The Terror of the Liberal Bogeyman

For all the hysteria the Frightwingers create with fake issues like terror babies and terror community centers and terror European vacations and terror health care and terror net neutrality, the fake issue that gets the most attention from the agenda-setting biddies in Village comes from the Democratic Establishment: the Terror Professional Left.

Ken at Down with Tyranny tries to make sense of it via Michael Tomasky's recent piece in the American Prospect. He opens with this quote from Tomasky:

"The GOP base wants tax cuts and deregulation, and when the Republicans are in power, they deliver as much of those things as they can. The Democratic base wanted a public option (actually, single-payer) for health care, a trillion-dollar stimulus, and the breakup of the big banks. It never came especially close to getting any of these things."

Ken excerpts Tomasky's examples of grossly unbalanced coverage of republicans and democrats and writes:

No, indeed, inside the Beltway they sure don't treat Left and Right anywhere near equivalently. D.C. Dems routinely trash progressives to build up cred with their mythical "Center." By contrast, even before the Terror of the Teabaggers it would have been hard to imagine Republican pols saying anything unkind about the blatant ignorance and insanity pouring forth from their rightward flank; now it's all but unthinkable.

After making the comparison I quoted at the top of this post, Michael strolls down Health-Care-Memory Lane.

"It is important for us to build on our traditions here in the United States," Obama said early in the health-care reform process, by way of warning that single-payer was off the table from the start. It's pretty close to impossible to imagine a Republican president taking a policy goal for which tens of thousands of rank-and-file conservatives had petitioned and lobbied over many years and defenestrating it from jump street. When progressive goals like single-payer are not even seen as starting points for negotiation, they become marginalized, non-mainstream; the whole spectrum moves rightward.

Then he reviews some Clinton history: denouncing Sister Souljah, passing NAFTA, supporting welfare reform, signing DOMA.

Clinton may well have believed in all these things. But he also knew that they were smart politics: If he stuck it to the liberal interest groups a few times, Establishment Washington would applaud. I think it's fair to say there is little such equivalent pressure on Republican presidents.

Democrats kowtow to -- and appropriately go to bat for -- their interest groups at times. But it's usually a negative application rather than a positive one. That is: Democrats typically don't go out of their way to embarrass the unions or the pro-choice lobby, as we saw on the health-care debate, when both of those factions won certain side victories. But doing something big and affirmative for labor, for example, like passing card-check legislation? Many Democrats are scared to death of taking action.

The reasons for this are depressingly straightforward. One: About 40 percent of Americans identify as conservative, and 20 percent identify as liberals. If those numbers were reversed, the levels of passion would be as well. Two: The conservative noise machine has done an effective job of painting liberal interest groups -- even ones whose main causes have respectable or even majority levels of support -- as if they're all secret agents of Hugo Chavez. The noise machine accuses; even if the interest group is innocent, which it typically is, it must constantly explain why it's innocent, and the explaining takes up most of the group's time and resources.

"There are," Michael insists, "no quick fixes" for these problems. "America will never be a 40-20 liberal country (even in the mid-1960s, at liberalism's political apex, we were more like 30-30)." And the mild-mannered "liberal noise machine" is no match for the right-wing juggernaut.

[O]ne of these days, a Democratic president -- preferably the sitting one -- is going to have to choose an issue, just one, that is important to the base and enjoys popular support and just say damn the torpedoes and push the throttle. It might be the public option, in an Obama second term, after the full implementation of the health-care law in 2014. It might be a price on carbon, which majorities consistently support in polls. Just one issue: It merely has to be demonstrated that a goal important to the liberal base can be winning politics (and, subsequently, good policy). Things will change; still slowly, but they will. . . .

Ideally, the Democrats will pay somewhat more attention to their base, and the Republicans somewhat less to theirs (which they might, if prominent Tea Party candidates like Marco Rubio and Sharron Angle lose this fall). We'd have a more balanced politics, and liberals would have more of a voice, even if we don't get everything we want. Given the alarming way things might go in this country, I'd count it a victory if that's where we are 20 years from now.

And this is what we would have to call the "optimistic" scenario!

I am not that pessimistic. I believe strongly that the failure of this administration to pass the strong liberal legislation the majority of Americans want - specifically, health care reform with a strong public option and a $1 trillion all-jobs stimulus - is the direct fault of this administration for appeasing the bullies of the opposition.

Americans love winners, not appeasers. Obama and the Democrats are not getting the credit they think they deserve for health care reform and the stimulus because those two bills were not victories. They were surrenders. And the American people know it.

The solution is two steps:

First, face the reality that President Obama is a cowardly, appeasing corporatist. Replaying election night videos and clapping harder for the He's Really a Liberal Fairy isn't going to change that.

But he's our cowardly, appeasing corporatist; this is still a Liberal Democracy, and the power of an awakened Democratic electorate has not yet begun to be tapped.

So, second, FIGHT! Make the Liberal Bogeyman into a reality Democratic politicians fear and respect.

Start by telling President Obama and your members of Congress exactly what liberal legislation and policies you demand. Tell them over and over and over again. Give money to real liberal candidates through the Blue America PAC. Even better: find, encourage and support local Democratic candidates who stand tall for liberal American values. Pound the streets, knock on doors and make calls for them.

This isn't the administration we voted for. So we have to make it change.