Amazing, another "Democrats divided" story. You'd think that with the hate much of the right wing blogosphere felt towards the Republican candidates, they might have been worth a story. But now wired.com takes up the traditional media torch and makes sure it's absolutely clear that Obama has problems from the left too, not just right and center.
I know this isn't a huge deal, and you can read the article for yourselves, but to me it just reinforces the need to temper our well reasoned criticism with notes on how we can leverage our influence to improve the Obama candidacy. As much as I respect many of the bloggers referenced in the article, I do think the long term impact of Obama appearing on Fox News Sunday is limited, and these kind of disagreements only provide fodder for the "Democrats divided" template.
I'm not trying to criticize anyone here - as a strong supporter of Obama, I haven't always been perfect in everything I've said and written - but I think it's critical that we all agree on some kind of broad, coordinated strategy for working with the Obama campaign (which most of us have aligned ourselves with to some degree) while making sure that the campaign itself doesn't take us for granted, treat us like shit, and end up infuriating us. As difficult as it might seem, I have faith in the voices I've met here and elsewhere, that we can come together, respect ourselves, respect a campaign most of us support, and try to figure out a way to remain unified going forward to support the things we care about, and still make sure that our values and principles become bedrock for the Obama campaign.
Here's what I wrote on the matter on Sunday night at OpenLeft, and your thought are very much welcome:
I don't think that the Fox News thing is going to hurt him that much, on the blogosphere or anyone else. Perhaps it should, because it was an error. I was skeptical when I read that his "taking Fox on" would be with a Chris Wallace interview. That's not the format for taking Fox on - if you want to take on Fox News, you need to be one on one with an antagonist, an O'Reilly or a Hannity, and just get in their face and be ready to come out swinging and put them on the defensive. Chris Wallace is just a bad or weird Russert - his questions are going to suck, but in a way that you can't beat him up over it, because he's not a crazy partisan. Conservative, yes, but not a crazy partisan. He took on McCain, kind of, but that's definitely not the same as taking on Fox.
I'm not really sure what the right action might be in this situation. I don't think it's a reason to regret the endorsement, or to retract it - the endorsement was not expressed primarily as support for Obama's position on Fox, as much as for other reasons related to the 50 state strategy, taking on McCain, having more foreign policy credibility, etc. All of those reasons still exist.
Campaigns, and presidencies, will almost always be fundamentally top down, even Obama's. He will have millions of small donors and individual supporters, but unfortunately there will be bad advice, and bad decisions, that will exist outside of the control of a related movement, of the blogosphere, progressive, etc. This is unavoidable. Here are a couple things we might be able to do, just off the top of my head:
- learn as much as we can, and formulate ideas for future responses to disappointments, because they can and will happen. We have power of some kind, and there are decisions that can be influenced? Where do our greatest strengths lie, and how do we connect them to influencing the kind of poor decisions we saw in this case? It seems to me that one of the reasons politicians get away with pulling this kind of shit is because we haven't constructed a manner of exerting our power in a remedial fashion. At the risk of getting too meta, I also question if we can - who is "we," anyway? Are we too amorphous, heterogeneous, and disconnected to make a difference on a presidential level? Obviously, every blog operates independently - each is a different body with some coordination to others, not organs of the same body, if that makes any sense.
- try our best to influence individual lower level decision makers through primaries and other tools; by adding more from the Donna Edwards vs. Al Wynn mode, we gradually increase our influence within non-presidential sources of power, both in actuality (literally having a better congressperson) and by appearance (victories earn respect in all sorts of media and whatnot). This may push the party as a whole in a more progressive direction, and show that there is a will for integrity, and better process and policy.