Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Matt Stoller has an interesting post at Open Left, where he claims that Obama was unable to properly respond to this Jeremiah Wright business because he didn’t have the progressive community behind him.  And why aren’t Stoller’s netroots aggressively supporting Obama, the most left wing Democratic front runner in decades?

Obama is not a part of any progressive fights, so there’s no independent organizing going on on his behalf from people who actually understand the right-wing media and how it operates.  He’s decided he’s a post-partisan politician, and when a politician makes that choice, it’s not just a disincentive for partisans to fight for that person.  It becomes structurally impossible to fight for him because the incentives get all out of whack.

There’s two things wrong with this analysis.  The first is that Obama isn’t part of any “progressive fights.”  Sure, I would like it if Obama was aggressively pushing against telecom immunity, but it’s not like he’s been totally absent.  He’s on the right side on FISA.  But more importantly, his presidential campaign is a “progressive fight.”  Last time I checked, electing the most anti-war of the two candidates and perhaps the first civil libertarian candidate would be pretty progressive.  It’s kind of hard to be pushing legislation and working the Senate like Russ Feingold while you’re running for president.

The second part that I think Stoller gets wrong is that Obama has no progressive grassroots support and no one to help him argue away the Wright controversy.  While Obama doesn’t have the full fledged support of, say, Open Left, he has the support of most regular Daily Kos posters and the official endorsement from MoveOn.  And he’s had plenty of people in the blogosphere essentially running interference for him on Wright.  For one – and to be fair, Stoller pointed this out – Obama himself posted on HuffPo to defend himself.  This post was lauded and picked up all over the place.  There’s also the little matter that Obama doesn’t really need My DD or Open Left as badly as their proprietors would make it seem.  That’s because he’s managed to build up his own grassroots support base that is separate from the self-anointed progressive organizations and websites who see it as their role to have candidates strive for their affections and then to grant them support.  Kinda like Greek leaders traveling to Delphi or European kings seeking the blessing of the pope before a war.  Obama is the one who has 1,000,000 donors – many of them small donors.  He is, if I may exaggerate a bit, the apotheosis of how the progressive organizing and fund raising model, and maybe that’s why some of the netroots elites are cool to him.