Apparently bloggers disagree with each other. Please discuss it here.
FWIW, I side more with Andrew because Sullivan is not playing the credible commenter here. He’s being an activist. This is presently a smart move because (a) Obama instinctively avoids fights, especially on the culture side, and (b) he responds to pressure from the left. There is also extra bonus incentive (c): if the activist left raises a big enough stink and acts insatiable enough, Obama’s “reasonable compromises” will end up looking like what nice people on the left wanted to see in the first place.
The first example that comes to mind is the public option. There was no eighteen dimensional yahtzee going on; Obama wanted some lesser compromise but the nutroots emboldened their representatives to make a fight out of it. The same thing happened when Obama tried nominating a torture advocate (momentarily forgot his name) for a senior advisory post.
In my experience it is an activists’ responsibility to be an insatiable pain in the ass. Destructive and stupid behavior usually backfires (ELF), but so does playing nice.
Justin
What does it mean?
clone12
I take it to mean that Sullivan is playing to stretch the overton window
Anonymous37
I think that Justin’s right — you may have meant “John” and misstyped.
Anonymous37
Oh, oops, now I see what you mean. Never mind. I shouldn’t comment drunk.
Rob C.
Screw you and playing nice when there are literally millions of us in America with no insurance and (again, literally) going broke trying to pay mounting and egregious medical bills. Obama is simply a wimp.
grass
The problem with being the pain in the ass activist is that you’re a pain in the ass, which makes reading his blog incredibly difficult without getting a migraine.
Rosali
Aren’t Andrew and Sullivan the same person? Why use two different names for the same subject in one sentence?
beltane
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Being nice results in being ignored. And, to his credit, Sullivan was generous in his praise of the President today.
There is, however, a fine line between effective activism and engaging in the kind of hysterical behavior that alienates allies, e.g. Firedoglake lately.
licensed to kill time
I am confused – did you mean John and Sullivan?
Arclite
Good points about Sullivan’s comments. Although, I think John won the argument handily.
Anoniminous
The tendency in negotiation is for the parties to “meet in the middle.” On a scale of 1 to 100 with 50 being “The Middle” the party starting at 60 will give away more to the party starting at 10 as the middle of these positions is 35.
Numbers for illustration but it generally works something like that in practice.
Lot’s more way to munge this but it generally works the party that starts closer to the middle is also the party that is more willing, eager, to compromise to “Get It Done.”
What’s interesting in the Health Insurance Reform Debate (snark) is the House Progressive Caucus stood their ground at, say, 80. The House GOP just said NO! NO! NO! making their position the equivalent of 0 — effectively removing them from influencing the process. So the “Middlers” wanting to Get Things Done were forced to deal with the House Progressive Caucus moving things Upwards, To the Left, or however one cares to label it.
Chris
I believe John Brennan is the name you’re looking for.
General Winfield Stuck
Early this morning I was watching a Ratigan segment with a political professor talking about why dems fight among themselves so much, especially when their pols are in power.
He said it came from dems/libs having the belief in activist government and all the ideas about what flavor that should take. Repubs on the other hand, don’t want government to really do anything, and so it’s easier for them to march in lockstep.
Though it sounded a bit simplistic, I think it is basically correct. But I disagree that drawing the line of stupid behaviour begins with a group like Elf, and though activism is good and necessary to apply pressure on dem pols when they have the chance to make changes in government, it actually matters how it’s done when also considering keeping power to continue good works.
When pressure is rational and focused it is a good thing. When it’s not that, then not so much. Folks divining stuff they can not know and assigning motives because it fits an activist narrative, I for one, will oppose every time. Why? because someone has to stay home and protect the Fort while the heros are out being heros.
KRK
Writing a blog is not being an activist.
Commenting on a blog is not being an activist.
Mind-reading politicians and then congratulating oneself for their “changed” positions is not being an activist.
Being a pain the in the ass is equally prevalent among the activist and non-activist populations.
The Obama-affiliated Organizing for America got more than 300,000 calls into Congress on a single day last week pushing for passage of health care reform legislation. Please show your work justifying a conclusion that the nutroots accomplished anything.
General Winfield Stuck
@KRK:
This absolutely!
Will Danz
No sale. Sullivan blustered and accused without knowing what was in the goddamned bill.
Not sure why it’s so important to give Sullivan more credit that he deserves as an “activist.” He’s just another blogger, one with easily triggered — though incredibly selective — outrage, limited mostly to his very own interests. And the blowhard doesn’t even attempt to do basic homework before typing.
Andrew, and Sullivan, as well as Andrew, are all shallow assholes.
Mr Furious
If this is about the “he didn’t say ‘gay'” thing, I think Sullivan chose the wrong hill to die on.
I didn’t really see any tiptoeing in Obama’s statement, and failing to use Sully’s phrase of choice when “sexual orientation” is the proper technical term is nitpicking.
Somehow I think if Obama had ended the HIV ban FIRST and THEN signed the Hate Crimes Bill, Sullivan would have kept his underwear in order.
He was being pissy because he still had a personal issue outstanding.
Third Eye Open
Posted this in the last open thread, but I thought it was hilarious:
This poll seems to be a bit slanted, but I just can’t put my finger on it
mcc
This is by itself a perfectly good rationale for pressuring Obama and/or pushing as hard as possible on DADT. It’s a good working rationale for, I don’t know, the NEM, or Dan Savage, or Queerty?
But it does not work for Andrew Sullivan. The problem is that while Andrew Sullivan is serving as an activist on some parts of the gay rights agenda, he is actively opposing other parts of the gay rights agenda, like ENDA and the hate crimes bill (coincidentally both the parts of the agenda that are most important to me personally, and the parts of the agenda that are being handled first). So he’s not pressuring from the left, he’s pressuring from the right. He’s pushing the Congress, national orgs etc to abandon parts of the gay rights agenda and do this other thing which is more important to him instead. He’s being an activist for the other side. And then he has the audacity to attack the Democrats for not doing anything for gays, while he actively works against the things the Democrats actually are doing for gays. I have no sympathy for this.
jibeaux
Well, I thought “Elf” was a really cute movie, and I sometimes answer the phone with “what’s your favorite color?” around the holidays now.
valdivia
@KRK:
this.
Clifton
Andrew and many many others are not activist they are bloggers. I think the first thing so many little p “progressives” need to learn is that ranting on a website, then post phone numbers is not activism it is lazy and it useless. Organizing means:
1) stop preaching to the choir and
2) bring the millions of people who are not following this crap by the minute and only getting the political news from the evening news before dinner involved and educated.
Again I repeat Blogging is “NOT” activism. It is helpful but it doesn’t even scratch the surface of activating the populace.
Sentient Puddle
@KRK: OK, but how do you motivate those 300,000 people to make the calls in the first place? Could it be that occasionally, someone has to be a pain in the ass and spew a bunch of hyperbole to get people to care enough?
Not saying I totally disagree with you here, but I don’t think mobilizing people like this is quite as easy as you make it sound.
General Winfield Stuck
Well, of course they are sitting at the edge of their seats anxiously awaiting a call from the Great Orange Satan himself.
Nothing moves beforehand.
dr. bloor
Why anyone reads or thinks anything about Andrew Sullivan in the first place is still beyond me.
Morbo
@Third Eye Open: Where’s “No, I want single payer”?
chrismealy
Obama’s been fighting hard for a public option all year. I was making organizing phone calls for the public option off of barackobama.com way back in May. This summer they organized people to go to congresspeople’s offices in person to demand a public option. He talked about it for 5+ minutes in his nationally televised address to Congress. Obama’s been organizing around the public option all year. He’s been completely consistent on it.
Just because he’s not deploying lame-ass George W Bush-style “my way or the highway” tough guy rhetoric doesn’t mean he’s a sellout. It means he’s a grownup playing a smart strategy.
Minionero
@grass:
It also makes people less sympathetic to you, and it can do more harm to your cause than good, at least if your cause includes swaying public opinion.
Third Eye Open
@Morbo: It doesn’t exist in the minds of FOX viewers, apparently. I guess there are only shades of “this sucks”
El Cid
The super-rich and right wing clearly see advantages in being (or hiring, in the case of the former) the biggest pains in the asses with the most demands and the loudest whines and the most dramatic complaints.
And they usually get most of what they want.
Maybe people on other sides of the political spectrum, or who are or represent more ordinary people, ought to note the remarkable record of success for the super-rich and the right and decide that they’d like some of that success.
Admittedly the tools and tone have to be quite different, but not the energy with which it’s pursued.
Nick
@Sentient Puddle:
I’m reasonably sure most fo those 300,000 people don’t spend their time on blogs…I’m sure because the no one in te blogsphere was promoting OFA’s calling campaign. I didn’t see front page diaries on DailyKos, MyDD, OpenLeft or DemocraticUnderground.
The President himself was the pain in the ass that got people to act on that.
Mnemosyne
@Sentient Puddle:
Considering that I’ve been getting daily e-mails on health care from Organizing for America for at least six months now, I think the blogs are a much, much more minor part of the fight than they’d like to think. Those e-mails go to every person who ever donated to Obama and, given how many individual donations he received, that’s a pretty goddamned big mailing list. If only a fraction of the people e-mailed act, that’s your 300,000 right there.
handy
@Third Eye Open:
LOL I think they’re missing something in that poll, but can’t quite put my finger on it.
geg6
Sorry, Tim. But I got dozens of emails over the last 6 months or so from OFA regarding activism for the public option. He may have played conciliator in public, but OFA IS Obama and he has never backed off it among his activists. As for Andrew, please point out to me exactly what actions he’s taken on any gay issues other than babbling incoherently about DOMA, DADT, and the AIDS ban on his blog. He spent the entire summer lolling on the beach in P-town, not lobbying Congress or organizing email or letter writing campaigns or going to town meetings. THAT’S what activists do. He went to one march. He didn’t give any speeches, he didn’t go door to door, he does nothing but bitch from his ivory tower at the Atlantic. Fuck that and fuck calling that activism. It’s not and you demean real activists by calling him that.
Jody
Well put, Tim.
Sullivan is still a dope, though.
valdivia
@geg6:
this too. absolutely.
Chad N Freude
@Third Eye Open:
A masterpiece of understatement.
Ming
MikeJ
Since this is technically a open thread I’ll mention how happy I am with lunch. Serious Pie. Pizza with sunny side up egg and liberal elitist rocket, parm grated over the top. Mmmmmmm.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
JUST WORDS!
Ming
@Ming: sigh. please imagine, inside the block quote above,
FYWP.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
The formatting is totally phucked.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/hiv-travel-ban-lifted-by_n_340109.html
Mark S.
You guys are all wrong. Real activism is sending fake dog shit to congressmen you don’t like.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Nevermind. The linking worked the first time. I had to refresh the page.
General Winfield Stuck
@chrismealy:
Yes
Cain
@Nick:
No, but tehy did call people like me and urged me to contact my congressmen, which I in turn did. So, I called up my Oregon congress critters. Needless to say, voice mailw as full. Besides, Oregon is in teh tank in getting this stuff done. We have some very awesome people in Oregon.
cain
licensed to kill time
@MikeJ: Speaking of Serious Pie, I would like to note how happy I am that the return of Bong Water Bill pie did not get much response in other threads, beyond “there goes the neighborhood” , “I thought he was banned?” and a couple sincere attempts by Molly to rebut the bong water posts.
Remarkable self-control, BJers!
General Winfield Stuck
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
He could have done this sooner, sooner, sooner, sooonerlll………
Shawn in ShowMe
Did I miss the conference where the word “activist” was redefined to include people who bitch online without doing any heavy lifting in the physical world? I don’t think “just words” means what the Poutrage Lobby thinks it means.
binzinerator
Is this a five minute argument or the full half hour?
General Winfield Stuck
It’s only words, and words are all I have.
KRK
@Sentient Puddle:
I’m not the one making it sound easy to achieve grassroots change. Exactly the opposite. It’s a LOT harder than “I wrote a post (or series of posts) on my blog and changed the world!”
Fax Paladin
By the by, is it possible to fix WordPress or whatever the blogging software is so it stops rendering parenthesis-R-parenthesis as the registered trademark symbol (R) (and likewise, as in today’s post, with parenthesis-C-parenthesis rendering as the copyright symbol (C) )?
MBunge
“Obama wanted some lesser compromise but the nutroots emboldened their representatives to make a fight out of it.”
No. What Obama wanted was to be sure some lesser compromise that would still advance the cause of health care reform could be had if that was all that was possible. That’s as opposed to some folks who would have been thrilled to throw away the best chance at reform in generations as long as they could feel self-righteous about it.
Mike
freelancer
@Fax Paladin:
Hahaha! No.
Minionero
@mcc:
Does Sullivan really oppose ENDA? I understand his opposition to hate crimes legislation (from an equality point of view, it’s hard to understand why murdering a person because s/he is gay makes you worthy of more punishment than murdering a person because s/he is, say, left-handed). But ENDA, it would seem, is right up his alley.
Another problem with the “be a pain in the ass” strategy is that you are risking the good in your pursuit of the perfect. A good example came from Sullivan today, where he tried to explain why he hasn’t said a word about the Washington State effort that would lead to civil unions. Civil unions, he said, are not marriage. But of course they are – they are marriage rights without the marriage name (it’s called the everything-but-marriage bill for a reason) But by expressing disdain or indifference for civil unions, he is harming his cause.
General Winfield Stuck
@Fax Paladin:
No It’s not. And any attempts to do so could result in Global Thermonuclear War.
In seriousness, the wordpress platform here has been like haunted house in like forever, in that it kinda has a mind of it’s own and may change it by tomorrow. Attempts to repair have obviously not yet succeeded.
gwangung
Well, yes, but….
These two statements don’t quite match up. Somebody is misunderstanding something…
cleek
just an FYI to all the users of the pie filter: i made a small change which might fix some of the lack of pie some of you have been seeing lately.
grab it!
handy
Either that or Obama is a very clever fellow
mcc
@Minionero: He’s actively opposed it in the distant past; in recent years he merely goes out of the way to avoid expressing an opinion. This is the most recent thing I’m aware of him saying on the subject, which is… not exactly negative, I guess? (He expresses he dislikes the bill, but nevertheless opposes people who oppose the bill on grounds of trans inclusion. It is unclear to me whether this somewhat convoluted position was intended as an endorsement of the bill, or an endorsement of trans exclusion.)
If anyone is aware of him having even acknowledged the existence of ENDA on his blog this year, I’d be very curious to see this.
Malron
When health reform passes bloggers will be patting themselves on the back trying to take credit for it in the same way they tried to claim credit for Obama’s election – after spending most of 2008 throwing fits because he wasn’t paying them enough respect or asking for their advice on how to win or saying he never had a chance etc etc…
Cerberus
Yeah agree with many of the commentators. Being an activist, being a thorn in the side of the men in power can be very productive, but you also have to be sane.
If you’re crazy, well, our lazy media love you to shit but you don’t get any messages out there other than “Obama, just words, stab in the back” which doesn’t make any use of the air time you win. Plus it makes sane lawmakers less likely to take you seriously (though it may trouble the centrist and the crazy).
Though I disagree that blogging can’t be activism. It can be, but as such it can only serve two and only two functions. Advertising and keeping people informed of genuine activism. See the wonderful work on Pam’s House Blend, Billerico, and others in terms of organizing the funding of No on 1, the volunteer vacations, and recruiting people to help on phone bank for GOTV.
Or it can inform about the needs of the group, putting a human face to political fights and the lives and needs of minority groups to do the “education” aspect of activism.
Well, okay, three, it can also radicalize those who agree on an issue so that they’re motivated and pumped to engage in activism when needed instead of being like the SF queers pre-prop-8 who just stayed home and didn’t even bother to vote. Much like getting people involved in Milk.
But besides this, it’s wanking on the internet. And well Sully likes his tugs.
Zach
I feel kind of dirty. Did I do this right? LOLCZARS
If anyone comes up with images that skewer wingnuts instead of relying on arcane trivia, send them my way.
Cain
Hey I hear, Lieberman is planning on running for election and at same time he’s stumping for Republicans. God I saw want him to run, there is going to be a lot of wallets opening up for the opposition. Just get a damn good opponent. Prior to running, Dems should strip him of all his seniority and send him packing.
Asshole.
cain
FlipYrWhig
Lots of good analysis on this thread. Of course, there may be a simpler answer, which is that people like Sullivan, Aravosis, and Hamsher are simply obnoxious loudmouthed dickheads who like to take credit for Doing Stuff.
mk3872
Tim – You have no proof that any outside actions caused any movement in Obama’s position because he played his cards close to the vest the entire time, and still is.
This foolishness were people say that the POTUS should be the John Wayne style of “leader” that stakes out positions, shouts them from the rooftops and never budges, is a recipe for disaster.
Look what happened the last 8 years under this style of leadership.
A liberal/progressive version of Bush W is NOT ideal. I’ll take the pragmatist as President any day.
Cain
ha, gates and obama managed to get rid of that bloated f-22 program quite nicely with no fan-fare. Nice.
h/t Kevin Drum
srv
I’m at 13000 feet in the Andes with mild altitude sickness and it still doesn’t make any sense anyone pays attention to Sully.
General Winfield Stuck
@srv:
Maybe Sully has a higher calling.
AhabTRuler
@srv: Have some Coca tea!
Kayla Rudbek
@mk3872: I’d prefer Lord Vetinari to John Wayne myself
Chuck Butcher
I write a blog and on it I regularly encourage people to act. Not write, not whine, act.
I spend more time and money and effort than is good for me on politics and I do mean in action not writing. Sully can kiss my ass, he’s a dishonest twit. He may write prettier than I do, he certainly has a lot bigger audience, and I’ll still stack my influence up against his anytime.
Chuck Butcher
Tim,
Maybe you’d like to explain how it is that OFA is news to you? I get email at least weekly.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@dr bloor (#25): Precisely.
He’s simply another conservative, happens to be gay so that discombobulates him every so often from the party orthodoxy. Doesn’t make him a common political friend, far from it.
Brick Oven Bill
Testing.