There is an irony to the idea of a much awaited speech by Obama on TV.
The fact is that television has a much bigger impact on us than we generally are able to be aware of, and probably plays a bigger role on the way we think about politics than we would like to admit.
This to me, is a large reason for progressives telling pollsters and complaining in numerous online fora that they will probably sit out the next election.
Having engaged in long term progressive coalition building, and having spent a lot of time writing messages to appeal to swing voters in an attempt to create a broad philosophical appeal for progressive policies, and having had some years to deeply think about it, I think I may have a perspective to contribute.
Homo Sapiens has been around for something over 100,000 years.
TV has been around for a little over 50. This would suggest that we have an evolutionary vulnerability.
Progressives are intelligent people who seek to better their lives and their communities through civilized use of brainpower, not brawn. We can imagine better conditions and seek to make changes that move us forward.
There is a vulnerability in what makes this possible.
The ability to envision, to think about what could be a better way, comes with a powerful sense of empathy.
We have all watched television dramas since the cradle. These work as well as they do because they require identification with characters and empathy. So we learn something from this.
But we are also sucked into this in a way that we have not been able to disentangle ourselves from. Plotlines are constant between commercials, TV series and movies. They all set up a crisis that is resolved in a story arc that ends in a fairly quick time frame. That is the take away from millions of minutes of watching TV.
We transfer this to our shared national mythology of the real, our politics. We want everything to resolve in a satisfying way quickly. When we see politicians on TV, we confuse reality and entertainment fantasy. Thus, a lot of people are primarily voting for a TV character and not a leader. Most people don't know the difference.
When you go down to city hall to watch the council deliberate, or to the legislature what you are seeing, on one level, is a myth play about who we are. From one generation to the next, people step in and out of the various roles. The momentary plot circumstance might shift a bit, but little really changes.
If you talk to people who, now quite elderly, were participating in politics before the television era, you find that there is something to observe and that progressives might really be more vulnerable to it.
When things don't, when reality turns out to require sustained persistence over time, we get antsy. We threaten to withdraw our support, not realizing that this threat makes our support less valuable.
The hard core conservatives who don't envision anything beyond keeping the status quo the way it is and just accepting things the way they are, have no real problems sustaining a persistent effort. Staying in the same rut and justifying that is what they have always done. If it were up to them we would still be chipping the same flint blades in exactly the same way our first Homo Habilus ancestors did.
What progressives must do is to meditate on this basic difference and how a more long term, sustained effort can be maintained that will have some chance of actually producing the foundations on which the future we all have in our best dreams can actually be built.
Obama is a departure from the trend in our national direction set under Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Bush. That is about a half century's worth of momentum.
Progressivism is the exception and not the rule.
To change that, to change foreign policy so that it proceeds from different basic assumptions about the way the world works, to change the way the Presidency can operate in really providing intellectual leadership in a world that really needs it, that requires deep persistence and deep thinking about the true nature of reality.
If the Democrats lose Congress because progressives don't have nervous systems that are up to the stress and the anxiety produced by what this really will take, then no direction setting that means anything will take place and no change will happen.
Instead, the plodders that see nothing beyond the status quo and who are upset by the idea that anything might change in any basic way will see justification when things are "righted" in the next election.
From the comments on this site, it seems obvious that not very many people are willing to go to the library or the bookstore to actually read up on the details of history that are not to be found on TV or in newspapers.
Assumptions about what is really going on are very shallow, superficial and have a tendency to sound like high school immaturity.
Progressives will not make a difference in the nation's direction - or even that of the Democratic Party - without a more profound sense of history and what a change in direction on an historic level really means and how to maintain that as a 21st century way of thinking and being. Republicans are offering a vision of a very consistent sense of status quo that appeals to a lot of people who want the comfort of believing that the '50s can be brought back.
An equally persistent and a reality-based, intellectually sound purpose that defines the 21st century in pro-active terms has to be applied through multiple election cycles and multiple presidencies if it is to gain validity as well as traction in real, historic terms.
Television is an obsolete medium that won't stand the test of evolution. The future is really here on the web, in the interactivity of fora like Daily Kos. It is important that the deeper reality inform our evolutionary process towards a larger, more inclusive deliberation as an enlighened public.
Otherwise the future belongs to politicians like Sarah Palin.
The reality is that Obama is in a precarious moment in our history. He is on a tight rope, with a lot of people eager to see him fall off. If he succeeds, he just might have an opportunity to do something no president has been able to even contemplate since at least Kennedy or maybe LBJ. If he succeeds, there is some chance that his successor might be a Democrat who can build towards progressive ideals on the foundations of his administration. If he fails, we go back to protesting some Bush or Reagan or Nixon.