Obama forcibly took up the DEM's agenda today because he believes that this reform is best for all Americans. This may signal a way back for the DEMs for 2010.
Diary xposted at www.delawareway.blogspot.com
It's been hard to maneuver through the intertubes lately without running into Rahm Emanuel's strident defenders. Rahm's been running from a widespread call for his resignation.
After a year of an Obama Presidency stubbornly perched over the great bipartisan divide, Rahm is taking the heat for the lingering perception that the White House has fallen down on every issue they've taken up. And that they've taken up with a few too many special interests. (Instead of falling on his sword, Rahm has resorted to pointing fingers through his Washington Post surrogates.)
President Obama finally stepped away from the bipartisan divide and turned to his base in a combative call for an immediate vote on health care reform legislation. Obama forcibly took up the DEM's agenda today because he believes that this reform is best for all Americans. This may signal a way back for the DEMs for 2010.
I started thinking about the Overton Window after reading this 2006 DKos diary some months back ~
http://www.dailykos.com/...
the GOP knows that the middle DOES matter. They know that by playing to their base in very well-crafted ways, they can shift the very definition of what the middle is. By introducing radicalism into the public discourse (and taking initial heat for it), whatever used to be radical within this context becomes moderate by comparison.
Use health insurance reform as an example. An Overton shift strategy for the DEMs would have been to initially put the 'radical' idea of single payer (and eliding private health insurance) on the table. With the goal being a shift in a general public understanding and acceptance of alternatives to the private insurance industry, single payer is eventually dropped in favor of the public health care insurance option. Because Rahm Emanuel feared the wrath of big health insurance et al (or perhaps because he coveted their ready pocketbook) single payer was never even introduced as an option.
The DKos diarist showed how the GOP took up the extremist notion of homeschooling to make their agenda items, vouchers and tuition tax credits, seem innocuous by comparison. The GOP was successful in strategically shifting public perception and acceptance toward their right wing pubic policy agenda ~
Systematically, piece by piece, the GOP takes what had been considered impossibly radical positions and makes them worthy of consideration just by talking about them--and then makes what had been considered outside possibilities truly possible. Now, I happen to believe that legalization of homeschooling is a good thing (though there should be oversight)--others may disagree. But the important thing to remember is that the Republicans are carrying out this same exercise with every public policy debate today--from invading Iran to making birth control illegal to eliminating Social Security. The once unthinkable becomes possible--and they don't care if they take some heat for it initially.
To finish:
Step by step, ideas that were once radical or unthinkable --homeschooling, tuition tax credits, and vouchers -- have moved into normal public discourse. Homeschooling is popular, tuition tax credits are sensible, and vouchers are acceptable. (On the latter, they've been soundly defeated in Michigan of late, but the point is that they are a part of normal public and political discourse.) The de facto illegality of homeschooling, by contrast, has gone the way of the dodo. The conscious decision to shift the Overton window is yielding its results.
Why can't it be a strategy for success for the DEMs agenda too? ~
To win, we must sway the middle by playing to the base--and we must understand that this is a difficult and heavily calculated process that requires time, money and manpower.
To win, we must realize the power of the Overton Window, and stop kowtowing to the antiquated thinking that pits the Middle versus the Base.
To win, we must understand that there is no conflict between playing to the middle and the base--so long as our messaging is clear and well-crafted, and our positions are principled, memorable, and consistent.
Today, Dan Froomkin painted an unhappy image of Emanuel killing his own party while cowering under his fear of the GOP ~
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The Rahm Emanuel that Obama hired is the poster child for the timid, pseudo-pragmatism that is inimical to the idealistic Obama agenda so many excited voters responded to last November. And it's a pragmatism that is absolutely killing the Democratic Party in the long run, because American voters have an intrinsic distrust of politicians they see as tacking with the polls or shying away from a fight. This if nothing else is the lesson of two George W. Bush presidencies: American voters have a profoundly soft spot for people with clear, strongly-held principles, almost regardless of what those principles are.
Emanuel is a Bush Democrat - but not in that he has learned the lesson about the value of holding firmly to core values. He is a Bush Democrat in that he has allowed Republicans to traumatize him into submission. Emanuel operates on a battlefield as defined by Republicans, where the terrain is littered with the specter of imaginary but profoundly terrifying GOP attack ads. His reflexive approach is the strategic retreat. Most obviously in the current debate about health care, he has empowered the Democratic and centrist Republican obstructionists by validating their fear that come campaign time, they will be portrayed as radical -- even when they are supporting measures such as the public insurance option that have public support among a super-majority of voters.