Talking The Talk

by digby

Somerby had a good piece about two different subjects of interest. The most important is the second part in which he talks about how deficient the Democratic arguments have been about health care over the years, and therefore, how ineffectual they are when trying to pass something important to the Democratic agenda. This really can’t be emphasized enough — it’s not enough to gain a majority or even to strong-arm your allies into voting the way you want them to. (The last only being realistic if you have real power.)

If progressives want to change politics in this country they are going to have to do it not just in institutional terms, but in rhetorical and ideological terms as well. It’s not like we haven’t talked about this before. Until the 2008 presidential campaign, it was one of the primary issues we talked about — changing the terms of the debate, educating the people, giving voters something to believe in and care about. But for some reason, on the progressive side all we seem to care about these days is poll numbers and institutional reform.

I think those things are important, but they aren’t the whole story. If the Republicans make a comeback — a big “if,” in the short term — they will do it because they have spent the last thirty years indoctrinating the American people into a certain way of thinking. It doesn’t give them a permanent hold on power,obviously, because at some point their bad ideas have consequences. But unless somebody explains why those bad ideas were the reason for the bad consequences, they can manipulate the electorate into believing that the problem wasn’t the ideas but the implementation. Since the people are comfortable with those ideas — and nobody’s offering a real alternative — when a crisis hits they naturally gravitate to the ideology they have internalized without even knowing it.

I’m not sure why we lost that thread on the progressive side. Part of it was that Obama ran a very clever campaign that sort of sounded like it was a new way forward, but it was more about symbolism and process  than new ideas. And symbolism won’t help you when the shit is raining down. But it’s time we activists started thinking about it again. It’s a long term project that needs to be undertaken once and for all and I would guess that unless we do it, the Republicans will always be able to recover smartly from their defeats and the reform agenda will never get off the ground.

Anyway …

I also have to mention the other story Somerby flags, which is the lugubrious Sally Quinn monstrosity. He points out an appalling vignette that I actually missed in the Taylor Branch Clinton bio:

Read Quinn’s full column, and you’ll learn a sad fact: These people think they get a large say in how the White House operates. They start to get mad when their wishes aren’t met—when their firmly-held views about various procedures aren’t honored by the silly shlub who stooped to getting elected. In Quinn’s piece, we hear unmistakable echoes of the way these people turned on the Clintons when they somehow weren’t respectful enough. But then, Clinton and Clinton “were not of Washington” either!

This is a deeply foolish “elite.” They’ve done this damage before.

Don’t get mad, get stupid: Is the following claim about Sally Quinn true? We have no way of knowing. But Taylor Branch, a sober fellow, decided to include it in his book, The Clinton Tapes. David Corn told the tale in real time:

CORN (9/21/09): In 1996, when Washington author Sally Quinn was telling people that Hillary had not written her book, It Takes a Village, Branch suggested to the First Lady that she invite Quinn and her husband Ben Bradlee to the White House. “You know,” Hillary shot back, “she has been hostile since the moment we got here. Why would we invite somebody like that into our home. How could she expect us to.” Branch writes, Hillary “said Quinn and her friends simply invented gossip for their dinner circuit. They had launched one juicy affair between Hillary and a female veterinarian attending Socks, the Clinton family cat, with tales about how somebody discovered them in flagrante on a bedroom floor in the White House.”

Wow.  Those are some mean, mean socialites if that’s true. But it sounds right …

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