Whoooooooooops the Alienation of Your Base During an Election Is Definitely a Terrible Idea!

Or just more evidence that I am very, very stupid and don't understand 12-dimensional chess. ("It's that one."—The Obama Administration.)

So, in their ongoing strategy of totally pissing off the activist base that helps people win elections, the Obama campaign has turned the hippie-punching up to eleven. Amanda Terkel reports on an email sent by the campaign's point person in New Mexico which takes aim at Paul Krugman and the "Firebagger Lefty blogosphere."

"I know many of you have raised frustrations, but please, I implore you, please take 5 minutes and read the article below. It does a great job of explaining the Debt Ceiling deal," Sandoval wrote in bold text.

The rest of the email was a blog post taken from a blog called "The People's View," run by Spandan Chakrabarti. Chakrabarti writes that he has "been participating in online and offline liberal activism since 2003, when Gov. Howard Dean ran for president."

The blog post that Sandoval thought was important enough to share with others harshly condemns Krugman and progressive bloggers who have been critical of Obama. From the 1,825-word post:

Paul Krugman is a political rookie. At least he is when compared to President Obama. That's why he unleashed a screed as soon as word came about the debt ceiling compromise between President Obama and Congressional leaders - to, you know, avert an economic 9/11. Joining the ideologue spheres' pure, fanatic, indomitable hysteria, Krugman declares the deal a disaster - both political and economic - of course providing no evidence for the latter, which I find curious for this Nobel winning economist. He rides the coattails of the simplistic argument that spending cuts - any spending cuts - are bad for a fragile economy, ignoring wholeheartedly his own revious cheerleading for cutting, say, defense spending. But that was back in the day - all the way back in April of this year. [...]

No, the loudest screeching noise you hear coming from Krugman and the ideologue Left is, of course, Medicare. Oh, no, the President is agreeing to a Medicare trigger!!! Oh noes!!! Everybody freak out right now! But let's look at the deal again, shall we? [...]

Now let's get to the fun part: the triggers. The more than half-a-trillion in defense and security spending cut "trigger" for the Republicans will hardly earn a mention on the Firebagger Lefty blogosphere. Hell, it's a trigger supposedly for the Republicans, and of course, there's always It'sNotEnough-ism to cover it.

"Firebagger" is most likely a combined reference to the liberal blog FireDogLake, founded by Jane Hamsher, and "Tea Bagger," a less-than-flattering term for Tea Party activists.

Not only is this email stupidly hostile during an election to the very people who are most politically active and comprise what should be the president's activist base, but it just utterly misunderstands why it is that the "ideologue Left" is angry with the President.

There has long been this insistence that disaffected progressives just don't comprehend how politics work, this continual implication that we're just whiny babies who don't understand the political realities with which the grown-ups have to contend in DC, but that is manifestly not the issue. The "ideologue Left" know very well how politics work: It was not we, after all, who foolishly believed that "hope and change" was enough to fundamentally alter the political vitriol plaguing the Beltway, who arrogantly believed that politely asking Republicans to rise above petty partisan bickering was going to inspire them to compromise.

We know how politics work. Insomuch as our criticisms are about politics, as opposed to policy (I'll come back to that in a moment), they are designed to challenge the administration to do politics in a different way than they've been doing it.

Greg Sargent lays out this piece of it pretty clearly:

[T]his story does provide a window into what I think is a real problem — the nature of the Obama team's frustration with liberal critics. The problem is that some on the Obama team don't reckon with what it is lefty critics are actually saying. Obama advisers get angry when they think liberal critics are refusing to accept the limits placed on him by current political realities, and when lefties presume at the outset that Obama will inevitably sell out. That's reflected in Sandoval's angry email and in other periodic explosions of anger at the "professional left."

But the lefty critique goes considerably further than this. It's an argument with Obama's team about tactics and strategy, about what might be attainable if he handled these negotiations differently. The case from these critics is if Obama approached negotiations with a harder line, it would be better politics because it would juice up the base and show indys he's a fighter. They also advocate for this course because the current dynamic is hopelessly broken — and they think a more aggressive approach has at least a chance of broadening the field of what's substantively possible. (There's a segment on the left that also thinks Obama wants what's in the deals he keeps securing, but the points above are broadly what many lefties agree on.)

Whether you agree with this critique or not — people make persuasive cases in both directions — Sandoval's email shows a broader failure to reckon with what it is that has lefty critics so ticked off. That's the real problem here — and it's one of the key causes of the tension between the left and the White House.

What we have here is a failure to listen. The only thing the White House is hearing is a straw-argument that's easily dismissed: They have unreasonable expectations because they are unsophisticated.

That, literally, could not be more wrong. (Nor, frankly, more insulting.)

It also completely leaves aside that there are deep policy differences between critics on the "ideologue Left" and the administration, legitimate criticisms about the approach to the economy. Atrios sums up this chasm succinctly: "I don't ever imagine the Very Important People sit up late at night worrying about what's being posted on the walls of this humble lemonade stand. But to the extent that something might be in their base bugging their d00dz, I hope it isn't the armchair punditry or even the policy advice. It's that we've basically had 9.0%+ unemployment for 2.5 years and maybe...somebody should do something."

The irony of the administration sniffing haughtily about the "professional left" is that I can think of a half a dozen progressive bloggers who started blogging full-time after losing their jobs, and every progressive blog commentariat includes active and passionate and valued commenters who are unemployed. Unemployment is part of the reason there is a professional left, and the pretense that we are somehow separate from Real Americans, that we see things differently and/or don't speak for people experiencing long-term unemployment, would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.

The White House is missing, profoundly and comprehensively, that there are valid and reasonable political and policy differences with their progressive base, and, at minimum, those differences need to be heard and respected.

And, before I leave the subject of the President's base, I want to quickly mention, yet again, the potential to alienate female voters with shit like this from Obama's current stump speech:

If we're willing to do something in a balanced way--making some tough choices in terms of spending cuts, but also raising some revenue from folks who've done very well, even in a tough economy--then we can get control of our debt and deficit and we can start still investing in things like education and basic research and infrastructure that are going to make sure that our future is bright. It's not that complicated, but it does require everybody being willing to make some compromises.

I was in Holland, Michigan, the other day and I said, "I don't know about how things work in your house, but in my house if I said, 'You know, Michelle, honey, we got to cut back, so we're going to have you stop shopping completely--you can't buy shoes, you can't buy dresses--but I'm keeping my golf clubs'--you know, that wouldn't go over so well."

Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.

Listen, the administration can keep getting pissy about the "ideologue Left" just being a bunch of stupid hippies who create headaches for them, or they can PAY ATTENTION to how this stuff looks from, say, my perspective. I'm a professional woman who writes progressive political material, and I'm implicitly being denigrated as a ninny-brained shopaholic who needs her husband to audit her spending and explicitly being denigrated as a know-nothing shit-head who doesn't understand how politics work.

When the election rolls around, and I don't feel the slightest inclination to support the President, his (male) supporters will be lining up to sneer at me, "What do you need—a personal invitation?" No, I don't need a personal invitation. What I need is to stop being given message after message after message that I am worthless, because I am not a corporation, because I am a progressive, because I am a woman.