Field Watch: Visibility Done Right

From Crooks and Liars:



Hundreds of clergy and congregants at a candlelight vigil at Senator Lieberman's home in Stanford, Connecticut.

This is public field visibility done right:

From the Danbury News Times.

STAMFORD -- Quietly holding candles, hundreds of clergymen, congregants and reform advocates lined the sidewalks outside Independent U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman's Stamford home Sunday night in a show of support for universal health care.

"When we heard not only would he vote against it, but he'd use his power, his position as a swing vote ... to block it from coming to a vote, we had to send a message so he knows people who vote overwhelmingly favor the public option," said Rabbi Stephen Fuchs, of Congregation Beth Israel in West Hartford.
...
The vigil began at Stamford High School, Lieberman's alma mater, and ended at the senator's home, the Hayes House, across the street.

"In some sense, it's poetic," said Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy, who attended the vigil. "The place where Sen. Joseph Lieberman received his high school education, the place he visited upon his announcement to seek the vice presidency, a place where his run for the presidency began -- and it just so happens, a place across the street from where he lives."

Yet another example of the Great Realignment. Civilization is returning to America, precinct by precinct.  

The Dog salutes you.

Palin stiffs fans in Indiana

What goes around, comes around...

The Great Realignment: Taking back the grassroots

There was an interesting op-ed  in the New York Times yesterday, pointing out that Senate support or opposition to the Obama healthcare package has little to do with the merits (or lack thereof) of the plan.  The correlation is to Obama's personal popularity in the State a given Senator represents.

Consider, for instance, the 39 Democrats who voted against the bill in the House, which approved the health care bill by a margin of 220 to 215. According to data compiled by The New York Times, 31 of the 39 Democratic naysayers hail from districts that John McCain won last November. Although the upper chamber has a reputation for being less rigidly constrained by near-term political considerations, odds are that the same calculus will prevail in the Senate.

Thus the opinions of the electorate on health care are trumped by their feelings about Obama:

The authors sum up the dynamic:

Nowadays, President Obama enjoys higher approval ratings — in the low to mid-50s, according to most polls — than do the Democrats’ health care reform plans, which are mired in the mid-40s in most surveys. Conditions being what they are, Democrats would rather have a referendum on the president than one on the health care bill itself.

Still, what these numbers seem to reflect is a series of missed connections. On the one hand, there is a disconnect between Mr. Obama and the electorate: the president — who had popularity ratings in the 60s when the health care debate began — has generally stayed in the background during health care negotiations, leaving the unpopular Congress to be the public face of the bill.

On the other hand, there is a disconnect between the electorate and the 535 members of Congress, who seem to be so fixated on Mr. Obama’s standing in their states that they’ve paid little attention to what their constituents might want — or need.

This actually makes the problem solvable. Not so much by Obama, but by the national Democratic Party - in particular by its Blue Dog and Labor-liberal components.   Much if not most of what passes for conservatism in this country is populist anti-leftism.

Based upon cultural and geographical commonality the outreach would have to be done by an ideologically balanced organization anchored in civic culture and working on the basis of civic responsibility.

The effort would also have to be independent of Obama.

Quite frankly the various progressive activist groups (MoveOn, et al) and Obama's Organizing for America would be detrimental in such an effort. In the absence of campaign discipline, Obama's current volunteer operation is Howard Dean, redux, precisely the kind of dysfunctional operation recognized as counterproductive in 2008.

Deval Patrick the Slime Mold That Walks Like a Man

There are few people in public life I despise more than Deval Patrick, the Governor of Massachusetts.  For that reason, there is always the danger of cheap shots while blogging.

I'll let this and this speak for themselves.

The purpose is supposedly to deal with the ongoing State budget crisis; however consider the payroll costs for patronage employees in just two agencies:

Seems like the Governor has...different priorities than rape victims or (state subsidized) gambling addiction.

Requiem for Floon

Another Boston election cycle is over and both the media and activist community do what they do best: misunderstand the obvious.

Given the abysmally low turnout, the race was Flaherty's to lose. And he lost.

As I predicted, here, here, here, and here, the alliance between Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon was doomed to fail because the alliance was much less than the sum of its parts. This is unfortunate in a perverse sort of way because Boston needs a viable alternative to the current Administration. The Dog is not averse to tilting at the occasional windmill, and if either Flaherty or Yoon had shown any indication of being principled reformers, he would have been the first to hold their signs during rush hour.

On the plus sign, if I hadn't been so annoyed by the sheer incompetence of both the challengers and the media coverage thereof, I probably wouldn't have started blogging. (That's plus for me, dear reader, not you.)

At any rate this municipal election cycle was a textbook case study of political incompetence and journalistic misfeasance.  The media coverage of the race was so crappy that to call it incompetent would be a complement.  The Boston Globe in particular went through a consistent period of self-deluded Duh moments masquerading as political coverage. Menino has a short temper? Menino likes to micro-manage? Menino runs a closed Administration?  Spare me. He's been that way before he was even a District City Councillor.

And everybody with an IQ above single digits knows it.

What the media never covered is the fact that the Mayor's lack of articulation disguises arguably the best field brain of his generation of Democrats.  The rise of the "accidental Mayor" was never accidental; he had a comprehensive City-wide organization (put together, I might add, in plain sight) a good year before the 1993 election.  The only problem was and is the fact that the Mayor's electoral virtues are administrative vices.

The opinions of good-government progressives notwithstanding, campaigns aren't democracies, nor are they organized to further the common good.  Campaigns are about obtaining power.  Thus, a wining campaign manager is always aware of the shifting correlations of power.  The demands of the business thus present the danger that the inherent dispassion necessary to win can morph into cynicism.

In a functioning civic culture this danger is checked by informed and active citizens (and their elected representatives) at the local level.  But Boston's civic culture's been dysfunctional for decades, aided and abetted by an equally dysfunctional media.  There were (and are) no checks and balances in the system, and only a few at the neighborhood level, conspicuously the Dominican community and the West Roxbury neighborhood of the city.  Both communities are organized as civic units across class and ideological boundaries; hence Menino is always attentive to their needs. 

The City Council's power to limit Mayoral abuse by cutting the city budget is unexercised. Flaherty's accusations during the campaign were if anything understated.

The problem was that Flaherty never did squat to address those issues in nine years on the Council.

Yoon not only did nothing of substance on the Council; his reluctance to dirty his hands with constituent service work made him less than popular with his constituents.  Yoon's alliance with progressives ignored the fact that progressives are not seen as assets in black, Latino, and working-class white communities.  In the case of Boston's Dominican community, cited above, there has been a decade-long fight against white Jamaica Plain activists over developmental issues.  In Boston's black communities there are similar battles are fought. (The difference being that the better-organized Dominicans win their fights.)  Coupled with the profoundly incompetent advice he got from his consultatant, Yoon actively repelled those the media thought were his core supporters (Menino won Chinatown with twice Flaherty's vote.)

Hence, from where the Dog sits, there was never any doubt about the outcome.

The problem is that principled candidates, running competent campaigns could have easily won.