March 19, 2006
Crashing the Gate by Jerome Armstrong & Markos Moulitsas Zuniga
I have a hard time finding books from the left I find interesting and this is another example of why. The Authors write,
"By late August 2005 we were at a cabin in Whitefish, Montana, with the first draft of the book due in a mere five weeks. We'd planned the Montana retreat months in advance to wrap up the book, yet we found ourselves scrapping all that we had written and starting from scratch."and it shows. They have produced a book that spends its first half retelling paranoid, vitriol fill tirades about the Bush presidency with the vulgar expletives edited out to give the book that PG rated feel. After this shallow raw meat to make the faithful happy they shelled out the money for the text they go on to talk about how everyone needs to become a rebel without a cause they can talk about.
It is telling that much of the book is spent talking about the left’s effort to find a message appealing to the electorate other then “choice” (killing unborn babies), “corporate responsibility” (expansion of government control of business), “union growth” (forcing more people to contribute to causes they don’t support), “United Nations negotiation” (turning our national security over to an incompetent and corrupt world body) and every other pet special interest that comes along. The book spends quite a bit of time talking about how these special interests (which are the base) should shut up or be ostracized from the debate unless they can keep their mouths shut until the party can manage to win. At least five cases are citing how the candidate managed to win an election by making sure the core issues of the Democratic Party were not ever brought up. The entire conclusion is spent bemoaning a coherent national message that would have broad based appeal.
So lacking a message to explain the Democratic defeat and dismissing the possibility that message may be the cause of defeat our authors blame the DNC and their consultants targeting Shrum in particular (the now 8 time looser). While I do believe they have a good point that the campaign dollars were wasted on these consultants I doubt any other consultant could have done better promoting the so called missing message of the Democratic Party that the authors complain about.
The book is full of instances where partisan blindness prevents the authors from seeing the forest because of the trees. They talk about how republicans are able to quiet and subjugate their special interests (particularly religious) while complaining about how those same interests control of the Republican Party. They talk about large donor control of the Republican Party then talk about how the Democratic Party is finally moving away from large donors (because of McCain-Feingold) and building a small donor network equal to the republicans.
The authors talk about building a big tent party where small differences don’t matter. Several pages were spent complaining about the DNC lack of support for candidates (Dean in particular for whom they worked) they didn’t think represented the best path for the party. How our authors square this with their attacks on Joe Lieberman and their attacks on Dean’s competition for leadership of the DNC is never even noticed. It appears they mean people in the party that have a differing consensus opinion can vote for Democrats as long as they keep their dang mouths shut.
What I find even more fascinating is the change now that our authors have become a part of the establishment. Paul Hacket became a netroots sensation during his house run which he lost (seems the netroots success is not much better then Schrum’s). He later went on to run for senate. He recently dropped out because current party bosses mislead him about a possible challenger and then went around behind his back drying up his donation base with telephone calls. When Hacket angrily dropped out of the race getting all his supporters stirred up in anger at the DNC our two author champions stepped in and tried to quell the agitation by turning on Hacket and supporting the democratic insider that had stepped into the race. So much for bottom up populist activism.
About the only good principled idea advocated in the book is the fifty state strategy. For this they could be commended. But I want the Democratic Party to run on its core values in all fifty states instead of develop the fifty state stealth strategy. If democrat leaders are open and honest about their intentions in all fifty states we could solidify republican control in every state interested in traditional family values free commerce, security and prosperity.
I recommend this book but only as a look into the fever swamp and how shallow it is. It’s fairly short and you can skip the entire thing if you visit the two bloggers websites because very little will be new. But it makes a good primer for those that haven’t. It also has the advantage of being written before the “idealists” completely sold out to their establishment bosses.
Posted by Sid at March 19, 2006 12:48 AM | Book Review
