Rebuild the Dream (14 page)

Unfortunately, the strategy of the White House helped Obama's opponents succeed—because neither President Obama nor his supporters were willing to stoop low enough to meet these claims head-on. Instead, they tried to “ignore the allegations to death.” Daily charges of communism and even treason were met with a cool silence. Big mistake. The White House did not arrive at this approach by accident; it was part of a deliberate, conscious strategy.

I have first-hand experience with the reasoning. When I worked as a special advisor to the Obama White House's Council on Environmental Quality, the attitude was that we should simply ignore
Fox News
and the whole right-wing noise machine altogether. The constant refrain went like this: “This is the White House. We are not going to be distracted by this nonsense. Why should we dignify these ridiculous allegations with a response? Why elevate these people? Why have a fight on their terms? We need to stay focused on governing. That's what the American people expect from us. We are not going to reward and validate these people by giving them the attention they crave.”

That approach made sense to me at the time. It is part of the reason that I didn't work harder to clarify the evolution of my own views from anti-capitalist critic to champion of market-based innovations. But, looking back, we made a serious misstep that was rooted in public relation orthodoxies that have not taken into account important changes in the media system.

After all, the right wing was able to tie President Bill Clinton in knots, using only talk radio and the online Drudge Report, at a time when the word “blog” did not even exist. Back then,
Fox News
was just getting started, yet Rush Limbaugh and his “mini-me” clones kept Clinton off balance throughout much of his presidency. Even in the simpler media environment of the 1990s, a Democratic White House was barely able to hold its own.

By 2009, President Obama was confronting a much more dangerous and difficult media system.
Fox News
had emerged as a twenty-four-hour propaganda machine, beamed into 100 million homes every day (although only 2.2 million are watching at any given moment). It billed itself as a news network, but it acted as an arm of the opposition GOP (and forces even farther to the right). Right-wingers continued their dominance of talk radio—both satellite and terrestrial. And there was the rise of Internet-enabled pranksters and
provocateurs, such as Andrew Breitbart. The times called for new rules of engagement, especially at the White House and DNC levels.

For instance, conventional wisdom says one should never repeat a libel to rebut a libel, because any repetition just supports the libel. (This is a lesson that GOP senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell learned with her infamous “I'm Not a Witch” TV ad.) But not repeating the libel is not the same as not responding to it. Democrats should have learned this lesson from the “swift boat” experience of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry; he waited too long to refute false and scandalous allegations, and he paid a fatal price in the polls.

In this media environment, one must not stand back from challenging a nasty charge, for fear of amplifying it or dignifying it. An online search engine cannot distinguish between truth and poppycock. Once on the Internet, even ludicrous statements multiply, generate feedback loops, and amplify themselves ad infinitum until the public begins to assume that there must be at least some truth to the slurs. Left unchallenged, ugly charges in the new media system dignify themselves.

Early on, Team Obama failed to appreciate the danger that these attacks posed. Perhaps worse, it failed to see the opportunity.

Because Obama is not a socialist, he could have used the false allegations as the occasion for a series of speeches on capitalism itself. He could have explained to Americans how the free market works—the good and bad. In the process, he could have explicitly defined and rejected socialism, tying it to failures around the world, including in Africa and Asia, where he has family and
personal experience. He could have referenced capitalist success stories—individual and national—in places such as Indonesia and Kenya. By owning his rich life experience, he could have used his perceived “otherness” to strengthen his fidelity to American values, including American capitalism. (U.S. senator Marco Rubio of Florida has done a brilliant job on this score.)

Obama could have pointed out that the free market works according to rules, and sometimes those rules have to be better enforced or even upgraded. He could have said that our system is the best in the world but far from perfect; that is why the federal government has to get involved from time to time, to put things back in order, to ensure basic fairness, and to keep things on track. He could have welcomed the attacks and used them as opportunities to reinforce his own free market commitments, to debunk the false claims, and to lead a public discussion about basic economics.

Then he could have taken on his critics—from the left and the right. He could have told libertarians why their radically deregulated version of capitalism failed the country, by letting Wall Street run amok. But he also could have explained to traditional leftists why he was rejecting some of their favorite government-based approaches in lieu of market-based mechanisms. For instance, as I pointed out earlier, he rejected the idea of a government-run single payer solution for health care, choosing instead to change the rules of competition among private insurers. In the energy field, he rejected the idea of directly ordering polluters to cut emissions, in favor of letting companies use a more flexible cap-and-trade system. Whatever one thinks of those proposals, they reflect an underlying philosophy that is strongly pro-market.

By explicitly challenging both sides of the argument, he could have located himself in the middle, where he authentically is, and projected strength in doing so.

He could have said, “My job is to protect and fix the free market system, to make sure it works. And this time I want us to make sure that it works for you—not just for the global corporations, China, and the folks on Wall Street. There are two kinds of capitalism. There is the kind that just wrecked our economy, and there is the kind that will rebuild it. My opponents are in love with the kind that hurt America and left us all poorer. I am standing up for the kind of capitalism that will restore America's prosperity and grow our wealth again. To get America back on track, we will need the best of America's entrepreneurs, the best of America's government, the best of America's communities and families, and the very best from you. If we ignore these silly distractions and work together, we can fix America's free market system so that it works for you and your family. To get the job done, I need you to stand strong and stand with me.”

Such a message, repeated ad nauseam, could have been more than just a rebuttal to the Tea Party's wild charges of socialism; it could have been an important contribution to our nation's battle of ideas. President Obama would have forged a more coherent storyline for his presidency, secured his leadership, and distinguished himself from the anti-government libertarians
and
the anti-capitalist leftists.

The gladiator spectacles on cable news and Sunday morning TV shows have an important place in our society, providing public catharsis and helping to define political parties and leaders. A president cannot sit out the big fights, nor can he simply stand above them.

Alas, in the summer of 2009, nobody wanted to lower the stature of the commander-in-chief by having him respond to charges from right-wing nobodies and sore losers. And so the moment came and went when the president could have gone on
the ideological offensive before the midterm elections and aggressively defined himself as a free market champion.

Q
UESTION
:
When is the best time to kill a dragon?

A
NSWER
:
In the egg.

Taoist masters teach that we should solve problems when they are small. It is unwise to let a minor matter get out of hand and then try to fix the mess with big efforts on the back end. Failure to apply this counsel to the Tea Party threat—while it was still in its infancy—is the root of many of our country's current problems.

It was not just the White House that ignored the extremists too long. Grassroots progressives did, as well. Between summer 2009 and the November 2010 midterm elections, progressives passed up multiple opportunities to derail, or at least slow, the reactionary steamroller.

Today it is hard to remember how puny and foolish the Tea Party looked at its inception. On April 15, 2009, the liberal establishment did not gaze out upon the groups of tricorne hats and fall down trembling in fear. To the contrary, its leaders mostly fell down laughing. Afterward, mainstream liberals proceeded to express disdain for the whole Tea Party movement, scoffing at it, even as it picked up dangerous momentum.

Throughout August 2009, the Tea Party sent trained activists into the town hall meetings held by U.S. Congress members—and disrupted them. From coast-to-coast, angry, red-faced, President Obama haters were grabbing microphones and screaming about “death panels,” communism, and “czars” (ahem).

The resulting spectacle dominated television news coverage for weeks; the media treated these eruptions like a spontaneous uprising against President Obama and his healthcare plan, which had not even been released yet.

The truth is that these populist outbursts were staged and largely scripted. Well-funded groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity had quietly provided training beforehand; they unleashed free PR afterward. Meanwhile, right-wing media outlets led the rest of the press in hyping the disgruntled protesters, reacting to the relatively tiny numbers of activists as if they were already a massive force.

In fact, OFA outperformed the Tea Party in terms of the number of people it turned out. Obama supporters outnumbered the screamers by at least one hundred to one at many town hall meetings. But the small number of Tea Party protesters had been trained in the dramatic art of disrupting meetings. They would stand up and start yelling, pulling all of the television cameras to them and stealing all the coverage.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of attendees, including overwhelming numbers of respectful supporters of President Obama, were left sitting there with their mouths hanging open, unsure of what to do. The OFA attendees had not been trained to take the room back from professional hecklers, for instance, by drowning them out with patriotic songs or “Yes, We Can!” chants. So the media focused on the loudest voices and angriest faces. The theatrics worked.

In the end, August of 2009 was an unmitigated disaster. President Obama's forces numerically out-mobilized the Tea Party, but the Tea Party politically outmaneuvered the president's forces. And September was just as bad, if not worse, with a mass march that brought tens of thousands of backlashers to the streets of Washington.

After Labor Day that year, progressives should have taken stock. It was clear by then that the forces fighting for positive change were facing a serious uprising, however contrived its origins. Some nursed a false hope that a legislative victory on healthcare would silence the backlash. But no amount of legislative action was going to put the Tea Party genie back into the bottle.

The grassroots—led by OFA—could have unleashed a powerful response, by calling for counterrallies and counter demonstrations all across the country.

The basis for a massive response was obvious: opposing the angry, disrespectful vitriol of the Tea Party, which was abhorrent to the vast majority of Americans.

Progressive activists could have used the poisonous negativity of the Tea Party against it, calling for national unity under the slogans “Hope, Not Hate” and “One Nation, Indivisible.” Hundreds of rallies could have explicitly underscored the patriotic value of standing together against the fear-mongers who were seeking to divide America in such an ugly way. After all,
E pluribus unum
(“out of many, one”) is a national slogan, antithetical to the alarmism and divisiveness that already had become the Tea Party's calling card. Other slogans could have been used to rally the base, including “Yes, We STILL Can” and “We Are One” (the name of the concert that proceeded Obama's inauguration).

OFA still had 13 million names in its database. Even by mid-September, the Tea Party collectively had probably mobilized fewer than 250,000 people in public demonstrations. The hope-roots had the capacity to respond by putting millions of peaceful people in the streets.

A “thunder on the left” strategy would have fired up the base, given the media something exciting to cover, and instantly eclipsed the Tea Party. The contrast in numbers, dwarfing the tiny Tea Party
marches, would have been stunning and undeniable. Marches and protests are the bread and butter of the left, and yet there was never even an attempt to launch public mobilizations to put the last election's losers back in their place.

The reason for this failure is hard to admit: the forces that ordinarily call and participate in big demonstrations, including myself, had largely gotten pulled into the vortex in Washington. Those pushing for change believed that the levers of power were now in the hands of Washington Democrats; under the new administration, extraordinary amounts of energy were used to navigate the terrain of the federal government.