Death To The Consultants
by Tim Russo, Mon Nov 08, 2004 at 09:18:26 AM EST
Where is the inspiration in our party? Like Karl Rove, we've been reduced to a cabal of mad scientists dreaming up some alchemy that would somehow create gold out of the fecal refuse of a focus group. The futility of crafting the perfect "message" has left us soulless, our leaders and candidates, at every level, reading speeches like a kindergarten teacher reads a scripted code of conduct in homeroom.
Vacant, distant, their eyes seeming to look more into themselves for error than into their audience for connection, our highest office holders are caricatures of themselves, appearing unable even to laugh, joke, watch a baseball game, drink a beer, without some crisis group meeting of their consultants.
Where is the soaring rhetoric of possibility? When did the words "together we can" become standard, prerequisite, cliché dogma? The silliness of "hope is on the way" being repeated for the sake of repetition, being printed on placards and distributed by advance teams at rallies, is dismissed on its face by an electorate just too damn tired of hearing it out of the mouth of every single candidate from president to state rep. to county auditor.
I yearn for a Democrat to deliver oratory again. Not like Howard Dean ranting, or Bill Clinton feeling our pain. The field of American candidates is bereft of anyone capable of taking powerful words rarely used, weaving them amongst the American experience universally understood, and thus taking the electorate with him to a higher plane of belief and inspiration.
...for the rest, see extended entry...
The resulting soul searching may be a blessing in disguise. The answers, I suspect, are not in some exit poll, they are within us all. Our party, and our politics, are in need of a long overdue gut check.
America's best ideas, values, foundations, are its easiest to understand. We were founded by a bunch of religious misfits, restless adventurers, tax-hating businessmen, and persecuted ethnic groups who took the absurdly dangerous risk of crossing an ocean on a rickety boat to get to something better. There's a little bit of that in all of us, and our democracy reflects it.
But our politics has become such a reeking cesspool of polls, consultants, and their banal spells concocted out of boiling cauldrons of spin and code words designed to win at the margins, most Americans turn away in disgust.
Taking this science to a new low by making gay bashing the new Jim Crow in Ohio, Bush sneaked his way into the presidency on the back of coded and clandestine support for a same-sex marriage ban. Pennsylvania had no such measure on the ballot; Kerry won PA by the same margin he lost in Ohio. Once again, a candidate resorting to division to bump turnout in his base leaves a country cheated and deceived.
It would be easy to dismiss the voters who responded to this call as unreachable for Democrats, too far from our "values" to merit even the effort. But that would be a mistake...most of those voters are not troglodyte trailer park bigots (though many certainly are).
Most of them have mothers, fathers, grandparents, who came to Ohio on the back of the same "values" we Democrats hold closest to our hearts. They may be fleeing our cities into the never ending sprawl of homogenous suburbia Ohio is becoming, but then again, so are we. Just like us, most are descendants of immigrants, hard working families whose dreams mirror ours, who feel the same deep betrayal of politics leaving them behind, dividing them into camps of "pro-gun" vs. "gun-control", or "pro-choice" vs. "pro-life".
Those same voters can be reached on our terms. They voted for Bill Clinton twice, many are old enough to have voted for liberal giants like Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn many times over. They will probably even vote for Jerry Springer for governor in 2006.
They are Americans in search of inspiration, and given the choice between cynical division on cultural issues versus a higher calling that reaches their souls, they will deny the consultants' game plan every time.
But where is this inspiration in our party? Like Rove, we've been reduced to a cabal of mad scientists dreaming up some alchemy that would somehow create gold out of the fecal refuse of a focus group. The futility of crafting the perfect "message" has left us soulless, our leaders and candidates, at every level, reading speeches like a kindergarten teacher reads a scripted code of conduct in homeroom.
Vacant, distant, their eyes seeming to look more into themselves for error than into their audience for connection, our highest office holders are caricatures of themselves, appearing unable even to laugh, joke, watch a baseball game, drink a beer, without some crisis group meeting of their consultants.
Where is the soaring rhetoric of possibility? When did the words "together we can" become standard, prerequisite, cliché dogma? The silliness of "hope is on the way" being repeated for the sake of repetition, being printed on placards and distributed by advance teams at rallies, is dismissed on its face by an electorate just too damn tired of hearing it out of the mouth of every single candidate from president to state rep. to county auditor.
I yearn for a Democrat to deliver oratory again. Not like Howard Dean ranting, or Bill Clinton feeling our pain. The field of American candidates is bereft of anyone capable of taking powerful words rarely used, weaving them amongst the American experience universally understood, and thus taking the electorate with him to a higher plane of belief and inspiration.
Democrats have as their almost exclusive domain the ability to personify and embody the American experience in this way. Barrack Obama, the new senator from Illinois, seems to have this ability, in the way Mario Cuomo or Jesse Jackson does, to not just speak to an audience, but to stir it. Not just to reach minds and make them understand, but also to reach hearts and make them pound with pride, hope, and possibility.
I spent election day in African American inner city Cleveland polling places. Voter number 100 at the Rainbow Place retirement home on Euclid Avenue walked in at 8:15 a.m. A tall, middle-aged man carrying an umbrella, wearing a suit, walked in and got his ballot, with a stern look in his eyes, facing a twenty minute wait in line for a voting booth. He checked his ballot for hanging chads, made sure he punched the right hole in the ballot, cast it with pride, and went to work.
Somewhere else in Ohio, in a sprawling suburb lily white, someone else went through the same experience, waiting perhaps even longer, in the same rain storm.
Both can remember the sweet smells of grandma's kitchen, the way that snow seemed to fall heavier at Christmastime when they were kids. Both are heartbroken when the Browns lose in overtime, or when an Ohioan dies in Iraq. Both want their kids to stay in Ohio, so when the grandchildren come along they can create those same memories for them.
We can reach them both.
The good news is that the ground on which they stand is more common than the consultants are capable of understanding. We Democrats have that ground, because we've lived it.
Reach for the stars again, Democrats. It's time to tell the consultants to get lost, and invite our parents and grandparents into our strategy sessions...hopefully they'll bring some cookies to the meeting.
Only then can we take American democracy to a new level of positive inspiration rather than negative division, finding the better angels of our nature among the common drama of the American experience.
Tags: General 2008 (all tags)
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