Last June, Matt and I left MyDD, in order to start a new website. Mike Lux was, and still is, one of the three partners in that venture. Mike currently isn't blogging much, as he is working in the Obama transition as the progressive liaison:
Veteran Democratic official Mike Lux has been tapped by Barack Obama to serve as an adviser and progressive liaison during the transition period, the Huffington Post has learned.
Lux, who worked on the Clinton administration transition efforts in 1992, confirmed the hiring but, citing a need for clearance, declined to offer further information.
Mike is excellent at liaison work, possibly the best person in Democratic politics, even. He did this as senior staff in the Clinton White House back when he was my age, and now he is doing it for the Obama transition. His insight, his commitment to progressive politics, and his ability to bring people together are why Matt and I were eager to partner with him, and I'm sure why he earned a senior job in the Obama transition. In the meantime, while Mike is on assignment, Matt and I are working on a variety of projects. This includes, as I mentioned yesterday, a broad and still growing effort to systematically hold anti-progressive Democrats accountable:
This road map is clear. On Sunday, in D.C., I attended a meeting of several netroots and other innovative progressive organizations to discuss this and other ideas for progressive accountability work (the meeting itself was off the record, but that the meeting took place was not).
It is kind of surprising, in the midst of all this, to be told:
Chris, Matt, this is why you have no allies: Because you throw them all away.
We don't have any allies? We have thrown them all away? Really? Certainly doesn't seem like it to me. Even leaving our coalition projects and connections to the Obama transition aside, our traffic isn't even that bad. While we are not (and never have been) at the level of several more prominent websites, even before the media frenzy surrounding a couple recycled comments of mine hit, we have maintained an inordinately large share of our pre-election audience. Further, let me just say that as a bearded, hoody-wearing guy who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in West Philly with my fiancé, I am perpetually amazed that I am able to have any political influence at all and perpetually afraid I will lose it. As such, I do what I can to not throw away any allies in the political world. I even have connections at Third Way and the DLC, because there are some people there I actually like talking with.
More in the extended entry. |
I've tried to develop a thick skin over the years as a writer, although there are moments when it breaks down. Atrios encapsulated those moments pretty well in a recent post:
Anyway, after years and years of blogging I've developed a pretty thick skin, as I assume Chris has, but the one thing which tends to gnaw at me is when people make bad faith accusations, assuming that everything I'm writing about or not writing about is part of some grand strategy to get an administration job, or become a Real Live Tevee pundit, or some other weird motive which never makes any sense to me. If those were my goals I'd use the word 'fuck' a lot less.
Hear hear. I really hate it, and have never developed a thick skin, for the times when I am accused of having an ulterior motive. I do my best to not only make a difference in politics, but to be open and honest in my thoughts and actions. So, when people who claim to be on the left think that they have some special insight into the inner workings of my brain, it pisses me off. To paraphrase a favorite sarcastic line of my soon to be sister in law: "You don't know me. Why are you talking about me like you know me?"
In the above quote, the post of mine that Atrios was referring to was a recent article where I argued that Michael Tomasky was wrong in a recent column of his. Specifically, I argued Tomasky was wrong for calling people who disagreed with Obama's personnel moves "idiots," because there probably wasn't a single personnel move in Obama's entire transition where his own top advisors held a unanimous opinion. It is foolish to think that criticism of Obama's personnel moves only exists outside of the Obama transition team. That is, quite simply, an absurd belief. Obama has not surrounded himself with mindless automatons. He has, instead, surrounded himself with people who will, invariably, disagree about things like who should be Secretary of Agriculture.
Over the past month, it has been frustrating, to say the least, to be caricatured as a friendless, ally-less, lone progressive who is unceasingly howling in anguish about Obama's cabinet picks. Not only has my writing on the subject been quite mixed, and not only is there undoubtedly internal dissent within the Obama transition on every single pick he has made and for every single reason I gave, but somehow this has happened to me despite being the only blogger I know of who is business partners with a senior member of Obama's transition. Caricatures like these, as with all stereotypes, make it easier for people to dismiss legitimate ideas with which they disagree. In the end, you get a psychological diagnosis of perpetual misanthropy:
This, I think, is the problem: The left does not know how to win. It is a completely foreign feeling to us. We do not know what we'd do if we ever caught the roadrunner. Similarly, the idea of allies are foreign to us. We don't know how to work with allies; we've never had anything but enemies. Allies are not things that work with you toward a common goal. Allies are those things that stab you in the back.
What allies are we not working with? Despite our somewhat meager results, I still think Open Left has done a decent job at working on an inside and an outside strategy, both of which require a broad range of allies. Is there some organization or group in particular with whom we have cut off ties that we should have made more of an effort to engage? I am more than open to hearing someone provide examples, and then I am happy to sit down with that group if I have not already done so. And even beyond specific groups, have we at Open Left made any arguments that were not made, at least behind closed doors, by a minority of the relevant decision makers within the Obama transition team itself? I seriously doubt it, but again I am open to hearing examples.
In case you hadn't already realized the proximate cause of this post, I never received any emails about mcc's banning. I'm not saying he didn't send one to someone at Open Left, as he claims to have done in his post, but he never sent me one. It still surprises me that someone claims to have just remarkable insight into my brain, even though s/he never listed a single ally I have apparently thrown away, a single election I was upset to have won, or a single argument that I have made that never came up within the Obama transition team itself.
Anyway, I am going to continue my work at progressive accountability, and I will try to do a better job of bringing more people into the fold. After all, if there is one thing I learned over the past six weeks, it is that we need more people willing to do such work. And I will try to be as open and honest about it as ever, just like I am in this post and the other articles I wrote today. As a final note, when it comes to progressive accountability work during 2009-2010, one of my major worries is that now even the progressive grassroots will dismiss such work as either vague whining, or simply as a representative of a psychological dementia that can't stand either winning or having allies. Right now, a significant percentage of the progressive grassroots, I would estimate about 20%, is willing to drop progressive accountability work altogether if Obama asks them to do so. See, for example, the surprisingly large amount of blogosphere support for keeping Lieberman as Homeland Security chair, once Obama made his preference on the matter known. Right now, Obama dominates Democratic opinion, both at the leadership and grassroots levels. As such, it will be extremely difficult to engage in successful progressive accountability work that he publicly opposes.
And btw, if you get banned and you think it was wrong, send me an email. I have reversed several of my own bannings in the past. What I need to know is if someone is actually interested in participating in our community, rather than just ridiculing it by, say, handing out troll ratings unnecessarily. We have a mission here at Open Left, and I am not going to put up with commenters who are actively opposed to what we are trying to accomplish. If you think that what I am doing here is simply an act of left-wing psychological dementia that can't stand either victory or other people, then please, move along and find another blog. However, if you want to participate, and you think the banning was wrong, then send me an email and make your case. While I ban a lot of people, I have reversed about half of the bannings when people personally email me. After all, if you send me an email, rather than just creating another account, it shows that you actually care about the community and are interested in doing more than undermining it. I love it when people want to help, because most of the time I feel wholly inadequate at engineering change. Allies are useful, necessary and a lot of fun. No matter what some people think or say, and despite my very serious failings at inter-personal communication, I still work to cultivate them. |
