I think this best describes my state of mind right now.

DENVER, COLORADO… HE WERE COME!

You guys and iBrattleboro get the longer version of this story. Hope you like it! – CA

Photo by Bart Nagel

Those were the first ten words written by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga when the Web log Daily Kos was launched in 2002. At the time the Bush Administration was hellbent on invading Iraq. Daily Kos gave people an outlet to vent their frustrations. Then the blog took on a life of its own. It became the medium through which bloggers could organize, take on “the gatekeepers,” and work for political change.

More below the fold.

In his new book, Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era, Markos documents the power of online organizing. In the tradition of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, Markos lays out the game plan for contemporary activists: How to connect, coordinate, and command attention; how to embrace inevitable attacks and make them work for you; and how to design powerful narratives and drive them into the the mainstream. OffTheBus caught up with “the blogfather” recently and discussed the new book.

I live in Brattleboro, Vermont and some notable activists in my community think “people don’t read blogs.” How is it changing the landscape of activism today? How does blogging translate into action and how does “Taking on the System” address that?

Taking on the System is not a book about blogging. It inevitably discusses that because it’s a tool amongst many that activists now have a say in the world around them. Whether it’s politics, culture, music, art, etc. It used to be certain elites would have a monopoly on discussing those issues. What’s happening is technology is taking a sports bar metaphor and allowing people all over the country and the world to discuss the things they care about. Once they start talking about those things, a lot of times, they will act on those issues. Particularly in politics and music. The book talks about how the technology has democraticized the ability of people to gather around the issues they care about and work for change. Blogging is a tool but so is YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, e-mail lists, etc. It’s a way to grow networks and reach out beyond your geographic space. Like if you were in Chicago, you’d basically stuck in Chicago politics, vote for president etc. Basically you’re limited to a ballot in your own precinct. Now people in Alaska can get excited about a senate race in Oklahoma and vice-versa. They can send money, do virtual phone banking, etc. There’s a lot of things they can do to work on the issues that excite them and get involved.    

These same activists in my community are very old-school. They tell me “blogging is chipping away at the power of community and activism.” Do you believe it’s replacing current means and tactics of activism, such as non-violent protests, sit-ins or direct action or is it adding to it? Is blogging (and some of the examples you put forth in “Taking on the System”) winning battles that traditional activist tactics have had problems with in the past?

Well as you read in the book, I’m a critic of traditional protests. I think an effective modern activism campaign requires a strong media component. Because if you do something and nobody hears about it, you’ve basically wasted your time. What you want to do is maximize the number of people that find out about your action and hopefully you can use that attention to bring people over to your side. So you go out in the street and you protest but nobody cares. Everybody has seen it a million times, it’s a hassle a distraction, etc. Generally speaking, they don’t work. In the book, I talk about street protests that didn’t work. It’s not that the tactic is bad, it’s the way it’s traditionally been done. “Let’s all get together and make a lot of noise! Yay! Free Mumia!” That is absolutely useless. It’s almost counterproductive. So you have to have a media strategy and blogs are a medium. It’s one way to get the message out and what I talk about in the book is you work your way up the media hierarchy. You start off with blogs and work your way up. If you are effective and your activites are compelling enough, they will jump over into traditional media outlets. You work your way up the ladder and get more people to know about your action.

One excellent example of that was Cindy Sheehan. Her protest in Crawford, TX began as a blog and e-mail list phenomenon. It worked its way up the ladder. MoveOn started promoting it. Then it jumped over to radio, television, newspapers and it became a huge national sensation. It had a huge affect on the national sentiment on the war in Iraq. Then it started disintegrating because at that point, she was marching traditional protests, demanding attention, visiting Hugo Chavez, it all fell apart at that point. But that initial strategy was very much effective. I don’t think he would have gotten as far without the blogging component.  Blogging is just a tool in the toolbox but it’s clearly a citizen powered media and it’s an essential component to any kind of modern activism. I don’t think the Obama campaign would even exist if it weren’t people powered media.

It seems that the Internet is still in “the silent film” stage in terms of its potential to change society. Where will blogging and political change lead us in to the future?

Ideally, in the perfect world, it would lead us to a more responsive governance. It used to be that the ruling elite, the president, Congress, Washington Post, NYT, and WSJ columnists, etc. If you weren’t a part of the media elite, you were pretty much out of luck. We’ve seen time and time again how columnists love to speak about the heartland and the average Americans, these are millionaires who have lived in Washington for decades and have no clue what people are up to. So we have a medium that empowers people everywhere and they can say what they care about and it’s a lot harder for those elites to speak for everybody else. We’re bypassing those elite media filters and political filters and given that ability, we have a more responsive government to the people not to the gatekeeper elites.

In Feeding the Backlash you talk about Kerry ignoring Swift Boat attacks in the 2004 election. In the book you write the following: “In the heat of the moment you differentiate between credible and effective threats and those that won’t make a ripple in the media landscape.” How do you navigate around which attacks to respond to and which ones not to respond to?

It’s hard. It’s one of those things in hindsight, it might seem very obvious and clear. But in the moment it doesn’t. I also say there are some attacks that help. There’s nothing better for Keith Olbermann’s ratings than Bill O’Reilly having one of his temper tantrums. That stuff is gold. Sometimes being attacked is good and you want to encourage more of that. People will think he/she must be important otherwise why else would O’Reilly attack him? What we’re realizing now is once upon a time it would have been a lot harder for somebody like James Corsi to get the word out. One of the huge components of the Swiftboat ads was online and blogging-based. They spent very little money on these ads and it was pretty much was the biggest factor in John Kerry’s defeat.

I appreciated your chapter “Fight big, win small.” You seem to argue that activists don’t win by going after the whole pie at once. You chip away at it one piece at a time. This is why the GOP has been so successful. Do most progressives not get this?

It’s clearly one of the cruxes of the progressive movement. I think part of it has to do with being a movement that’s very fragmented among various groups. Each of them thinking their issues is the most important and the whole world rest on that issue. They’re constantly in competition against each other. You don’t get that sense among on the right among anti-tax groups, gun groups, and family values folks. They work together with each other, they’re patient and they realize it’s a longterm struggle and they won’t win things overnight. You definitely don’t get that on the left. Everybody seems to think if their issue is not the number one issue on the agenda, then you’re not a real progressive. It’s ugly. But it’s another reason why the right has been successful. It’s very methodical.  It’s their ability to subsume the movement into a common whole that’ made them very powerful. I write about unions and how they once took that approach. Now it’s different. Hopefully it will change. We are a much broader coalition then they are. They’re basically a white, male southern party. It’s a lot easier to keep people in line if that’s your base. With the left, it’s basically everybody else at this point.

This is off tangent but there was a prominent activist from Brattleboro named Marty Jezer whom I admired. He once said “the difference between the way the right and left organize is the right organizes for electoral power – even between elections – whereas the left organizes for self-expression. They right seems to focus on the goal of power whereas the left encourages everyone to do what each individual wants.” Obviously you see that today in so many different ways.

Yeah. I think the smart activists, the ones who are more effective at affecting change relaize there are certain power areas and that’s what you need to influence. You can be as loud and obnoxious as you want but if you’re not reaching the certain crowd (in power) you’re not doing ay good. In the book I talk about the pressure points. You have two pressure points as an activist. You can influence decision makers or you can influence the public. You can’t pick one or the other.  

Because this is just too damn surreal.

Crossposted at Huffington Post’s Off the Bus.

The presidential election is turning again on a choice between conversation and confrontation. How will we choose to approach our neighbors, allies and adversaries — domestic and foreign? Helena Cobban is a veteran journalist who has traveled extensively around the world. She writes for the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Review, and blogs at justworldnews.org Her most recent book is Re-engage! America and the World after Bush, in which she suggests ways citizens can help shape a more inclusive, less confrontational, foreign policy. Off The Bus caught up with Cobban this week and asked her about her book and what she thinks the “post-Decider”-era might hold in store for us and the world.

Interview below the fold.

Off the Bus: In your book, you make the case for global inclusion as a new path for U.S. foreign policy. We’re coming out of eight years where the message has been basically: “I’m the president. We’re the United States. This is how it’s going to be.” We haven’t been very diplomatic at all.

Helena Cobban: For some of us, there is this thinking that, because we’re so special, we deserve a perch somewhere higher than the other 6 billion people. We need a re-inclusion with the rest of the human race and to get back to the framework of international law, norms, and institutions, like the United Nations.

Look at the role the U.S. traditionally played, particularly in the founding of the United Nations. If you go back and read the Preamble to the U.N. Charter, you’ll see how it was so visionary. It was written by Americans in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Three years later another American, Eleanor Roosevelt, drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The U.S. played an instrumental role. It was a pillar of its founding and they have hosted the U.N. ever since. So when George W. Bush just blew off the U.N. in a completely arrogant and self-referential way in 2003, that really broke with tradition.

You address six elements the U.S. government should pursue in becoming a “neighborly nation among nations”: the environment, human rights, economic and social justice, and rejoining the rest of the world. With the election coming up, what indicates the U.S. is pursuing those issues?

I’m seeing a new openness. I think this whole experience of the Iraq war has made people more thoughtful. Back in the 1990s, there was this post cold war victory euphoria. We had Madeline Albright talking about the U.S. as the “indispensable nation” and policy elites seeming to be in a self-congratulatory frame of mind. They didn’t think about the longterm questions and problems nearly hard enough. Now, after what we’ve seen in Iraq, it seems the “indispensable nation” was carried through its ghastly logical conclusions with such horrible results. We’ve had 4,100 dead Americans soldiers; we’ve had tens of thousands of badly maimed and mutilated Americans come back into our communities with PTSD; and we’ve inflicted far greater damage to the people of Iraq than what we have suffered. We also have to remember the war was completely financed by debt. Our children and grandchildren will be paying off that debt. That’s going to impact future generations. I think we need to look at the interests of our country’s citizenry, not of its corporations.

We’ve been damaged as citizens. I can’t easily travel to a lot of the places where I used to. We have to be fearful as we go through our own domestic airline system because of the hatred. This invasion has fomented anti-American hatred around the world. It’s such a change from September 12, 2001 when Le Monde ran the headline “WE ARE ALL AMERICANS.” There was large amount of sympathy for the United States among Muslim, European, African countries all around the world. George W. Bush completely blew that off. Instead of using that sympathy to build new alliances around the world, Bush took a posture of suspicion that fueled anti-Americanism. I think a lot of Americans are seeing the folly of that now. They may not be seeing the criminality but they’re definitely seeing the folly of those decisions.

But global inclusion issues have always been placed on the backburner. What should be our top priorities?

My three markers are to close Guantanamo, announce a specific date to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq, and declare intentions to negotiate (in good faith) the Kyoto Treaty. I think taking very concrete actions on these issues in the first 100 days could really revolutionize how the other 6 billion people look at us.

Do you think Obama’s visit to the Mideast and Berlin indicated a change towards global inclusion?

I think Obama is on the right track. He has so many multicultural skills that would be helpful in pursuing constructive relations. But right now we’re in an election period and he’s surrounding himself with people telling him what he needs to do to get elected. I thought he did really well on his trip, but my understanding is that doesn’t necessarily help in America. Looking like a superstar in Berlin allowed John McCain to portray his visit as a mark of elitism or being removed from American concerns. I think Obama succeeded in showing he has commander in chief qualities and an understanding there has to be a give and take with other nations. I’m moderately hopeful. I’m also not completely pessimistic about McCain. I know he’s a mercurial character and he won’t take my policy prescriptions to heart, but maybe he would close Guantanamo because of his own personal history as a P.O.W. I think he is genuinely outraged by some of the things Bush has done regarding detainees. I think we should continue to place those demands on whoever gets elected.

What I’m trying to do with the book is to get our citizens more engaged in the discussion and feel more empowered. After 9-11, a lot of citizens felt scared and or lacked confidence in voicing their opinions on foreign affairs. We have to get our citizen voices back in there because these guys have been so criminally irresponsible.

Next up…. a VERY special interview! Stay tuned.

The BBC reports that world renowned writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure. He was 89 years old. Solzhenitsyn was a longtime resident of Cavendish and returned to Russia after the fall of the Communist Party. There's so much I can say, I'm at a loss for words. I appreciated his works, his ideas, and his bravery for speaking out against Joseph Stalin. He will be missed.

Raw Story is reporting that former first lady Hillary Clinton will ask that she not be nominated for Veep at the Democratic National Convention this month. According to the New York Daily News

A source close to the New York senator confirmed she won’t file a formal request to the convention asking to be nominated along with Barack Obama, who eked out the victory in their fierce primary slugfest.

“She is not going to submit the signed request,” the insider told the Daily News. “People are still circulating petitions on her behalf, but this is a done deal.”

Party rules stipulate that Clinton must ask in writing to be nominated herself and also submit a petition signed by 300 to 600 delegates. Without her signed request, petitions of support are meaningless

Well OK then. I guess this isn’t a surprise to some of us. Still, PU advocates like Armando Llorens (aka Big Tent Democrat of Talk Left and MyDD) will be pissed!

To read more click here.

So much more I wanted to include but Huff Post only allows me 1,200 words. We talked about A LOT of stuff. – Christian

UPDATE: Tune in tomorrow on 1490 WKVT. Steve West will talk with Perrin during the 11 am to noon slot!

Crossposted at Off the Bus.

Is the Democratic Party really a party of peace? Not according to satirist Dennis Perrin. In his latest book, Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War, he writes that the Democratic party has long been a party of war. Perrin, a former joke writer for Bill Maher, offers curt revelations about Democratic Party idols such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He shatters the myths associated with past Democratic Presidents, their stubborn attachment to war, and a party unable to stand up for the ideals they claim to stand for. He ends the book with a humorous account of last year’s Netroots Nation conference and the idea that politics will change for the better, if we only elect more Democrats. OffTheBus caught up with Perrin to discuss his new book, his perceptions of the Democratic Party, and alternatives to bringing about social change.

More below the fold.

OTB: You begin your book with the following: “We’re not inflicting pain on these fuckers. When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers. I believe in killing in great numbers. I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.” That was Bill Clinton reviewing his options in Somalia in 1993. To me, that was one of the more shocking aspects of your book. Was there a lot of similarly shocking material you cam across as were researching the book?

Dennis Perrin: I don’t know if shocking is the word. I was pre-conditioned to not being surprised by it. I knew a lot about the Democratic Party history in the 20th century. But when I read about the 19th century Democrats, I only knew so much about them. When you go beyond Andrew Jackson and the “Trail of Tears,” you find the Democrats were the leading American Indian killers of the 19th century. It began as a war party. It hasn’t changed. Later on there were anti-war and social justice movements that came up through the Democratic Party, or at least were co-opted by them, but that never defined the party itself. The party began in war and is still very much involved in war.

You do a good job in breaking down the myths associated with the Democratic Presidents. Barack Obama is drawing people like a magnet and people keep comparing him to JFK. How does Obama compare to JFK?

There still seem to be people who think JFK was going to pull out of Vietnam. They’re isn’t any serious evidence of that. There was talk about withdrawing troops from South Vietnam, but it was contingent on what they considered success in Vietnam. The idea that JFK was going to unilaterally pull U.S. troops out of South Vietnam is antithetical to the actual history. Maybe he would have eventually pulled the troops out, but there is no indication of that. Keep in mind, JFK also ushered in the modern death squad state in Central America through the Alliance for Progress in reaction to the Cuban Revolution, among other things. In a sense, Obama is like JFK. only he is saving his militaristic rhetoric for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The idea that he will pull completely out of Iraq, well, I’ll believe that when I see it. I can’t believe he is going to go in and unilaterally pull the troops out after all this money and blood that went in and out of Iraq, that he’s just going to call it quits. Maybe I’m wrong. But look at FISA. He fully expects to be elected as he wants to have all the power that goes with that. I don’t know of any newly elected president who came in and diminished his power.

It’s clear a lot of American elites want Obama to be the president because he’ll play the same role that Carter and Clinton played before him: arriving after an era of Republican excess. He’ll come in and be the uniter and supposedly bring the country back together again. It’s an ongoing cycle and he’s the latest version of that. The problem is that most liberals will go along with it like they did with Bill Clinton. But let’s say Obama expands the war in Afghanistan or bombs Pakistan or Iran, will we see a significant liberal protest? I doubt it.

What would you say are the biggest roadblocks for the Democratic Party preventing it from embracing or enacting at least real liberal-progressive policy or reform? You mentioned the corporate elite.

It’s just the reality of our situation. There is no place in the current economic political make-up of the United States for a true peoples Democratic Party. This is one of my main arguments with liberal bloggers. They seem to think electing better Democrats is the answer. It may make a difference in small ways, but I just don’t see the Democrats being reformable at all. It’s impossible under the current conditions.

You wrote about your experience at Netroots Nation. What was revealing to me in your book was the line “I thought the whole point to blogging was to democratize political expression.” Can you elaborate?

Of course blogs could have a tremendous effect, but that has to come from within the minds of the people blogging… [bloggers would have ] to think beyond the boundaries given to them and that’s just not happening. They’re using a narrow form and existing corporate parties to try to effect change. That’s impossible. So when I see Netroots Nation and online activism, it’s primarily the domain of white college-educated people. Working class poor people are not part of the Internet conversation. I talk about that in the book. If I mention Daily Kos or Atrios to them, they wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. That’s how far removed it is.

I’m not saying there aren’t possibilities. I don’t think what we can see what this technology can do. We’re still in the silent film stage of the Internet. We haven’t gotten to techni-color or wide-screen yet.

[…]

I have never ruled out serious political and social change. It’s possible, but what I’ve experienced it’s going to have to go through a different avenue. Voting for better Democrats just gets us more Democrats. All it does is keep the system in place. What should we replace it with? I don’t know, but to know what that will look like [ahead of time] is insane. The whole process of social change is that you don’t know how it’s going to end. All you know is what your hopes and desires are in the present, and you build towards something. There will be plenty of defeats and roadblocks along the way, but you have to experiment, not get demoralized, not give up, and simply hope that Obama will change it for you. You have to see beyond the immediate structure. As they say, “no guts, no glory.”

Check out Dennis Perrin at www.dennisperrin.blogspot.com

Once again, another U.S. leader snubs Palestine on his trip to the Mideast. Barack Obama’s trip was all about Israel, “its needs” and “its security.” He even made a trip to the Western Wall that’s making headlines around the world. Except he forgot to visit the other one. One that symbolizes oppression and a violation of human rights.

Someone told me today, “Yo Christian… Jewish voters are another important bloc in American voting just like Latino voters, Asian American voters, union voters, anti-war voters, etc. politicians do what they feel is in the best interest of the groups whose support they are seeking.” Well then Arab Americans should be treated just as important. But more importantly, leader after leader makes this about Israel and their security needs. I didn’t see Obama talk about Palestine’s needs to the press. He didn’t talk about the refugee crisis. He didn’t talk about the “security fence” that violates human rights and the ICJ ruling. He didn’t say Jerusalem also belongs to the Arabs but maintained it should all belong to Israel. If he goes to the Western Wall, then shouldn’t he also go to a mosque or another sacred worshipping place? Why didn’t he? There’s a lot more but the point is Palestine’s needs should be put on the same level as Israel’s and he should emphasize that in public, not leave it behind closed doors. That’s the bold change we need in the Mideast.  

I caught this video today on Huffington Post. It pretty much sums up my feelings about Obama’s trip to the Mideast. Sorry y’all, but I had to get this off my chest. Palestine always touches a nerve in me.

Crossposted at Huff Post’s Off the Bus.

His colleagues call him “Big Media Matt.” That’s because Matthew Yglesias is a respected voice of the liberal blogosphere. The 28 year-old Yglesias has accomplished much. He graduated magna cum laude, from Harvard, served as editor-in-chief at The Harvard Independent, and upon graduating, he became a writing fellow at The American Prospect. Yglesias began blogging in 2002, focusing on American politics, public policy, and foreign policy. Yglesias now writes for The Atlantic Monthly and blogs at the Atlantic blog.

His new book, Heads in the Sand: How Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats has just been released by Wiley Press. In the book, Yglesias offers a new approach for the Democrats, an outline of how they might restore America’s integrity in conducting international affairs. He talked to OffTheBus last week.

More below the fold.

Off the Bus: What was the driving force or spark that led you to write “Heads in the Sand?”

Matt Yglesias: It wasn’t really one thing. It sort of came out of articles I was writing in 2005 for “The American Prospect.” At the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005, everyone was sort of writing their version of what went wrong (after the election) and it just seemed natural to me to focus more closely on foreign policy issues. What was so maddening about his re-election is that you would think a president couldn’t propose a war to eliminate weapons of mass destruction programs that didn’t exist, have the war go badly, and get re-elected anyway. That seems almost natural to us all now because we know it happened. But it seemed like a big mystery to me and required some explanation. The one thing people thought before the war was, why would the Bush Administration want to invent this? They must be telling the truth to some extent (about Iraq) because it would be hugely embarrassing to them if it turns out to be wrong. But they were able to do it, even though many of the claims have been discredited.

It seems the central argument in your book is that most mainstream media pundits ignore the fact that Obama and McCain are running on the same tired foreign policy strategies Bush and Kerry did in 2004. Can you elaborate?

Right. I think there’s not a lot of appreciation in the press for the more abstract, deeper questions about strategy. There tends to be an assumption that the goals of American foreign policy are uncontroversial and don’t need to be examined at all; that people are arguing about tactics and there isn’t a lot of sensitivity to the bigger issues at stake. Foreign policy in particular in the coverage of the campaigns is mostly done by people who don’t necessarily have a sophisticated understanding of the issues.

How do you gage Obama and McCain so far?

I think McCain is different from George W. Bush in various ways. But on foreign policy, [McCain] expresses a very pure version of the same kind of neo-conservative ideas that got us in so much trouble.

Obama is a very promising candidate. He opposed the Iraq War for the right reasons and he’s put some bold ideas on the table about nuclear proliferation and high-level diplomacy with rogue states instead of this sort of isolation strategy. He has a tendency to go vague on a lot of topics, which I think has prevented him from having as crisp a message as he might have. Right now he’s trying to win an election rather than govern the country and he’s trying to keep his options open with his rhetoric as much as he can. Which is understandable but it means you don’t necessarily know what he’s going to do.

You think the best solution is to revert back to liberal internationalism. Why do you think this is the best approach?

I think the biggest threats to the United States don’t come from other countries. The main things we want to do aren’t incompatible with the interests of other major countries. The issue is, are we going to clamp down on international terrorism, avoid climate change, or nuclear proliferation? What you need is broad-based cooperation between countries to really advance on those issues. We can either try to intimidate others into going along with us, which has been the Bush approach, or [move] along mutually accepted ideas or interests.

What are some of its limitations?

One problem is it’s always tempting for the strongest country to think, “if we only didn’t have those pesky rules.” Nobody is really strong enough from stopping the United States from doing x, y, or z. It’s easy to get into the habit of mind to think “these rules are the problem.” If we only got rid of them, then we can go ahead. I think that’s tempting in each particular case. Because we are so strong and no one can really stop us. What you have to remember is that the things we’ve seen over recent years is a bit of an illusion. Trying to do things alone in this respect doesn’t actually accomplish the things you’re hoping to achieve.

It’s always challenging for Americans to set priorities, to say “here are three or four or five things that are most important to us and that means we’re going to have to give up some other things.” It’s difficult politically to ever say something like that. It’s also difficult psychologically because everyone wants to have it all.

You tackle a very sensitive issue: The Arab-Israeli crisis. What exactly are the Republicans screwing up and the Democrats missing? What should they be doing?

Well, I don’t want to maintain that I can solve the Arab-Israeli conflict because I have ideas (laughter). What I’m really trying to say is the United States has felt that trying to resolve the conflict is in our interests. You saw that when Clinton, Bush Sr., and Carter was president and it’s remarkable how George W. Bush has just tossed that legacy aside. Obviously, no previous president has solved the problem. But almost all the ones who worked on it in a serious way, have brought things closer. It’s important to keep working on it and not fall into the politics of “well, we’re backing Israel blindly.” It’s not that it’s a bad thing for Israel that past U.S. presidents have helped brokered an agreement between Israel and its neighbors. It’s helped make things more secure and a reasonable peace agreement with Palestine would be a great thing for Israel. People shouldn’t think that support for this country, either on a political or substantive level requires them to have this Bush-like indifference to the matter.

What could the Democrats have done better?

Well, it’s difficult to try and make foreign policy. You saw that with the Democrats’ failed efforts to bring the troops home from Iraq. They just couldn’t do it. The president wins those kinds of standoffs. I think sometimes Congress, particularly with issues related to Israel, the Congress has usually been even more invested in symbolic “pro-Israel” posturing rather than trying to do anything constructive and you see that from both parties.

I do think you see a broad difference in the policy toward the region as a whole. The Democrats are looking to have some kind of engagement with Syria and Iran on a broad range of topics and I think that includes elements of Israel. The Republicans have gotten involved in an idea that the United States and Israel are somehow going to team up and subdue the entire Middle East and dominate it. You see this in particular over Iran’s policy, where there’s a pretty clear difference.  

It seemed to me that human rights issues took the back burner in your book. How important is it to U.S. foreign policy and why won’t the Democrats capitalize on it?

Like I said, it’s difficult to set priorities. It’s unfortunate. But to some extent, promoting humans rights abroad can’t be the top item on the American policy agenda. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be concerned with it at all, but we should recognize we can influence it around the margins and we can certainly be determined not to do harm like we have in the past; by not supporting abusive regimes directly and by not committing torture and other violations ourselves. The best thing we’ve ever done for human rights, around the world, is end the Cold War. When we didn’t have the United States and the Soviet Union backing rival factions in civil wars in the developing world, that was a boon for people who lived there in terms of peace, human security, human rights, democracy in Central America, etc. Trying to maintain a basically friendly relationship with countries like Russia and China is vitally important,even though China does not have a great human rights record. But unless China changes, it’s very hard to put human rights on the forefront of the international agenda. I don’t think, at this point, we have any capacity to force the Chinese to change.

I guess you would also have to include banning land mines, cluster bombs, and other lethal munitions.

Now that’s the kind of thing where we can make progress. The United States is one of the main countries holding up landmines and cluster bomb bans. Those elements of humanitarianism, of promoting peace and disarmament, are vitally important. That goes for comprehensive test ban treaties for nuclear weapons as well. The U.S. can and needs to commit to those agreements.

Now onto blogging and citizen journalism. People ask me whether blogs translate into meaningful actions with results. Do you think blogging has been successful in generating any kind of political change?

Has it been successful compared to what exactly? It hasn’t been successful as some of the people involved would hope. I mean, I think it has made some impact on issues that don’t have interest groups organized behind them. Blogs do have the capacity to make their voices heard, be counted, and let political leaders know there are people out there who care about this stuff. So far, that influence hasn’t been totally enormous, but it does grow over time with new technology and a growing audience.

It seems the one big victory for the liberal blogosphere was helping Ned Lamont beat Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary. That seemed to make a major difference.

Well you also had Donna Edwards beating Al Wynn (in the Maryland primary). The Internet played a big role there, but you also have to see something like the recent fight over FISA in Congress. We never ultimately won that fight, but that the fight wouldn’t have even happened 10 years ago. I think any movement, particularly ones that take on causes that lack champions, they’re fighting uphill battles are you’re going to lose a lot. But to some extent, causing a fight where people didn’t think there was going to be one will make them think twice next time. Even if we lose. I think it will be an important factor coming into November and even more so in the years to come. Right now, heavy Internet use is a very age bounded phenomenon. A lot of people are just really sort of too old to be impacted but that will change over time.

How do you think this will affect rank and file organizing that’s been a mainstay of organizing the vote?

Well, I think it’s mostly additive. It’s just that you have an additional mechanism of communication. Things still need to happen in the real world, one way or the other. It’s like when telephones were invented and people started using them to get in touch with other people and do their organizing. This is just another way.

OffTheBus is a citizen journalism Web site. How do you think bloggers or citizen journalists might do a better job influencing foreign policy?

To some extent, real coverage of foreign affairs is one of the areas where mainstream media has a big advantage. To run a Baghdad bureau costs a lot of money. There’s almost nothing you can do about it. But one thing that’s interesting to blogging and citizen journalism is the diversity of voices of people from all over. You can read blogs written by Iranians and it allows potentially for more direct unmediated international conversations. If that does grow over time, I think could change the way we perceive countries and individuals and how we relate to one another.

Next up….. Dennis Perrin author of Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War.  

So much more I wanted to write about but they only give me 1,000 words at Huff Post. Matt and I spoke for about a half an hour on all kinds of stuff. Hope you enjoy!

     

His colleagues call him “Big Media Matt.” That’s because Matthew Yglesias is a respected voice of the liberal blogosphere. The 28 year-old Yglesias has accomplished much. He graduated magna cum laude, from Harvard, served as editor-in-chief at The Harvard Independent, and upon graduating, he became a writing fellow at The American Prospect. Yglesias began blogging in 2002, focusing on American politics, public policy, and foreign policy. Yglesias now writes for The Atlantic Monthly and blogs at the Atlantic blog.

His new book, Heads in the Sand: How Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats has just been released by Wiley Press. In the book, Yglesias offers a new approach for the Democrats, an outline of how they might restore America’s integrity in conducting international affairs. He talked to OffTheBus last week.

Off the Bus: What was the driving force or spark that led you to write “Heads in the Sand?”

Matt Yglesias: It wasn’t really one thing. It sort of came out of articles I was writing in 2005 for “The American Prospect.” At the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005, everyone was sort of writing their version of what went wrong (after the election) and it just seemed natural to me to focus more closely on foreign policy issues. What was so maddening about his re-election is that you would think a president couldn’t propose a war to eliminate weapons of mass destruction programs that didn’t exist, have the war go badly, and get re-elected anyway. That seems almost natural to us all now because we know it happened. But it seemed like a big mystery to me and required some explanation. The one thing people thought before the war was, why would the Bush Administration want to invent this? They must be telling the truth to some extent (about Iraq) because it would be hugely embarrassing to them if it turns out to be wrong. But they were able to do it, even though many of the claims have been discredited.

It seems the central argument in your book is that most mainstream media pundits ignore the fact that Obama and McCain are running on the same tired foreign policy strategies Bush and Kerry did in 2004. Can you elaborate?

Right. I think there’s not a lot of appreciation in the press for the more abstract, deeper questions about strategy. There tends to be an assumption that the goals of American foreign policy are uncontroversial and don’t need to be examined at all; that people are arguing about tactics and there isn’t a lot of sensitivity to the bigger issues at stake. Foreign policy in particular in the coverage of the campaigns is mostly done by people who don’t necessarily have a sophisticated understanding of the issues.

How do you gage Obama and McCain so far?

More below the fold.

I think McCain is different from George W. Bush in various ways. But on foreign policy, [McCain] expresses a very pure version of the same kind of neo-conservative ideas that got us in so much trouble.

Obama is a very promising candidate. He opposed the Iraq War for the right reasons and he’s put some bold ideas on the table about nuclear proliferation and high-level diplomacy with rogue states instead of this sort of isolation strategy. He has a tendency to go vague on a lot of topics, which I think has prevented him from having as crisp a message as he might have. Right now he’s trying to win an election rather than govern the country and he’s trying to keep his options open with his rhetoric as much as he can. Which is understandable but it means you don’t necessarily know what he’s going to do.

You think the best solution is to revert back to liberal internationalism. Why do you think this is the best approach?

I think the biggest threats to the United States don’t come from other countries. The main things we want to do aren’t incompatible with the interests of other major countries. The issue is, are we going to clamp down on international terrorism, avoid climate change, or nuclear proliferation? What you need is broad-based cooperation between countries to really advance on those issues. We can either try to intimidate others into going along with us, which has been the Bush approach, or [move] along mutually accepted ideas or interests.

OffTheBus is a citizen journalism Web site. How ldo you think bloggers or citizen journalists might do a better job influencing foreign policy?

To some extent, real coverage of foreign affairs is one of the areas where mainstream media has a big advantage. To run a Baghdad bureau costs a lot of money. There’s almost nothing you can do about it. But one thing that’s interesting to blogging and citizen journalism is the diversity of voices of people from all over. You can read blogs written by Iranians and it allows potentially for more direct unmediated international conversations. If that does grow over time, I think could change the way we perceive countries and individuals and how we relate to one another.