than blaming free trade/free lunch utopians like Joe Klein.)

It’s not that these populist hordes want the world to just go away. They want guys like Klein to just go away and stop blowing smoke up their asses about how much better off they are when their jobs are outsourced and how glorious it is to get your kid killed in a useless war.

As much as I agree that the Democratic strategists are lame, I actually think that the liberal punditocrisy is a bigger problem. They spend all their time kissing up to the right, disparaging elected Democrats and mischaracterizing the real concerns and beliefs of the grassroots of the party.

By the way, Klein’s book is called (get ready)…

Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You’re Stupid

I would have thought he’d save that one for his autobiography.

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