The Power of Leadership
Interesting Politico article on MoveOn orienting its priorities to match Barack Obama’s. One assumes you’ll see much the same thing from many progressive groups over the next couple of months. But what’s interesting about the MoveOn case is that you can hardly chalk this up to some kind of backroom conspiracy — they’re writing about the results of a grassroots poll of membership:
What they chose: universal health care; economic recovery and job creation; building a green economy; stopping climate change; and end the war in Iraq.
What they didn’t: holding the Bush administration accountable; fighting for gay rights and LGBT equality; and reforming campaigns and elections.
MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser says that this happy alignment with Barack Obama’s agenda — and fortuitous absence of conflict with same — comes in part because “the people he’s listening to and the people we’re listening to are the same people.”
Writer Andie Collier calls it “fortuitous” but Pariser knows better — there’s no coincidence here. But I’d say it’s not even so much that Obama is listening to the same people as MoveOn members are listening to. Rather, MoveOn members are listening to Obama. He’s the most admired man in America and particularly among the MoveOn who supported him back in the primaries he’s very very admired. There are probably things Obama could do to alienate his base, but there’s also a great deal he can do to induce that base to align their ideas with him. Especially about something gentle like the question of priorities, he has an enormous ability to get people to see things his way.
And that’s not a unique Obama power. Often the press works with a model wherein voters have views on issues, and then politicians have views on issues, and then voters form opinions of politicians based on the alignment of those issue views. But the reverse process is almost certainly more common — voters know which politicians they like, and then take cues from those politicians.
29 Responses to “The Power of Leadership”
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December 29th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Well, for speculation that totally lacks any factual claims as foundation, that’s not bad.
Here’s another: This is about prioritization–those other issues are simply not as urgent to as many people. I mean, if I have to choose between getting health care right, and prosecuting Bush & Cheney, it’s not even close.
December 29th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Where Moveon.Org (and blogs like this one) will play a very distinct role from the Democratic Party is in media pushback.
The “Clinton Rules” will begin on January 20th (if they haven’t already with the Blagojevich nonsense). The traditional media will waste serious time on nonsensical stories that were cultivated in the Drudge/Freeper fever pots swamps.
MoveOn and the liberal blogs must counterbalance that nonsense so that Obama can do his job.
That’s the role we will play. We didn’t exist in any strength the 19990s or the 2000 or 2004 elections to swat away the nonsense hit-pieces and smears. We’ll need to be ready.
December 29th, 2008 at 9:49 am
MoveOn orienting its priorities to match Barack Obama’s. One assumes you’ll see much the same thing from many progressive groups over the next couple of months.
Like… CAP?
December 29th, 2008 at 10:06 am
1) The failure of Obama and MoveON to hold the Republicans and Fox News accountable for the massive damage they’ve inflicted on this country will come back to haunt them. Once in a generation you get an opportunity to kick a party into a long term wilderness.
2) The Republicans and the right wing propaganda machine are already blaming the Democrats on the approaching surge in unemployment and fall in living standards. If you don’t discredit Bill O’Reilly, then people continue to listen to him. And if he repeats his deceit often enough, people listen to it.
3) I rather doubt that the MoveOn poll is really representative of the grassroots. It was shoved through –with NO prior warning — in roughly two days right before Christmas (Dec 15-17)– when the grassroots was busy with shopping, family,etc.
The cadre and Leadership were organized to vote — i suspect that much of the grassroots membership was not.
Moveon membership is 5 Million — there were only roughly 78,000 responses to the request for goals. Each goal suggestion was rated and the membership voted only on the 10 most popular categories. There were 806,707 votes — not clear if that was 806,707 separate individuals or 265,000 people voting for 3 of their top choices.
Note how a group voting en masse for a few proposals could push those proposals to the top of the voting list –well above thousands of ideas submitted by individuals.
December 29th, 2008 at 10:07 am
But the reverse process is almost certainly more common — voters know which politicians they like, and then take cues from those politicians.
Which is how we wound up in Iraq.
Which is why we must be skeptical of even those politicians that we like.
December 29th, 2008 at 10:19 am
To reiterate, here is how, in my opinion, the MoveOn movement was subverted:
1) Goal setting process sprung on membership with no warning, at the busiest time of the year, and with only two days for discussion.
2) A rating system that allowed groups voting en bloc to elevate their goals above those of the mass of individuals — so that only the goals of the organized groups made it to the final voting list.
3) Arbitrary redefinition of goals into more general, more vague categories.
4) lack of clarity re how many people actually voted (806,000 people –or 265,000 casting 3 votes )?
5) Legitimizing the supported agenda — and dismissing contrary goals — by Claiming that the above process represents the consensus of 5 million people.
December 29th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Like Don, color me skeptical that this fortuitous alignment actually represents a bottom-up rather than top-down event. Not that I particularly care — it’s not like MoveOn is going to move in a direction different from what its leadership wants to do anyway.
December 29th, 2008 at 10:30 am
1) In the larger picture, what is really being subverted is the peoples’ outrage at how they have been fucked by the plutocrats the past 8 years.
2) As I’ve noted, the plutocrats have their Republican puppets fuck us like dogs for 8 years — then dispel the rising anger by bringing in their Democratic puppets to assure us that things have “changed”. First job of the Democratic puppets is to keep the Republican puppets from being lynched –since the Plutocrats will want to bring the Republican puppets back in in about two or four years once the Democratic puppets lose credibility. Second job is to move about $7 Trillion from the US Treasury into the pockets of the plutocrats, with NO paper trail for where the money went.
3) The LAST thing the plutocrats want is “Change you can believe in”. Campaign finance reform. Any Change in the USA’s political structure that would threaten the USA’s highly inequitable distribution of income , wealth, and power.
So the second thing you have to do is kneecap the leftist activists. Cripple Dean for America in 2004 by convincing Dean to stay in the Democratic Party and not form a third movement.
More recently, Divert Moveon into fighting for Universal healthcare — instead of reforming a deeply corrupt campaign finance system that had led to Medicare being underfunded by $38 TRILLION .
December 29th, 2008 at 10:38 am
1)”Change You Can Believe In”??
Empirical DATA is what you can believe in.
Here’s US Household income for the last 40 years — with both Democrats and Republicans being in power at various periods.
2) What is the ONE constant pattern?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1967-2003.svg
3) Anyone want to make any bets that that pattern will change in the next 8 years?
December 29th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Re Don Williams
Considering that Mr. Williams’ Eagles won yesterday and made the playoffs, despite losing twice to the Deadskins, it’s rather surprising that he is in full blown Bolshevik mode this morning. Must be off his lithium.
December 29th, 2008 at 11:26 am
‘Stuck in outrage-mode’. Nice.
Where is the Obamian Kool-Aid?
December 29th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Interesting that all the outrage in this thread is over MoveOn’s reorientation away from Bush administration-blaming (which doesn’t feed any mouths or remedy any civil rights failings) and away from the gays, who under Obama’s leadership are now apparently some kind of “intolerant” but ultimately unimportant minority.
December 29th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
But the reverse process is almost certainly more common — voters know which politicians they like, and then take cues from those politicians.
This is particularly obvious on the right. The people who opposed the Bosnian intervention, shouting “wag the dog” were all for the the Iraq invasion. We’ll discover a sudden deep concern on the part of republican polled for the rule of law, and congressional limits on the president. The wingnuts know what a loyal team member believes.
December 29th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Gay rights activists need to stop whining about Rick Warren. No, wait not “stop whining” – making some noise about this will help move the “window” to the left, and that’s a good thing. What they need to stop doing is reducing their support for Barack Obama.
This is going to be the most gay-friendly administration in American history. Barack Obama will do more to advance the civil rights of gay people, and to root out anti-gay discrimination, than every previous president combined.
So he made a smart pick for his Inauguration Invocation? It’ll make some of the bastards let their guard down. This is a good thing for the cause of gay rights.
As Napoleon said, “France is worth a mass.” Clap politely when fat boy is done talking, then enjoy the progress for the next eight years.
December 29th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
“Once in a generation you get an opportunity to kick a party into a long term wilderness.”
And the one sure way to put them into a “long term wilderness” is to govern successfully.
The media and 47% (at least) of the country would react to war crimes trials as a partisan assault on a defeated party. The surest route to a quick Republican resurgence would be to make martyrs out of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
I share your outrage. In a healthy, informed democracy, George Bush would have been impeached and tried for war crimes by the end of 2006. But we are dealing with an American public (and a jingoistic, pro-Republican media) that largely think torturing people is justified if it’s in America’s perceived interests.
Prosecuting Bush and company at this point in time would have the exact opposite effect than what you wish it would.
December 29th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Joe From Lowell: As Napoleon said, “France is worth a mass.”
Henry IV, right?
December 29th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
The media and 47% (at least) of the country would react to war crimes trials as a partisan assault on a defeated party. The surest route to a quick Republican resurgence would be to make martyrs out of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
“The Media” needs to be in its place, politically and ethically, and a honest investigation of the crimes they keep trying to ignore is the best to slap some grown-up morality into them. Tell the truth, tell it again and again, and do not get defensive or let them change the subject. Note how Katrina got a number of the media talking heads to start acting like reporters for a while, and how the correspondents who have spent long stretches in Iraq show more courage and honesty than the rest.
I frankly doubt that anywhere near 47% of the electorate is going to interpret an investigation as “partisan.” That’s a media buzzword, and a good majority of Americans will always respond well to a government acting with integrity–it happens so rarely these days. The only people who are going to get angry, outside of the Beltway social clique, are the 30% or so of snarling dittoheads who already think government is a partisan liberal conspiracy against them. They already hate Democrats and liberals and whoever else disagrees with them. How much madder and more paranoid can they get?
December 29th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
“The only people who are going to get angry, outside of the Beltway social clique, are the 30% or so of snarling dittoheads who already think government is a partisan liberal conspiracy against them.”
Yet that very same coalition (angry white male conservatives and a complicit media) managed to exert almost total control over our politics for an entire generation and run this country into the ground into the process.
I do not share your faith in the American public. I believe they will rally around Bush and Cheney if they are prosecuted for their crimes, if only because something like 80% of Americans are responsible for supporting their actions after 9/11.
I would rather get positive legislation passed than make an example of Bush and Cheney to demonstrate America’s rectitude for the history books. Me, my friends and family live in the here and now, after all, and this country isn’t going to fix itself. This may be our only opportunity for another generation to strengthen the social safety net and make a middle class lifestyle a possibility for most Americans – and I don’t want us to blow that opportunity.
December 30th, 2008 at 2:56 am
Don Williams, you’re right that the outcomes were more or less pre-ordained, but I wouldn’t act as if it were sinister that it came out that way — it’s not about getting guidance from the grassroots, but getting the grassroots to sign onto that agenda.
MoveOn is an organization with one-way communication, that is national in scope, and delivers its messages to members on a practically daily basis. Certainly anyone participating can write in their preferred agenda items, but what you lack is the ability to organize other members to vote the same way. Meanwhile, they have been driving home the agenda set by management for the last year without any input at all.
I figured this out when I was at a MoveOn house meeting in 2005 or 2006 to “set the agenda” — the host listed a few potential items, then we split into four groups to discuss what we wanted. I got my one quarter of one meeting to go along with the idea that we needed to fight the privatization of water (along with healthcare and one of the other pre-suggested items), but in the end all of what the room voted to do was off of MoveOn’s list, and our influence on the whole was infinitesimal anyway.
C’est la vie — if you don’t want to work off a stacked deck, work in smaller groups where your opinion means something.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:01 am
That said, supporting vast, top-down organizations with vague aspirations with regular small contributions are really how a lot of people engage with politics. If it’s going to be someone, it may as well be MoveOn, right?
December 30th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Re Matt w’s comment “If it’s going to be someone, it may as well be MoveOn, right? ”
———–
I certainly think well of MoveOn.
My argument above — that MoveOn leadership’s decision to avoid warfare with Republicans in favor of more pragmatic agendas is a mistake — was made because I think that decision will hurt MoveOn’s agenda in the longer run.
You don’t tolerate a nest of rattlesnakes living under your house– you burn them out.
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