Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/062507T.shtml

Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?
By Rick Perlstein
The Nation

09 July 2007 Issue

snip//

For as long as I can remember, liberals have been complaining about awkward, self-conscious attempts to recover this "mainstream" sensibility and how they have paradoxically weakened the party. They forced Democratic politicians to become obsessed with polls. That, in turn, boxed Democrats into an identity the public - the mainstream - found the most off-putting of all: Democrats became timid. They couldn't pursue a bold public agenda because they were too hemmed in by polls. Very recently, among progressives, a new dictum has emerged: Hug close to the polls, worship the polls, be the polls.

snip//

We may not be able to get the media to understand that this is the most favorable climate for liberalism in a generation. But I do know a class of people we might have a better chance of influencing: Democratic politicians - especially Democratic presidential candidates. But what I'd like to say is a paradox, given what I've been arguing above: Don't pay too much attention to polls, no matter how favorable they may be to the kind of politics you'd like to see. Not just because it keeps you from leading but because it can keep you from winning.

More and more I find myself telling a story I consider the key to understanding modern American political history: that of Ronald Reagan's 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. His expensive, top-drawer consultants had hired a company formed by psychology PhDs who promised that Reagan's would be the first campaign run "as a problem in human behavior." Many liberal interpreters of Reagan's career have pointed to this to suggest that he was plastic, or a pawn, or a manipulator of voters. Not so. In fact, he was the opposite. One of the first things he did was tell all these fancy pollsters to shut up. In his early, exploratory campaigning, he'd been attacking the insolence of insurgent Berkeley students - who "should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the university once and for all." His consultants told him to knock it off, pointing to their data: Berkeley didn't even show up as an issue. Reagan threw the polls back in their faces: "Look, I don't care if I'm in the mountains, the desert, the biggest cities of the state, the first question is: 'What are you going to do about Berkeley?' And each time the question itself would get applause."

Reagan followed his heart, of course, made Berkeley his signature issue and thumped Edmund Brown in one of the greatest upsets in modern political history (even though the establishment media hated his conservatism then more than they hate our liberalism now, and even though Republican elites were more unmistakably ashamed of the GOP "brand" than DLCers are of the Democratic one now). The technical lesson in this story is that longitudinal polls like Pew's are inherently incomplete. They derive their value from asking exactly the same questions over time, even though the banquet of issues people care about always changes. A politician who goes into battle believing polls can teach him "the issues" is fighting in a static world, which is not the world we live in.

But the more profound lesson is that the greatest politicians create their own issues, ones that no one knew existed. Was the mood in California favorable for Reagan's conservative message in 1966? Obviously, or else Reagan wouldn't have won; he wasn't a magician. But he was - yes - a great communicator, confident of his gifts. By listening and interacting with ordinary people, and sniffing out where his own sense of right and wrong dovetailed with what he heard, he divined a certain inchoate mood. It had to do both with a fear of breakdown of the social order and resentment of liberal elites. Finding those frequencies sounding via the trope of "Berkeley," he was able to turn that mood into a political appeal. In that regard, his pollsters could only hurt him. All they knew was that Berkeley wasn't an "issue."

That's the danger of even the best polling: its power to smother intuitive leaders in the cradle. The Pew poll and all the others can only point to the modern electorate's anxieties - anxieties that have something to do with a sense of breakdown in the economic order, and with resentment of conservative elites. But what story can Democratic politicians weave to repair them? None that they are telling yet. All I know is that to sound the right frequencies, we need candidates who know when to tell their pollsters to stuff it.

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[MissWaverly]

1. we will win if our votes can be counted for a change

the pukes know this, they know that Bush did not win in either of the last two races, they are doing their best to tinker with the
vote, surge and purge so that they can "freeze" their cronys in place.

[illinoisprogressive]

2. Excellent article and a must read for the DUers

[OHdem10]

3. Excellent article and oh so true.

I have believed this for a long time. The Media likes this in
Candidates--Remember how they swooned over McCain in 2000. It was
the same principle. Human Beings like a little spontaneity.

It is much more important that one appear to want to be President
showing an air authority, (here comes someone who knows what he
or she wants and knows how to get it.) Not arrogant but enough
self-assuredness that one appears competent. Man on a Mission with
a sense of humor.Woman on a Mission with a sense of humor.

Our party has history of cautious tentaive candidates--too many
out of touch consultants and too concerned about Polls.