Let's pause our Congress-bashing for a moment and take stock of where we are.
A theme has emerged recently (on this site and others) that the Democrats have screwed up by depending on Republican support to get anything done this Congressional term.
You can reasonably take this position if, like mcjoan, you are a "Defundamentalist," which I'll address below.
You can take this position if, like Kagro X, you argue that the Dems could and should be better political gamesmen than they are. I agree with him, but find their sins to be venial ones.
Most, though, seem to take the position that Democrats are screwing up because they, to quote today's New York Times editorial, "don’t have, or can’t summon, the political strength to make sure Congress does what it is supposed to do."
Well, yeah. They can't repeal the laws of math.
So, in a time of unprecedented Republican obstructionism, at whom does the would-be Mighty Wurlitzer of the Left aim its guns?
The Democrats. The Democrats. The Democrats. Something is wrong here.
(1) Depending on the Republicans
We don't have to depend upon the Republicans for everything, it's true. We just have to depend on them to pass legislation. Some criticisms of them are not about the failure to pass legislation, and I'll address those below. But a lot of criticism is about the failure to pass legislation, and here there's something pretty crucial to keep in mind: the Democrats can't repeal the laws of math.
It takes 60 votes to shut down a filibuster. Now, as I'll note below, Kagro X is right that we shouldn't let that stop our efforts to push legislation hard. But, the fact remains: it takes 60 votes to shut down a filibuster, and the Republicans are willing to filibuster to a literally unprecedented degree.
Should we make them go through the motions of actually doing a real filibuster? That's what Kagro X and the New York Times say. I absolutely agree. The Democrats should do this. But their failure to do this is not a mortal sin; it's a venial sin, a tactical error. You want to find the mortal sin? Not even 20% of the Republicans will vote the right way on these bills. THAT is the mortal sin.
We complain about the right-wing Mighty Wurlitzer that springs into action at times like the 2002 Wellstone funeral, the 2004 Swift Boat lies, the 2006 bungled Kerry joke, and now the 2007 MoveOn ad. And we say that the Left needs its equivalent of the Mighty Wurlitzer, and we say that the progressive blogosphere can be it.
And what are we doing with our Semi-Mighty Wurlitzer? We're aiming at Democrats.
(2) Defenestrating the Republicans
I want you to imagine an alternative political universe, where the netroots were as intent on moving elite and public opinion as the right wing is. What would we be doing when the Republicans alone, in one week, shot down Habeas reform, Webb's "dwell time" legislation, and the Levin-Reed Iraq plan, and were most of the opposition to the preferable Reid-Feingold Iraq plan?
We would be nailing them to a tree. We would be using all of our considerable talents to turn the public against them. We would be putting most of our efforts into ridiculing them, putting the fear of voter rejection into them, underlining the theme that with 56 votes on this legislation, we're almost there, we just need more Democratic votes. This is why Kagro X is right; because the embarrassment of having to filibuster highlights Republican obstructionism in the public's eyes, and they can't stand people understand what they're doing. Only fear and shame can drive them to do the right thing.
Instead, our Semi-Mighty Wurlitzer is largely aimed at Democrats, primarily the leadership, who we rail at because they can't deliver what we want. They can't repeal the laws of math! Yes, they are screwed up in a lot of ways, and screw up a lot of times. Yes, they got their pockets picked on FISA. Yes, yes, the minority of the caucus that trashed MoveOn should not have done so. Yes, yes, yes, the minority of the caucus that opposed Reid-Feingold should have been much smaller and ideally non-existent.
But in a week when the Republicans have blocked three major pieces of legislation where the Democrats had (or, in the case of Levin-Reed, easily could have had) a majority, why are we aiming our fire at Democrats? This is a moment to teach the public about how rotten the Republican caucus is. Why are we aiming our fire at Democrats?
If it weren't for the fact that the Left routinely pulls this kind of stunt, I would think that the Republicans would not be able to believe their good fortune. Here, they are taking unpopular and disgusting positions. They should expect to be pilloried for it. But instead, as they close their eyes waiting for the firing squad's bullet, they hear shots and see that the executioners are shooting one another. They did their worst -- and they're getting away! It is read as the Democrats' failure, not theirs. They're getting away with it!
Not only that, they're better off because -- again, these are the laws of math -- in a two-party system, politics is a zero-sum game! That is, whatever hurts the Democrats helps them! So they cast these awful votes -- and they actually come out ahead, because the Left does not focus its fire on them, but on the so-called "failures" of its own party!
Now I agree that they should be doing things differently, but to be an effective agent of change on the public, my complaint against the Democrats not forcing an actual filibuster should be said once for every 24 times I point out that the Republicans are rotten bastards based on their votes on these issues! And my criticism can actually be constructive: pointing out what the game is and how by forcing a filibuster Reid would actually strengthen our position.
Are better tactics available for this fight? There usually are, and the collective wisdom of the netroots can be deployed to find and promote them. But look at what we're actually doing here: letting the Republicans escape being the main targets of our wrath. Madness.
(3) Defunding and the Republicans
I see that the leaders of the netroots have captured Chris Dodd. If you look at the "no" votes on Levin-Reed today, you'll see 44 Republican names (counting Lieberman on this issue), 2 conservative Democrats (Pryor and Ben Nelson) and Chris Dodd. (Three other progressives, Boxer, Durbin, and Sanders, refused to vote on the bill. It didn't matter; as an amendment to the 2008 NDAA, 60 votes were required.) Dodd says that he will not support any legislation on Iraq that doesn't contain a firm timetable for withdrawal. He is now more Feingoldian than Feingold.
Well, OK. Dodd is a good guy, one of my top two choices, and he wants to differentiate himself as he runs for President. This was a cheap protest. If he had refused to be the 60th vote rather than the 48th, I'd be kicking his ass in this diary, but as it is, it made a fine if small point. (Note: why would I be kicking his ass? Because the problem that people raise with bills like Levin-Reed is that they give Republicans a way to be ineffectually against the war. If he were the 60th vote, that means that only 10 Republicans would be joining with the Democrats. In other words, the fear would be groundless. If there were 80 votes for Levin-Reed, he'd be doing the right thing to vote no, becuase it would be a fundamentally different political situation.)
While requiring a date certain for withdrawal is a slightly different issue than defunding, his adoption of this position and presentation of a widely appreciated manifesto on Iraq voting make him pretty much the leader -- if not the sole member -- of the "Defundamentalists" in the Senate. These are the people who have an answer to the position that it makes no sense to repeal the laws of math: they don't want to rely on any Republican votes, they just don't want to produce legislation funding the war at all.
I have to admit, it's a cogent position. It is theoretically possible for the Democrats not to produce any bill at all funding Iraq, if they all hang together. (It is also theoretically possible not to produce an NDAA for 2008 at all. This won't happen, as it would be ruinous. Don't take it from me; ask someone you trust who knows diddly about politics.)
The problem here, so simple that I'm surprised it needs stating, is that the Democrats won't all hang together. In the House, you have 70 or so Reps committed to defunding, and you need 218 agreeing to defund before it works. We don't have a recent House vote pointing to how hard it would be to get from 70 to 218, but the House isn't that different from the Senate, and we have two Senate votes this week that suggest that this will be impossible: the sliming of MoveOn and the vote against Reid Feingold. In both, about 55% of the Democratic caucus took the correct position. In the House, that translates to about 126 votes, which I think is a good upper estimate of how many we could get to defund. (Bear in mind that supporting defunding is a cheap vote if it's not going to happen; the number of Democrats who would really stick to their guns may be far smaller.) That leaves us, at best, about 92 votes short.
Some of these 92 House Democrats may be bad on this issue, maybe even pro-occupation, though I can't remember any publicly taking that line recently. Some may just fear the future political consequences, knowing that public opinion is fickle and has little memory of where it was in the past. And bear in mind, these are the voters that are least likely to be moved by us: their districts are the most conservative and, as we've seen with the MoveOn vote, they believe that they stand the most to gain by differentiating themselves from the Left.
A strategy that depends on moving almost 100 Democratic Reps is no more realistic than one that depends on scaring the bejeezus out of enough Republicans to push up to 60 votes on any of these laws. We should stop pretending that this is an easy -- let alone an obvious -- solution.
And, if we think it is a solution, we should be aiming our Semi-Mighty Wurlitzer (when not at Republicans) directly at the votes that are likely to be the last to come and the hardest to get: the Blue Dogs. Without their votes, no one else's votes make a difference because they won't lead to defunding, and given the prospect of a discharge petition they won't keep a vote on funding from coming to the floor. We should not be aiming at Pelosi, who is a preferred target here, because while one of her jobs is to push people to vote the right way, another is to know how many votes she can realistically get, and if she can't get the votes she has to find another path. She's doing her job, and it's the same job that Conyers or Frank or Kucinich would do in the Speaker's chair, at least if they didn't want to be summarily deposed.
(4) Conclusion
People here have grimly trumpeted the low polling results for Congress as if it proves us right. What it proves is that we, as activists, are not doing a good enough job of convincing the public that the fault here overwhelmingly if not exclusively lies with the Republicans. That's what we should be doing rather than carping at Democrats.
It has been argued to me elsewhere that the netroots should consider themselves to be a pressure group, not a think tank. But one can be a pressure group in one of two ways: firing at apostates on ones own side, or firing at the enemy. The former helps absolve one from responsibility for what one's side eventually does. The latter risks complicity. But with the GOP's filibustering good legislation, the latter is more important right now.
It's not always so. Back in the Civil Rights Era days, the Democratic Committee Chairs were mostly Dixiecrats, held in position by seniority, as opposed to most progressive legislation as the Republicans that most of them would later become. It would have been possible in those days to blame the Democrats for the failures of Civil Rights legislation, even though most of the Democrats favored it and most of the Republicans did not. Instead, under LBJ, the Democrats just went around the obstacles. Activist groups helped them do this. They did not bash the Democrats as a whole, they bashed the obstacles. And they got the laws passed.
Today, everyone has their risky and tenuous strategy, like defunding, for getting around the obstacles. But unlike the Civil Rights era, there is not a lot of reason to think that they'll work. And you can't fault politicians for preferring plans that are more likely to work. There is a straightaway path to a better Iraq policy: pass good legislation, and make the people that stand in the way of it suffer for their obstinance.
We have a lot of power and influence here if we use it well. Bash the obstacles. That means bashing the Republicans.
P.S. I shouldn't neglect my hobbyhorse: one way to weaken the Republicans is to enforce Congressional subpoenas and get them panicked and on the run. They have a lot to hide and can be made to suffer. More of that, please.
Disclaimer: diary contents do not represent any candidacy or campaign.