Blog: March 2008

The Boston Globe attended a bar where Duke alumni and fans watched the pivotal game against UNC, and interviewed Jamie and Erika:

"I think people just want to be around that same energy," said Erika Alders, class of '04, who runs Duke Club activities with her husband Jamie, class of '02.

Hooray!

Unfortunately, they got the graduation years mixed up. Is this a consequence of reporter expectations that wives are always younger than husbands? In only 13% of married couples is the woman more than one year older. Did this reporter write down Jamie '04, Erika '02 and assume she must have switched them?

In mid-January, I went back to the Google office to see some old co-workers and return some computer equipment that was in my NYC apartment. I grabbed a few photos of some of my favorite cute things around the office, the sorts of things that make working at Google a little less stuffy and sterile than your typical company.

My grandmother wanted very much to live to see a female President. Unfortunately, that was not to be, and moreover, increasingly likely not to be this year for the rest of us either. I would very much like to see a female President in my lifetime. But I'd prefer a different Democratic candidate this year. I've been holding off any new posting about Obama-Clinton out of respect for Grandma Gloria, but it's time.

I actually don't share many of my friends' reasons for disliking Senator Clinton. I don't approve of her war vote, but there are many areas in which she'd probably govern more progressively than Obama and many in which she'd govern more conservatively. For me, the choice comes down to one issue: I don't trust her senior advisors.

Her inner circle comprises the same people who invented triangulation and stopped trying to lead the public toward understanding progessive viewpoints. They're the same people who criticized the 50-state strategy, the idea of organizing in every state and every district rather than focusing on the narrowest 51% needed for victory while ignoring everyone else. The senior people running Clinton's campaign presided over a tremendous decline of the Democratic Party into a frightened, small-c conservative and in many ways large-C Conservative bunch who think if they say as little as possible (what Lessig calls tiny speech) and talk to as few people as possible, they can hang on to power just a little longer.

In The Nation, Ari Berman chronicles the Clinton camp's cold war with Howard Dean—undermining his efforts in 2006, preparing to build a parallel DNC last year. The DNC used to be nothing more than a fundraising machine that lost all its institutional memory every four years. Now it has built a powerful, ongoing base of funders and databases of voters to organize over the long-term. The fact that Clinton's people like James Carville and Rahm Emanuel would choose to throw away what so many have worked so hard to build shows how short-term and out of date their thinking is.

From their beginnings in the early 2000s, through the 2004 election, to the Congressional victories in 2006 and on to today, progressive political blogs have pushed many issues but one major narrative underlay them all: Democrats need to be less cowardly. When they speak up for what they believe and fight for what is right, people respect and vote for them; when they hide in fear, as they did on Iraq even with majorities in Congress and an unpopular President, they lose respect. Strength and conviction win elections. But the Clinton advisors do not believe this, and their ascendancy in the party would turn back the clock to old strategies and more failure.

We don't know for sure how Barack Obama will govern on the issues. But we do know he practices the strong form of politics. When Clinton attacked him with the "red phone" ad, Obama fought back—successfully. When Republicans attacked him for not wearing a flag lapel pin, Obama didn't race to get a flag tattoo, he explained himself coherently.

This is the kind of President we need. I don't know if Obama would appoint a bunch of Republicans to his cabinet. But I do know that his senior advisors won't tell him to half the states in the country, fire the new organizing talent in the party, and wish that blogs and grassroots activists would just write a check and shut up the way the Democratic rank and file did in the 80s and 90s with we-know-what success.