General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why is DU's popularity waning? (Title edited, explanation within.) [View all]karynnj
(59,504 posts)In the first place, during recent years, foreign policy has only rarely had more than 10% of the posts - and it is unusually below that. There are times - like when bombing Syria was discussed - when foreign policy did drive DU. It is interesting that the development of the coalition to fight ISIS did not generate the same level of discussion -- nor I think did the earlier leaving Iraq.
What is odd here is that DU has always favored "politics" over policy. (Try posting a live blog of the foreign relations or armed services committee - even with friends planning to watch, it was hard to keep it on the first page that the people I knew posted it in the JK . I have often found good articles that others post on foreign policy, but usually on threads that never get more than about 10 responses. ) You would have thought the 2014 elections could have driven the posts up -- not down. (It does not seem that the reason was people devoting themselves to GOTV in 2014! )
I wonder if Obama"s coalition against ISIS has itself been something that has made DU slow down. Unlike when Bush attacked Iraq and almost anyone here was very likely adamantly against it, this is different. First of all, some of us trust Obama. More importantly, this is most of the world agreeing that ISIS has to be stopped. It also is so nuanced and so complicated, that tuning out is easy. (Not to mention, what is the alternative?)
In that time frame, there were people who posted that many of the Democratic fund raising letters -- speaking of doom used fear to try to raise money. I wonder if the election results, these letters and the volume of DU posts all reflect some kind of exhaustion. It is often said that the party that shows more enthusiasm, excitement, motivation and purpose will win. After the election, Howard Dean made an insightful comment that the Republicans ran against Obama -- and many Democrats argued they were not Obama. Jon Steward had a brilliant after the election piece - listing all the accomplishments Obama had -- then saying the Republicans must have done this by winning the election because otherwise the Democrats would have spoken of it. (both paraphrases - apologies if wrong).
The other thing - and again many here warned of it - was that a large part of the party was already more focused on 2016. The media drove this, so I have not blaming any potential candidates for this.
What I do blame Hillary Clinton and Leon Pannetta for is that they opted to attack Obama on Syria and leaving Iraq - with Hillary going beyond what she wrote in her book and even saying that Obama's choices could have led to ISIS. If she really thinks this, she could have had that interview with Goldberg in mid November. There was no time sensitivity. The same with Pannetta - he could have waited to put out his book. I think what those things did was to amplify the Republican meme that Republicans keep us safe - and polling shows that Obama near that time lost the edge on that in polls.
One would expect that we should be entering the preprimary and primary periods that I think were among the most lively in the past. I suspect that Hillary dominating the primaries to the degree that people are already attacking ANY criticism as against "our likely nominee" has made this time period less lively than either 2004 or 2008.