Another morning, another memorandumb:
| Take charge, part 2: it’s not the populism, it’s the partisanship tristan | Wed, Jun 6, 2012 4:45 PM EST Your think piece for this evening - there's no Celtics game, so you have the time! - promoted by david On the Talking Points Memo post, I don’t have the same read that Charley does here. The problem identified by “JB” was not a lack of anti-plutocratic populism — though I think that has been part of the problem underlying the spinelessness of establishment Democrats. Instead, the problem “JB” identifies is much more pervasive and endemic, reaching beyond DC to progressives all over the country — it’s a lack of partisan chutzpah, driven by a misperception about how politics really works. (( ... yimmmer ... yammer ... yada ... ¡snip! )) |
| American politics is based on emotion at least for a majority of voters who matter — the swing voters. It’s frustrating to those who believe that the person with better policy ideas should win, but that’s the way things are. If this is not something you can deal with, then you need to find another line of work. Obama won in part because he’s a great campaigner and gives great speeches, while McCain is dull. Not the only reason but one important one. Democrats won in 2008 because finally they picked the best candidate, not the one with the best resume on paper or whose turn it was. I’m not sure a dull, boring Deval Patrick could have won in ’06 with the same strategies and platforms. It’s not just making the case but making the case in a way that connects with people. In the current environment especially, Democrats need candidates who are gifted in communicating and connecting, because it is is easier to stir up fear and anger in an era of declining standards of living than it is to counteract those forces once unleashed. I’m sure Marisa DeFranco was ready to make an aggressive case for progressive values as well. Elizabeth Warren is so exciting not only because she sticks to her guns, but she does so in a way that gets things done and inspires others to join her cause. I know many voters who admired the way she kept her cool while testifying in Washington despite the shabby way she was treated. So it’s not necessarily about being the loudest and most aggressive. There’s more than one way to make an emotional connection with voters, but above a certain level, it’s usually necessary. I haven’t seen it necessary in statewide races Ike attorney general — which may help explain why our last few AGs who ran for higher office didn’t do so well. oceandreams @ Wed 6 Jun 10:27 PM |
| "There’s more than one way to make an emotional connection with voters" (( fold here )) Now there is an oracle worthy of Delphi, or Dodona, or 20 Quincy Street. But oracles demand the dragon eye. However ‘exciting’ to bluevolks who can get excitated about such a product, St. Elisabeth of H*rv*rdy is in danger of coming out about the same place where the late King Crœsus of Lydia came out, there having proved to be more than one way "to destroy a great kingdom." Perhaps the connection reliably established for somevolks by scraping chalk on a blackboard is not ‘emotional’ in the strict clinical sense, but it comes close enough for Fedguv purposes. There is no need to take Paddy McTammany's word for it when one can easily ask Senator Coakley. Or grab firm hold one's bluenose and then do a little amateur political sociology in the e-columns of the much-esteemed, mnogouvazhàyemniy, Boston Herald, where the fruits of the Journalism School an' the frathouse babes are gonna work up a hernia one of these days if they keep on scrapin’ so hard. This, however, though supremely pertinent in Paddy's opinion, will not be what Dame Oracle had in mind. Nor will She have been vouchsafing that, in addition to (1) the inevitable and fearfully pricey MacL@@han Tube, one can get at the hormones of the populace nowadays by way of (2) WWWonderland. And maybe even still via (3) direct mail, though that is getting dubious. Plus of course (4) even Her Excitation is bound to attract at least a few street-corner sign-brandishers. [*] And, strictly for auld lange sygne, ¿why not toss in the Boston (NY) Globe as well, making (5)? No, that enumeration is not the right kind of "more than one way" either. Almost certainly Dame Oracle meant that Her Excitation, or rather Her Excitation’s funders’ operatives, have a wide variety of Mass. emotions to appeal to: pity, envy, ambition, disinterested admiration (¡hah!), sex nausea, "the presentation of Self in everyday life," Cherokee chauvinism, gown-v.-town, &c. &c. -- all these, and many more, might be practiced on so as to move a fewvolks to pull the lever for Lizzie. She herself (D. O., that is) specifies only "fear and anger," not a happy sampling, in light of how difficult it would be to work up much of that against the cuckoo currently nestin’ in The People's Seat™. Senator Fratboy has a really deplorable native flair for the responsio mollis [quæ] frangit iram. Soft-soap ‘R’ Scottbo. [3] <sigh> Happy days. --JHM ____ [1] A fresh outbreak of Black Death would not deter that crew. As if Mass. intersections were not accident-prone enough when just left to themselves. [2] Lib. Prov. XV:01. As for sermo durus suscitat furorem, that appears to Paddy and Eye to be pretty much what some of the (other) nobility and gentry in this thread would like to see more of, with their "pugnacious liberals" and their deploring that "we want to tell stories without villains" and so on. [3] I guess Dame Oracle supposes the cuckoo broke in originally by resortin’ to "fear and anger," though this conjecture would be tricky, I think, to elaborate in a manner reconcilable with scrupulous reality-basing. One wants, after all, to avoid mention of anything that it would be respectable to shudder at or thunder against. In Januuary 2010, the Funders of Fratboy (LLC) certainly classified ‘Obamacare’ under that rubric. Their freelordships even, very intellectual-foundationally indeed, hoped that Fratboy, once installed, would decisively vindicate the neoteric Forty-Percent Majority Principle (Pat. Pend.). Scottbo bobbled the medical catch, and we are still waiting to see if the Supreme Court will back him up on the play. Moreover, once America's Otherparty started havin’ old-fangle fifty-one-percent majorities to talk about again, their poor new F-PMP was relegated to high on some dusty shelf at the American Ideological Enterprise until the Otherpartisans need it again, ¡Father Zeus hasten the happy day! Unfortunately, though Paddy and Eye can do a pretty plausible imitation of pavor indignatioque about SmirkCare™ for invalids an’ ‘filibustocracy’ for the Senate, we two are hardly representative of Televisionland and the electorate. Even if we were, to emote about matters that substantive would put us three fields over from Their Worships’ present topic, which, as you no doubt recall, is "On a Certain Lack of Partisan _Huçpâ_ Amongst Demoncrats." Somebooby should maybe advise E-comrade ‘Tristan’ that the Seemighties Themselves never mean anything good by the show-off technical term he borrows. Better would have been plain four-letter ‘zeal’, or maybe--¡bow-wow; arf, arf; grrrrrrrrrr!--‘ferocity’. M. Roget must have a couple zillion synonyms for the supposed magic ingredient. |
That "yimmer yammer yada" bit is maybe a little disrespectful even by Paddy O'Forelock's standards.
Life would be a little less unfair if only the nobility and gentry could be persuaded to adopt our own principle that, barring genuine inaccuracy, if one does not like one's own stuff entirely without sugar sprinkles on top, maybe it is not really one's stuff aftet all.
Oh, well.
Happy days.
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