The following is an open letter to David, in the hopes that it will encourage him and the community to figure out how to support our presence in the mainstream of American political conversation. I am highly supportive of David and the work he did yesterday (Friday, May 15th) on CNN, and I want to do whatever I can to support it in public.
David,
I want to thank you for doing this segment, and getting yourself to a place where the producers knew to put you on tv. I really hope to see you doing similar work on MSNBC and other CNN shows. Folks like Maddow and Olbermann stake out our territory on their own shows, but we need people like you who will go onto these mainstream shows run by blathering ratings-winners like Blitzer, and forcefully make the points that you made. You were essentially bullying goposaurs with the truth, til they were left saying stupid things like "what does this have to do with the spanish inquisition?".
...
Too many of the people who 'stand up for our views' on these 'debate' shows are really political practitioners who have little investment in what their party does while in power. Instead, they care about the purely mechanical questions of a) how to stay in office without changing the system so dramatically that they put themselves out of business and b) how to make their clients happy by slowing down actual reforms that will impinge on their relatively fun lifestyles in the spotlight. This means arguing for health care 'reform', but not pissing off the health care companies that pay for their wives' trips to Bermuda. This means reforming military procurement practices by canceling the President's Helicopter renewal program (which is relatively easy to point to while on TV), but not putting a long-lasting halt to the missile defense shield, despite the absolute lack of readiness or usefulness in the contemporary world -- they won't touch that, because they can't afford to completely piss off Northrup Grumman.
Much of the reason that conservatives often get what they really want (or at least stop progress) is that the people on TV speaking for their side push for actually conservative policies. Their side is often represented on television by clinically diagnosed ideologues like Liz Cheney, while we've got James Carville. Liz Cheney is paid well by somebody, yes, but she might actually also believe the insanely fascist things she is saying about how our country ought to conduct itself -- she has to believe these things, or she'll hate herself and think her father ought to be in the Hague.
James Carville is talking to us about 'accountability' because some poll told him it would play well on TV (and sell books), not because he thinks it is vitally necessary for the future viability of this potentially great nation. What James Carville really cares about is whether or not he'll be drawing a decent paycheck next month. He doesn't have any 'ideological' liberals pushing him to be legitimately progressive. Frank Luntz doesn't give a shit about his position on health care reform either, but he will mouth the corporatist line because they pay him best, and there are crazies like Grover Norquist out there who will make Luntz look silly if he talks about what republicans supposedly think, without paying homage to Limbaugh's or Norquist's thoughts. People like the woman from American Progress aren't used to people like you attacking them with a cogent, thoughtful position from the left, so she took 4 minutes to come up with a sensible-sounding (but off the mark) comment. We need people like you on these shows, so that all those folks out there who don't necessarily know any better than what CNN and the Times say, will have heard a legitimate and correct viewpoint. Our only other choice, it seems, is to get enough money together to hire guys like Carville to go after their old friends in the establishment.
So my final question is this: how to we get you, and people like you, on these shows? What can we, as a movement, do? Do we need a fund to help guys like you afford to go out and schmooze the right people? There must be something we can do, despite not owning multinational corporations…
--Adam
P.S. -- I hope I'm not viewed as simply attempting to beat up on James Carville. Clearly I don't know the guy, and I don't know how well he fits my stereotype. I'm using him as a representative for the chattering class that supposedly stands up for liberals. This open letter was simply my opinion, not some attempt to expose a particular man as a fraud or anything of the sort.
Cross-Posted at Congress Matters. Where, I hear, your Daily Kos ID and password get you in.