The Roots of Town Halls

Well, if you read Bob Somerby, you will be reminded forcefully that this has been going on for a long time...

"It is the product of a more competitive media atmosphere"

What? There's less media competition now than ever before. More outlets don't matter if there are fewer owners pulling the strings. Healthy media competition would have provided a viable alternative to this decade's right wing lovefest years before MSNBC dared to put Olbermann on the air.

It's a fair point by Krugman, but the main reason I was a fan of Obama's on this point was not the idea that he would reduce the anger of the opposition, but that over time his responses would diffuse it. He has a great way of making his argument seem completely reasonable and opponents of his seem completely unreasonable. For me, that was most important for our foreign policy, but it's also handy for domestic stuff.

No, it began back in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations when they began chanpioning interest groups and narrow constituencies engendering identity politics. When Kennedy stole the election with the help of Mayor Daley and Johnson decided to demonize Goldwater because he couldn't win on his record. It may have reached it's apogee in 1994 but it started way before.

Excellent point. If you are right, does it make sense for people to discuss how certain provisions in the policy will play politically or to discuss the strengths or weaknesses of political messaging strategies? Are bipartisan policy debates even meaningful?

It seems that the rational strategy for the Democratic party would be to just ram through the best legislation they can.

Ezra I'm glad you put all this into words.

It's all about the way politics and the corporately managed media are nowadays. Structural, as you say, not situational.

Personally I blame the dream state that Reagan offered, which many accepted, and which somehow has persisted long beyond its shelf-life.

But I note the other commenters, maybe it was the Dems who started it. I agree with rpy1 that Obama in the midst of this will produce an effect over the long term to change this structure, largely I think by illustrating it in ways the public as a whole can see.

I agree that the polarization of the electorate follows from these causes, but not the quality of the debate. The Left and the Right do not feel equally constrained by evidence. When liberals say "Bush lied. People died.", they have particular lies and deaths they can adduce and a plausible story of the causal connection between them. When conservatives say "Obama lies, Grandma dies", they're merely parroting the Left to taunt them -- they have no actual lies or deaths in mind.

Passionate debate is not bad. Dishonest arguments and intimidation are.

I don't disagree, but I would point out that certain Presidents can exacerbate the situation, and some can calm it down a little. Part of that is "diffusing it", as stated above. Part of it may be simply engendering less of that blind rage in the first place. The change in our tone MUST come from the bottom up, but a President can facilitate that change.

I don't know if Obama's gonna make things better or exacerbate it. It's a long term project, we're not gonna know in the middle of his first legislative battle. But no one really expected him to have immediate, effortless success, anyway.

Friedersdorf has been saying the choice to pursue ambitious, large-scale reform rather than more incremental changes facilitates misunderstanding, what with thousand-page bills and so forth. See http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-11/why-obamacare-scares-america/full/. Further incrementalism might be financially and patient-care-wise iiresponsible, but we need very much to address this objection squarely, I think, if we're going to optimally respond to fearmongering.

"It is not the product of this health-care bill. These are the politics of our time, and they'll have to change from the bottom up, not the top down."

I dunno, it might help if we had a president who was above partisanship and led from the center, as if he were the leader of his country rather than his followers. We haven't seen much of that style of leadership - certainly not recently.

I agree that the gerrymandering of congressional districts and proliferation of media outlets and narrowcasting has contributed to the partisan rancor. But, on balance, I think the proliferation of media outlets has been salutary as there is a greater diversity of news/opinion.

dfhoughton -

"The Left and the Right do not feel equally constrained by evidence."

It's natural for people to find the arguments which confirm their biases to be more compelling. IMO, if you truly think yourself (and your side) less susceptible to dishonsesty/irrationality/rancor you are, I feel, deluding yourself. You suffer from a a hallmark of partisanship: the bias blind spot.

"But no one really expected him to have immediate, effortless success, anyway."

I think part of the difficulty that health-care reform is running into comes from the fact that the administration did expect it to be immediate and effortless. Obama sets a deadline, Congressional Democrats come together as one with a plan, and it's a done deal before recess. That fell apart, and it became clear that no one had really thought through how to sell reform to the public.

"...an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1)." – Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman

Prime evidence from just two days ago:

A front webpage New York Times article (at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/health/policy/11health.html?hp ) begins:

"The White House on Monday started a new Web site to fight questionable but potentially damaging charges that President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health care system would inevitably lead to “socialized medicine,” “rationed care” and even forced euthanasia for the elderly."

How is, "forced euthanasia for the elderly" a questionable charge, and not a flat-out outrageous lie?

For more on this see: http://richardhserlin.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-york-times-forced-euthanasia-not.html .

As others have been saying, it's not that we thought any Democrat would be exempt from the attacks, but rather that we hoped the response would be somewhat more constructive, or at least less damaging to the Democratic cause by not escalating and personalizing the contentiousness. With Hillary Clinton, especially on health care, we were afraid that there would be issues of personal history with the personalities and issues involved. Moreover, some of us simply felt that if we were condemned to endure the insane attacks of the reactionaries, at least let's experience in some type of new iteration, rather than simply experiencing an exact rerun of the 1990s, down to the exact same personalities. You could call it an aesthetic preference.

there are highly organized political campaigns conducted by both parties, but seemingly more effectively by the GO, that are designed to capture/shape the media narrative (local, regional, or national) and inluence public opinion (as measured in public opinion polls)

everyone knows the "swiftboar" campaign was blatantly false and everyone agrees it hurt john kerry's campaign

fighting for light in the current news is the us attorney scandal where tradtional gop "vote fraud" scare tactics are revealed openly for all to see

the healthcare narrative should not be "harry and louise", or "death panels", or rising health care costs

the healthcare narrative should be what political media campaigns are being waged, who is running them, who is participating in them, and who is paying for them,

the media does not appear to be capable of telling that story