The Left Flank
Posted on Tue Jun 16, 2009 at 07:15:32 AM EST
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Chris Bowers described a part of yesterday's meeting with former President Bill Clinton (I was in attendance):
President Clinton told the assembled bloggers that one of the best things they could do for elected Democrats is to function as a "countervailing" source of progressive pressure. That is, he encouraged us to offer left-wing criticism of Democrats on key policy areas, and that we should urge our leaders and elected officials to favor further reaching, more community-focused public policy. In fact, he indicated that he would have wanted more such progressive media pushing him during his time in office.
Additionally, President Clinton told the assembled bloggers that they should focus their pressure in a "sophisticated" pattern, focusing specifically on members of Congress who could be the most influenced. By this, he meant Democrats in safe blue districts afraid of primary challenges, and members of both parties in districts that could be swung in the next general election. He also indicated that he believed this was the start of anew progressive era in the federal government--the first since the mid-1960's--and was hopeful that major progressive agenda items on health care and climate change would pass as a result.
On the state of the progressive agenda, Matt Yglesias offers a contradictory view:
“[P]olitical capital” is a pretty misleading metaphor. . . . [T]he entire structure of the US Congress with its bicameralism and multiple overlapping committees is biased toward making it easy for concentrated interests to block reform. . . . Meanwhile, the fact of the matter is that in recent years plenty of incumbent Republicans have been brought down by primary challenges from the right and as best I know zero Democrats have been brought down by primary challenges from the left. This has been a huge advantage for the Democrats in terms of winning elections—it’s an important part of the reason Democrats have these majorities. But it also means that when it comes to policymaking, Republicans have a lot of solidarity but Democratic leaders have little leverage over individual members. In other words, nobody thinks that Collin Peterson (D-MN) is going to lose his seat over badly watering down Waxman-Markey and that matters a lot more than airy considerations of capital.
(Emphasis supplied.) This is an interesting observation and to me, demonstrates in many ways the complete superiority of the Right Wing activist model to the of the Progressive activist model. Even when they get trounced in elections, the Right Wing activists wield more power than the Progressive activists. And the reason is, in my opinion, Right Wing activists put their issues first, their pols second.
They remember what elections and politics are actually about - what the policy looks like in the end. Consider this observation from Yglesias:
The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. . . . But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.
(Emphasis supplied.) George Bush LOST the 2000 election and barely won the 2004 election. His agenda was disfavored by the American People. And yet he got his agenda through the Congress.
Yglesias has this wrong. The American Presidency is only weakened on policy when Democrats hold the office. This is, in part, because the Left Flank of the Democratic Party is incredibly ineffectual.
I once thought that the Left blogs could help to change that. But it seems there is much more interest in being Charlie Cooks and Stu Rothenbergs or in engaging in food fights with the Right blogs and Glenn Beck than in shaping the policy of the country .
I'll be expanding on this point in an entry at the TPM Book Cafe discussion of Eric Boehlert's book, The Bloggers on The Bus.
Speaking for me only
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