Sirota and the "scandal" of small money

David Sirota notes the latest bit of trumped-up outrage put in circulation by those whose own behavior is far worse:

The Hotline, the uber-insider journal of Beltway conventional thought, claims today to have a scandalous scoop of “opposition” research on Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (D). Are you ready for this? There’s a YouTube video of Obama asking a working class crowd in Cleveland for - gasp! - small campaign contributions. Obama, the Hotline breathlessly recounts, dares to ask “everybody here to pony up five dollars, ten dollars for this campaign. I don’t care how poor you are, you’ve got five dollars.”

Is Obama guilt-tripping the poor? After all, five dollars to the poor is a lot more than five thousand dollars is to the wealthy. How dare he!

And so on.

Now strictly speaking, Hotline is not calling it a scandal, they're offering it up to their readers as oppo--a different animal.

Oppo research is not a tool of enlightened discussion (which, by comparison, calling something a 'scandal' almost is, reminiscent as it is of the tasteful charm of a Restoration comedy of manners); it's not an exercise in subtlety. It's all about finding something smelly and sticky you can throw at the other person, regardless of facts, logic, or consistency, and hoping that at minimum they'll lose precious time and momentum while they try to unstick it (and while you wait with the next bit of oppo cradled lovingly in your hand behind your back, like a muddy snowball).

Oppo research appreciates a juicy, splattery, gossipy scandal, of course, but its bread and butter is locating positions, the more obscure the better, that have changed over time (even over decades) or the long-unnoticed quote or action which, when stripped out of historical context, paints the opponent as hypocritical, extremist, the tool of extremists, etc.

(For example: Hillary's senior thesis at Wellesley about activist/radical/provocateur/hellraiser Saul Alinsky has long been the holy grail of Hillary Conspiracy Theorists, is now available for reading at her alma mater.

And what could be more obscure than a decades-old thesis? Trust me on this one.

Expect Candidate Clinton to have to expend at least some time and trouble in the next year arguing against memes-in-the-making like this:

[Chris] Lacivita co-produced the "Swift Boat" ads in the 2004 presidential race questioning Democratic Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam service. He told MSNBC.com that no fact from a candidate's life is too old for negative advertising.

"I think the last election cycle proved that there's no statute of limitations," said the Republican political consultant. "What someone did or said 35 years ago is certainly fair game, especially if you're running for president of the United States.

"I have not read her research paper. Though I can assure you that I will very soon," Lacivita added with a laugh.

He began to brainstorm what such an ad might look like:

"You have to make it relevant to world events today.

"Maybe you look at the contrast. What year did Hillary write this paper? 1969.

"And where was John McCain in 1969? A POW in Vietnam."

A total non sequitur--linking one person's undergraduate thesis topic with another, unrelated person's war experience, the only connection being that they happened in the same year, almost 40 years ago. Might as well have linked her thesis topic with the total tonnage of pig iron produced in Great Britain that year. But attack ads, whisper campaigns, and swiftboating do not build on what is logically rigorous, and only coincidentally at best on what is true. They build on what sticks, however temporarily.

Lacivita, of course, is Satan's spawn. But like many of the radical right's tools, oppo research-based attacks are potentially quite effective--only providing you're unprincipled enough to use them. Come to that, it slightly boggles the mind to realize that I myself, having published about Alinsky in the past, could risk being tarred with the same right-wing oppo brush if I were to stick my head above ground in the coming months as a presidential candidate with a multi-million dollar warchest and 100% name recognition. But I digress.)

I quibble with Sirota about that one fiddly little detail, but I'm certainly in agreement with his overall point:

The real scandal, of course, is the shock that emanates from the Beltway when a major political candidate has the audacity to ask regular people to be a big part of a presidential campaign. Washington would like us to believe that there is only one way to run campaigns these days: by getting a bunch of corporate lobbyists from D.C. and a few super-rich people from New York and Hollywood into a few ballrooms to bundle tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions. It's government of, by and for Big Money - a Smokybackroom-ocracy - and any other model is seen as a big scandal. If you are wondering why so many politicians sound like Halliburton press flacks or ExxonMobil PR representatives, and why the entire political debate could be dominated by the comments of a Hollywood billionaire to the New York Times' glorified gossip columnist, look no further: it's because of this innately corrupt model, and the media's glorification of it.

But there is another model that very few people talk about - the one where lots of working people give lots of small dollar contributions. People like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) have been doing this for years. Howard Dean did it in his presidential primary run. It's a much harder path, of course, because it's much harder to organize lots of people than it is to organize a few wealthy fat cats. But in the absence of public financing of elections, campaigns that try to rely on lots of little contributions are the next closest thing to a small-d democratic election system.

We can add Portland mayor Tom Potter to the list of those who made it into office on small contributions, and Portland to the list of places where public financing of elections is at least getting a road test.

Reading: Sirota, Obama, and the Great Education Myth

Sirotablog has a clear-eyed take on the spectacle of the media adoration of Barack Obama as he flirted with the voters of New Hampshire over the weekend.

It was a wild-card candidate's dream: Days later there's no transcript of what Obama actually said, but there's bags and bags of punditry on what his presence in the Granite State means. Sirota gives us the wrap-up of the speech, available from C-SPAN's web site (which is almost as good as burying it under the Rocky Mountains), and notes that, about three-quarters of the way through his speech, Obama brings up the topic of globalization and its implication for American children, who are "competing against children not just in California or Florida or Illinois they are competing against folks in Calcutta or Beijing."

Sirota responds:

Sounds good so far - sounds like we’re going to get some honest straight talk about how the rules of trade are rigged to protect patents, copyrights and intellectual property, but not to protect human rights, union rights, wage levels or the environment, and that such a tilted playing field unfairly forces Americans to compete with slave labor. But that’s not what we get from Obama.

Sirota then quotes the next paragraph from Obama's remarks, in which the Senator holds up support for American education as the cure to the ills of globalization.

Busted! The Great Education Myth--the belief that increasing the availability of education will be the solution to problems that weren't caused by availability of education--is a marvelous bait-and-switch tactic, but not one you'd want to stake the future of American workers on.

Sirota:

[T]he government’s own data shows that, in fact, all of the major economic indicators are plummeting for college grads. You can make everyone in America a PhD, and all you would have is more unemployed PhD’s - it would do almost nothing to address the fact that the very structure of our economy - our tax system, our trade system and our corporate welfare system - is designed to help Big Money interests ship jobs offshore and lower wages/benefits here at home.

That gets us to exactly why the Great Education Myth is so often repeated by politicians: because it is the one myth that simultaneously looks like an economic panacea to the public and avoids offending the Big Money interests that bankroll political campaigns. Talk of reforming our trade policy to equalize capital protections (copyrights/patents) and human protections (labor/wage/enviro) threatens Corporate America’s efforts to use foreign economic desperation to increase the bottom line. Talk of ending massive taxpayer subsidization of job outsourcing threatens the profit margins of the major political donors like General Electric that are benefiting from such gifts. Talk of cutting corporate welfare threatens the corporate welfare queens that write big checks to politicians. Talk of sending more taxpayer dollars to schools even if that prescription will do very little to address the country’s structural economic challenges - well, that threatens nobody. […]

[Obama] is a man who seems caught between his background as a community organizer in touch with real people, and his current existence surrounded by Washington insiders and consultants who, by profession, push politicians to avoid challenging power. Peddling the Great Education Myth is the ultimate way to avoid challenging power. If this is just a fleeting tactic and Obama goes on to get serious about the real heart of our economic challenges, then he may be the great presidential candidate Democrats need. But if this aversion to confronting power previews the rest of his campaign, there will indeed be a major opening for a real populist candidate to win the nomination and the presidency.

Sirota's piece is going onto the Readings list on the sidebar.