January 2008

When Did Gore and Kerry Get Sainted?

ArchPundit January 1, 2008 2 Comments

Markos and others attack Obama for daring to criticize Gore and Kerry.

I’m not picking on Markos individually, but this general idea that somehow those two twits are above criticism from our candidates is silly as hell.

They came in and trashed the party with condescension and crappy campaigns built on lame appeals fought over the margins and not the heart of the country’s values.   If you like John Edwards or Barack Obama, they are doing exactly the opposite by arguing about values and justice, not over the most recent version of school uniforms.

The person who is the natural follower of Gore and Kerry is Hillary Clinton–one of the best practitioners of the politics of condescension and someone who will argue over 10 voters in an Ohio precinct instead of millions of Americans across the country.

The question is are Democrats going to compete broadly and over values or are we going to have another candidate arguing over lockboxes and arcane votes? A Democrat will likely win the White House, but if we want to perpetuate the kind of crappy campaigns run in 2000 and 2004, pick someone who is going to argue over arcane policy points instead of arguing about the values that Americans hold dear.

The blogosphere faces significant challenges in being the best critique of the press and groupthink  in the press, but also is developing serious blindspots about the groupthink in the liberal blogosphere.

More specifically though the notion is that Obama is blaming Gore and Kerry for polarization.  That’s not what he said though, but running the kind of crappy incremental, policy wonkish and condescending campaigns aimed at winning that small sliver of swing voters perpetuates the polarization we see today.

Polarization has been heightened by a right wing noise machine over the last 25 years, but polarization is a natural effect of a closely divided nation. We would be polarized with or without the right wing noise machine. However, the way to overcome that polarization is not to build up the same infrastructure, it’s too create a large governing coalition so the elections aren’t that close.

It strikes me that both Obama and Edwards are proposing doing exactly that though using different language.  Even then, the language is more similar than anyone seems to notice with both offering critiques of the current system as a system cut from social Darwinism..
H. Clinton, Dukakis, Kerry, and Gore all held the debate on Republican terms.  Changing the terms to be on Democratic terms isn’t going to the right, it’s the kind of innovation the Party should have adopted years ago instead of going with the DLC in the early 1990s.

The progressive blogs have tended towards Edwards because of his rhetoric of fighting and I don’t find it unreasonable. I think there is a group think based on the notion that contrasting partisan fights are better overall and so it’s the only way to win.  I have never understood the argument as being an exclusive way to win though–in fact, it is one of two ways to change the debate on to Democratic terms. One can, effectively, argue that fighting for progressive values redefines the debate.  But at the same time, so does an argument that focuses upon different rhetoric, but gets you to the same end point.

The larger point is that both approaches are huge improvements over the traditional Democratic campaigns since 1980 other than 1992 and 1996. The people running those campaigns were part of the problem and it’s time to get rid of them and instead of reacting to Republicans, providing the argument to which they have to respond.