It could be a horror story for the Democrats: on Tuesday, within weeks of getting healthcare through the Senate, Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts might fall into the hands of a Tea Party Republican—putting not only healthcare reform in jeopardy, but everything on Obama’s agenda during this all-important election year. We’ll have political chaos if it comes to pass, emboldening the far right and throwing progressives into a prolonged era of soul-searching.
The question everyone should be asking is how we got to this point. I offer three reasons:
1. Obama and the Democratic leadership have not been aggressive enough.
Obama and the Democratic establishment have tried to play nice with Republicans, touting the benefits of bipartisanship and avoiding strong language to describe the GOP. Months were spent courting Olympia Snowe on healthcare, only to see her thumb her nose even when the bill met all her requirements. Obama rarely called out Republicans for their obstructionism and other outrageous antics.
This conciliatory posture has deflated rank and file Democratic voters, who fought hard for the 2008 mandate and want their leaders to stop making overtures to a party bent on their destruction. Obama and party leaders have also shied away from strong moral language, instead relying on more cerebral arguments. While they’re sensible and just, they don’t excite the passions. The enthusiasm gap between the parties is not hard to understand.
In addition, the priority given to healthcare pushed many other progressive issues aside, e.g., gay rights and immigration reform, disappointing large parts of the Democratic left.
2. The expectations of the Democratic base
While Obama and other party leaders are partly responsible for the deflated attitude among rank and file Democrats, these same activists can also blame their own unrealistic expectations. The notion that Obama would simply roll into Washington and usher in a new progressive era was naïve; change doesn’t happen that fast on the Beltway.
Similarly, there is a bizarre disconnect among many Democrats between the disappointment they feel and the reality of what Obama is on the edge of accomplishing. Getting healthcare reform through Congress would be such an achievement that if he never passed another significant piece of legislation, his presidency would be one of the most consequential ever.
But Obama has done more. He passed a major stimulus bill that brought us back from the economic brink and includes hundreds of billions for infrastructure and green energy. He passed the Fair Pay Act that bans gender pay discrimination. The House has passed significant financial regulatory reform and climate change legislation that the Senate will take up shortly. And through executive order, Obama has vastly improved government transparency and trimmed government waste. He also nominated the first Hispanic to the Supreme Court, and has been relatively successful on the foreign policy front.
So while there’s much to criticize and much left to do, the Democratic base should appreciate all that’s already been done. It should whet their appetite for the years ahead.
3. The media’s kid-glove treatment of the Tea Party movement
The so-called Tea Party movement has found a soft touch in the mainstream media. I’ve paid close attention these past couple of months, and it’s clear that the movement is a hodgepodge of misguided populism, white resentment, and a big dose of lunacy—all of which makes it incoherent, outrageous, and often despicable. What do the media do? They lap it up and let the Tea Partiers spew it out.
Many Tea Party leaders have no political background, little or no education, and are often used as pawns by established Republican figures (such as Dick Armey, whose group Freedomworks has been heavily involved in the Tea Party’s fight against healthcare reform).
The movement’s focus on deregulation as a cure for America’s economic woes is particularly striking. Tea Party activists make the populist argument that deregulation will lead to more competition, but the reality is just the opposite: there is nothing that big business would love more than a new wave of deregulation.
The media should be doing its job, exposing Tea Partiers for what they really are—a toxic threat to the body politic and the public interest. Instead, Tea Party activists get major and largely deferential coverage. In possibly the most egregious example, Tom Ashbrook (my favorite NPR commentator) devoted his entire hour-long show to the movement and never challenged numerous outrageous statements. For instance, after one leader likened Obama’s universal healthcare to Nazism, Ashbrook just cut to a commercial—never even questioning this vile claim.
As Paul Krugman notes, the media seems so cowed by charges of liberal bias that if a rightwinger should claim the earth is flat, the media will invite in another panelist to argue why the earth is round. This has got to stop.
In summary, the American body politic is in big trouble. Hopefully, Coakley will win in Massachusetts on Tuesday—and we’ll all have had a wake-up call to get more serious in the days and months ahead.
Jason Scorse