Wanted: Funders for a new "There You Go Again" Brigade

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http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/26/billarys_onetwo_punch_has_chan/

Billary's One-Two Punch Has Changed the Game
By Jim Sleeper - March 26, 2008, 10:45PM

The latest one-two punch from Billary has done it: I hereby call for a third campaign, one that can endure through the general election.

Relax, but just a bit: I don’t mean a resurrected John Edwards or a third-party bid like Ralph Nader’s or, in fact, any campaign with an actual candidate. I mean a campaign called “The Real Firestorm,” a tight, flying wedge of citizen volunteers who, like the best early civil-rights demonstrators, will physically face Bill or Hillary -- or any wayward Obama surrogate or Republican swift-boater or journalist who’s helping to gin up the latest “firestorm” or “uproar” – and chant at them, at a photo-op moment, “There you go again! There you go again!”

Ronald Reagan immortalized the charge in a 1980 jab at Jimmy Carter. Here, it would mean, “There you go again, subverting the civic-republican truths and trust we need, not as Democrats but as Americans.”

This campaign will need funding and a few charismatic leaders, “conservative” as well as “liberal.” But most of all, it’ll need strategy and troops capable of waking up enough other people to shame Bill and other swift-boaters into silence. Here’s why, and a bit about how.

The one-two punch that brought me to this was, first, Hillary’s pronouncement that we can’t choose our relatives but we can choose our pastors – another slick truism, typically (that is, badly) calculated to be just behind the Jeremiah Wright curve she hoped to ride; second, there came Bill’s comment that he and Hillary aren’t “quitters.”

I hear you, Bill, but here’s the thing, old Buddy: Every time you’ve opened your mouth this year, you’ve made me want to quit you and Hill, with a tear in my eye, as I never expected I'd have to do.

See, Bill, you just keep on reminding us that your way of not being a quitter has a certain shameless, Jack-in-the-Box quality to it that the commentator Jack Beatty calls your “tumescent narcissism.” It just keeps bouncing back at us, again and again, with a silly grin on its face, just like the Wall Street Journal’s gelatinous sleuth-pundit John Fund.

It’s gotten so bad, Bill, that you've made me revive my own passing thought of January 30 here at TPM that there ought to be a “There you go again!” campaign against Republican swift-boaters and their neo-con covers such as David Brooks, who, for all his seemingly post-partisan prevarications, is just positioning himself to reel readers in for McCain, when he’ll come in for the kill on the Democratic nominee.

You know all about these types, Bill, but now you yourself remind me of them. You make me remember what I told the Washington Post on January 15, when your camp started shuffling the race-card: "Every time these people open their mouths and engage race,” I said, “they are greasing the skids for the Republican Swift-boaters and reminding voters of the Democrats' indulgence of racial squabbling."

It got so bad that I had to caution your camp’s other shameless Jack-in-the-Box, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, Hillary’s Arthur Schlesinger Jr.-in-waiting, for his breathakingly underhanded assault on Obama’s people as race-baiters. And now you’ve even got Hillary -- who we all hoped could control you -- into the act herself, trying to keep the Rev. Wright round-robin going.

That does it, Bill. Herewith, an open letter to George Soros and to… Well, I might have said Bill Buckley, were he still with us, but surely some other worthy conservative will step forward.

Please fund a campaign, called something like "The Real Firestorm," that stages photo-op protests that even our perverse and fickle news media can’t ignore. Nothing as bad as what the Republicans staged at the Miami Board of Elections in November, 2000, mind you. But almost.Recruit and train thousands of ordinary citizens to show up, physically, and chant "There you go again!" at progenitors of swift-boating and its media enablers.

No matter whether those progenitors are Billary or the new Karl Roves of either party, or the Limbaughs or Drudges, or –and this is important – the supposedly more moderate reporters and columnists, like TIME's Joe Klein or NEWSWEEK'S Evan Thomas and their more plodding emulators in city rooms and bureaus who fan "firestorms" and "uproars" based on little more than press releases or leaks that involve mainly just the players and the journalists.

George Soros himself proposed the “There you go again!” slogan, on a panel I caught on C-Span, very much as I’d proposed it two weeks before him here at TPM.

The purpose of such a civic campaign, as its charismatic public leaders would have to say again and again, would be to make very clear that millions of Americans are gagging on having their politics degraded with these tactics, that we’re sick and tired of being stampeded by operators who goose the fears and hatreds latent in most of us.

True enough, it works. I know it rather well. Most Americans, stressed and distracted, can easily be induced to behave as Walter Lippmann said they do in "Manufactured Consent" back in the 1920s: They’re easily bum-rushed into “uproars” of one kind or another. At best, Lippmann complained, they’re like playgoers who enter a theater during the second act, decide who’s the villain and who’s the hero, and leave before the final curtain, set in their conclusions.

But Lippmann's insight is exactly the reason we should have this campaign. The country can just as well have a counter-"manufacturing" of consensus about who the villains truly are as it can the stuff we're getting now. With enough backing and strategy, Americans can remind one another, in an effective, well-grounded way, that we’re better than those whom “The Real Firestorm” campaign would target and burn, the people who, as consultants, campaign operatives, horse-race political reporters, and power-columnists, are targeting the public for personal interest and/or profit more than for anything else.

When Americans are reminded how much better they want to be, they sometimes do become better. Examples in living memory begin with the early civil-rights movement, which also reminded us that even the best "grass roots" movements require leadership and planning by people with enough resources, savvy, and discipline to revive and mobilize other people’s wounded faith.

Too much money and planning is going into the worst alternatives. Yes, Obama's campaign means to be just what I'm calling for. But it can't be. Its preeminent end-game has to be winning institutional power, in a zero-sum game. Obama’s deeper end-game -- a better politics for all -- is real, too, but captive to the first goal, inevitably so.

That’s where others come in. In a republic, making public life go well has to be some people’s primary goal, even beyond winning itself. The counterintuitive truth here is that Americans find and fulfill themselves best -- as members of the early civil-rights did -- by upholding certain values that aren’t rewarded in zero-sum games and that, in fact, are degraded and ground under foot there.

The civil-rights demonstrators looked almost foolish at first, or at best, hopeless, in standing by those values against the powerful and sophisticated. So might this campaign: There have been "campaign-fairness” commissions before; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg may have been calling for that, sincerely even if only secondarily, in his pursuit of other agendas. Not much comes of them.

What all such efforts have lacked is troops and a strategy at least as good as that of the nation’s founders, So, let’s appeal to Soros or whoever is ready to play Samuel Adams or Gouverneur Morris or Alexander Hamilton: Set up the damned website, already; assemble the strategists, sign up the volunteers, and start taking names of the campaign’s targets -- the political operators and journalists who fan the false firestorms in order to keep us from clicking the remote or, indeed, from straying too far from their conglomerate masters’ agendas.

Find them. Confront them, as peaceful civil-rights demonstrators confronted Bull Connor and subtler, more charming purveyors of oppression. Insist on crediting them with more decency than they’ve shown, and ask them why they can’t show it.

Surround Hillary on the stump, or Sean Wilentz crossing the Princeton campus, or the neo-con New York Sun publisher Seth Lipsky at his hangout at the Harvard Club of New York, or any number of reporters and columnists who are stoking this perversity. And chant, “There you go again!” Help them and everyone who’s watching to understand what’s at stake in your doing this. Film it. Make these failed Americans the targets of the only “firestorm” or “uproar” we need more of right now.