Post-primary Mortem
In the wake of Tasini and Maloney losing, I’m updating the “Supported Candidates†section of the blog. Before I take down their flags and fold them into neat little triangles, I wanted to address something in terms of what we can learn from their loss, especially Tasini. Buffalo Girl recently posted something that bugged me, and the more I thought about it, I realized it bugged me because she’s kind of right, and I didn’t have a good answer to what she was saying. The main point I took away:
Essentially, Hillary has no primary. She barely has a general election, honestly, but since her potential Republican opponents are polling at 31% or 35% and Tasini is at 15%, what reason does she have to pay attention to him over the Republicans? Like it or not, progressives have to face reality. You are not getting Hillary’s attention. Try something else.
I like to consider myself a member of the Reality-Based Community â„¢, so this hit me square in the forehead. As did this:
There is no substantial progressive movement with any real strategy or momentum to either impact Hillary Clinton’s record in any way or give her any sort of a run for her ginormous stacks of money, and anybody who thinks otherwise needs to check in at the front desk of Hotel Reality for a message. This is no way to build a progressive movement.
That’s for damn sure. We’ve seen that with the unusual rise of the popularity of this site in such a short time. We can’t be THAT awesome. I attribute a lot of it to the fact that there’s not much else out there, aside from a few fellow progressives. Yes, we’re connecting. Yes, we’re organizing. But we’ve got a long way to go to catch up to the right wing noise machine, or heck, even the centrist machine (I see Hillary as being the driver seat of that machine, in NY at least). There are a lot of good progressive organizations out there, doing great things (e.g. MetroJustice, DfA, and others). What can we do to magnify our efforts and effect, so we’re not always fighting uphill to the left?
So what to do? How do you cause a shift? Well, hate to tell y’all this, but it’s going to take long hard work. You have to elect more progressives to local and state office. You agitate on specific issues and legislation with Hillary, similar to this recent local action that encouraged Chuck Schumer to come out in favor of Net Neutrality. You have to organize for the long term, look for better candidates, raise more money, build more long term support. You have to deal with the reality of those who don’t support you and why, and find other tactics besides temper tantrums and guilt trips to persuade people.
Well, yeah. We agree—though instead of a shift, we call it a “turningâ€. Tomato, tomahto. (Or Tomatoe if you’re Dan Quayle.) Another example was our local MoveOn chapters spurring Kuhl to drop his sponsorship of the horrid Social Security Privatization last year. And long-shot candidates aren’t always quixotic. There’s a documented phenomenon called “issue uptakeâ€, where issues raised by the challenger are taken up by the incumbent. The question is, is Tasini’s 17% enough to make Hillary uptake anything?
We’re committed to fundamentally and strategically shifting the local mindset towards the progressive end of the spectrum, so Tasini’s anti-Iraq-War message resonates with more folks. So Maloney’s holistic approach to combatting Medicaid fraud (i.e. investigating providers/pharma instead of just recipients) gets him elected instead of just consoled as a “rising star” after the fact.
So, how about these for some goals?
- Short-term, we get the remaining progressives on our “Supported Candidates†list elected. Donate and volunteer.
- Medium-term, we do everything we can to get Clean Money/Clean Elections enacted in NY. This is a strategic playing-field-leveling action that will piss off the lobbyists and corporate interests, while democratizing access to, well, democracy.
- Long-term, we foster sustainable, progressive infrastructure round these parts, through blogs, think-tanks, workshops, and/or whatever else makes sense. (Should we do this one before or after solving world hunger?)
Obviously there’s some details to be filled in. Okay, a lot of details. So I invite Buffalo Girl and anyone reading this to weigh in with any suggestions. Or maybe we should have a summit offline. Buffalo Girl, care to drive to Rochester for Drinking Liberally some Thursday night? Drinks are on us.
Related posts:
Heh, thank! I would if I were in New York at the moment, but I’m on a campaign that shall not be named in another state, until after the election…. Thanks for taking my post to heart, though.
I would suggest the following: do a proper survey of the progressive landscape in NY State, and find the best examples from other states, and beyond the ones obvious to bloggers. Citizen Action comes to mind. I heard about The Blue Tiger Dems recently, so they are worth checking out further. And look at community organizations that are being effective like PUSH in Buffalo. Then go from there.
The Blue Tiger Dems link didn’t seem to work.
You know what else? I think the focus needs to be less on leaders like Hillary, and more on the actual people of New York. If we want to elect more progressive leaders then we need more progressive voters. You need to change their minds first.
I think the keys are:
(1) bringing progressive organizations together
(2) bringing more progressive voters into an organized system (which I think is best done via blogs and other such things)
(3) getting more people to to do simple things like write LTE’s, call ABC, give $20 to a local candidate, watch Olbermann instead of CNN. These little things add up quickly.
Tasini won in the city of Ithaca and got 42% of the vote county wide.
Now THAT’s an interesting measure. His message obviously resonated with that area. I assume Ithaca being home to Cornell and Ithaca College, along with Ithaca itself being a progressive-minded town, was a major contributor to that.
Inspiring. I’d like to think of it as a preview of what’s possible if the progressive movement eventually has that kind of impact all across upstate.
Either that, or that’s where his family lives. Ithaca ain’t that big. . .
But, I’ll be posting more later about all this.
Looking forward to it!
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Hillary?…
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[...] DragonFlyEye continues a discussion (which also involves Rochester Turning) about the failed Jonathan Tasini candidacy entitled How Do You Solve a Problem Like Hillary? So even among the progressives in NY, there was only the most tenuous support of acing Hillary. We might have greater objections to her running for Prez, but that’s another story. So what, exactly, was Tasini’s candidacy supposed to have accomplished? I think that a lot of people got caught up in the notion that we could all ride the Anti-War Rage Bus right into the White House. But also there is something to be said for hitting a candidate where it hurts: in the polls. One can argue (as indeed Buffalo Girl does) that this was not accomplished because Tasini did not take the primary. I would argue that when 15% of what should be a locked constituency in the Democratic Party votes for a single-issue candidate (and hey, that’s what this was all about, even if he had loads of other great ideas) over you, you’d be a fool not to notice. [...]