There are two ways to approach politics.
You can seek to govern or you can seek to kvetch. That is you can seek responsibility of you can run from it.
Most of us are kvetchers. We are so far from the reality of power that there is no cost to our kvetching. We say "if I ran the world" but we don’t so where is the harm.
If we take that attitude into our political lives and depend upon it in every case nothing can get done unless one side is oppressed. This is the key to the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It’s about getting to 51%, it’s about us vs. them, it’s about playing dominance games. It is, at its heart, dysfunctional, and it has brought us to this point. The beliefs underlying Nixonism no longer work — seeking the "other," fighting the "other," destroying the "other" has become a dead-end street.
It is at the heart of what I call the Internet Thesis of Consensus (because the Internet is where these values spring from) that we seek a general agreement and work out from there, rather than seeking disagreement and working inward. The latter search may get you to 51%, and the American system of checks and balances can be very frustrating in that search (which is why the Bushies turned over the table) but that’s what conflict gets you.
So my question to Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas (above), to Digby and David Sirota and Jane Hamsher, to Howie Klein and all the rest, is this.
You want to govern or you want to kvetch?
What happened on Monday is that your kvetching killed a compromise that might have worked. We buy these CDOs, this Confederate Money we let Wall Street create, we take it apart, toss out the garbage, renegotiate what we can, and put together new instruments people can value for re-sale. It can work if we have enough capital backing the play so everyone who holds the fake paper knows they will find a buyer. We can even make money doing it.
Instead, Markos became Richard Viguerie (right) with hair. The simple plan went down, and today the Senate will debate a Christmas tree. Something for everyone. Do conservatives think higher FDIC limits and the elimination of the "mark to market" rule will save the day? You got it. Do liberals think limits on CEO compensation and mortgage forbearance will save the day? You got it. Anyone else got anything else on their wish list? You got it. Now pass it.
You know what the kvetchers will say? This plan has their stuff in it, hell no. Markos hates Viguerie and Viguerie hates Markos. These are the habits of lifetimes.
These are the habits we must break if we’re to save the country and save the world.
It is this whole approach to politics, as much as anything else,
that Barack Obama has been challenging. Identity politics, us vs. them,
scapegoating, the search for conspiracies and evil-doers, this is
something Barack Obama rejects, and has rejected, his entire political
career. He doesn’t like it when it comes from the Right, and he doesn’t
like it when it comes from the Left, either.
This was hard for the Clintonites to understand. They first attacked
him from the left, using their identity as liberal heroes, and then
from the right, using their blue collar roots. They tried every tactic
they knew. They were done in, finally, by strategy and organization.
Obama didn’t win the debates. He learned through them and held his own.
He won through superior organization and a clear vision.
An integral part of that vision is the search for consensus. That’s
what all that "John is right" stuff was about Friday. It was strategy.
It was not tactics. A lot of Democratic analysts, accustomed to
thinking of Presidential debates in terms of one-liners, were
gobsmacked. He was being "professorial," they said. He needed to "jab
more." They didn’t see that what he was doing was building a strategic
tapestry, demonstrating a different way of governing, and of approaching
governance. He was treating us, for the first time in our lives, like
we were adults with the attention span to grasp such high concepts.
He is trying to do the same thing with the work-out of these CDOs.
He lays down some simple principles, he looks for general agreement. He
stays strong and he stays at it. He knows that what comes out of the
process won’t be perfect – no piece of legislation ever is – but with
enough support he’ll have the leeway to implement it and
make it work.
That’s what Presidents do. They execute the laws. Their
responsibility when it comes to creating laws is consultative. Lay down
some general guidelines and let others do the details. Build a
consensus, find agreement, work outward from there. Then seek to
administer it fairly, honestly, rationally. And explain it to the
people in a way that’s simple, but that adults can understand.
Calm in the center of the storm. That’s good governance. Strategy, not tactics. That’s what we need.
By holding out for the last dollar, the last concession, by
demanding that the legislation be everything he wants or no deal, Kos
puts himself in the kvetching camp. That’s fine. Most of us are
kvetchers.
But I want a President. Thank God we have found one.
