Sigh. I’ve always wanted to like Matt Taibbi. His politics are pretty close to mine, he’s got the passion and energy of 100 Labrador Retrievers , and he is refreshingly un-betrothed to the journalistic establishment.
But time and time again, I read his work and I come away disappointed. He leans too heavily on his (considerable) gift for invective, his arguments are often swamped by hoary and half-relevant anecdotes and his interpretation of events is often bent six ways to fit the narrative he’s pushing.
The piece highlighted in LeftyCoaster’s recommended diary is no different. What a mess.
Years ago, over many beers in a D.C. bar, a congressional aide colorfully described the House of Representatives, where he worked.
It's "435 heads up 435 asses," he said.
Yawn. Could you begin with a more lazy, predictably cynical anecdote? Is there supposed to be some crucial insight to be gleaned from the cliched slurrings of an overworked Capitol Hill staffer bombed on too many Brau Pils? Is there a more annoying and counterproductive “analytical” tic in political “thought” than lumping everyone together, from the very best of the Democratic caucus to the very worst of the Republican caucus, and essentially saying “throw all the bums out”?
I thought of that person yesterday, while reading the analyses of Hillary Clinton's victories Tuesday night. The arrival of the first female presidential nominee was undoubtedly a huge moment in American history and something even the supporters of Bernie Sanders should recognize as significant and to be celebrated. But the Washington media's assessment of how we got there was convoluted and self-deceiving.
This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in '08 or even Gore-Bradley in '00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion.
The classic example was James Hohmann's piece in the Washington Post, titled, "Primary wins show Hillary Clinton needs the left less than pro-Sanders liberals think."
Then there was Jonathan Capehart, also of the Post, whose "This is how Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same person" piece describes Sanders as a "stubborn outsider" who "shares the same DNA" as Donald Trump. Capeheart snootily seethes that both men will ultimately pay a karmic price for not knowing their places.
The conclusion that the Democratic establishment has learned nothing from Bernie Sanders’ campaign is more than a bit premature considering that Bernie hasn’t even conceded yet and the race effectively ended two days ago.
And Taibbi has strange ideas about who represents the Democratic establishment. Two (“most”?) editorialists from the same paper in no rational person's universe represent the party elite and brain trust. As for the real Democratic establishment, the words coming out of their mouths seem to fully appreciate the momentous nature of Bernie’s movement.
And there’s small piece of news that the Hillary campaign has hired the Sanders’ campaign’s national director of student organizing. That seems to imply that Hillary very well grasps the importance of wooing and understanding Bernie’s constituency. But no, let’s draw broad conclusions from a Jonathan Capehart column.
If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants like Capeheart would not be celebrating this week. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support.
They should be freaked out, cowed and relieved, like the Golden State Warriors would be if they needed a big fourth quarter to pull out a win against Valdosta State.
As we all know, this is utter nonsense. Bernie ran a remarkable campaign, far stronger and more resonant than anyone might have expected back in mid-2015. But he lost any hope of a pledged delegate majority almost three months ago. 4 million votes and 400 delegates is not close.
The better analogy would be that Warriors took a big, insurmountable lead by halftime and the plucky players from Valdosta State played them fairly even in the second half. But that wouldn’t fit Matt’s pre-cooked narrative, so we have here the ludicrous notion that Hillary needed the equivalent of a last second heave from half court to win the primary.
But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn't just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey).
Apples and papayas. In 2008, California voted in early February 2008, the early days of a heated, close primary, in a race that generated a wee bit more enthusiasm than the average. This is a bit different than voting in June in an all-but-decided fight.
And the sloppiness of Taibbi’s argument shows here. The fact that Bernie got a bit more than 40 percent of the vote in these “low turnout” elections kind of undermines Taibbi’s broader claim that this “massive grassroots movement” will save the Democratic Party.
The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders this year were equally a blistering referendum on Beltway politics. But the major-party leaders and the media mouthpieces they hang out with can't see this, because of what that friend of mine talked about over a decade ago: Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.
The habitual lumping together of the Trump and Sanders campaigns, without meaningful distinction, should bother any decent liberal. Bernie deserves better.
In D.C., a kind of incestuous myopia very quickly becomes part of many political jobs. Congressional aides in particular work ridiculous hours for terrible pay and hang out almost exclusively with each other. About the only recreations they can afford are booze, shop-talk, and complaining about constituents, who in many offices are considered earth's lowest form of life, somewhere between lichens and nematodes. It's somewhat understandable. In congressional offices in particular, people universally dread picking up the phone, because it's mostly only a certain kind of cable-addicted person with too much spare time who calls a politician's office.
"Have you ever called your congressman? No, because you have a job!" laughs Paul Thacker, a former Senate aide currently working on a book about life on the Hill. Thacker recounts tales of staffers rushing to turn on Fox News once the phones start ringing, because "the people" are usually only triggered to call Washington by some moronic TV news scare campaign.
I don’t get it. It seems to me that this Paul Thacker fellow has it pretty well figured out—ignore the morons who start calling in en masse when Megan Kelly complains that Santa Claus is turning browner, and recognize that most constituents are hard-working people with little time to call a constituent hotline 12 times in an afternoon. And why, pray tell, are we talking about 21-year old staffers here? Are they now the Democratic establishment?
These stories are funny, but they also point to a problem. Since The People is an annoying beast, young pols quickly learn to be focused entirely on each other and on their careers. They get turned on by the narrative of Beltway politics as a cool power game, and before long are way too often reaching for Game of Thrones metaphors to describe their jobs. Eventually, the only action that matters is inside the palace.
This qualifies as insight? Have you ever met young professionals before, Matt?
Voter concerns rapidly take a back seat to the daily grind of the job. The ideal piece of legislation in almost every case is a Frankensteinian policy concoction that allows the sponsoring pol to keep as many big-money donors in the fold as possible without offending actual human voters to the point of a ballot revolt.
This dynamic is rarely explained to the public, but voters on both sides of the aisle have lately begun guessing at the truth, and spent most of the last year letting the parties know it in the primaries. People are sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances who only get whatever policy scraps are left over after pols have finished servicing the donors they hang out with at Redskins games.
I’m lost—the main problem with the lawmaking process is….the cynicism and callowness of Congressional aides? Quick history lesson that almost anyone with a passing knowledge of U.S. history could provide: “Frankensteinian” legislation—and the horse trading, painful concessions, goodies for home districts and unrelated riders that come with it—has been baked into the process for over 200 years.
But you know how to get more meaningful legislation that helps ordinary people? Elect more Democrats. There have been four periods of major social and economic legislative activity in the last century or so. 1913-14, 1933-40, 1965-66 and the brief window from 2009-10. All were marked by control of the Presidency and both houses of congress by Democrats, many of them not idealistically or morally pure, and many of the “establishment” kind.
Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they'll convince themselves that, as Hohmann's Post article put it, Hillary's latest victories mean any "pressure" they might have felt to change has now been "ameliorated."
The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.
Maybe my standards are too high, but predictions of massive, endless victories in an era of protracted partisanship, an unchanging electoral map and rigid ideology require a bit more support than a tossed off assertion.
And the broader point is again undermined by the fact that the pure vessel for all of these electoral-map changing positions just lost the Democratic primary in a “low-turnout” election.
This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.
But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters.
Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.
Again, examples, evidence? I know of no rational observer who believes that Bernie Sanders “created” his constituency though line jumping, and in fact, there has been a widespread understanding that this constituency is very real and represents an important part of the future of the Democratic party.
Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.
This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag. As Thacker puts it, the theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says.
But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.
There is no subtlety to this argument. No attempt to deal with the ticklish issues (cough racism, sexism) that are driving the “anger” on one side. No discussion of the sticky issue of the weird profile of some of Bernie/Trump crossover voters. No discussion of Hillary’s actual platform, which happens to be, to my eye, the most progressive platform since McGovern. No nuanced discussion about how Bernie has influenced the party for the good, already (see climate change, minimum wage, etc). No recognition of the massive opportunity that exists at this moment for movement liberals to effect meaningful change and influence the direction of the Party, elect better Democrats, and promote progressive solutions.
No, just pure cynicism and nihilism, and not a particularly coherent brand of either. Throw all of the bums out. Burn it all down.
Count me out.
