One of the immense challenges of governance--for governors AND FOR THEIR POLITICAL SUPPORTERS--in a time of multiple crises is to prioritize the battles you have to fight. Reading the progressive forums like this one is an exercise in blur. People tend to mix strategic errors at both ends of the spectrum:
* They fret over minor tactical concessions.
* They advocate a pragmatism that accepts dithering and fails to see where the crucial battles are.
Both errors bother me. What I want to see is concerted action by the progressive movement to win the real battle--the Battle of Pelennor Fields. To do that, we need to get our thinking straight.
First, we need to recognize the dimensions of political warfare. Take this matter of the Stimulus Package. I am heartily sick of people agonizing over its details. The details don't matter:
- Barrack has got to win this vote. In terms of sheer, practical politics, nothing, NOTHING is more important than getting a Win on the board. Failing to prevail would be fatal to his presidency, and, probably, to democracy in America and possibly the globe's environment.
- Winning this (or any vote) vote grows political capital and weakens political enemies. Win this one and you can win more. More specifically, the GOP is in an unsustainable position. They are going "all in" here in trying to obstruct. When some initiatives begin to bear fruit, they will be decisively marginalized. (IMO, they are marginalized already, but no one realizes it.)
- The issues in the stimulus package are an aggregate and can be easily added to--ASSUMING OUR POLITICAL CAPITAL GROWS! We've seen it already. The Senate conceded some education money which was promptly restored in conference, and one more GOPer signed on! That is going to keep happening as the American people discover the reality of the fact that government can help. The fact that some initiative is left out now doesn't mean it can't be added later. Even the idiotic tax cuts not only CAN be adjusted later, they inevitably WILL BE ADDED when the political capital is sufficient to directly take on the Tax Break mantra of the morons.
The Stimulus Package is Gandalf holding off the Witch King at the beginning of the Battle of Pelennor Fields. It does good and creates a starting point. But it comes nowhere close to winning the larger battle.
And this is where the Progressive blogosphere, IMO, is failing. Leaders have not gotten together to coordinate and mobilize a major attack on the TARP issue. That is where the real battle is. It's the battle between Axelrod and Geithner, 2 guys that give face to the death struggle over the power that Wall Street can no longer afford to wield, but which it cannot give up.
This is the part of the battle with a murky outcome. It is not at all clear to me who has the upper hand. On the one hand, Obama surrounded himself with corrupted guys who show no signs of really getting it. Congressional hearings are muddled and indecisive. Geithner's big policy announcement was a blur of ambivalence that seems to avoid the issue. Blah, blah. You know the score.
On the other hand, as Krugman pointed out yesterday, the policy lacked some of the worst mistakes of TARP 1. Congress is holding hearings, and the CEOs are enduring PR nightmares which have got to push them closer to the edge of the cliff. And we know that Axelrod & Co--who managed Obama's campaign win--are in there pitching.
And here's the thing. The Wall Street position is unsustainable. They cannot keep this up. The US government cannot keep it up. The Ponzi schemes must fail.
And that's where the life and death come into play. That's why TARP is worth going to war over, where details in the stimulus package aren't. TARP is not about details. It's about the structural core of our economic system. We either get it right or the system collapses disastrously.
The survival question to me is this: will Obama Co. come to the point where it is willing to deal with Wall Street in time to head off financial Armageddon? Or will Wall Street's delaying actions waste the precious time we have left?
In trying to answer that question, we most understand something:
America is unprepared ideologically and cognitively for what has to be done! The price of doing it right will be massive cognitive dissonance. To get that to happen, a breach must be made with every conceptual and procedural convention of the last 30 years.
Only 2 powers can force such a rupture with self-destructive habits.
A. Crisis. And here's the problem. The current economic crisis HAS NOT YET BEEN ENOUGH to compel America to deal with Wall Street. It has to get worse before America will be forced to do face this task.
The fear is that if we wait for a crisis that large, it will simply be too late for anything to matter.
B. Massive and coordinated ideological conversion efforts that change the way people think in fundamental ways.
Where's that going to come from? Well, if not from us, it won't come from anyone.
And that's what frustrates me about our movement. First, there is no conventional election to give shape to our efforts. Second, we are all over the place. Look at KOS and the larger blogosphere and you find people fretting over literally hundreds of issues, all of them important, but all of them also doomed if we can't win this battle with Wall Street in time to survive and reinvent ourselves.
We have one chance to actually make a difference in forcing the confrontation with failed Wall Street. The time is now. But we need to get our act together.
And by "we" I really mean our leaders. I can't do it. You can't. I'm talking about Kos. Bowers. Armstrong. Averosis. Black. Hamser. Etc. We need our leaders to actually show leadership, pull us together, and unleash us in a decisive pushback against the most dangerous people in America today--no, not the GOP, but the centrists IN OUR MOVEMENT who are trying to coopt us and protect Wall Street.
The effort ought to begin right away and it needs to be both strategically and tactically savvy:
- Focus on 1 issue that gets at the core of our thralldom to Wall Street.
- Forbid whining, fretting, and undisciplined screeds that apply rhetoric that worked against Bush to a DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP THAT IS US!
- Organize action that will force "OUR" Leadership to deal with these issues ... without throwing that leadership under the bus. We need to develop the art of pushing our leaders without trashing them.
- Organize actions to address the cognitive dissonance that tempts the nation and its media superego to avoid taking on the core of the problem.
Something like that. I dunno. I'm just a lone guy with limited knowledge and virtually no influence other than what I can scare up in a diary that will remain on the front page for about 30 minutes. I'm pretty helpless.
But if you want to make a difference, you don't have to recommend the post, but you do need to demand that our leaders--our movement leaders AND our leaders in DC--begin to organize the troops to fight the real battle, the one with the one against the Nazgûl who believe they never have to die. It's past time we organized an Army of the Dead to win that battle.