Eric Alterman: Kabuki Democracy

Short book, the least personally critical of Obama's post-election turn to the middle of the road -- you know, the spot Jim Hightower reminds us is only occupied by yellow stripes and dead armadillos -- or worse. Alterman doesn't explain what he means by "kabuki" so I'm left to imagine a highly stylized, highly ritualized theatre where actors go through the motions of upholding democracy while being controlled by unseen forces off stage.

Alterman previously wrote What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (paperback, 2003, Basic Books) so his section on the relentless stacking of the media against Obama is unsurprising. Beyond the media (or perhaps behind the media) are the lobbyists and the amazing system they exploit to convert cash into favors. Anyone who hopes to change the workings of law and government has two high hurdles to surmount there. Still, Alterman doesn't get to the deeper question of what if anything Obama actually intended to accomplish. That's largely because he clings to the idea that Obama is playing some sort of "long game" -- holding back on the real change until his second term (ignoring the fact that no president since FDR has had a productive second term). The political obstacles are certainly real and treacherous, but what we've seen time and again was Obama advocating compromise even when it leads to policy failure -- one good example was the stimulus package size: had he demanded a large enough stimulus to fill the gap, he would have been in a far better position to blame the Republicans for failing to turn the economy around; instead, he got the inadequate sum he asked for and took the blame for its expected failure.

Introduction: You've Got a Lot of Nerve to Say You Are My Friend (pp. 1-2):

This turn of events is particularly disheartening when one recalls the powerful wave of progressive support Obama rode to the White House, coupled with the near total discrediting of his conservative Republican opposition, owing to the disastrous consequences of George Bush's presidency. In order to pass his healthcare legislation, for instance, Obama was required to specifically repudiate his pledge to prochoice voters to "make preserving women's rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as president." That promise was lost in the same drawer as his insistence that "any [health care reform] plan I sign must include an insurance exchange . . . including a public option." Labor unions were among candidate Obama's most fervent and dedicated foot soldiers, and many were no doubt inspired by his pledge "to fight for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act." Yet that act appears deader than Jimmy Hoffa. Environmentalists were no doubt steeled through the frigid days of New Hampshire canvassing by Obama's promise that "as president, I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming -- an 80 percent reduction by 2050." But that goal appears to have gone up the chimney in thick black smoke. And remember when Obama promised, right before the election, to "put in place the common-sense regulations and rules of the road I've been calling for sine March -- rules that will keep our market free, fair and honest; rules that will restore accountability and responsibility in our corporate boardrooms"? Neither, apparently, does he. Indeed, if one examines the gamut of legislation passed and executive orders issued that relate to the promises made by candidate Obama, one can only wince at the slightly hyperbolic joke made by late night comedian Jimmy Fallon, who quipped that the president's goal appeared to be to "finally deliver on the campaign promises made by John McCain."

1. When the Autumn Weather Turns the Leaves to Flame (pp. 10-14):

The result of this malign neglect is that post-Bush America is one disaster after another waiting to happen, all of which -- when they do -- are laid at the feet of the current president, regardless of whether addressing them is consistent with his policy agenda. For if he does not find a way to do so, they will likely overwhelm it. The financial crisis that dominated Obama's early months -- and almost brought down the entire world economy -- is one obvious example. Afghanistan and Iraq are another. But let's consider for a moment the crisis that most pundits termed to be the most significant of Obama's early presidency: the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began on April 15, 2010. President Obama was, naturally, responsible for his administration's reaction to the spill as well as his ill-considered decision, taken just weeks before the spill, to allow expanded drilling in coastal area. But most mainstream media reporters viewed the oil spill as an act of God or of individual corporate negligence. But when the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan published a column during the final weekend of May in which she mused that she could not "see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill," she appeared to argue that the mistakes made by the Obama administration in the wake of the disaster somehow constituted the entire story, at least insofar as it allowed pundits and the public to judge his success as president. In fact, the conditions that led to the spill -- including the egregious malfeasance that empowered BP and the rest of the industry to ignore the most basic precautions -- were a direct outgrowth of the Bush/Cheney industry-friendly defenestration of the government's basic regulatory functions. [ . . . ]

Meanwhile, as a result of this almost comically lax enforcement, BP executives felt no compunction about ignoring those safety and environmental rules to which it was legally subject. One 2001 report found that the company paid little attention to the safety equipment that it would need in the event of an emergency shutdown. It often fell back on the least expensive and less than reliable deepwater well design and did so far more frequently than its industry competitors. At the well where the explosion took place, numerous workers also voiced concerns about poor equipment reliability, "which they believed was as a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over planned maintenance," according to a survey commissioned by the rig's owner, Transocean. Despite these findings, nearly half the workers surveyed feared potential reprisals if they raised their voices. Any number of key components -- including the blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves of the rig -- went uninspected over a period of more than nine years, although the company's guidelines called for them to be evaluated every three to five years. But a number of workers entered false data owing to what many of them viewed as the company's "counterproductive" safety system. Another BP internal investigation found 390 overdue maintenance problems with the rig a month before the spill began, though to be honest, we may never know the full story. As late as October 2010, Transocean was still refusing to cooperate with the federally appointed panel investigating the disaster and would not turn over key materials related to its compliance with international safety management codes. It also declined to provide testimony from a key manager called by the panel as a witness. [ . . . ]

Incredibly, during the very days, early April 2010, when the world was focusing on the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air for forty days in a row; these toxins went unnoticed by residents and unaddressed by BP until local area children began experiencing respiratory problems. According to one report, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, escaped into the atmosphere. And instead of shutting the refinery down, the company merely diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, allowing hundreds of thousands of pounds more to contaminate the air.

(p. 15):

As it happens, Cheney himself was crucial in creating these conditions. Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Task Force concluded in May 2001 that many of the protections under which drillers had previously operated were no longer necessary, as new, allegedly more "efficient drilling production methods" could "reduce emissions; practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms; and enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources."

2. Don't Know What I Want but I Know How to Get It (p. 18):

The two parties are demonstrably different in this respect. Democrats, even in the minority, participate in solutions designed to improve governance. They cannot help themselves. A commitment to the principle of good governance is the primary reason must Democrats tend toward politics in the first place. One might argue that this faith in government's ability to improve people's lives is misplaced, or that it becomes easily corrupted over time by the temptations of power and privilege, but few serious political observers would deny its initial presence. This is rarely true of Republicans, who are suspicious of government on principle and opposed to successful programs in practice and therefore happy to see government programs fail and, ideally, disappear entirely.

(p. 24):

Republicans, unlike Democrats, are able to keep their members united in party-line votes at least in part because conservatives enjoy a genuine political movement that is eager to challenge incumbents in primary contests should they stray from the fold. Liberal Democrats, in contrast, have no such enforcement mechanism and hence no ability to threaten deviants and turncoats seeking to save their own political skin.

3. If That's All There Is, My Friend, Then Let's Keep Dancing: unequal representation in the Senate, fillibusters, holds (pp. 29-30):

Again, Republicans in the 111th Congress proved far more promiscuous in the employment of this antimajoritarian tactic than any before them. As of September 2010, fewer than half of Obama's federal nominees for jobs had been confirmed and 102 out of 854 judgeships remained vacant. Of the 81 judicial nominations Obama sent to the Senate during his first eighteen months in office, only 30 were approved, largely due to single-senator holds placed on individual nominees. As a result, Obama saw fewer than half the number of his nominees approved that George W. Bush had seen approved at the same point in his presidency despite Democratic control of the Senate for the first two years of that presidency. (One judicial nominee was confirmed, following a nine-month Republican hold, by a vote of 99 to 0.) On April 20, 2010, Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) took to the floor to try lifting the holds on 45 separate federal nominees. John Kyl (R-AZ) objected to every last one of them.

(p. 32):

The Senate is a drainpipe [that] can be blocked by the tiniest speck of obstruction. The shamelessness of Obama's opposition in exploiting the system's vulnerability in this respect must be an essential component of any sensible analysis of any progressive president's ability to honor his campaign promises. Exactly why Barack Obama has not done more to illuminate this issue remains, at least to this author, one of the myriad mysteries of the first two years of his presidency.

4. What It Don't Get, I Can't Use (p. 33):

The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) calculated that approximately $3.47 billion was spent lobbying the federal government in 2009, up from $3.3 billion the previous year. By the final quarter of the year, lobbies were handling out $20 million a day. The most generous spreaders of wealth were in the pharmaceutical and health products industries, whose $266.8 million in 2009 set a record for "the greatest amount ever spent on lobbying efforts by a single industry for one year," according to CRP. At one point, PhRMA, the industry-wide trade association, employed forty-eight lobbying firms, in addition to in-house lobbyists, with a total of 165 people overall, according to the Sunlight Foundation's Paul Blumenthal.

Cap and Trade (pp. 39-40):

Like a manure pile at an Iowa factory pig farm, this stuff adds up. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the number of lobbyists devoted to climate change had risen by more than 400 percent since 2003 to a total of 2,810 -- giving lobbyists a five-to-one advantage over the combined membership of the House and Senate. (This is in contrast to an estimated 138 working on behalf of alternative forms of energy.) Targets for improving renewable energy resources were roughly halved as Congress gutted the EPA's authority to regulate carbon emissions. And rather than auction off pollution permits, as candidate Obama had proposed, the legislation offered 83 percent of them to polluters for free. All told, according to one analysis by Stanford University economists, polluters earned themselves $134 billion in taxpayer-funded gifts as they reduced the overall goal of a reduction in carbon emissions from 20 percent to 17 percent. Strongly supported by the financial industry, which stood to make billions on proposed carbon credit markets, this awful bill barely squeaked through the House by a 219 to 213 vote. Alas, it died there.

Financial Regulation

The Power of Culture (pp. 54-56):

This particular gravy train travels in both directions. Former clients of current committee staff members include H&R Block, the New York Stock Exchange,t he Bond Market Association, Wachovia, MetLife, and Experian. Not a one has any experience lobbying for consumer organizations such as the Consumer Federation of America, Public Citizen, USPIRG, or, God forbid, ACORN. And this practice is hardly limited to bank lobbyists. At the time of the BP oil spill, more than 400 of the industry's 600 registered lobbyists were former government employees, including 18 ex-members of Congress and dozens of former presidential appointees. [ . . . ]

Rather than being perceived as pimps or prostitutes, corporate lobbyists are beloved members of the new political establishment where everybody does everybody else's jobs and no hard and fast lines can be found anywhere -- save those between winning and losing. After all, government pay does not even begin to approach the levels earned on Wall Street or inside the nation's top law firms. Salaries being what they are, aside from proximity to power, the key perk in Washington is the ability to live beyond one's means. Journalists, with few exceptions, have lost what were once generous expense accounts and can no longer pick up three- and four-figure dinner checks as a matter of course. Staffers never could. The only people left with cash to make life worth living luxury-wise are the lobbyists, and none are richer than bank lobbyists, whose earnings and bonuses are twice the average elsewhere in the private economy, much less in the public sector. During the first eighteen months of the Obama presidency, then-House Minority Leader John Boehner, funneling money through his political action committee, the Freedom Project, enjoyed trips costing more than $67,000 at the Ritz-Carlton Naples in Florida; at least $20,000 at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia; and more than $29,000 at the Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio, according to federal records examined by the New York Times. Between 2000 to 2007, he and his wife enjoyed no fewer than forty-five flights on private corporate jets in addition to $340,000 in contributions from just one industry: tobacco.

"Crazy, Anti-Business Liberals"

Money, Talking (pp. 62-64):

These rulings have opened up new opportunities for all funders, but none so much as those working through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which functions as a kind of "fence" for many corporations looking to intervene in the political process without leaving any footprints. Grover Norquist, who acts as a combination of overseer, middleman, and occasional capo di tutti capi of the myriad right-wing lobbies that dot the Beltway, notes that, even though the Chamber of Commerce is not the most reliable of ideological allies, it is one of the most welcome. "K Street is a three-billion-dollar weathervane," Norquist told the New Yorker. "When Obama was strong, the Chamber of Commerce said, 'We can work with the Obama Administration.' But that changed when thousands of people went into the street and 'terrorized' congressmen. . . . Now that Obama is weak, people are getting tough."

The chamber has gone into business procuring advertisements that target candidates without revealing who is paying for the ads. In August 2010, as the Associated Press reported, "the country's largest business lobby has pledged to spend $75 million in this year's elections. That's on top of a lobbying effort that already has cost the organization nearly $190 million since Barack Obama became president in January 2009." [ . . . ]

This avalanche of cash was just the tip of the new, uncontrolled corporate spending iceberg emerging from a series of Supreme Court decisions. In the most important of these, 2009's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the one-vote conservative majority somehow concluded "that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."

(pp. 69-70):

The results of this deliberate dumbing-down of children in Texas and elsewhere will not be visible for years, but it is not difficult to see the results of the right-wing campaign throughout our political discourse. Over and over during the raucous health care town hall meetings in the summer of 2009, which were credited by Grover Norquist with exciting the Chamber of Commerce to take on Obama, citizens would stand up and scream some variant of "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." At one such meeting Representative Robert Inglis (R-SC) noted, "I had to politely explain that, 'Actually, sir, your healthcare is being provided by the government.' . . . But he wasn't having any of it." In some cases, citizens are genuinely ignorant regarding these issues. Americans are, after all, no strangers to deeply held beliefs based on misinformation. But frequently this confusion is the direct product of cynical manipulation by conservative elites, such as Norquist and his funders, which have somehow managed to help spark a movement of ordinary people going to the barricades to fight for the well-being of the funders of Norquist's many organizations.

The Buying of "Indians" (pp. 70-72):

In the age of Obama, right-wing billionaires and corporate titans have also succeeded on another front, one that allows them to put a populist gloss on their unchanging agenda. In doing so, they appear to have solved what conservative scholar Bruce Bartlett describes as the right-wing libertarians' age-old problem of being "all chief and no Indians." And when Bartlett says "no," he means no. Back in 1980 when oil billionaire David C. Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket, his platform endorsed the abolition of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies, the FBI, the CIA, public schools, and just about anything else, as Jane Mayer observes, that "either inhibit[ed] his business profits or increase[d] his taxes." He polled barely 1 percent of the popular vote. Today Koch not only funds a vast network of pseudo-scientific organizations to undermine legitimate climate science, as discussed earlier; he also funds Tea Party groups that provide foot soldiers to march on behalf of his, and his fellow plutocrats', financial and political interests. For instance, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which gave its Blogger of the Year Award to somebody who termed Barack Obama America's "cokehead in chief" and accused him of "demonic possession," was founded by David Koch, who remains its chairman. This foundation received more than $5 million from Koch foundations in 2005-2008 alone. The group's literature complains -- rather ironically given the source of its funding -- that "today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests. . . . But you can do something about it." The group helps to train Tea Party organizers and fund their demonstrations, often working in tandem with Dick Armey's FreedomWorks (formerly, Citizens for a Sound Economy), also funded by the Kochs to the tune of $12 million. Speaker after speaker at these events complain of what they call the Obama administration's "socialist vision for this country." As one Republican consultant explains, "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud -- and they're our candidates!" [ . . . ]

And the all chiefs, no Indians nature of these organizations has no bearing on their electoral effectiveness. The Concerned Taxpayers of America (CTA) worked tirelessly to defeat Democratic congressional candidates in Maryland. It turned out to represent exactly two taxpayers. But give the CTA credit. Its membership is double that of Taxpayers Against Earmarks, which describes itself as "dedicated to educating and engaging American taxpayers about wasteful government spending and the misguided practice of earmarks" and poured millions into races in support of conservative Republicans across the country. Alas the "taxpayers" were really just one taxpayer, Joe Ricketts, founder of Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs, who voluntarily disclosed his identity, though he was not required to do so by law.

5. I Read the News Today, Oh Boy: Fox (pp. 74-75):

This is a matter of considerable political significance for the potential success of any progressive president because the number one cable news network in America just happens to be dedicated to a program of purposeful misinformation rather than any honest accounting of the news -- "a cyclonic, perpetual emotion machine that gins up legitimate political disagreements into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao," as Jon Stewart told Bill O'Reilly during one of his periodic visits to O'Reilly's show. [ . . . ]

Fox is something new -- something for which we do not yet have a word. It provides almost no actual journalism. Instead, it gives ideological guidance to the Republican Party and millions of its supporters, attacking its opponents and keeping its supporters in line. And because Fox manages to earn over a half a billion dollars a year, according to 2009 figures, in doing so, it functions as the equivalent of a political perpetual motion machine.

Fox's broadcasting is deeply biased against liberals in almost every way imaginable. Fox News broadcasters regularly distort what the president says or cut away before letting him finish. They invite Republican politicians and conservative propagandists to come on and lie outright about both people and policy and then build on those lies to tell even larger lies. They invite faux liberals to come on the air to attack the real thing.

Who's Zooming Whom? (p. 75):

"Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us," conservative commentator David Frum has observed, "and now we are discovering we work for Fox." This turned out to be literally true in the case of at least four likely Republican candidates for president in 2012: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum. In fact, as two Politico writers observed in the autumn of 2010, "with the exception of Mitt Romney, Fox now has deals with every major potential Republican presidential candidate not currently in elected office."

(pp. 78-79):

No line separates right-wing Republican Party propaganda and the "news" broadcast on Fox. Indeed, when Fox's parent corporation, News Corp, gave a $1.25 million donation to the Republican Governors Association and another $1 million to the pseudo-Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce during the 2010 election cycle, the cash was undoubtedly much appreciated but was in many respects redundant. Fox, like much of the Murdoch media empire, has more in common with the integrated political/judicial/business/media empire that is making a mockery of Italian democracy under the rule of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi than it does with any American media organization. It is a 24/7 continuous contribution to the conservative cause in America, with a market capitalization of more than $43 billion, an operating income during the first quarter of 2010 of $1.15 billion, and a budget for the Fox News channel of over $1.2 billion. [ . . . ]

Is it any wonder that according to survey after survey Fox News viewers, despite their obsessive interest, are among the worst-informed Americans about politics?

The Ticking Time Bomb: you know, Muslims; even Sauci Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns a $3 billion chunk of News Corp.

"A Deep-Seated Hatred for White People": Glenn Beck (pp. 86-87):

In mid-November 2010, Beck took a somewhat surprising step deeper into the right-wing swamps of ignorance and prejudice he often inhabits with a special two-part show devoted to attacking the liberal, Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. During the course of a complicated explication of Soros's alleged activities as a "puppet-master," Beck -- to the shame of everyone involved with production and broadcast of his program -- engaged in some of the most offensive anti-Semitic imagery ever purposely shows on American TV. The fact that he did this while accusing Soros, who had to flee the Nazis, of aiding the Nazis against his fellow Jews, only added to the absurdity. Beck calls Soros his own "shadow government" happily manipulating his "puppet" Barack Obama. He actually equated Soros's effort in helping democratic revolutions succeed in overthrowing Communism in Europe with evidence that Sorow seeks to take over the United States of America. "Not only does he want to bring America to her knees, financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well," Beck insisted.

An Empire of Their Own: The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan (pp. 93-95):

The Journal, in the tradition of doctrinaire Stalinism, makes no distinction between art and politics as its arts and culture pages -- and particularly its book reviews -- reflect all of the political prejudices of its editorial board. Take a look, for instance, at an August 16, 2010, review by James K. Glassman of a book by Thomas Geoghegan called Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? According to the reviewer, the book was a "meandering stream of consciousness" by "an admitted nonexpert" who "details various boring conversations he had with anonymous Germans and Frenchmen he bumped into, drops a few statistics, cites some books and comes to the conclusion that we Americans would lead richer lives if only we adopted European social and economic policy -- especially the part about high taxes." Glassman rebuked the author by arguing that "Europe's economic story in recent years -- well before the current crisis -- has been one of sluggish growth and high unemployment. As a result, a wide gap has opened up between Europe and the U.S. in the most revealing indicator of economic well being, GDP [gross domestic product] per capita." [ . . . ]

As it happens, Newsweek published a cover story the same day this Journal review appeared in which it ranked the qualify of life in nations across the globe based on five categories of national well-being -- education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and political environment -- and compiled metrics within these categories across one hundred nations. The United States did not even make it into the top ten. Finland was number one, and most of the rest were also in Europe, particularly northern Europe, where tax rates are highest. For instance, Americans work an average of 1,841 hours per years, whereas Germans work 1,473 hours. Yet 24.7 percent of the elderly and 21.9 percent of children in the United States fall below 50 percent of median income, compared to 10.1 percent of the elderly and 9 percent of children in Germany. [ . . . ]

(Ironically, Glassman's bio describes him as a "former under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs" and the "executive director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas." All true, but the man is too modest. Glassman is also the author of the infamous work Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Sock Market, published not long before the tech bubble of the 1990s brought the Dow a great deal closer to 6,000 than it ever got to Glassman's prediction. At this writing the Dow Jones average stands at less than one-third of Glassman's prediction.)

(pp. 98-99):

And yet instead of objecting to the manner that Fox perverted the news for political purposes, the other networks appeared intent on aping it. This reflects one of the great unremarked successes of the conservative movement in recent decades: Its propaganda efforts, cloaked as journalistic enterprises, have so successfully inserted themselves into mainstream discourse and debate that conventional journalists are willing to embrace them without even realizing that is happening. Ask yourself, Why did the 2008 Democratic presidential debates -- particularly those moderated by George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson -- focus so relentlessly on future tax rates affecting barely 5 percent of America's wealthiest citizens? And why did Stephanopoulos badger President Obama about whether the health care plan then under discussion constituted nothing more than a "tax increase" on the American people -- a line that was immediately transposed into a Republican National Committee attack ad the very next week? Why did CNN, which found it could no longer live with racist birther Lou Dobbs, rushed to hire the incendiary right-wing blogger Erick Erickson on the basis of such clever commentary as to call Michele Obama a "Marxist harpy" and Supreme Court justice David Souter a "goat fucking child molester"? Why does MSNBC cohost Mika Brzezinski insist, rather crazily, on the day after Sarah Palin resigned her job as a governor to begin an estimated $20 million-plus-a-year career as a pundit and public speaker, that Palin represented "real Americans" as opposed to those who thought her quitting her job in the middle of her term worthy of criticism? Why does CNBC's Jim Cramer casually refer to the "Pelosi Politburo emasculation"? Why was racist Rush Limbaugh considered an appropriate roundtable commentator on NBC's Meet the Press? Why, indeed, was nutty Newt Gingrich -- a man who claims to discern "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us" -- the program's most popular guest in 2009, a year in which the presidency, the House, and the Senate were all controlled by Democrats. (Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did not even appear once; neither did any other former House speakers. In fact, no former House speaker other than Gingrich has ever appeared on Meet the Press.)

Remember, this favored sage of the mainstream media went so far in the autumn of 2010 as to embrace the bizarre arguments of right-wing journalist Dinesh D'Souza, published, unaccountably, on the cover of Forbes magazine, that President Obama "is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" D'Souza had written, "Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."

The Attack on ACORN: how Andrew Breitbart snookered the mainstream media

The "Racism" of Shirley Sherrod: how Andrew Breitbart almost snookered the mainstream media again, at least panicking Tom Vilsack into firing Sherrod on the basis of pure manufactured rumor.

What Liberal Media? (pp. 108-109):

According to a study published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the Newshour's guest list during a two-month period spanning May and June 2010 contained think tank soruces from right-leaning groups (at least 50 percent). "With just four sources (13 percent), left-leaning think tanks were outnumbered by right-leaning ones 4 to 1."

The continuing fealty of mainstream institutions to conservatives and the purveyors of Washington conventional wisdom has important consequences for the Obama administration's ability to focus public debate.

(p. 111):

Even at the highest levels of the profession, personality trumps substance at every turn. It speaks volumes about the contemporary state of political journalism to note that Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's best-seller about the 2008 election, offered up the story of John and Elizabeth Edwards's marriage troubles in excruciating detail but said next to nothing about the policy differences that separated the candidates or what such differences might imply for their respective presidencies.

(p. 112):

The relentless trivialization of the news is in part a function of the explosion of news outlets, almost all of which fail to invest in actual reporting and hence spend their time chasing the same set of stories with the same information -- only the "personalities" offering the commentary distinguish one from the other. The trend is most pronounced on cable news, but it spreads through the media like an infectious disease. For instance, the nonsensical "Balloon Boy" story of 2009, which turned out to be a silly, publicity-seeking hoax, received 16 percent of all available airtime from October 12 to 18 on the twenty-four-hour cable networks, according to the Pew Center. Afghanistan did not rate even half as much time, despite key battles taking place between the Taliban and regular Pakistani forces on Pakistani soil that very week.

Conclusion: It's Here They Got the Range and the Machinery for Change: Ari Melber wrote parts of this section dealing with campaign finance reform

The Broken Senate: eliminating holds, limiting fillibusters.

Corporations, United (pp. 122-123):

Former Republican senator from Maine William Cohen told Charlie Rose in August 2010 that he found the pressure put on candidates for Congress by lobbyists to be "obscene," adding, "If the American people saw what legislators go through, [with lobbyists saying,] 'Don't forget we supported you in your campaign,' I think the American public would finally turn against that." And this disgust is not confined to former officials and outsiders. Newer, younger members increasingly say the process is both miserable and untenable. In a 2010 survey of freshman members, Politico found congressional schedules packed with several hours of fund-raising per day. That includes hours of "call time" -- phone-banking potential donors from the "cramped cubicles" of campaign committee offices that one freshman likened to a "sweatshop."

(p. 125):

Until 2007 federal law required government officials to wait just one year before taking jobs lobbying their former colleagues. When Congress extended the break to two years and applied the law to a wider circle of congressional staff and administration officials, it drove one senator into early retirement: Senator Trent Lott from Mississippi, a former Republican majority leader, quit, Sarah Palin-style, before his term was up just to ensure that he could cash in on his old job without bothering to wait an extra year. The new regulation was a start. Yet the goal cannot be simply to inconvenience the future Trent Lotts of the world. It must be to root out the encouragement that the current system offers to staffers to sell themselves to the highest bidder.

A House Divided (pp. 126-127):

As journalist Harold Meyerson rightly observes, thinking of both the New Deal and the civil rights reforms of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, "In America major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe." Indeed, "Both FDR and LBG had to respond to large and potent insurgencies on their left -- industrial labor for Roosevelt, black freedom for Johnson," adds historian Michael Kazin. "Each of these movements had gestated for decades before emerging as a force that could make or unmake a presidency." Today, liberals and progressives have nothing remotely comparable.

(p. 130):

The current situation, which has resulted in an estimated 11 million undocumented workers in America today -- down from 12 million two years ago -- invites exploitation of powerless people and breeds contempt for the law at all levels. What is clearly needed is a path to citizenship for those workers already here as well as rationalization of an out-of-control system that will radically reduce the number of workers here without proper documentation (and therefore legal protection). As a political matter, honest work is the best way to prove to the rest of the nation that they can be valuable allies in the struggle to build a fairer and more (widely) prosperous society.

Don't Mourn: Organize (p. 132):

Despite the desire of hundreds of thousands of Obama volunteers to continue their efforts on behalf of the administration, according to an online survey conducted by Organizing for America (OFA, the successor organization to Obama for America) the administration was not really interested in promoting any alternative structure to the Democratic Party. The concern most likely was the danger that OFA might develop its own priorities and interfere with those of the administration. (And the Obama administration certainly did not want to encourage primary challenges to sitting Democratic senators. In fact, it went to great lengths in Arkansas, New York, and Pennsylvania to discourage such challenges almost irrespective of the politics of the incumbent in question.) OFA continues to raise money and send out e-mails, but it does not ask for any sustained involvement or even discussion of the issues the administration chooses to address.

Voting Rights and Elections (pp. 134-135):

As the American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein noted in response to an earlier version of this argument, to counter the oversized power of such minority interests, "in Australia, where failure to show up at the polls (you can vote for 'none of the above') leads to a $15 fine, attendance is over 95 percent -- and politicians cater less to consultants and the extremes (since both bases turn out in equal proportions) and more to the small number of persuadable voters who are not swayed by outrageous rhetoric." [ . . . ]

In this respect, Australia is not unusual; the United States is. For example, according to one survey of sixteen nations and four Canadian provinces, only four place the onus of voter registration entirely on the individual as the United States does, which helps account for this country's anemic rates of political participation. So, too, as many have pointed out, does our unwillingness to allow people to vote on a weekend or a holiday, when they are not forced to miss work or to wait in line for hours and hours merely to exercise their constitutional right to pick their leaders. (It is almost as if some politicians do not want people -- particularly wage workers -- to be able to vote.)

The Problem of Media: Rescue and Reform

Epilogue: The Thrill Is Gone (pp. 145-146):

"Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn't want," predicted political scientist James Morone. "Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master." And certainly, as Barack Obama observed to Rolling Stone, "In an ideal world, I wouldn't have inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit and the worst recession since the Great Depression. But you work with what's before you." Indeed, on Inauguration Day 2009 the unemployment rate was raging out of control as the economy hemorrhaged, on average, 800,000 jobs per month. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the president's emergency stimulus bill helped to create or preserve 3.7 million jobs. The tax cuts contained in the bill saved nearly $1,200 for 97 percent of U.S. households. Moreover, Obama's health care reform bill, his financial reform bill, and the saving of the auto industry made his first two years as president among the most politically consequential in the past half-century -- far exceeding the accomplishments of his immediate Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

(pp. 148-149):

These choices were accompanied by some extremely ill-advised -- indeed, near suicidal -- complaints about the lack of appreciation administration figures were receiving from the administration's political base. Liberals were "fucking retarded," complained Emanuel when some objected to the administration's failure to fight for a "public option" in the health care reform bill. (Emanuel later apologized to retarded people and their families, but not, alas to liberals.) "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality," complained spokesman Robert Gibbs regarding the same topic. And Obama himself joshed at a late autumn $30,000 per person fund-raiser at the Greenwich, Connecticut, "If we get an historic health-care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial-reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particular derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter) I thought that was going to happen quicker."

Perhaps Obama and company were reflecting the casual disdain that so many in the Washington establishment feel toward dedicated campaign supporters, both in local communities and the blogosphere, but if so, the foolishness they evinced in repeatedly giving voice to this disdain is breathtaking in its insularity and arrogance.