Dead on. Here's Glenn Greenwald's entire quote:
During the 2008 election, Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas. Many online political and "news" outlets -- including some liberal political blogs -- discovered that the most reliable way to massively increase traffic was to capitalize on the pro-Obama fervor by turning themselves into pro-Obama cheerleading squads. Grass-roots activist groups watched their dues-paying membership rolls explode the more they tapped into that same sentiment and turned themselves into Obama-supporting appendages. Even labor unions and long-standing Beltway advocacy groups reaped substantial benefits by identifying themselves as loyal foot soldiers in the Obama movement.
Now, says Glenn, liberal allies are boxed in. They tooled their operations and fund raising around The One, and can't turn back to issues, not even to give Obama breathing room to move left, without alienating Obama fans.
As they say, read the whole thing.
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| It's self-evident that Alegre is being vindicated daily. She was the first, and nearly the only, blogger to crystallize issues as our most important focus. There was much hand wringing that critics of Obama would not "have a seat at the table," and would not have an ear to push reforms like health care and voter rights - we'd be out in the cold, we were told.
Now, less than a month into the most awesome presidency ever, it's clear that for issue-advocates, joining Team Obama was the worst thing short of a third W administration.
To say I was ambivalent to our two choices last fall is an understatement. Neither choice was acceptable to me, and it was a hypothetical thought experiment about which result would be less harmful to the country. My one argument in favor of McCain was that we would be able to fight him in the open on the issues. Since polling was more clear that we'd have a very Democratic Congress than about who'd win the presidency, it was easy to imagine the issues would be flushed into the open, and we'd automatically use the theory of contrast to move the country left, setting up big wins in '10 and '12 (cough, cough), with no actual damage to policy along the way.
So here we are. All of the major liberal institutions and groups, from voting rights advocates to feminist groups to labor to health care reformers have been corrupted and consumed by the Obama campaign machine. It was brilliant of Axlerod. This didn't just neutralize criticism, but bought room for Obama to be himself, a compromiser who couldn't stand the partisan conflicts of the '90s, all of which our issue advocates were fully engaged in.
Heck, the biggest new issue advocate, MoveOn, was more flamboyantly co-opted than anyone else.
It's going to be a long haul for issues like universal health care and economic populism, but we critics are in the right spot for it. Advocacy groups will experience a lot of trauma as they either become obsolete, or disentangle from their one-person movement to find their way back to where we are, honest critics. |
