There seems to be some dueling diaries going on around here the last few days. On one side is what I'll call (in an admittedly derisive way) the
WHY AREN'T "THE DEMS" CENTERING ALL THEIR CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATIONS ON THE ISSUE MOST IMPORTANT TO ME camp. I'm adamantly on the other side. I'm on the side that views elections not as an opportunity to talk about issues, but an exercise in which power is distributed to the winners.
And I want to win.
What started this was installment 5,839,428,994 in the "'Dems' Don't Get It" series of annoying diaries and comments, in this case
this diary about global warming. Almost never does someone define "the Dems," so often they're pulling up something John Breaux did in 1997 and implying that counts as an action by "The Dems." And there's almost never any accounting for what Democrats can do while not holding power over any branch of the federal government.
But of late I'm noticing a different approach. Now it's not "why won't the Democrats stop the Republicans in Congress" diaries. [And for the record, there are times when the Democrats blow it in dealing with Bush and the Republican Congressional leadership, and I've written about some of those cases here at Daily Kos, so I'm not interested in hearing accusations that I'm simply a Democratic apologist.] No, the new variant is why won't the Democrats run their campaigns on this or that particular issue.
Do you want to know why we shouldn't be running our campaigns on the issue of global warming? Because it won't help us defeat Republicans and gain power over Congress so we can actually DO something about global warming.
Now Jerome a Paris has decided to use my comments to invent a strawman argument. Before citing comments I made in the previously referenced diary, he writes this:
So let le say it here starkly: Dems are so damn terrified to lose elections that they forget to actually stand for anything, and end up being an unattractive alternative - and losing the issues to smarter - or more cynical - Republicans.
No, Jerome, and anyone else devoid of political sense who believes that: it's not fear of losing that makes us emphasize other issues, it's the desire to win, and more importantly, the desire to possess the power to actually do something about global warming and all kinds of other issues important to our country and to the world.
People in the WHY AREN'T "THE DEMS" CENTERING ALL THEIR CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATIONS ON THE ISSUE MOST IMPORTANT TO ME camp need to get out of their own heads and drop their sanctimony and enter the real world. Only in their fantasies are Americans waking up in the morning saying "yeah, we really blew it when we didn't ratify the Kyoto Accords." The polls I've seen demonstrate that despite all the junk science out there, Americans generally accept the reality of global warming. But there isn't an emotional connection there. And you don't win elections by going for the head, you win elections by going for the gut.
People are sick of Iraq. They're feeling squeezed over stagnating wages and rising tuitition and health care costs. They're disgusted with Bush's incompetence and the corruption in Congress. They have an emotional response on those subjects. And they also have an emotional response on energy policy. They think we shouldn't be relying on energy from countries from which terrorists come and fly planes into American cities and kill thousands. They think we shouldn't have Americans dying over oil (which many independent voters believe is an underlying factor to the Iraq fiasco). And they respond well to the idea that America should lead the world in developing new, clean, reusable and sustainable energy sources.
These are the issues on the minds and in the guts of voters. And going where the voters are isn't a sign of fear of losing an election. It's evidence that you put aside your own ego to go where the voters are if you want to win elections. It's what you do if you're responsible.
A couple years ago I wrote a piece for the front page of Daily Kos on what the great German sociologist Max Weber called the "ethic of responsibility":
For Weber, "three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion." Weber distinguished passion from frenzy or heated rhetoric; he characterized passion "in the sense of matter-of-factness, of passionate devotion to a 'cause'...It is not passion in the sense of that inner bearing which [can be called] 'sterile excitation'..." Passion manifests itself in the resolute, unending, but ultimately pragmatic pursuit of one's goals.
However,
mere passion, however genuinely felt, is not enough. It does not make a politician, unless passion as devotion to a 'cause' also makes responsibility to this cause the guiding star of action. And for this, a sense of proportion is needed. This is the decisive psychological quality of the politician: his ability to let realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness...The 'strength' of a political 'personality' means, in the first place, the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion...
[there are] only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and--often but not always identical with it--irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins...
We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an 'ethic of ultimate ends' or to an 'ethic of responsibility.' This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends...and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action.
...If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people...he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection. He does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action. The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels 'responsible' only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quenched...To rekindle the flame ever anew is the purpose of his quite irrational deeds, judged in view of their possible success. They are acts that can and shall have only exemplary value."
Elections aren't about waving a flag of purity, or even of talking about important issues on which you hope to act upon taking office. Elections are about getting the power, governing is about using the power. It's a fundamental distinction, and it's one that Jerome and others seem to be missing.
Not emphasizing global warming is not evidence that Dems don't plan to do anything about it. It's evidence that they don't think it's an important enough issue in the hearts and minds of voters to effect their vote. I don't hear Democrats saying much about the Kentucky River decision, but you can bet it's on their agenda to try to do something about it if they can, and if they thought it was a good issue to run on, they probably would. (Smart candidates would, however, talk about Kentucky River when appearing before a union audience.) But there's a difference between campaigning and governing, and it would help people to recognize that.
Some of the most important decisions made in governance are not in the forefront of the average voters' consciousness. Global warming is one of those issues. That doesn't mean, however, that Democrats are hostile to doing anything about it, or don't care, or are cowardly because they're not running on the issue. It means they're making what they believe is a smart assessment of what will convince voters to vote for Democratic candidates over Republicans. All the polling I've seen backs that up, as voters are generally favorable to doing something about global warming. However, there's little intensity associated with those feelings about global warming, especially when compared with Iraq, pocketbook issues and ethics and leadership issues like the Foley cover-up. And I've been talking with voters about politics, some years more than others, since 1990. I can't think of a single time someone offered up global warming as what was on their mind. And I've listened to lots of people this election cycle talk about what's on their mind, and not a single one has mentioned global warming.
Campaigns aren't about changing beliefs as much as they are about eliciting a single action: a vote for your candidate(s). Election campaigns don't change attitudes very much, if at all. They tap in to and utilyze attitudes, beliefs and emotions already possessed by the voters to generate a vote. For Democrats to emphasize issues that aren't intensely felt by voters wouldn't be a sign of courage or integrity. It would be political malpractice. Elections are about attaining power, and to do something so contrary to attaining that power as indulging their own desires at the expense of talking about issues important to voters wouldn't just be dumb. Using Weber's concept, it would be unethical.