Understanding The Moment

by digby

Chris Bowers wrote a very poignant post about Barack Obama that expresses the bewildered dismay I think I lot of us feel when we read or hear our leaders still using us as a foil to distance themselves from their own base. It’s so disheartening to see someone we hope will be a brilliant leader make the mistake of running against the Party just when it is finding a new sense of unity — and the other side is having an identity crisis.

It’s worth recalling where these “Sistah Souljah” impulses came from and look at whether they make any sense in today’s politics. The term applies to Bill Clinton’s repudiation of some hot rhetoric after the LA riots, which happened smack in the middle of the presidential campaign. Souljah, a political activist and writer/rapper, had been widely quoted (out of context) in the mainstream media as saying, “if Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton responded to that comment with “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”

This was interpreted as part of his “centrist” campaign to be tough on crime and welfare, which, after twelve years of Welfare Queen and Willie Horton demagoguing, was deemed to be a necessary step to Democrats taking back the presidency. (In those days, remember, the GOP lizard brain appeals were more directly racial. They hadn’t yet adopted their new language of religious code to obscure their regional and racist strategy.) Clinton had made the calculation that if he could neutralize those issues and run on an economic message aimed at the middle class, he could win. (It was also an attempt to marginalize Jesse Jackson, at that time a major institutional player in the party, and widely considered to be a drag on the Democrats’ presidential chances in the south.) The three days of televised riots presented a very serious threat to that plan.

So, he did what he did and received huge plaudits from the punditocrisy. Jesse had a fit and that made everyone even happier. And Clinton won, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the candidacy of Ross Perot. (Whether you agree that Perot took votes from Clinton or Bush, there’s no doubt he scrambled that election.) It became, however, a matter of conventional wisdom that Democrats needed to distance themselves from their “special interests” and liberal base in order to win elections.

Now, fifteen years later, it’s become a tic, a reflexive point that is no longer used for any specific purpose but rather serves as a political ritual designed to assure the conservative political establishment that the candidate does not associate himself or herself with undesirable liberals. The members of the base who have been used for a decade and a half as the human sacrifices to the pundit Gods of the beltway are starting, quite naturally, to rebel. It’s not, however, just because they are sick of being scapegoated; it’s because it’s become part of the predictable “braindead politics” of Washington that Clinton so rightly ran against in the first place.

I don’t blame Bill Clinton for doing what he did. Indeed, I give him credit for having the guts to point to a specific act instead of adopting the modern mealy mouthed rhetoric (“some on the left need to stop …”) which at least allowed for an honest debate about something identifiable and real. And, in the wake of the riots, as part of a serious national debate about “law and order” and race in the middle of a presidential campaign, it made sense for a Democrat to try to thread that needle.

At that point it had been two decades of Republicans running against amnesty, acid, abortion — and, of course, civil rights. Democrats were ready to try new things. And Clinton already had all the liberal heuristics in his corner. He was only 46 years old and the first baby boomer candidate. He had extremely respectable anti-war and civil rights credentials. He listened to rock music and had a feminist wife and and a marriage of equality. He had even run McGovern’s campaign in Texas. Most importantly, he was comfortable with modern life, which after Reagan and Bush senior, had the fresh whiff of the future. (After all, the boomers, unlike most generational cohorts had been very politically active since they were teen-agers and had been waiting to take the reins for a long time.) Because of all those signifiers, he was forgiven all this tacking to the right because we believed that in his heart he was one of us. The passing of the torch to our generation stood in for liberalism.

The conditions that made that work were unique and it was a fleeting moment of liberal satisfaction anyway. Instead of being able to calm the waters, Clinton’s presidency immediately ushered in an unprecedented surge of right wing extremism — helped along by an unexpectedly hostile press and an emerging partisan media machine. They were anything but mollified by his rightward tack and used all the subtle, symbolic characteristics that we liberals all liked so much, to assassinate his character. Perhaps it was inevitable. Bill Clinton, or someone like him, was probably needed to exorcize the perceived sins of the liberal left.

But in that process, modern conservatism also began to discredit itself with the public. They never again reached the high water mark of 1994 and despite their very sophisticated efforts to portray George W. Bush as the “good” Clinton in 2000 they didn’t manage to convince a majority of the people to vote for him. The conservative era that began a quarter century ago had started to sputter. 9/11 momentarily stalled the progression (and perhaps even changed its direction in some unexpected ways now that Bush has so thoroughly discredited the Republicans’ greatest political strength — national security.) Bush’s grand failure has accelerated a process of political rejection I thought would be much slower. Today it is the right that requires the litmus tests and demands that their candidates show fealty to the extremist elements in their midst. It is those radicals, not the exaggerated hippie chimera the beltway keeps trying to conjure, who are making average Americans recoil.

So my problem with Democrats these days is not what they did back in the 90’s. That’s water under the bridge. It’s that they are failing to seize the moment right now. The most recent (imperfect) analogy I can think of is 1980. The Republicans seized that moment of national “malaise” and discontent to go mainstream. After that election it became a matter of faith among millions of Americans that “they didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left them.”

The Republicans understood that the ship had finally made its turn, that many of the folks were unnerved by all the social and economic change of the previous 15 years. (And they knew they could leverage that discontent against everybody’s favorite scapegoat in times of trouble — African Americans, who also happen to be Democrats.) Over time they convinced a lot of people that they actually were “conservatives” but in that moment it was all about simply identifying with the great swath of Americans who were tired and fed-up — and pointing the finger at the opposition.

Today, it’s the Republicans who are seen as captives of their own worst impulses which is why it is so out of sync and dissonant for Obama and others to still be triangulating against their own base. It feels odd — discordant. The Democratic rank and file are no different than millions of average people in this country who are feeling uncomfortable with the radicalism, incompetence, hubris and corruption of the Republican party after six years of one party rule — and a quarter century of conservative consensus. And the activist base from which these politicians are trying to distance themselves is where the energy and future of this new majority party rsides. Why would you run from them just when the other side’s consensus is starting to fray? It’s far more politically useful to present them to the public as the average people they really are. We’re all just like you — regular everyday citizens who believe that the country needs a new direction.

As we have seen, triangulating can sometimes be the politically smart thing to do. But not right now. This is the political moment for the Democrats to seize the mantle of the mainstream — to argue that we are the big tent, where people of conscience from all over the political spectrum are coming together, concerned about our nation, ready to work in common cause. The Republican party has abandoned the concerns of the American people. The Democratic party is the party that will secure the future.

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