Lessons Learned

by digby

Susan Dunn has written an interesting and provocative op-ed piece in today’s NY Times about Roosevelt’s failed effort to interfere in primaries in the 1938 election and the lessons Obama and Co. should take with respect to similar interference in state and local races around the country.

FDR too was plagued with reactionary wingnuts in his own party who tried to obstruct his agenda, so he intervened in the primaries by supporting liberal challengers in the ’38 midterms. (She quotes him saying about a Conservadem of the day, “Take Tyding’s hide off and rub salt in it” which would garner a GOP hissy fit of epic proportions if it were uttered today. “He’s endorsing torture!” the hypocritical Republicans would cry.)

According to Dunn it didn’t work because he underestimated the strength of the political machines, local papers and the attachment constituents have to their incumbents. Roosevelt had to do a lot of fence mending with these people when they were returned to office and her advice is for Obama to take a lesson from Roosevelt’s experience.

She claims that Roosevelt (like Obama?) relied too much on his own charisma and popularity instead of setting in motion long term political programs to build the party from the grassroots up. And while she recognizes that Obama is interfering in elections not because he wants to get rid of the barriers to his reform agenda from within his own party but rather out of “pragmatic” necessity to simply keep the seat at whatever cost, she seems to think that he’s in danger of doing exactly what Roosevelt did. To that, I can only say “I wish.” Roosevelt wanted to pass a progressive agenda and was being hamstrung by a bunch of right wing jackasses who didn’t have the nerve to actually run against his program (he was immensely popular) so he put his own popularity and political capital on the line to replace them with people who would. It didn’t work, but God bless him for trying.

Obama, on the other hand, seems to be leaning in the direction of working to preserve impediments to his own agenda, for reasons that can only be seen as self-destructive. (Of course, that’s assuming he wants his agenda to pass, which is still not entirely clear.) The Obama team has learned a lesson from Roosevelt’s experience alright, but not the one that Dunn thinks they should have learned. They seem to have learned that you should protect the conservatives in the party and never use even the slightest bit of political capital to persuade voters that they should elect more liberal representatives.

I’m not saying that Roosevelt did the smart political thing. I don’t know enough about the history of this move to judge whether there was any long term gain from what he did or whether it actually hurt him in the short run. But as a general rule, I don’t have a problem with a president putting his own credibility on the line to pass his agenda. The problem is when he uses his institutional clout to subvert the democratic processes that are in place for people to make their own decisions.

If Obama wants to go out and campaign for Arlen Specter it’s his privilege (although I can’t imagine why he would think that Specter would be a loyal ally.) But what he shouldn’t do is make promises that there will be no primary opponents or tell people that they can’t run for office simply because he wants to protect the seat. And it would be far more helpful to his own ability to govern if he used his popularity to help elect people who would actually vote to pass his agenda.

I’m all for ideological election battles. If people want to try to convince voters that their platform is the right one, and they have the stomach for political battle, then they should throw their hats into the ring and run. If the president wants to support challengers or incumbents who will help him be successful, then that’s perfectly fine. What isn’t fine is rigging the game.

To be clear, Dunn isn’t defending that idea in the least and she obviously believes that Obama should be putting his efforts into party building from the ground up rather than building his power on his own personal charisma, which is, after all only a temporary advantage for the Democrats. But, as I said, I think the administration has learned a lesson from this, but it came to the wrong conclusions. They seem, so far, to be obsessed with maintaining seats, no matter how reactionary they may be, and we are seeing how that translates into obstructionism by recalcitrant “centrists” who understand that they have the power to run the country based on nothing more than their own egos. It’s not a healthy way to run a democracy. I admire Roosevelt for going at that head-on in a time of crisis.

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