I have a rule of thumb in politics that if one side is doing a
lot of whining, it probably means they’re losing. This was true,
for example, when liberals were on an electoral losing streak and
carped that Republicans were simply meaner people and better at
Rovian/swift boat tactics; or when conservatives blamed the media
for the fate of the McCain-Palin ticket. Liberals complained
about special interests destroying health care legislation in
1993/94, while conservatives were forced to lament the dishonest
demagoguery being used by the left to turn the public against
Social Security reform in 2005. As I
wrote yesterday, Democratic lawmakers have been at the
receiving end of a public backlash against their health care
proposals, and now they’ve been working with their liberal allies
to discredit protesters by painting them as tools of insurers and
the Republican Party. Today, a blogger for liberal activist group
Campaign for America’s Future
equated opponents of liberal health care policies with
Holocaust deniers, and the Democratic National Committee jumped
into the fray today with a statement claiming that, “The
Republicans and their allied groups - desperate after losing two
consecutive elections and every major policy fight on Capitol
Hill - are inciting angry mobs of a small number of rabid right
wing extremists funded by K Street Lobbyists to disrupt
thoughtful discussions about the future of health care in America
taking place in Congressional Districts across the country.”
This is silly. We can argue about how many of the anti-government
health care protesters were encouraged to attend townhall
meetings by larger groups and how many decided to organize at the
local level. But either way, it doesn’t really matter, because
the whole reason activist groups exist is to encourage citizens
who agree with them to get more involved. This is no different
from what unions, liberal activist groups, the DNC, or Obama’s
own Organizing for America are trying to do. During last summer’s
Democratic National Convention, I attended
a number of events in which self-described progressives argued
that it was up to them to make sure that once elected, they
forced Obama to govern as a liberal, just as past movements had
pressured initially reluctant FDR and LBJ to create new social
programs. And after Obama won the presidency on the strength of
his organization, we heard lots about how he would harness his
impressive grassroots apparatus to build public support for his
policies.
If liberal organizations were succeeding in the current health
care debate, they’d simply have larger numbers of people in
support of their policies at all of the townhall meetings,
allowing them to drown out the “small number of rabid right wing
extremists.” Instead, the meetings are being swamped by opponents
of their proposals. Coordinated or not, the attendees of the
meetings are real people with real concerns about what is being
discussed in Washington. The fact that liberals are reduced to
whining thus suggests they’re losing the organizing war, and that
they know it. With that said, it’s important that conservatives
not get too cocky. Losing is not the same as having lost.
