Whack-proof. I signed a nifty, quick online petition this morning addressed to congressional Democrats, whose simple message is: "Howard Dean speaks for me." Go thou, and do likewise.

Though the message may, indeed, have already gotten through (not that there's anything wrong with overkill in these matters): let's take note of a couple of reports coming from the weekend's meeting of the DNC executive committee. From Reuters, via dKos:

Democratic National Committee leaders embraced feisty party boss Howard Dean on Saturday and urged him to keep fighting despite a flap over his blunt comments on Republicans. ...

"I hope Governor Dean will remember that he didn't get elected to be a wimp," said DNC member Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a South Carolina state representative. "We have been waiting a long time for someone to stand up for Democrats." ...

"Howard Dean is going to be much more aggressive, much more outspoken and much more of a risk-taker outside the Beltway than any chairman has been. We knew that," said Alvaro Cifuentes, chairman of the DNC Hispanic caucus.

"We have to get our politics out of Washington. We cannot continue to be held captive by party leaders who I respect but who have to play their own local politics," Cifuentes said, calling congressional Democrats "timid" and the flap over his comments "mostly a Beltway play." ...

Several DNC members said Dean had done what he promised -- shift the party's focus to local races rather than concentrate solely on the White House, and pump money into "red" states dominated in recent years by Republicans.

And this, still more telling, from Mike Allen in the WaPo:

"People want us to fight, and we are here to fight," Dean said during a quarterly meeting of the party's 64-member executive committee. "We are not going to lie down in front of the Republican machine anymore."

Dean's aides said he now realizes he needs to choose his words more carefully but plans to keep the pressure on Republicans.

Several key Democrats had said early last week that Dean should resign but concluded by week's end that there was no viable movement to oust him. Dean yesterday embraced his reputation for volatility, saying he is being buoyed by activists and donors. At one point, Chicago alderman Joseph A. Moore had trouble getting recognized and joked that next time he would "jump up and down."

It's the hoariest of cliches in Left Blogovia, the success the right wing's "work the refs" strategy has had in making the national media safe for all forms of conservative propaganda. It's somewhat less remarked on how useful, even central, that strategy is in coordinating the winger political base. When rightist figures come under mainstream criticism (though how rarely for mere rhetorical excess!), a significant population is already inoculated against it: the "liberal" media is simply showing its bias again. Criticism thus confirms the "liberal media" myth, and strengthens the identification of the base with its leadership.

I take the stories emerging from the DNC meeting as confirmation that a similar process has now taken hold within the Democratic rank and file. In sharp contrast to where the early reaction that followed last week's Dean "gaffes" was leading, it seems that HoDo's hand has, if anything, been strengthened: the liberal/left has its own narrative of media perfidy firmly in place, and the MSM's transparent interest in organizing another round of Dean-baiting has managed to do nothing more, really, than reinforce that part of the story in which Howard is the lefty John McCain, the maverick they hate because he tells it straight.

Our narrative has a couple of prongs, of course: the corporate media, become a crypto-right institution from a combination of privileged laziness and political cowardice, is mated in it with the national Democratic leadership, too beholden to inside-the-Beltway standards of discourse to be able to do anything except take with polite demurrers what the attack-dog Republicans dish out. Here, too, the reactions of the Edwards, the Bidens, the Obamas, played to the hilt the roles scripted for such figures in the left's own media myth. (By the way, I mean "myth" purely as a term of art here, not a pejorative. True things can be myths, too.) They were too eager to rush into the breach (or what they thought was the breach), too insensitive to the engaged (and enraged) rank and file to realize that the game has changed, and that the blogosphere and the netroots have done a great deal to change it: you fall out of step at your peril now. It's not for nothing that HoDo can claim that he's "buoyed by activists and donors." [I'm reminded, in that highlighted sentence about the coup that couldn't get off the ground, of that episode of the Sopranos where Richie Aprile fails to enlist support from any of the other bosses to take down Tony—and Uncle Junior realizes that he can't ride to power on Richie's back, because he doesn't command respect. Thus putting Richie on the endangered list. Word to the wise, Senator Edwards.] Hell, if I were Dean's PR guy I think I'd try to schedule one or two more of these feeding frenzies over the next year, just to keep things nicely goosed.

Dean has entered the realm, I think, in which attacks on him, on his rhetoric anyway, are only going to legitimize him with the base—and de-legitimize any Democrats foolish or retrograde enough to think about piling on. (Though I imagine a few people are feeling a little too burned, after last week, to try anything like that again soon.) And as little patience as I have with most forms of blog triumphalism, I think it deserves a mention here how remarkable a development this is. The left corporate-media critique I'm gesturing to here—that I only need to gesture to, because it's so ingrained at this point—where was it three or four years ago? Now it's not just on the radar, it's become part of the common consciousness of the activist base of the Democratic party, so much so that the party leadership is being forced to adapt to it. That's an extraordinary work, in a short time, of the formation of opinion, and I think a great deal of that is owing to the relentlessness with which the narrative has been pushed by the blogs.

posted by michael  3:39:11 PM  
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