Outside of MA Republicans kicked a lot of Democratic ass last night. (Ezra Klein with the Big Picture here, 9 takeaways from the 2014 election.) When you (we) lose that badly you need to do a reality-based self-assessment. I’ll offer my thoughts later this week. In the interim, Kevin Baker in the NY Times, President Obama Is Not a Happy Warrior:
This appears to have been a baffling rejection to this supremely detached president, whose supporters have been protesting that the public just does not appreciate all he has done — a list that invariably includes Obamacare, a revived stock market and an unemployment mark that has inched slowly downward.
What the White House doesn’t seem to appreciate is just how little a dent this has made in the devastating loss of wealth, security and opportunity so many Americans have experienced in the last few years. But this administration has also been afflicted almost from the start with the inability to decide just whom it is trying to appeal to.
Like Bill Clinton before him, this New Democrat president early on dismissed traditional liberals as “professional leftists” as his first press secretary once put it. But just a few months ago he also let his new F.C.C. chairman suggest an end to net neutrality, and his secretary of education heartily endorse the decision of a Republican judge ending teacher tenure, in which said judge claimed “there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms.”
Well, which is it? Are you trying to build the new, white-collar Democratic Party or not, and if so, where do you expect these people to come from?
This sort of confusion about practical politics has long bedeviled New Democrats. And in fairness, we did let the president down, after that cool, cool fall day in 2008. The sorts of sweeping, groundbreaking reforms we were hoping for — the change we could believe in — has never been accomplished from the top down in America, but has always meant a president gathering up the strands of many useful ideas and experiments, and working with the power, and often the hands, feet, elbows and knees, of grass-roots movements at his back.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leading advisers, Harry L. Hopkins, Frances Perkins, Harold L. Ickes and Henry A. Wallace, among others, had labored long in the trenches on crucial issues of social welfare, labor rights, and land and farm preservation. The Tennessee Valley Authority came out of a decades-long struggle for public power, by Senator George W. Norris. No one in the Congress or Mr. Obama’s cabinet has provided anything like this sort of counsel, or experience.
Nor has there been anything like the sorts of longstanding, populist, militant farm and labor movements that put the New Deal over. In the turmoil of the 1930s, worker uprisings literally took over waterfronts, factories, department stores and even the city of Minneapolis. Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park, then evaporated. It takes more than that — more than casting a vote every couple of years — to make change.
Baker’s points are very well taken. People who give a shit about changing things for the better would do well to keep them in mind as we approach 2016.