Gilliard has posted a rundown of the recent Fall of the House of Bush. You can certainly understand why the patriarch might cry in public. But what’s most fascinating is this amazing picture.
It reminded me of this article by Phil Agre from a few years back that I’ve been meaning to discuss as we watch the edifice of modern conservatism start to crumble. It’s an interesting piece, but what’s really important is something that is so obvious that we sometimes forget about it with all the Neo-con and Theo-con intellectual babble of recent years:
From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use “social issues” as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.
There’s been a lot of rightwing populist talk in recent years and plenty of econobabble about “the ownership society” and the rest. Modern conservatism’s most successful strategy was to merge public relations and politics into a seamless operation in which it could use modern marketing methods to convince people to vote against their own interests. (Perhaps we are seeing the first signs of how that can blow back on them. We’ll see.)
But looking at that amazing picture of the Bush clan in the White house — the former president, the current president, the Governor of one of the largest states — all together in the White House says everything you need to know about what true conservatism is really all about.
We allowed them to impeach the duly elected president who beat the father, for trivial reasons. We allowed the father’s appointees to settle a dubious election result in the son’s favor. We have watched them as they created a presidency insulated from popular or congressional oversight in which they have gone so far as to set forth the idea that the president has no obligation to follow the law. They lowered taxes on the very rich to a level not seen in many decades and created an income disparity between the very, very rich and everyone else that is unprecedented in the modern era. They eliminated the single best means of ensuring that an aristocracy will not truly form — the estate inheritance tax. The ten year campaign to repeal it was bankrolled by 18 of the richest families in America.
Who says Bush isn’t a real conservative? Why he’s the most purely conservative president in American history.
Tom Schaller over at TAPPED notes something I’ve been observing for a while as well: the precipitous loss of Tony Blair’s rhetorical skills:
MARKETERS-IN-CHIEF. Regarding the Blair-Bush press conference this morning, is it just me or is Tony Blair becoming less eloquent and coherent the more he stands side-by-side with Bush?
I thought it was just me. It’s rubbing off, and not just in Bush’s presence. Here’s an excerpt from his Labour Party speech in September:
And of course, the new anxiety is the global struggle against terrorism without mercy or limit.
This is a struggle that will last a generation and more. But this I believe passionately: we will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible.
This terrorism isn’t our fault. We didn’t cause it.
It’s not the consequence of foreign policy.
It’s an attack on our way of life.
It’s global.
It has an ideology.
It killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of.
It has been decades growing.
Its victims are in Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey.
Over 30 nations in the world.
It preys on every conflict.
It exploits every grievance.
And its victims are mainly Muslim.
This is not our war against Islam.
[…]
If we retreat now, hand Iraq over to Al Qaida and sectarian death squads and Afghanistan back to Al Qaida and the Taleban, we won’t be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril.
Of course it’s tough.
Not a day goes by or an hour in the day when I don’t reflect on our troops with admiration and thanks – the finest, the best, the bravest, any nation could hope for.
They are not fighting in vain. But for this nation’s future.
I’m sure it sounds better in a british accent but it’s still Bush boilerplate. I’m surprised he didn’t say that that until 9/11, England had always thought the oceans would protect her.
I have concluded that while we have all been trying for years to figure out just what in the hell Blair thought he was doing, the simplest answer is probably the right one. He’s just as dumb as Bush on this matter. He believes this crap. Now that all the early rationales that made his rhetoric sensible lie moldering in the historical compost heap, he’s left with nothing but the puerile ad copy that Junior’s team concocted to make these people believe they had been anointed by God to fight a grand struggle between good and evil. Sad.
Update: “I know it’s tough”
In case anyone missed Bush’s little tantrum this morning, here it is:
Q Mr. President, the Iraq Study Group described the situation in Iraq as grave and deteriorating. You said that the increase in attacks is unsettling. That won’t convince many people that you’re [not] still in denial about how bad things are in Iraq, and question your sincerity about changing course.
PRESIDENT BUSH: It’s bad in Iraq. Does that help? (Laughter.)
Q Why did it take others to say it before you’ve been willing to acknowledge for the world —
PRESIDENT BUSH: In all due respect, I’ve been saying it a lot. I understand how tough it is. And I’ve been telling the American people how tough it is. And they know how tough it is. And the fundamental question is, do we have a plan to achieve our objective. Are we willing to change as the enemy has changed? And what the Baker-Hamilton study has done is it shows good ideas as to how to go forward. What our Pentagon is doing is figuring out ways to go forward, all aiming to achieve our objective.
Make no mistake about it, I understand how tough it is, sir. I talk to families who die. I understand there’s sectarian violence. I also understand that we’re hunting down al Qaeda on a regular basis and we’re bringing them to justice. I understand how hard our troops are working. I know how brave the men and women who wear the uniform are, and therefore, they’ll have the full support of this government. I understand what long deployments mean to wives and husbands, and mothers and fathers, particularly as we come into a holiday season. I understand. And I have made it abundantly clear how tough it is.
I also believe we’re going to succeed. I believe we’ll prevail. Not only do I know how important it is to prevail, I believe we will prevail. I understand how hard it is to prevail. But I also want the American people to understand that if we were to fail — and one way to assure failure is just to quit, is not to adjust, and say it’s just not worth it — if we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future.
And as I said in my opening statement, I believe we’re in an ideological struggle between forces that are reasonable and want to live in peace, and radicals and extremists. And when you throw into the mix radical Shia and radical Sunni trying to gain power and topple moderate governments, with energy which they could use to blackmail Great Britain or America, or anybody else who doesn’t kowtow to them, and a nuclear weapon in the hands of a government that is — would be using that nuclear weapon to blackmail to achieve political objectives — historians will look back and say, how come Bush and Blair couldn’t see the threat? That’s what they’ll be asking. And I want to tell you, I see the threat and I believe it is up to our governments to help lead the forces of moderation to prevail. It’s in our interests.
And one of the things that has changed for American foreign policy is a threat overseas can now come home to hurt us, and September the 11th should be a wake-up call for the American people to understand what happens if there is violence and safe havens in a part of the world. And what happens is people can die here at home.
So, no, I appreciate your question. As you can tell, I feel strongly about making sure you understand that I understand it’s tough. But I want you to know, sir, that I believe we’ll prevail. I know we have to adjust to prevail, but I wouldn’t have our troops in harm’s way if I didn’t believe that, one, it was important, and, two, we’ll succeed. Thank you.
I was reading Christy Hardin Smith’s piece this morning about my congressman Henry Waxman and how the republicans changed the rules back in the 90’s to give the the chairman of the house Government reform Committee unilateral subpoena power. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, my friends.
In her post she points out something that I think everyone should memorize and be prepared to quote every time these Republicans start to whine a cry about the Democratic witchhunt:
The House took 140 hours of sworn testimony to get to the bottom of whether Clinton had misused the White House Christmas-card list for political purposes, but only 12 hours on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
It would probably be very helpful to have at the ready a handy list comparing all the subpoenas and investigations during the Clinton administration as compared to Bush. The Republicans are going to portray the Democratic congress as an out of control lynch mob. It’s important that we remind everyone of what a bunch of slackers they have been under a Republican president and what a non-stop slavering freakshow they ran the last time government was divided.
But when I read that thing about the Christmas card list it also reminded me of something else I recently became aware of. If you’ll recall, during the Clinton administration there was a big scandal over the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom. Everyone agreed that campaign donors had been invited to spend the night in the White House since the time it was built, but what bothered everyone was how mercenary the whole thing seemed, how the hippie hicks from Arkansas were disrespectful toward the nation’s great heritage.
Here’s a pretty decent example of the tone of the complaints:
LEE CULLUM, Dallas Morning News: Yes, it is crass. It’s vulgar. It’s terrible taste. The Dallas Morning News had two editorials this week, not one but two, calling for a special prosecutor in this matter. You know, the White House has simply gone too far. I’m not naive…this has been a systematic selling of the White House in bits and pieces. It’s gone too far, and it’s way out of hand. It is crass.
When Bush ran on “restoring honor and integrity” to the White House, he wasn’t just saying he would avoid interns; the tabloid political press and the GOP congressional committees had been portraying Clinton as a cheap used car salesman, selling out the People’s House, for years. They even accused him of stealing the hand-towels on AirForce One.
So imagine my surprise when I see this on CNN the other day:
When the Secret Service phoned Lesa Glucroft, they were calling about hand lotion. Officials wanted to know if the Calabasas businesswoman was interested in sticking the U.S. presidential seal on her lotions and powders and selling them as “America’s Legacy” at the White House gift shop. At first she thought it was a hoax. “I certainly didn’t think it was a serious call,” said Glucroft, a registered Democrat. But the inquiry, from a licensing agent for the U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division Benefit Fund, was genuine. And now a line of toiletries bearing the presidential insignia is about to hit the gift shop’s shelves. The antibacterial hand wash, glycerin soap, after-shave and other products come in bottles embossed with the distinctive presidential seal: a vigilant eagle holding an olive branch and arrows in its talons and encircled by stars and the words “The President of the United States.”
You know, I don’t deny the Secret Service a right to have a Benefit Fund. More power to them, they do a fine job. They’ve run a little gift shop in the basement of the White House for years where they sell little tchotckes and they have a little fundraising program to sell ChristmasOrnaments door to door. (Who knew?)
But where did they get the right to exclusively license the sacred People’s House for toiletry items — which they are selling to the public all over the internet? I can’t help but wonder what other intimate products are adorned with the presidential seal these days.
It seems to me that the bluenose society mavens might find all this “crass,” “vulgar” and “in terrible taste,” if not entirely inappropriate. I guess not. In fact, I’m girding myself for the soon-to-begin paeans to the “graciousness” and “class” that the Bush’s brought to the social scene in Washington. They might have been the most destructive presidency in history but at least they weren’t a bunch of no-class hick liberal elites who didn’t know their place.
Update: Dave Niewert says:
I don’t know about you, but the symbology of the Bush White House marketing official presidential hand cleaner strikes me as a flagrant bit of unintentional self-revelation.
The following is an excerpt from Rick Perlstein‘s upcoming book Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972
The President began to look almost demented. At a March 25th speech to AFL-CIO Building Trades Department, as North Vietnamese troops made their deepest penetration into the South so far, he cried:
“Now, the America we are building”–he paused, and hit the words deliberately for emphasis–“would–be–a–threatened–nation if we let freedom and liberty die in Vietnam…
“I sometimes wonder why we Americans enjoy punishing ourselves so much with our own criticism.
“This is a pretty good land. I am not saying you never had it so good. But that is a fact, isn’t it?”
He pulled himself close to the podium, and stared into the audience, his eyes as wide as saucers.
That night, the bipartisan mandarinate known formally as the Senior Advisory Group began preparing at the Pentagon for a meeting with the President. Among them were advisors who’d steered the course of the Cold War before the Cold War had even been named. The last time the “Wise Men” had met, on November 2, they told the President to stay the course. Now, the head of counterinsurgency briefed them that because Americans had killed 80,000 enemy soldiers, Tet was a famous U.S. victory. UN Ambassador and former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg questioned his figures. Wasn’t the usual ratio that you could count on four times as many soldiers getting wounded than had died in a battle?
The briefer acknowledged that was so.
Then, Goldberg replied, that meant some 320,000 Communists had been removed from the field of battle. But the general had also told them that the Communists had only 240,000 soldiers. So we’d wounded 133 percent of the enemy.
Another briefer was more forthright. He said progress on the ground in Vietnam would take five to seven years. Clark Clifford asked him if the war could ever be won: “Not under present circumstances.” Clifford asked him what he would do if he were president: “Stop the bombing and negotiate.”
Which was exactly what President Johnson had been going around telling audiences he’d never do.
They met with Johnson the next morning. “Mr. President, there has been a very significant shift in most of our positions since we last met,” McGeorge Bundy began. He raised the name of Truman’s legendary secretary of state, a man to make any Democratic president quiver: “Dean Acheson summed up the majority feeling when he said that we can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left, and we must begin to take steps to disengage.”
Lyndon left, then raged to wise man George Ball: “Your whole group must have been brainwashed!” It was a kind of last gasp. He was finally beginning to get the picture: he had to prepare the American people for the reality of eventual disengagement from Vietnam.
David Sirota writing in the December issue of In These Times:
Candidates all over the country talked about how corporate lobbyists have manipulated our trade policy to crush workers, our energy policy to harm consumers and our health care policy to hurt families. Polls show populism (a.k.a., challenging corporate economic power) is the “center” position for the voting public, even though it may not be the “center” position in a K-Street-owned Washington, D.C.
Since the election, Washington’s elite have tried to deny progressives credit and to downplay a mandate that threatens their agenda. These revisionists say the election was about Democrats pretending to be Republicans, billing people like Virginia Senator-elect Jim Webb as a “conservative.” Yet here is what this “conservative” wrote in a Nov. 15 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Class Struggle”:
The most important—and unfortunately the least debated—issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. … The top 1 percent now takes in an astounding 16 percent of national income, up from 8 percent in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.
If that is the new “conservative,” progressives won an even bigger victory than we thought.
Yupperz. He goes on:
This is a difficult time for Beltway lobbyists and corporate front-groups like the Democratic Leadership Council. It hurts them to see how populism was the Democrats’ ticket. But the elite are not contrite, rather they babble—”Vital dynamic center! Vital dynamic center!” We can understand their outbursts—it hurts to be rejected—but they are just going to have to deal. As winning candidates from Virginia to Kansas to Montana proved, the strategy of repeating lobbyist-written talking points to win red states belongs in the historical scrap heap. It’s the Era of Populism now.
Read his brief article at the link. (Sorry for the typo in the post title.)
I can’t remember if it was Stewart or Olbermann who spot-lighted Bush’s recent speech where he repeated the slogan “sectarian violence” about a hundred times. The boy-President was repudiating his own responsibility for said violence (by blaming it on Al-Qaeda) but was also refusing to acknowledge what others were calling a civil war. On this latter point, I think he might be on to something. From Christy quoting Joe Wilson:
The problem is we are so far down the road on the way to chaos that there may not be any way to stop this until all sides are exhausted. The question is not whether the situation has become a civil war but rather whether it has degenerated from a civil war to out and out anarchy and a failed state.
It may be, but I think it also might be a more general (and savvy) move to curry favor with liberal Christians. They are starting to organize themselves in a more explicitly political way — partially to save themselves from a rightwing onslaught, but also because the left in general is simply organizing itself in a whole lot of new ways. If Edwards is smart enough to be looking for these organizing mechanisms and making a direct appeal, good for him. I believe that Democratic candidates who are looking beyond the usual suspects are going to be better positioned for 2008. The action is outside the beltway.
In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a stepped up effort to ‘dismantle the militias.’
McCain’s the big tough guy who’s been saying 20,000 more troops is the answer. What happens if he gets them? Does he flip flop and say it was too late after all when things don’t go well? Does he blame the troops for not being able to get the job done? It’s quite the dilemma for the man who thought he had a fool proof way to run as the only one in Washington who knew how to fight and win the war like a man.
Kevin Drum wonders why NASA is all excited about going to the moon.
Valuable minerals? Manufacturing of rocket fuel and “other materials”? Scientific laboratories? Did they crib this stuff out of a science fiction novel from the 50s? The scientific community seems barely able to think up anything useful to do with the International Space Station, and that even has zero gee as a selling point.
I love the space program, but if we’re going to spend a few hundred billion dollars on this program shouldn’t they at least pretend that they’re going to accomplish something?
Though the Bush administration’s attempts to realize a Pax Americana in the Middle East is the subject of sustained international debate, there’s been less attention to the White House’s dream of American hegemony in space. (This isn’t an accident: The current National Space Policy was released to the public at a moment when few reporters were around—5 p.m. on October 6, the beginning of Columbus Day weekend.) The Defense Department now has orders to “deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.”
Exactly what this means in practical terms remains to be seen. But as Aviation Week and Space Technology recently reported, the new directive now has “military space commanders… discussing ‘space control’ and ‘space superiority’ issues with unusual candor” after years of those “politically sensitive terms [being] off limits.” Among the few Democrats who appear to have taken notice is Al Gore, who, according to the magazine, told the audience at a recent private conference that this “may be the most serious strategic error in the entire history of the United States of America.” Will Bob Gates be sympathetic, opposed, or indifferent to letting generals with stars in their eyes push the new policy to the limits? Stay tuned.
Never let it be said that the Republicans are not focused. No matter what happens they just keep right on going with every harebrained scheme any crazed wingnut ever dreamed up on a AEI week-end acid trip.
Maybe somebody needs to ask St. John McCain about this.
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.
