For love or money

By Dave Anderson:

I am still digesting Netroots Nation. Yesterday was a wonderful day to play with my daughter and not think too much about politics. Over the next few days, I'll try to highlight some of the themes that I picked up on over the weekend. Afghanistan is within the progressive foreign policy netroots a mixed bag as there are caucuses of people who think it is a bad idea when Vietnam is being brought up as an apt comparison, others think that something is odd but they need to think more about the problem, and finally the schitzophrenic wannabee insiders who acknowledge that COIN is extraordinarily tough to do 'right', significant political and economic constraints exist against doing it 'right' and Obama can be trusted uber alles. Drug prohibition, harm reduction/mitigation and legalization was another interesting topic that came uip. Healthcare dominated the conversation.

Nate Silver during one of the first panels of the conference noted that he has a large confidence interval for net Democratic seats lost in the House. He estimated the reasonable dispersion of a loss between 20 and 50 seats. Charlie Cook said he would not be surprised if the Democrats lost 20 seats in the House as the political wind, intensity and organizational differences are much less pronounced between the two parties now than either in 2006 or 2008. They both identifed the intensity gap as one of their key indicators; conservative activists are active, and liberal/progressive activists are not right now. I have no dispute with that statement.

And the Democratic Party as a whole is shitting on its activist core. Bill Clinton in his keynote argued that liberals should shut up and accept anything that Max Baucus and three conservative, Glen Beck liking compatriots. Darcy Burner in the closing keynote argued both that healthcare is vital, the half a loaf strategy is bad, and half a loaf is about what we can expect, so we should go and fight hard for something that the vast majority of that room think is a watered-down, poorly positioned, poorly argued Blue Dog protection piece. Yeah --- that will go well.

So right now, it is probable that the Democrats will lose double digit seats in the House (mainly Blue Dogs who don't quite realize that they are dependent far more on a homogenous national trend today than twenty or thirty years ago) and the best thing that comes out of healthcare is going to be at best mediocre from pretty much any evaluatory standard. And the netroots activists are fine with this. If anything, most of the interesting buzz at the convention was murmurs that quite a few people would be willing to either fully sit out the 2010 cycle or do the professional de minimas activism unless there is significant change that is believable.

Politics is like sex -- you keep on doing it if you are either being loved or being paid. Right now the progressive netroots are neither being loved nor paid.