American Patrol

As amusing as the discovery of the Republican National Committee finance leadership meeting PowerPoint has been for the last couple of days, there’s really nothing about it that could be considered surprising. RNC fundraisers hold those who would donate to their party in complete contempt—well hell, who doesn’t? They seek to exploit fear to attain their ends—well, duh, they’re Republicans. They openly trade access for large donations, that is, peddle influence—yup, sounds like politics to me.

So, no, the contents of the presentation weren’t so surprising. What did surprise me was my reaction to it, specifically to the question “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate?” While its hardly a shock that the nexus of commerce and politics—what they used to refer to as “corruption” back when I was a lad—is more or less complete at this juncture, I had never really spent much time thinking of politics in terms of salesmanship before.

Salesmanship, the thing that sits a steak hungry nation down to a big, heaping plate of sizzle, changes everything. Suddenly, Republicans aren’t lying, really-- they’re being positive and confident about their product. That product is suddenly equivalent to a copper bracelet for arthritis pain or a ”natural male enhancement capsule” or a time share condo or a miracle absorbent cloth.


Mind you, confidence is the word from which we derive “con game,” sizzle isn’t particularly nutritious, and none of that shit works especially well. But sympathy for suckers is misplaced. In the sexist and anachronistic words of W.C. Fields, you can’t cheat an honest man. If this stuff is selling like gangbusters, the hucksters doing the selling are only half the story.

Happy news for Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel yesterday in the form of a Washington Post article (one of a series of recent hagiographies) offering the theory that if only the President listened more to this “force of political reason,” he’d be having an easier time of it politically. Emanuel, it is said, is largely ignored in favor of cultish Obamaists like Jarrett and Axelrod, but nonetheless bravely catches flak for the White House as a whole.

Heady stuff, to be sure, though Emanuel himself is said to be embarrassed by the attention (gosh, all that and humble too) and trying to avoid escalating internal conflicts. Sad, then, that I have to point out that these attempts to cast Emanuel not as a problem but as an unheeded solution come off as fairly typical products of Beltway mainstream media, larded with such choice cuts from the centrism’s greatest hits collection such as “going for the perfect at the expense of the plausible,” utterly dismissive of Progressives and the progressive agenda, and possessed of a fairly high horse shit content.

For starters, exactly what Obama initiative thus far introduced to Congress has constituted “the perfect”? The diluted stimulus package? The health care reform package that omitted even the slightest mention of the benefits of a single payer plan? In truth, just about everything that has made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to the hill seems to have been designed with an eye towards politics over policy, a distinction made in the Post yesterday by Ezra Klein as a handy means of introducing a bit of reality into the discussion, and has seemed to have Emanuel's fingerprints all over it.

Klein doesn't quite take it far enough, however. While Klein points out that health care reform would have passed long since were it not for the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, he fails to point out the degree to which that election exemplified ineptitude in the White House political operation-- Emanuel's bailiwick and supposed area of expertise.

While Emanuel was brought into the Administration as an experienced political hand with a unique understanding of Congress, his experience consists of time among the madly triangulating Vichy Democrats of the Clinton White House and his years as a northern Blue Dog in the House. Thus it is completely lost on him that a rather large portion of the decline in Obama's political capital has occurred not on the right, where Emanuel's political operation has been aiming its pitches, but on the left, among the people the Chief of Staff has characterized as "fucking retards." Emanuel is of a generation of Democrats who came of age in the Reagan/Bush hegemony and has been trained, Pavlov-style, to bark wildly at liberals and to assume the position and pucker up whenever a bell goes off in the conservative echo chamber. In this way, Obama's supposed pit bull has shown himself to be a very good doggie indeed, and this latest collection of media biscuits proves the point nicely.