The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [116]
—Charlotte Observer, 9/20/02
“The fact of the matter is, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, we still have a long, hard slog to finish this job in Iraq,” said Brad Woodhouse, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
—Detroit Free Press, 12/15/03
“A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting with Harry Reid’s people and the peace activism community,” Joel said. “And they were discussing how they were going to pitch the news to the public that the Democrats had decided to pass the war supplemental. And I’m thinking to myself, Why is the activist community working with the Democrats to figure out how to deal with the people? It should be the other way around.”
What Joel was talking about made perfect sense. All along, the thrust of the Democrats’ strategy with regard to the war had been to find a way to take political advantage of antiwar sentiment without hurting themselves electorally. Momentum seemed to have gathered around a strategy of taking a superficial stand against the war while also allowing it to continue long enough to be useful to the Democrats in the ’08 presidential race. Which meant no cutting off the war money, no risking being accused of taking guns out of the troops’ hands during an election season, even if it meant unnecessarily prolonging a deadly conflict. For the activist community to sign off on such a baldly political strategy was monstrous; it was the rankest sort of Washingtonian incest.
And yet, sure enough, after the Democrats buckled that spring and voted to give Bush his money for the war, the spokespeople for the peace activism community could be seen everywhere giving excuses for the Democrats. Woodhouse himself was outspoken in that regard. “We’re disappointed that the war drags on with no end in sight,” he told Reuters, “but realize Democratic leaders can only accomplish what they have the votes for.”
Joel went on to tell me a story about having seen a notice that Barack Obama had been invited to speak at a conference for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a notorious conservative action group dedicated to passing conservative laws in the state legislatures. Joel and his group quickly issued a press release calling for Obama to denounce ALEC, one of the most regressive organizations in the country. Instead, they got a slew of e-mails from the Obama campaign.
“They were all asking me, ‘Hey, why didn’t you just call us first, before you went to the press? We could have cleared this up.’ And my answer was, one, I don’t work for you. That’s not how this works. Two, if you don’t like ALEC, take advantage of the situation. Use this as an opportunity to tell people about ALEC, denounce them. But the point is, we see this all the time. Everybody acts like they’re on the same team. Nobody is really advocating. And worse, there’s this pervasive sense that if you challenge power, you’ll lose your ability to get hired by the right people down the road. Like me, I’ll never get hired by Obama now, but so what? But that’s why their people were so surprised that we blindsided them. They’re not used to it. That’s the attitude within the Democratic Party. There’s no ideology at all. It’s all about power—nothing more.”
The Democrats’ error was in believing that people wouldn’t notice this basic truth about their priorities. They were wrong on that score. In fact, a Quinnipiac poll taken around that time found the approval rating of Congress had fallen to 23 percent. Other polls saw the number plummet to the teens. The rating of the Democratic Congress was even lower than Bush’s, and it was not hard to see why. Bush was wrong and insane, but he stood for something. It was a fucked-up something, but it was something. The Democrats stood for nothing; they viewed their own constituents as problems to be handled, and even casual voters were beginning to see this.
Around that same time, there was a surprising piece of news from noted peace activism icon Cindy Sheehan, the so-called war mom who’d gained notoriety by holding a sit-in against the