What Dems need is a bombshell awakening

Only in a fact-free, evidence-free, actuality-free, reason-free political environment would "Meet the Press" have opened yesterday with host David Gregory booming about the NY Times' bombshell! of a Benghazi story.

That is to say, the story was never an explosive one--its hints of executive treason and gross incompetence were utter fictions conjured by the right's Goebbelsesque Darrell Issas--and anyone who had followed the facts from the beginning already knew of Benghazi's fabular past. 

Yet here we are, more than a year later--more than a year later--headlining the contours of a long-familiar reality as a bombshell, mostly because the right has been so damned proficient at bamboozling a gullibility-prone populace.

That--what some fashionably call a "conceptual framework," and others more simply call the Big Lie--is, it seems to me, the least-met challenge that Democrats will face again in 2014. Their pushbacks against the Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, deficit and unemployment fictions (one could go on, and on, of course) have been embarrassingly weak, leaving the field of sensationalism to--and here's a whopper of a paradox for you--their badly wounded yet miraculously unscathed opponents.

The right just stays on offense, no matter what. It's scarcely a complex strategy; nonetheless it's a strategy that Democrats can't seem to grasp--and thus deploy. The aforementioned weakness of their pushbacks lies, ironically, in pushing back much at all, when they should be on unified missions of remorseless assault. 

Republicans' October government shutdown was a stupendously boneheaded play that for Democrats should have been a sensation for a good six-to-twelve months. Yet in less than two it was, as a story, gone--eclipsed and then thoroughly overridden by the right's exploitative offense against a friggin' malfunctioning website.

Which, in the long run, is of greater importance to the nation: the GOP's determined sabotage of the U.S. government, or a bunch of non-ideological computer glitches?

Right. Yet only one of those stories had legitimate staying power. And, at bottom, we can't really blame the feckless Gregorys of the press for the sustained rise of the empty one, and the fall of the legitimate other.

The right knows how to play the press, and Democrats don't; the right knows how to stay on offense, and Democrats don't; and the right knows how to mobilize resentment. Democrats don't.

But they had by God better learn, or 2014 is going to be a very long, very miserable year.

  

Comments

[AnneJ]

You would think that after so many of years of this the democrats would have learned something from the republicans by now. It's not as though their behavior is anything new. It does seem as though every few weeks you need to write a blog about this very subject. Apparently not enough democrats are reading you.

[bpuharic]

Part of the problem is the fact the GOP can play the race card effectively. The issue the Dems care about...inequality...has been defanged by the right's views on 'class warfare'. The right has a comprehensive set of myths about America. The Dems have truth.

And the American people are always willing to listen to a lie rather than the truth. IF the Dems STARTED talking inequality, that would mean social policies like banking regulation, labor law reform to support unions, higher taxes on the wealthy, etc.

And the Dem leadership is too gutless to push this.

[Janicket]

Agree that the Dems need to get more ferocious, but let's not overlook the willing stooges in the media who run after every GOP shiny object without even trying, most of the time, to ferret out the lies behind the howling. Thanks to he said/she said, both-sides-do-it formulaic reporting, there's no independent fact-checking going on. President Obama has repeatedly pointed out nonsense from the right and his own vision of helping get this country going stronger, and what's the MSM response? A brief soundbite, a big yawn, and off to the next whomped-up "scandal". Or better yet, Miley Cyrus's antics.

[Peter G]

As a general prescription valid. Someone will have to explain to me how this works in practice.

Since the news media relies entirely on presenting perfectly Manichaean points of view without much in the way of analysis as to which view is more accurate or consistent with facts how do you achieve the stated goal of pushback? They don't cover news, they cover controversy. And they don't resolve the controversy. Taking sides is considered unjournalistic.

In this environment pushback on a given issue amounts to saying no where the other guy says yea. They key, I think, lies in promoting issues where your opponent is weak. Make that the controversy du jour and you have won before a word is spoken.

The right is not better at this. The left, as in the Democrats, are handicapped by holding the Executive office. Integrity requires the Democrats and the left in general to criticize the administration on various policies, fragmenting their message while the Republicans get to glory in it regardless of policy. You say they are wrong about this or that and the Republicans say they are wrong about everything. Tell me how you win a communications battle in this environment.

What the Republicans have recently shown themselves to be superior in doing is burying their mistakes as quickly as possible and refocusing again and again on favorable issues. All they need to do is keep harping on reasons why government should not be trusted and why everything it tells you is a lie.

What the left needs a good shovel as much as anything.

[Jon Ponder]

Agreed. In the Rove political playbook, rule one is that if you are on defense, you are losing. As simple as this is, Dems, especially those in Congress, can't seem to muster the guts for it.

For example, few if any Dems will come out and say it but they all know that the REAL reason Republicans oppose extending unemployment insurance has nothing to do with incentivizing shiftless 50-somethings who worked every day for 25 years before being laid off to get off their sofas and find minimum wage jobs.

The real reason Republicans have killed unemployment benefits is that it's part of their ongoing strategy to hobble the economy. In this case, they know that staunching the flow of UI dollars, the unemployed will have no money to spend on groceries and clothes or to pay rent or a mortgage. Over a million unemployed people will be affected directly, but there will be a ripple effect that will hurt retailers and others downstream.

Why would these representatives elected by the people do this to their fellow Americans, to their own constituents? Because they know that if they can depress the economy, it will benefit them politically in 2014 and 2016.

This is not new, of course, it's what has driven their push for austerity since Bush crashed the economy with their help in 2008 -- it's the reason they've been so eager to lay off teachers, emergency services personnel and other government workers. It's why they secretly love the Sequester.

Getting the GOP on defense would require Democratic leaders to summon the courage to call the GOP out for what is a prima facie anti-American strategy. Republicans and their lapdogs in the "liberal" media would be outraged by accusation, but in the end they'd be forced to defend themselves -- see rule one of Rove's way of politics.

[Turgidson]

^ adding to Jon's thought which I totally agree with, elected Democrats, particularly the long-serving ones, have so deeply internalized the "voters hate government spending" fable that they don't know how to effectively fight the GOP over austerity and its actual effects. And they are definitely too chickenshit to just call GOP economic treason what it is.

The way the GOP has managed to label the Democrats as the profligate tax-and-spend party, apparently for all eternity, while at the same time partaking in reckless deficit spending benders every time they get into power, will be something for historians and political scientists to puzzle over for decades to come.

But what I've learned, and elected Democrats continue not to learn, is that the voters may be "concerned" about deficits and government spending, but they won't punish a governing party for them if the economy is improving overall and things are OK in general. Seems like the Democrats should be able to confront GOP nonsense on the economy with amused dismissiveness of the GOP's own track record while then discussing what safety net and stimulus spending ACTUALLY DOES and how it ACTUALLY HELPS real people and the economy at large pull through tough times by putting actual money in actual people's pockets while they either look for work or perform work at the government's behest.

But the Democrats aren't great at it, and the ones who are good at it don't have the megaphone they need (hopefully Ms. Warren is starting to change this, but we'll see). The mainstream media is always more interested in hearing a centrist Democrat express their (completely baseless) grave concern over his/her party's excesses.

The conversation begins from what can be charitably called a false premise. Government is bad, government spending is evil, and the GOP have credibility on these issues. Less charitably, the conversation is a rolling absurdity and it contributes to the suffering of millions of people.