Wednesday Roundup
(credit: Politico)
Just one announcement this week: I’m leaving for vacation on Friday, and will be moving at the end of the month. Given how May went, we’ll see how well I can keep up the writing schedule!
On to The Roundup…
I think the way that Democrats prevent Lab Leak Theory from getting “Benghazi’ed”1 against them, is to pre-emptively beat Republicans to it.
Normally what happens is that the Right-Wing Propaganda Machine takes these mainstream media whiffs and prattles on about how they prove said media’s traitorous perfidy towards the American people. And there’s no stopping that whole process, especially since it’s already gotten started.
But what Democrats can do is get out ahead before the Right-Wing Propaganda Machine (“RWPM”) turns it into a Benghazi-style fishing expedition, by having their own fishing expedition first. After all, the RWPM and Dear Leader have already primed their thralls to see this as a secret plot by China. So the new fishing expedition builds on that, while jumbling up the RWPM’s plot lines and confusing their knee-jerk loyalty to Dear Leader. Biden, after all, has aligned his administration as investigating Lab Leak Theory (“LLT”), so to those who see these things through a partisan-only lens, either nothing Biden (or Democrats) say about LLT can be trusted, which neutralizes LLT as a RWPM weapon, or they have to start questioning whether Dear Leader was honest with them about LLT. This won’t work on everyone, not even most of them, but it doesn’t have to. It only has to peel a handful of voters off.
It’s also an opportunity to sneak some doses of Real Truth in to them. The investigation can unearth whatever the mainstream media missed in its initial dismissal, and publish it. Again, this doesn’t have to work on the entire cult to be politically effective. And yet another angle is that it gives us a chance to highlight the contradictions created by the RWPM’s frequent twists and turns, which aren’t as obvious to its thralls in real time2 as they can be when revisited later under circumstances Democrats control.
At the end of the day, Democrats need to get in the habit of shaping the narrative and stealing the role of “National Assignment Editor” that Trump pioneered over the last six years, instead of just reacting to the RWPM’s latest lie.On that note, we’re seeing a big evolution in terms of the presidential relationship with media and the public eye, from the “bully pulpit” model to that of “National Assignment Editor”. It was heading that way already, but Trump made it impossible to miss. And although Biden might superficially seem to be bucking the trend, a deeper analysis of his media strategy shows that he’s learned a lot of the lessons of Bush and Obama’s failures and Trump’s success.
The main difference is that under the bully pulpit model, presidents would use the media as an amplifier to speak directly to the American people, whereas in the new National Assignment Editor model, presidents seek to influence the level of media attention given to their efforts.
The bully pulpit model stopped working during Bush and Obama’s presidencies for several reasons. For one, the media and voters have become polarized and fragmented (that’s really four things all in one). It’s impossible to get a single message out, unfiltered and rhetorically intact - even a tweet isn’t remotely as widely received as FDR’s radio addresses were, and its ripple effect is filtered through numerous intermediaries. For another, the political landscape simply reacts differently today. The age of the automatic filibuster means that presidents couldn’t advance their legislative proposals even if their media bullhorn was still in perfect working condition. And in most cases, modern presidents have only hurt legislation’s chances of passage by publicly backing it, because Senators run like cockroaches from potentially controversial proposals whenever a spotlight is shined on them. This was particularly evident by the end of Obama’s term.
Thus enters the National Assignment Editor model. Trump devised it to have the media amplify his messages to his base. Since he had no real coherent legislative agenda or strategy, this didn’t really cost him anything. And the payoff was that it kept his base avidly tuned in, always ready to discipline the only people who could disrupt the Trump Show: the Republican legislators who hated his guts3. On the other hand we have President Biden, who’s doing his damnedest to stay out of the media spotlight for all but his reconciliation bills - which are immune to the filibuster, and thus actually stand to benefit from Biden’s intervention. Again, Biden’s approach might not seem to have much in common with Trump’s, but essentially both have focused on manipulating the level of media attention: Trump through maximizing it so his base would insulate him from impeachment, and Biden through minimizing it so he doesn’t accidentally polarize bipartisan legislation sneaking its way through Secret Congress.Speaking of which, it’s not so much Secret Congress anymore, since it’s captured some relatively big headlines, but the Innovation and Competition Act passed the Senate on a bipartisan vote (68-32) and will almost certainly pass the House and get Biden’s signature.
Liberal outlets like Vox, Slate, and MSNBC have been whining that the Act was butchered from the original proposal, which was basically “everything liberals wanted” when the Senate took it up. I’m sure they’ve got some very convincing, very earnestly liberal, and very appropriately technocratic arguments, but it’s important not to lose perspective here. The Act has anchored into place a bipartisan consensus in favor of building our national R&D capacity back up again. This consensus has been pretty solid in the technocratic-leaning punditocracy for quite a while, but a big bipartisan Senate majority is a very durable kind of permission structure for future iterations on the reform. We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good here; if anything, the ability to iteratively build policy off of popular reforms is exactly what filibuster opponents think the rest of the country secretly agrees with them on.
In other words, unless it’s absolutely intolerable, then if you have a bipartisan majority for an imperfect bill, pass the bill in front of you, and use that as the groundwork to negotiate for your remaining wishlist on the next bill.
Also, full disclosure, the $52B for helping resolve the chip shortage helps my industry. So there’s that.Frank Bruni at NYT thinks Kamala Harris can’t win. I’ve been saying some version of this for a while, too.
The core problem Democrats face against the RWPM is that it’s spent the past several decades perfecting the art of making Democratic leaders into bogeymen for their audience. It’s horrifically unfair, but it’s reality.
While elections are an increasingly overdetermined system - IE, we can’t boil them down to a single factor anymore - the narrative of how Democratic candidates have dealt with the bogeyman factor is telling, and importantly, self-consistent. Clinton didn’t have to deal with it because Fox hadn’t gotten off the ground just yet, but Gore had to suffer the fallout, and lost. Kerry was swift-boated, and lost. Obama won because he rose so quickly that the RWPM didn’t have enough time to poison the electorate against him. Obama’s re-election was tighter once they’d had that time, and Hillary’s image was so tainted by 20+ years of poisoning that she lost 3 whole points from Obama’s coalition. Biden was able to recapture some of that, but only by being such an inveterately moderate Democrat for so long - and an old White man - that he was immune to the RWPM poison.
Harris, by contrast, doesn’t have any kind of immunity. She’s proven less of a liability than I initially thought she was, and she’s managed to turn her biography into a powerful story à la Obama, but her actual political accomplishments are rather meager. She’s a product of the California Democratic Party establishment, a career “resume-builder” who was good at saying the right things on Twitter and at fundraisers to keep herself advancing along the track. Which is itself no mean feat! That takes a lot of hard work, skill, and savvy.
But it’s not the same as electoral politics. She’s only won anything herself as an establishment Democrat in a state where it’s nearly impossible for establishment Democrats to lose statewide elections. Pair that with the Twitter chops, and it’s no wonder she looked like “A Rising Star!”4 among the punditocracy for so long; but again, that’s not the same as being a nationally viable candidate.
Meanwhile, the RWPM has spent the last 15 years making her a bogeywoman. Just like Feinstein and Pelosi, that may not hurt her in California5, but it does in Michigan and Wisconsin.
So yeah, until Harris does something big, manages to upend the RWPM’s narrative about her in some big way, or even - heavens forbid - has to finish Biden’s term for some reason, my official stance here is that she doesn’t stand a chance in 2024 against a putative Trump re-run.In last Thursday’s Pod Save America, Stacey Abrams listed Texas, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, and Ohio as having looming threats on voting rights.
As she points out, they’re not all Southern!6 But what they are is all originally populated largely by Appalachian Scots-Irish. I’m planning on writing a rather long article about it, but the upshot is that I see this new evolution against voting rights as the legacy of the South exporting its White Supremacy Complex across the nation in the post-Civil Rights Era, as well as having cemented its co-option of Appalachian American culture.
“The process by which an event of initially neutral valence is first demagogued with baseless accusations, and then the accusations used to justify political fishing expeditions.”
In this case, the proposed strategy is for Democrats to start investigating LLT, with the goal of hauling Trump Administration officials before Congress to generate headlines about their negligence towards LLT.
The basic RWPM strategy is to feed its thralls on a steady diet of outrage. The “twists and turns” are both a symptom and cause of this outrage imperative: you have to constantly change the narrative in order to avoid tiring the thralls’ capacity for outrage, and the outrage is what reduces their critical thinking capacity and maintains a steady “us vs. them” mindset, which is necessary to keep them onside.
Thus, the RWPM narrative changes frequently enough to regularly contradict itself, but uses outrage to distract from the contradictions, that outrage being what necessitates the frequent narrative changes in the first place.
It’s really hard for veteran pundits to understand why Trump never tried to turn this into legislation, because pundits think in terms of legislation, and that was never the point of Trump’s presidency. Rather, the point was to indulge his base in throwing a childish several-year-long political tantrum, which also just so happened to be aimed at aggrandizing his own ego and protecting his sham finances from falling apart.
Today’s carbon copy of “person who says on Twitter all the things that liberals love but really is just another establishment California Democrat” is Katie Porter.
And may even help!
The implication being that only the South likes voting restrictions.