Gerstein and ‘new big ideas’

September 2, 2007

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz ponders seven key questions in the presidential race, and coming in at #6 is, “Do ideas matter in this election?”

Joe Lieberman aide Dan Gerstein comes up with the single most Broderesque response imaginable.

Dan Gerstein, a centrist Democrat and strategist, said: “The reality is both parties are brain-dead — they have no new big ideas to deal with the challenges we face today. Which is why I continue to believe that there is an opening for an independent, reform-oriented campaign to run against politics as usual and on a solutions-driven message.”

It’s hard to overstate how difficult it is to take this kind of analysis seriously. Listen to the standard stump speech of any of the leading Democratic presidential hopefuls, and you’ll be inundated with ideas — some of them big (healthcare, Iraq, an overhaul of U.S. foreign policy), some of them new (energy policy, combating global warming), and some of them old that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve (poverty, domestic security, education, trade, taxes). And it’s not just the politicians — progressive think tanks sympathetic to Democrats (Center for American Progress, among others) are teeming with detailed policy proposals on every issue under the sun.

I’ll gladly concede that the Republicans’ vision of the future is considerably thinner, and that the big, new ideas they are offering — war with Iran, privatizing Social Security, privatizing public schools — are awful. But for anyone to suggest that Dems are “brain-dead” is silly — they’re itching to implement a sweeping new policy agenda and are fighting for the power to implement it.

For that matter, this Unity08-like notion that a third party will swoop in to save us with a “solutions-driven message” is equally inane.

But just as importantly, Gerstein seems to buy into the notion that campaigns are driven by the power of big, new ideas. Way back in 2005, Jonathan Chait explained why this just isn’t the case.

The central assumption is that politics revolves around issues and ideas–rather than things like personality, tactics, and outside circumstances–and that the party that wins is the one that presents a more compelling vision of the future. […]

Alas, this sort of thinking assumes a wildly optimistic level of discernment by voters. Polls consistently show that large swaths of the voting public know very little about the positions taken by candidates. In 2000, the National Annenberg Election Survey found that just 57 percent of voters knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush, 51 percent knew he was more supportive of gun control, and a mere 46 percent understood that he was more supportive of abortion rights. “The voting behavior literature, which is massive, shows that people are not particularly idea-driven,” explains Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby. “They don’t know what the fashions are, with respect to what ideas go with other ideas.”

Gerstein’s analysis seems custom made to please the editorial board of the Washington Post, but that doesn’t make it true.

People like Lieberman and his entrouge have no concern regarding “solutions-driven messag[ing].” Such rhetoric is employed merely to obfuscate their true desire to control the narrative. They believe that by controlling the message, their willfulness will prevail – something all of us believe to some extent. But those of us who also believe in democratic institutions realize controlling the narrative leads to the debasing of our abilities to be informed. Being informed is a vital component of any self-sustasining democracy, and I proffer that anyone who spews rhetoric to the likes of Lieberman’s is not truly a small d democrat – let alone a fellow liberty-minded American. -Kevo

  • what “solutions-driven messaging” means depends entirely on what problem it is you are trying to solve. if my only objective, my only problem, is how do i win this election, showing a photoshopped ad of my opponent defiling a goat is solutions-driven messaging. It also shows how totally meaningless that phrase is.

    and how ironic that the JoeLie camp essentially described Unity 08 as its ideal, yet when people ask the U08-ers for their policy ideas, they candidly admit they don’t have any. for them, it is not about policy, it is about process and atmospherics.

    until the public is educated enough and cares enough to understand even arcane stuff like the subprime lending crisis, how can ideas really matter?

  • sorry. not enough coffee yet this morning to be playing with tags. preview would be my friend, if only i’d let it.

  • Give poor ol’ Dan a break. If he couldn’t pass the IQ test low enough to be a centrist giving bullshit quotes to idiots, the boy would be huddling in a cardboard box under a freeway overpass, costing the taxpayers money for his mental health treatment and the cops busting him and incarcerating him for public drunkenness.

  • “Dems don’t have any ideas, they just criticize” will join the other zombie memes — how long has ‘Dems are spendthrifts, GOP is good with a buck’ soldiered on without any , you know, facts, to back it up — that make American politics, and American political reporting, about as similar as rock candy and Rolling Rock.

    When reality and The Narrative aren’t congruent any more, it’s reality that gets taken behind the barn and put down. On the tombstone of the Republic will be the epitaph “Killed by a Story Arc.”

  • I can’t be the only one who wonders if Gerstein’s real motive is to frame this whole thing so that the only thing missing from the picture is – miraculously – the face of the perfect “unity” candidate: Joe Lieberman. I mean, Gerstein can argue that Joe won re-election to the Senate because he got votes from both parties, so…why not take that to the macro level and find a place for Joe on a Unity ticket? Well, there is the problem that Joe is reviled within Democratic circles, so he doesn’t bring any of them to the table, which seems about as far from “unity” as one can get.

    The public will continue to lack in their understanding of the issues, because not only will the media not take the time to educate them, but they won’t take the time to educate themselves in order to make it possible. They could, for example, take the time to highlight, in depth, one issue at a time, but that doesn’t fit the model of entertaining people with the “news” and so the average person has no clue what anything means.

    Unfortunately, there seems to be no way for the public to know what is and is not true – you have the administration out there spouting their idea of facts and statistics, there are counter-facts and statistics, this general is saying things are good, that one is saying things are bad, and there is no one out there in the maintstream who is sorting through this to separate fact from fiction – or at least to explain why it is that seemingly the same information can be used to advance arguments that are diametrically opposed.

    The fact that some people are looking for a candidate or a movement that will unite the country is the result of “leadership” and a political party that has spent years dividing us, demonizing the other side and doing it not by a reasoned and rational recitation of facts, but by reaching down and appealing to the most primitive and reflexive aspects of our emotions and feelings.

    Gerstein fails in the assumption that it is not possible to bring the country together any other way, but he ignores the truth that the country is already united on a number of issues, if we can believe the polling. The more the Republicans target their message at the base which thrives on fear and division, the greater the opportunity the Democrats have to capitalize on what is already a coalescing of opinion on issues the public sees Democrats as being better able to handle.

  • I agree with Matt Bai when he says the world is very different from 10-20 years ago:

    “It’s obviously changing our dynamic in a kind of post-industrial world where the economy that built the 20th century is no longer especially relevant. Facing those obstacles, I think the movement has to ask what has government been doing for 57 years that it needs to do differently now? We’re in a new reality. How do we meet the new reality? There’s very little discussion like that inside the progressive movement. In fact the discussion is generally how do we get back to what we were doing before. How do we get these conservative marauders out of the kitchen and figure out how to continue cooking the way we were cooking in the 1960’s and 1950’s. That, to me, is probably inadequate in order not just to change the country, which is what I’m primarily concerned with, but to build long-term majorities as well.”

    And, most of all: “There’s a strong feeling inside the Democracy Alliance and the rest of the progressive movement that you change the country by winning elections. I submit that the reverse is true. You win elections over the long term by changing the country. That in fact the mere act of electing Democrats does very little good for the country if those Democrats don’t have some idea about how to meet the challenges of the moment.”

    Winning elections by changing the country certainly reflects my experience. The conservative movement set out, post-Goldwater, to change people’s thinking so substantially that a Reagan and a Bush2 could be elected. One small example, the conservatives redefined “liberals” so successfully that we we now shy away from the term, all of us… The left’s thinking has become (dare I say it) reactionary.

  • First of all, as much as it’s claimed that Joe Liberman is “reviled” in Democratic circles, people need to realize that it’s obviously untrue, because otherwise he would start caucusing with the Republicans and split the committees in the Senate. Joe Liberman won his senate seat as an independent because primaries tend to nominate candidates that a small, vocal faction of Americans want and NOT what the *majority* of American people want. It is highly likely that if Liberman runs on a Unity08 ticket against whatever extremely conservative and extremely liberal candidates that are put up after the primaries by the other two parties, he would win.

    Secondly, Unity08 doesn’t seem to have a policy message yet, which at first seems unappealing. But I personally, and I hope a lot of others will agree, find Unity08’s idea of an online popular vote to pick Unity08’s policy positions to be a great idea and a lot better than being stuck having to support whatever dumb ideas that those small yet vocal groups of people make the Republicans and Democrats talk about every election cycle.

  • Joseph, there is so much about what you said above that is wrong that I hardly know where to begin.

    First, I defy you to go to any of the left-leaning, liberal and progressive blogs and find me some examples of the high esteem in which Joe Lieberman is held. Then go to the right-leaning ones, and see if you can find some examples of the low esteem in which he is held. See if you can translate to how that would make Joe a “unity” candidate, please.

    Second, Joe Lieberman won as an “independent” because the GOP in Connecticut did not get behind their primary winner, there are more Republicans in Connecticut than Democrats and that’s the voter Joe targeted. Closed primaries – ones where one can only vote for the candidate of one’s own party – nominate the candidate that those voters want, and in Connecticut, Democrats nominated Ned Lamont.

    If Lieberman should, by events that might portend the apocolypse, get a nomination from a Unity’08 party, he would kill any chances the GOP might have to win.

    The notion that a party could form with no policy message or platform just seems so silly and desperate that you really ought to ask yourself what the point is. If, by “dumb ideas” you think the two major parties are forced to talk about are things like the mess in Iraq, energy policy, jobs and the economy, health care, and the preservation of our constitutional rights, I wish you would enlighten us as to what is not a dumb idea. The only dumb ideas I see are the ones the media seems to want to push – like which candidate “looks” most presidential, which one has the best hair, which one smells the best.

    Joe Lieberman is not caucusing with the Republicans because he can’t stand the notion that he would be stripped of his seniority and lose his committee chairmanships – completely and utterly symbolic and selfish reasons, as I cannot think of a single thing he has done as a commitee chair that indicates he has any interest in holding this Republican president and administration accountable. The only thing worse than Lieberman’s dismal performance as a Senator is the Democratic leadership’s unwillingness to give him a swift kick in the ass as they usher him to the other side of the aisle.

  • The democrats have “ideas”? Whoa…and to think that i troll through the news looking for a light at the end of the tunnel every day and missed it. Yesterday i read a quote from Mr. Obama, declaring that our college students shouldn’t have to go into debt for an education…that we are “the wealthiest nation” on Earth and we should give them grants. That sounds like the kind of “idea” the Democrats have for policy. You would think that a sitting US Senator would know that we are not that wealthy. We don’t even have two nickels to rub together without bumming at least one of them from the Chinese, so we certainly can’t afford to just send everyone to college. Besides we already have more than a generation of educated fools from uneducated schools working as bartenders and servers to pay of the second or third rate education they borrowed to obtain.

    I agree that the Republican ideas are worthless, but to suggest that the Dems have good ideas is absurd. Besides, they are completely untrustworthy. Remember how they campaigned on the idea of ending the war in Iraq? So we know that even if the ideas they trot out are good–or we like them–we also know that they are empty campaign rhetoric. And a lot of their ideas are very bad. Mrs. Clinton is willing to entertain the idea of dropping nukes on Iran. Which brings me to the crux of the biscuit. The ideas of the Democratic party are nearly the same as the ideas of the Republican party, so if the Republicans are dumb then the Democrats are dumb…and maybe even a little ugly on the side.

    Finally, every Democratic “idea” will cost massive amounts of money that WE DO NOT HAVE; furthermore, without some attempt at fiscal responsibility we will not have such funds for at least a generation.

    The ideas that America needs would stem from something you might call “applied common sense”, and if there is one thing that America lacks–particularly in the field of politics, it is applied common sense.

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