Gerstein seeks to bury the ‘angry left’

February 2, 2008

Joe Lieberman aide Dan Gerstein has been ridiculed quite a bit about bloggers in recent years — he’s not quite the target Jonah Goldberg is, but during the Connecticut Senate race in 2006, it was close — but he doesn’t usually poke the bear with a stick quite as blatantly as he does today.

His item today about the “decline of the angry left” in the Wall Street Journal is so inane, I’d be tempted to think he wrote it just so people would link to it. Perhaps he has some kind of arrangement with the WSJ in which, instead of getting paid by the word, he’d get paid by page view?

Last Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic primary will probably be remembered as the day when the party’s emotional dam burst and many of the personal grievances and tensions that have built up over the past generation spilled out into the open — unleashing a cascading series of freighted squabbles starring a who’s who of post-Reagan Democrats (Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry and of course Bill Clinton).

That’s a shame, not just because it undermined the feel-good storyline of party unity, but more because it overshadowed a fateful statement South Carolina’s Democrats made by embracing Barack Obama and exiting John Edwards out of the race. Indeed, at the exact moment their party leaders were loudly replaying the psychodramas of the 1990s (and to some extent the ’60s), voters of both races were quietly resolving the pre-eminent conflict of the party’s present — between the politics of hope and the politics of Kos. (That being the Daily Kos, the nation’s most influential liberal blog and the left’s poster child for partisan pugnacity.)

I haven’t the foggiest idea what this means. I’m not sure if Gerstein does, either.

To be sure, I think it’s fair to say Obama has drawn a mixed reaction from the netroots. He has his backers and his detractors, like every other Dem who’s run this cycle.

But contrasting the “politics of hope” with the “politics of Kos” doesn’t make a lot of sense. Markos can certainly speak for himself, but as far as I can tell, he’s mentioned repeatedly, for months, that he plans to vote for Obama in the California primary on Feb. 5. In other words, Kos hasn’t rejected Obama’s style and message; he’s prepared to embrace it.

Perhaps, one might think, Gerstein wasn’t referring to Markos specifically, but rather, DailyKos readers in general. But even that’s wrong. Over the last several months, Kos straw polls have shown Obama either second or first in every match-up.

Gerstein went on to argue:

The signs of change are unmistakable. Over the last year, the Kossacks themselves seemed to be waning — the number of monthly page views on the site is down dramatically.

Again, I’m more than happy to let Markos and his team defend themselves, but this is just a silly swipe. DailyKos’ page views have held pretty steady over the course of the last year, and in January, the site had 26 million page views, which I think is a new record for the site. This isn’t “down dramatically,” it’s the polar opposite.

If this is a “sign of change,” it’s a sign that the netroots are more engaged and more active than ever. If Gerstein really wants to see a decline, he might consider his boss’ standing with his constituents.

More broadly, though, I suspect Gerstein is imagining a trend that simply doesn’t exist. Obama has backers online and from groups like MoveOn.org, and he has detractors online. It’s called a “competitive primary” between two top Democrats.

The politics of hope and the politics of Kos can co-exist quite nicely, thank you.

The politics of Gerstein segue nicely with the flip-flopping aberration that is John McCain, and serve as yet another clue to the “unholy alliance” that is McCain/Lieberman….

  • well, with a staffer of such refined mental prowess, it’s no wonder that lieberman never makes sense on iraq.

  • Ssssshhh. Let the idiots believe their fantasies.

    It’ll make November hurt all that much more if they don’t see it coming.

  • This clown’s idiocy just leaps from the page. How is Ted Kennedy a ‘post-Reagan Democrat’? He only became a US Senator 18 years before Reagan became President, and 5 years before he became California’s Governor.
    From there, Gerstein makes even less sense. Sure, Clinton and Obama have their loud and ardent supporters, but there’s a whole lot of people who will be very happy with either. Gerstein has as little sense of the mood of Democrats and progressives today as he does of the history of the last 50 years.

  • I wouldn’t consider Kerry or Jesse Jackson post-Reagan either, but don’t forget the WSJ is under new ownership. Facts have become a much more flexible thing these days.

  • It seems mostly like an article to justify a “clever” pairing of slogans (“politics of hope” with the “politics of Kos”) and defines most of the mindless punditry of today. A silly idea or a dumb wording is turned into a smear, a lie, and a column.

  • I know I’m stretching to try to find some logic in Dangerstein’s blathering, but here’s my guess: He’s desperately trying to see some equivalence between his boss’s Democratic primary and the current presidential primary, and since there couldn’t possibly be any rational reason for the netroots “anger” at Lieberman, the only reason there isn’t such “anger” in the present primary is that the “anger” that popped up then for no reason has just as inexplicably gone away.

  • Would it be too angry of me to suggest that Gerstein is the poster child for wingnut twaddle? Am I being pugnacious when I assert that Gerstein’s conceits do not pass the smell test even with the dubious imprimatur of the WSJ?

  • Oh, come on. Aren’t you being more than a little silly?

    No one expects Wall Street Journal op-eds to make any sense.

  • Trying to make sense of what Gerstein has written is futile. He’s either a compulsive liar or hallucinations are scaring him shitless. Either way, he desperately needs family intervention, and the WSJ needs to do a better job of screening it’s contributors.

  • So, Gerstein plans to bury the angry left, does he?. Wonder what he has planned for the mad-as-hell independents? He may believe, as many on the right do, that people to the left of center are whimps and easily dealt with. I don’t think he’s right about that. But I know for sure that independents aren’t so easily buried. We hold to every amendment of the consititution, including the first and second. We are not whimps and we think for ourselves. Group think is not a good thing. Just ask the Germans.

    Does he believe that Markos or his faithful Kossaks represent all people on the left or Democrats, in general? He is a fool if he believes that. I have plenty of friends who are definitely to the left of center and they hardly ever visit Kos. Poor Markos. He always gets it fom the right, showing once agin just how very much people like Gerstein just don’t get what they are up against this year and in years to come.

    Just take a look at the turnouts in the last three elections. Those people are not from the christian right, as Karl Rove would have us believe. They are mostly independents who are usually too disgusted to vote, but are now too disgusted and angry not to.

  • I think the confusion is that he’s assuming that the reason why liberals were angry with Bush, Lieberman, and himself was because we’re just angry haters and that’s what we do. And so he’s used that to rationalize why he ignores what we say. After all, if someone just wants to complain, there’s no reason to listen to them. But if their complaints are real, you have to do something about it.

    I think many mainstream politicos, pundits, and other media people have bought into this myth and continue to see our criticism in the wrong context because of it. And if that’s the case, we’d naturally reject Obama (though I fail to see who he thinks our candidate is). At this point, I’m fairly convinced he’ll never understand what his mistakes were; especially as, the more he writes this stuff, the more he’ll be bashed; which will only confirm his beliefs.

  • As usual he just makes facts up to try to prove a point…a point so obscure that even he cannot explain it. Is he talking about the politics of hope vs the politics of necessity. Because change is absolutely necessary and we hope we can make it a big change.

  • This article confirms my belief that the Right has completely lost their idea of who their “enemy” is, much as the Democrats had only an extremely fuzzy idea of who Republicans were when Reagan won the Presidency. The Right lives in a fantasy world, isolated from reality by Fox News, talk radio, and jingoistic blogs.
    The Right imagines their Democrat foe is some booze-soaked, drug-addicted moron that worships Satan, cackles with glee over each abortion that takes place, lives on welfare, unemployment, or criminal activities, tries to turn your kids gay, and is bent on turning over the U.S. government to the Taliban. They see the 2/3 of the country opposed to the Iraq occupation as the ‘far left’, and this 2/3 are only a tiny minority blown out of proportion by the MSM. Apparently everyone is also ‘doing fine’, except for those people that refuse to work. In their view, everyone shudders in dread or revulsion at the mere mention of the names Reid and Pelosi. Theirs is a bizarro world where people only dislike Bush because he is not conservative enough.

    Meanwhile, Democrats have a fairly clear idea of who they are up against after watching them for seven years. Reality is on their side, whereas the Bush Administration proudly brags that they create their own reality.

    The Right describes the Democratic primary campaign as ‘civil war’, when the major differences are little more than points of style. Thus, the withdrawal of Edwards is seen as the decisive defeat of the angry left wing. The GOP instead is fundamentally fractured between hawks, evangelicals, and True Conservatives. They are completely out of touch with even their own Party, much less the American public.

  • From Gerstein’s web site:

    WRITING: I start with a finely-tuned facility with language, an essential
    foundation for effective communications. I have been writing prominently
    throughout my career (four years at The Hartford Courant in addition to 11 years
    in national politics), and my wide-ranging portfolio includes op-eds in the New
    York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal; speeches that have
    been republished in leading journals and heard by millions; and a comprehensive
    campaign agenda for a major presidential candidate.

    Sometimes the snark just writes itself.

  • memekiller, at sixty years of age I’m not easily moved any more. That moved me. Thank you.

  • Antonius, I’m going to assume that you’re referring to the Gerstein piece rather than memkiller’s link. I’m making that assumption because I’ve lived through a year in the Mekong Delta, gum surgery and raising an autistic child. I’m in a thirty year happy marriage. If I’m not an adult then no one is.

  • Memekiller? Thank you. That was simply the most awesome piece of ‘political media’ as I’ve seen.

  • Poor thing. He’s being neglected, so he writes a piece that he knows will draw ire from the rabid lambs he misses so. Egotistic brats such as he crave negative attention which is better than none at all!

    I predict that McCain will NOT be physically or mentally able to finish the general campaign, and LIEberman will continue to be the man everyone laughs at. Way to go, Gerstein!!!.

  • Most of what I remember about Gerstein is from Lieberman’s ignoring of the Democratic primary was his penchant for not letting facts get in his way. Coupled with an arrogance unhindered by incompetence it is clear to see why he is still Lieberman’s top man. Thank goodness for tribal nepotism or we might risk having our french fries served up by this man (“Trends show people are tired of crisp, non-greasy french fries.”)

  • When are Senate Dems gonna kick his sorry butt out of Dem Leadership, Hell , he just wants to be McCains VP.
    I never did care for him even in 2000 I wondered then how big a brain fart did Gore have that would make him chose Liberdog as VP

  • As is always the case on an ultimate level, this guy’s actually talking to himself. It’s like a variation on the stages of grieving: in this instance a)mockery and ridicule (of blogging), b)anger at their gall (tacitly acknowledging a force to be reckoned with) c)begrudging credit for their influence while insisting they’re also undermining themselves/not as influential as they claim. This column represents stage c). I’m not sure what comes between this one and acceptance, though I’m willing to wager he’ll never reach acceptance.

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