Every time David Sirota posts here, I get increasingly nervous about the prospects of Democrats to push positive change in our politics. I don't deny the man's talents as a propagandist and, perhaps, a political strategist--but I have no doubt that his stridency, lack of self-knowledge, and ahistorical perspective is poison to Democrats' chances of both keeping power and using it wisely. His latest diary, Recommended by his adoring followers here, is perhaps the most glaring example: Sirota, great champion of ideological purity and scourge of the compromising Democrats, plaintively asks the question that Democrats have been wondering for almost forty years now: Where is Our Bobby?
My problem with this is that Sirota misunderstands both Robert F. Kennedy and, more importantly for our purposes today, himself.
Remember the circumstances by which Robert F. Kennedy went from a talented but ambivalently regarded inside political operator to the great martyr of the modern American left. The loss of his brother humanized RFK, transforming him from "JFK's Haldeman" best known for his sharp elbows in the 1960 campaign and his stint working for Joe McCarthy, into a figure of sympathy. His strange journey in 1964, running a carpetbagger Senate campaign in New York simultaneously on the coattails of and at arm's-length from LBJ, ended in victory, but he won by a full two million votes less than Johnson's margin in the Empire State. Over the next three years, he tiptoed toward and back away from the mantle of progressive leadership from within the Democratic Party, pushed on the one hand by idealistic young aides like Peter Edelman (who remains a great progressive champion in his own right today) and on the other by the old politicos who'd advised his brother and were keeping an eye on the 1972 presidential campaign for Bobby.
When it became clear that a large faction within the dominant Democratic coalition was going to push an intra-party challenge to Johnson in 1968, Bobby was the man they wanted. But, with the Sorensons and O'Donnells whsipering in his ear to keep his powder dry for '72, he wouldn't commit--and it fell to Eugene McCarthy, who had his own personal animus against LBJ, to pick up the standard. The David Sirotas of that time eagerly and entirely gave themselves over to Gene; the January Tet Offensive transformed the debate over Vietnam; and McCarthy nearly upset Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, coming close to a majority of the votes and winning most of the delegates. Only then did RFK join the race; soon after that, LBJ withdrew, and the progressives enjoyed four days of bliss before Dr. King was assassinated and the horrors of 1968 began in earnest.
If Sirota had been active in the mid-to-late 1960s, I have absolutely no doubt that he, of all people, would have assailed RFK as an unprincipled sellout, a vampire sucking at the neck of the sainted McCarthy and trying to justify, or at very best make an insignificant gesture of atonement toward, the deeply immoral Vietnam policy he himself had helped craft as the sinister helpmeet to his similarly unprincipled brother. Two scions of the Establishment, Sirota would have called them, trading on their looks and charisma to manipulate the emotions of the people toward the goal of perpetuating the power of monsters like their father.
Remember, the Kennedys' heroism is conferred largely in retrospect. JFK's 1960 victory was greatly aided not just by Mayor Daley's shenanigans in Illinois, but by just enough racist pandering to keep the South in the Democratic column. And even in RFK's last campaign in California, he made some of the same appeals to soft racism--implying that McCarthy would favor building tenements in white suburban communities outside LA--that would help Nixon win the election.
Sirota would have hammered Kennedy on these points, on all the Kennedys' compromises and corner-cuttings. Just as, if he'd lived in the time of FDR, or Lincoln, he would have gone after them.
What Sirota constantly fails to understand, as was never more evident than in his Nation hit piece on Barack Obama a few months back, is that the (notionally) principled heroes of the Gene McCarthy or Russ Feingold type are history's lovable losers: the people who at most can set the stage for a pragmatic leader to come in and accomplish real change--and at least as often, in their unassailably good intentions, pave the road to hell. Consider the possibility that the McCarthy and RFK challenges to the undeniably flawed Lyndon Johnson opened the door to Nixon's election and the disasters, from the perpetuation of the war to Watergate and the permanent dehumanization of our politics, that followed.
Yes, the world needs Charles Sumner types to lay down the occasional moral marker. But it takes a Lincoln--and, dear lord, how Sirota would have flayed his habeus-suspending, slavery-equivocating ass--to bring the country toward that better place. That the leader can't get them as far, or as fast, as one might prefer, is the sad reality of history--but that these people are subsequently venerated suggests that they did the best they could, and on balance succeeded brilliantly.
I can't imagine a leader more foreign to Sirota's absolutist sensibility than the late Robert F. Kennedy.