Effective persuasion
by digby
Matt Yglesias wrote something this week that I wanted to post today. It’s just a quick observation:
Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein are back to debating the hoary counterfactual of whether the Obama administration could have gotten a larger stimulus bill out of Congress had they fully recognized the depth and breadth of the recession they were facing. One thing I want to say about this is always that insider testimonies on this subject provide sort of poor evidence. This is often discussed in terms of arm twisting or political pressure, but administration officials who were there assure me they did everything they could and I more or less believe them. But maybe they could or should have been more genuinely persuasive? Presumably if Ben Nelson sincerely believed that appropriating hundreds of billions of extra dollars in stimulus spending would meaningfully imprve the American economy, then he would have voted for it. Pressure is nice, but on some level there’s no substitute for sincere conviction which means there’s no substitute for effective persuasion.
The problem in our politics isn’t just money, it’s cynicism. And that goes for activists as well as politicians. Persuasion is the very essence of politics and at some point, if you believe in representative democracy, you just have to get down to it and elect people who believe as you believe. Persuasion always beats coercion for the long term.
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