Every once in a while in my more than three years here I have felt the need to compose a rant against my fellow members of this site that will pretty much ensure I don't get invited to any good cocktail parties. Never more so than tonight.
This, at its best -- including leading up to last month -- has been a site of political actors. Leading up to tonight, it was a site of political observers. A site not of people trying to change the system, but of posers who want to chatter on about change.
If Paul Carmouche loses in LA-04 -- and I doubt that either provisional ballots nor a recount will reverse a 356-vote, .038% margin, unless it turns out that the last few come-from-behind votes were obtained by fraud -- then it was entirely foreseeable and entirely preventable.
We simply had to choose to act. We chose not to act. We should be ashamed.
We seem to have forgotten what this site is about.
Three diaries have been written on LA-04 this week, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, all by me. This does not speak well of me: the first diary was prompted by my having completely forgotten that these last two runoffs were taking place -- in fact, I had introduced my Tuesday diary assessing phonebanking by saying that the campaign season was finally over, oops -- so I asked for local intelligence on the races and noted archly the lack of interest in the race on both the right and left sides of the front page. Frankly, I would have left it there and gone back to doing nothing, but brownsox stepped up and took the one significant front page action on this race in the month since Obama won and posted a story on the races containing Carmouche's website and a link to the DCCC virtual phonebaking tool.
(I want to interrupt my telling the tale right there, because it sounds like I'm criticizing the site management for not pushing Carmouche. No, I am not. Markos and the CEs, whom I have never shied away from criticizing when I think they deserve it, have the right to make editorial decisions about what to cover. The readers of this site are not passive with respect to the content of the site any more than they are massive with respect to distant election returns. Interest in the diariest could have led to front page stories. We dropped the ball here ourselves, not Markos and his team.)
On Friday, I posted "Paul Carmouche (LA-04) phonebanking community diary", which garnered 26 responses, 16 by me. Brandon English of DCCC stopped in with thanks. There were only nine poll responses (which is how I generally gauge diary impact), six of whom said that were calling for Carmouche. As only LNK and SundayHighway mentioned doing this in the diary, my guess is that this means there were some lurkers from either LA-04 or the DCCC.
On Saturday, before I went to bed and shortly before the polls opened, I posted "(LA-04) Do GOTV phone banking in today's race -- or lose it", garnering 5 poll responses and 23 comments, 14 by me.
Am I crying because no one recommended my diaries, waaaaah? No. I am upset because people didn't write their own diaries. I am upset because people here did not do what any activist worth his or her salt (which I barely am) should have done: said "hey, there's two races left and one is polling close? What's up with that?" and then "how can we help win this thing?" and finally screaming "HEY! Everybody, HELP!"
What the hell do you think we are doing here having a national political website, anyway? We are helping each other win elections. Take a look at this post-results post by SundayHighway, who lives in LA-04 and regrets not having been able to do even more than she did for Carmouche:
I wish real life didn't get in the way so much of me helping out. With us losing by only 356 votes, it irks me just thinking about it, wishing I had that time, wondering what else I could've put on the backburner.
... I am so happy that people outside of LA-04 actually care about the district and would make phone calls and such....
That is what political activism, and Daily Kos, is about, for any posers out there who don't get it. You are supposed to feel the results of political races intensely -- which I, to my great regret, did not do enough either, playing away so much of my time in between calls -- so that when something is happening in another part of the country it is also happening to you. Maybe Democrats in LA-04 could not win the race by itself -- as Democrats in GA-SEN or Nevada's Presidential race might not have been able to do. Daily Kos makes that problem lighter! You don't have enough activists available to make calls locally? Can't raise enough money? Don't worry, reinforcements from parts of the country where we have time to spare and an interest in improving Congress will show up, step in, and help out -- even if only over the phone.
That is how Daily Kos is supposed to work.
Here's how Daily Kos does work these days, however.
We still have some of the great reporting and essays that are the ambrosia of the site, although they are not the point of the site. We seem to exist to defend President-Elect Obama against all criticism. (See below for that.) And we are here to have fun. We sure do have fun. Boy, did we not earn that fun this week.
In between my Tuesday diary on phonebanking (26 responses, 10 mine, and read some of those by others for some excellent insights) and my Thursday diary mentions above, I tossed off a goofy diary in the interests of community esprot, which I recognize is important. 478 comments.
I get the sense that we're eating a lot of dessert and not enough meat and vegetables (or meat substitute, for some of us.) I applaud the fact that there is a carefully hewn series up there on the Rec List now about hunger. But there should have been something about today's election as well. The hunger series is a wonderful, savory side dish. But winning elections is the meat.
I gave up about 5:00 PST tonight -- an hour before polls closed -- after 200 calls. Frankly, it was hard to stay motivated, because the DCCC's list was quite bad -- many wrong and non-working numbers. But, because I got people to commit to call their own friends, my guess is that I probably turned out more than ten votes that we wouldn't otherwise have gotten -- maybe, if people did honor my request to call their friends, as much as 30 or so.
A hundred other activist Kossacks on the phone -- not difficult to assemble on a Saturday if we have the will -- and Carmouche would have won going away.
After taking a nap at 5:00 I woke up at 7:30 and -- to my surprise -- saw a results diary for LA-04 with hundreds of comments.
I left mine near the top.
Now people are interested? (0+ / 0-)
Now ... people are ... interested? [Note: these were linked to my three previous diaries.]
Do a tag search on LA-04. Those are the three diaries you'll find.
Frankly, for there to be a results thread for a close race that it was impossible to get people to care about in advance -- and to do anything about -- is obscene. Leave LA-02 results up there, brownsox, but let people look elsewhere for LA-04 results.
The impossibility of getting more than three people to give a damn about LA-04 in advance is one of the worst signs I've seen about the recent changes in Daily Kos. If Carmouche wins, what is it to us? We should be mulling this one over for a while. Are we a site of political actors or political observers? Oh? Then, let's observe the results.
Glad to be able to say this here; saves my wasting a diary.
A half-hour later, Fleming had come from behind at the end and I posted this.
If the energy that had gone into following this diary this evening had gone into making phone calls over the past two days, Carmouche would likely have won.
I don't enjoy being Cassandra, but I hope that this is the biggest kick in the ass this site could possibly have. We could have changed this result. We sat on our hands. I hope that we return to being the Daily Kos that would have changed it.
Enjoy your Saturday night election observing. I'm going to try to tear myself away.
I couldn't tear myself away, of course -- though after posting this that might become easier. I'm posting here not to say "I told you so," but because I want people here to feel the personal pain of unnecessary failure. We could have won this race, we should have won this race, and we let it fall through our hands because we did not take responsibility for the result. We did not consider the residents of LA-04 what they are -- our brothers and sisters -- and we did not remember that some of the most important things that may pass or fail in Congress this year may have a margin of one vote.
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It is possible that some people are not yet upset at reading this diary, so I have one more place to cast blame: Barack Obama and those advising him. Mostly those advising him, because they proved themselves to be idiots in this instance.
Barack Obama, by cutting a single (so far as I can tell) robocall, did thousands of times more to try to win this race than I did, but he had the capacity with the flick of a finger to do much more. His reward -- our reward -- is the headline that the Republicans have won the final three races of the 2008 cycle.
The thinking, by the cautious geniuses who dominate Democratic politics, is that by not getting too involved in these Congressional races, Obama protected himself from the prospect of losing too much personal power by becoming associated with what may be losing causes. That's just brilliant -- unless one of the candidate loses by less than half a percent and people start asking "why didn't Obama do more?" But even that wouldn't be so bad unless we also lost the race that we deserved to lose but that everyone expected us to win.
Turnout was 15% in African-American areas. Obama could have boosted that, even without a personally appearance. (Oh, I'd never say that he should have appeared himself, not to win just one stinking House seat! Heaven forfend!) No, he didn't kow that the margin of the race would be fewer than the number of Electoral Votes he received, and he didn't know that Jefferson's loss would contribute to a December Republican sweep.
He shouldn't have had to know. Fortune favors the bold, and our party leader was not bold. He was not bold, I'm sure, largely because of all the people around him telling him not to be bold. The one advantage of the results is that they too look like idiots now and perhaqps they still, somewhere, have the capacity to learn from their mistakes.
(Update: I forgot to include my prediction that more time in comments would be devoted to defending Obama than to defending site participants. But it wasn't a hard call.)
(Update 2: I'm putting links to especially incisive comments here, such as this one from bhagamu. This comment and the one following it from Alan F are also some mighty fine meta for people to consider.)
(Update 3: Link to Stephen Crane's short story "The Blue Hotel," mentioned in the poll. Crane, who died before 30, is in my opinion the first English language writer in history whose prose seems like it could have been written yesterday.)
= = = = = = = =
Sometimes I write diaries to make the Rec List. I'd just as soon that this one didn't. I wrote this diary for one major reason: I'm changing my sig line to link to it. I want it to be a long time before we forget what should be the lesson of today: that our responsibility as Democratic activists linked nationally by a beautiful site such as this one is to be active when an election is taking place, and that on this last day of the political year, with one Congressional seat worth having on the line, we failed. You, me, all of us except a few people in LA-04: we failed.
Now let's get back to making this machine that Markos built into what it ought to be.