Matt Yglesias

The Not-Conservatives Strike Back

Following up with last night’s right-wing columnist dinner party, Obama sits down with some non-conservatives:

The group included the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, the Wall Street Journal’s Gerry Seib, National Journal’s Ron Brownstein, the New York Times Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, among others.

This highlights one of our enduring asymmetries in American political media, namely that everyone who’s not a card-carrying member of the conservative movement is counted, essentially, as a liberal. Or, rather, that the essential dichotomy is held to be between conservatives and not-conservatives rather than between conservatives and liberals. But this group isn’t at all the mirror image of the conservative roster we heard about last night. Some people on it are, but others really aren’t. It’s like the common description of Brookings (rather than, say, CAP/AF) as a “liberal” think tank simply because it’s not a conservative one.

Henke on CAP

Jon Henke has a smart post at The Next Right about CAP/CAPAF and the role these institutions have played in the progressive revival.

One word of caution I would offer, however, to people looking at building the next set of conservative institutions is that while it’s always good to learn from precedent, it’s not smart to slavishly imitate what exists. Insofar as CAP’s been successful, it’s been successful because it’s been responsive to the specific situation and filled roles on the progressive side that needed filling. The “gaps” on the right are in different places. In particular, the communications spaces aren’t remotely close to mirror-images of each other. Conservatives have both the luxury and the burden of operating with big, entrenched, profitable conservative media institutions like Fox News and the talk radio universe. I’m not sure what the specific implications of that are, but it does mean that if you’re thinking about creating and marketing new conservative ideas, you’re talking about operating under very different circumstances.

A Small Illustration

A small illustration of my it’s the progressive infrastructure, stupid thesis just happened on MSNBC. Chris Matthews was talking about Barack Obama and said offhandedly, not even as a slam, that Obama had “changed his mind” and rejected public financing. Keith Olbermann immediately challenged him pointing out that, in fact, Obama had never made any such commitment. That makes a difference.

Because of the new progressive infrastructure, the myth that Obama had promised to accept public financing and then flip-flopped and rejected it was never able to take hold the way it would have in 2000 or 2004. Someday, maybe MSNBC will decide that “hours of programming dedicated to shows with liberal hosts” should outnumber “hours of programming dedicated to shows with conservative hosts” and CNN and the broadcast networks will decide that “more than zero” is the right number of liberals to put on air. Then things’ll really be different.

The Difference-Makers

I’ve been a little bit surprised by the number of liberals who’ve been eager to proclaim John McCain’s 2008 campaign to be the most vile and dishonorable thing they’ve ever witnessed. It struck me as less vile and dishonorable than the other presidential campaigns (2004, 2000, 1996) that I remember. At any rate, Brad DeLong says:

# Yes, John McCain ran a dirty campaign. But it was a less dirty campaign than any Republican has run since… well, since the memory of man runneth (with the possible exception of Ford 1976). The difference this year was that–for some reason–this year a fraction of the mainstream press called them on it rather than ignoring it entirely.

I think the “for some reason” here is pretty clear: It’s the infrastructure, stupid. Organizations like Think Progress, TPM Media, The Huffington Post, Media Matters, and Progressive Accountability have ensured that there are dozens of people working, every day, to shoot down bogus storylines and to highlight especially egregious behavior. And those institutions are connected to a vast web of individual or small-group blogs that together form a sea in which long-existing progressive publications like The American Prospect, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Washington Monthly all swim, all reaching much broader audiences than they could in their strictly print days. New, more progressive columnists with ties to those institutions like Harold Meyerson and Paul Krugman have joined The Washington Post and New York Times op-ed pages. Television programs open to progressive ideas hosted by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have appeared on cable.

To make a long story short, the Obama-McCain matchup is taking place in a very different media context from the Kerry-Bush matchup in 2004. And Kerry-Bush happened in a very different context than Gore-Bush in 2000. And I think it’s no coincidence that as progressive infrastructure gets bigger and stronger, it gets harder and harder for conservative media strategies to work. The press’s all-out war against Gore galvanized people and have created institutions designed to fight back against that kind of garbage.

The Infrastructure

I don’t agree with it in every detail, but Jeanne Cummings has a pretty good brief overview of the growth in progressive infrastructure over the past five-six years, heavily featuring the Center for American Progress, and mentioning ThinkProgress specifically as an important achievement.