Giving Progressives A Bad Name

This column by Mark Schmitt appeared in the New York Times yesterday; I wasn’t familiar with Schmitt, but the bio with his column states that he is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

The group (as noted here) is, “a nonprofit, post-partisan, public policy institute that was established through the collaborative work of a diverse and intergenerational group of public intellectuals, civic leaders and business executives” that seeks to “bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation’s public discourse” (and the fact that the group is to be headed by the fine New Yorker writer Steve Coll is promising).

Given all of this, it sounded as if Schmitt’s column would be worth my time. Unfortunately, it was not (and here are some dubious excerpts)…

While the absence of policy detail in the Republican presidential campaign is remarkable, Democrats go too far in the other direction. Their campaign has entered the season of plans, the period during which a barrage of 20-page policy proposals frames the debate. The candidates disappear behind a screen of white paper.

And there will be more. The Service Employees International Union, among the most powerful voices in Democratic politics, has asked presidential candidates to issue a detailed health care plan by the end of the month to have a chance at the union’s endorsement. But the union is doing its members no favors by encouraging the candidates to take part in this ritual. By the end of the campaign, whomever the union endorses would have been better off if he or she had never written a health care plan at all.

That, in a word, is utterly preposterous. So the SEIU is supposed to give some blanket endorsement to a presidential candidate without having a clue as to whether or not this person wants to continue to take chances with our expensive, unreliable and shamelessly profit-driven private system or begin what I admit would be the slow, hard, expensive (in the short term) transition to a single-payer operation?

I’m drawing attention to this column by Schmitt chiefly because, if there is one thing I’m sick to death of hearing about, it’s the fact that Democrats lose elections because their campaigns are apparently too “issue-driven” or otherwise intelligent for voters to comprehend, and the Repugs keep winning because (in the past) they’ve effectively spun and propagandized on important issues and reduced their positions on them to “sound bites” in the process.

All of that worked back in those supposedly baaad Clinton years when we were all “fat, dub and happy,” but the “house of cards” constructed by the Repugs and their corporate media enablers has effectively collapsed. Only people who refuse to see that or are blinded by partisan bias against Democrats (or are basically too lazy to care one way or the other) still believe that this party represents a viable alternative in a national election.

And by the way, Schmitt’s column gets worse…

We don’t give our presidents total power to enact policy. They have to work with a Congress made up of people with their own views and constituencies. Does anyone really think that a plan cooked up by a bunch of smart 20-somethings after a couple of all-nighters amid the empty pizza boxes and pressures of a campaign is superior to what could be developed with the full resources of the federal government and open Congressional hearings and debate?

If I were a member of the campaign staff of John Edwards, for example, who helped craft the ideas behind his single-payer health care plan and I read that paragraph (you could substitute other Dem candidates also, of course), I would seek out Schmitt at my earliest opportunity so I could call him an idiot to his face.

Yes, I think such a plan from a particular candidate could be superior if it doesn’t get hopelessly watered down by the special interest demands of those who would do their best to cut it to pieces (which, sadly, would almost inevitably take place).

And here’s the topper as far as I’m concerned…

Democratic primary voters are infatuated with the idea of plans, not the plans themselves. We like to think that we vote based on our rational analysis of issues and ideas, not on such tawdry matters as personality. So we insist that candidates produce plans to show that they are as serious as we like to think we are. Voters mistakenly use the level of detail in a plan as a clue to the candidate’s level of commitment to solving a problem. But what we really need are clues to character.

I don’t know how someone affiliated with an organization that tries to provide a forum for “promising new voices” could lend its name to something like this that helps in a big way to do nothing but reinforce Republican party talking points (though now, witnessing Dubya’s “crash and burn” presidency, the Dems could legitimately claim the “character” baton as far as I’m concerned).

Resurrecting this whole “character” argument infuriates me, if you want to know the truth; we don’t really know any of these people we elect to office, and there’s no way we ever could. We can only support or not support them based on the issues.

Remember the corporate media narrative in 2000 that Al Gore was stiff, aloof, evasive and quite probably a liar, but George W. Bush was some kind of a “down-home” guy who wanted to be a uniter instead of a divider? Remember those supposed “character” issues?

At what point did that become a sick, pathetic joke to all of us? At what point did we realize that we had been utterly “played” by everyone who has helped perpetrate the nightmare we’ve had to live through since November 2000?

Is that what Schmitt wants to see again? A campaign that does nothing but reinforce whatever corporate media narrative gets replayed over and over and over?

I will continue to watch for columns written by members of the New America Foundation; I’m sure anything written by Steve Coll will be excellent. In the meantime, I will consider this column by Mark Schmitt (who, no doubt, now has a promising future taking up space at The New Republic) as merely an aberration.