The Wisconsin recall elections were a canary in the coal mine to working families across the country, and we were lucky that it happened so close to Netroots Nation so that we could immediately begin collectively reassessing how progressives can, well, progress from here.
Wisconsin Occupied Netroots Nation on the whole, particularly through our Take a Walk, Scott: Post-Mortem of the Wisconsin Recalls panel.
My response in the clip above, where Tea Party blogger Dana Loesch of Breitbart News and CNN postulates why the progressive base has become so “dispirited”, is an encapsulation of my opinion on the direction we need to take.
Well, specifically, what we need to go all out to counter:
I think the ability of the 1 percent billionaires to spread political propaganda - through expensive television commercials - is an unparalleled power that we have never seen before, that is able to manipulate people to vote against their own interests. And it's a specific plan to subvert democracy by making democratic discourse something you can literally buy.
This attitude that money is speech, that corporations can take over the voices of working families, and drown them out, is something that is shameful. And I think the attitude that - union dues are the same as checks from Wall Street - is pathetic, frankly.
I couldn’t be happier that
Karoli at CrooksAndLiars.com asserts that I made my “point loud and clear”, despite its spit-fire natured delivery (like I keep saying, Netroots Nation was cathartic). I’m also glad that Karoli blogs how she is “not sure I completely agree with the television advertising being as much of a factor as the other areas those billionaires spread their money around”, if only since it gives me an opportunity to relay this excerpt from
Matt Rothschild’s recall recap:
Few commentators have noticed that Walker essentially won the election from mid-November to the end of March, when he had absolute air supremacy. In early November, he had a negative approval rating of 58 percent. By June, his positive approval rating was 51 or 52 percent. He flipped these numbers around by running ads on the airwaves all winter long, from Thanksgiving through the Super Bowl and right up to the Democratic primaries. Even on the night of those primaries, he was on the air bashing Tom Barrett.
And in the last month, Walker's ads were everywhere, all over the TV and even on progressive radio stations.
To Karoli’s point, I think you had to have been in Wisconsin during this TV advertisement onslaught to really conceptualize how encompassing it was, and how early it started.
John Nichols tweeted that Walker had 24,087 TV ads to Barrett’s 9,416, but that also doesn’t account for how much better Walker’s ads were. This was not only in terms of their production value, but also for how badly Tom Barrett lost the occupation-inspired movement narrative that brought about the recalls in the first place.
In this vein, I don’t think we should be focusing on getting the most and best ads on TV at all. Rather, I believe that local bloggers, grassroots activists, and everyday citizens should expose this farce that has officially made #Democracy4Sale by creating our own videos online that we spread through social media.
We need a coordinated effort to counter the smears and lies of SuperPac TV advertisements, which we can do through inspiring the creative energy of the 99% to create videos that tell the truth. The key will be honing our efforts online to make sure our messages are heard, particularly in the local areas where they can most make an impact.
Hence, this is why I couldn’t be prouder to be working on SuperVoters.org, which is a web-platform designed to be the progressive answer to SuperPacs in this fashion. And as Wi$con$in has shown, the fight for democracy itself has only just begun.