It’s finally come to this. I wrote last week that Democrats are tired of being losers, but recent events have reminded me that they apparently love being losers as well.  This is nowhere more clear than in Krugman’s latest hit job on Barack Obama.  In his March 3 column, Krugman writes:

Some progressives are appalled by the direction their party seems to have taken: they wanted another F.D.R., yet feel that they’re getting an oratorically upgraded version of Michael Bloomberg instead.

It’s hard to know what to make of such blather.  Are we to believe that the former community organizer and the billionaire media mogul are really the same person because they both believe in using pragmatic, non-party-specific strategies to achieve their goals?  Are they really identical on policy and message?  Or is it that Krugman’s standards for ideological purity have become so stringent that a disagreement on a single feature of an admittedly less-than-perfect approach to national health care is sufficient basis to brand someone a traitor to progressive causes?  Gee, when Republicans enforce that kind of lock-step party platform unity, we call it crazy and dogmatic.  I suppose Krugman is immune because being right is all that is required to enact reform in this country, isn’t it?  (It worked beautifully for Truman with national health care and racial integration, and for Wilson with the Fourteen Points…)  So naturally Krugman is offended that Obama does not hold Democrats immune from blame for our nation’s troubles.  He writes:

[Obama] promises not a rejection of Republicanism but an era of postpartisan unity.  That — along with his adoption of conservative talking points on the crucial issue of health care — is why Mr. Obama’s rise has caused such division among progressive activists, the very people one might have expected to be unified and energized by the prospect of finally ending the long era of Republican political dominance.

Now, it may very well be that a number of progressive activists feel alienated by Obama—though I’m not persuaded that this is particularly true.  But it should be pointed out that progressive activists don’t win national elections.  Middle-of-the-road voters do.  I don’t just mean independents; I’m referring to members of either party who will readily vote for the other side—people who vote with their guts.  To win the support of such voters, it is not enough simply to point out how wrong the opposition’s policies are.  The American public doesn’t pay attention to policy.  They don’t notice when it’s working because, well, it’s working.  They don’t even notice when it’s not working; rather, there simply begins to emerge a society-wide sense of “something being wrong.”  This is why you have phenomena like “Reagan Democrats” or people waffling between candidates as fundamentally different as Barack Obama and John McCain.  Public opinion is fickle and relatively unconcerned with reason or merit.  So it’s hard to see how Krugman’s tactic of choice—remind everyone, often, that Republican ideology is stupid and wrong— wins elections.  And indeed, it seems to me that he is criticizing Obama for running on what looks to me like a winning general election strategy.

To be clear: I am not an Obamaniac.  I have not been to one of his rallies and been swept along by his oratorical gifts or personal charisma.  I don’t think that Obama is a magical political cure-all for this nation’s ills (there is no such thing).  Then again, that’s never been what his campaign has been about; rather, it’s simply the way he’s characterized over and over again by people who think that political goals can only be achieved by hammering your point home over and over again until your opponents are battered into submission (which, incidentally, almost never works).  I have no idea what kind of President Obama would be—because, face it, folks, we never know.  What I do think is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are offering the American people two very different versions of reform: one based on disgust with the current administration’s basic incompetence, and one promising an alternative to the much longer-standing gridlock and partisan squabbling that is perceived to have hobbled our government’s ability to accomplish meaningful work.

One can certainly build a rational argument against this latter perception, but it is politically foolish to ignore it.  Supposing the Democratic candidate runs on Krugman’s strategy and wins, they will still be powerless to enact a real reform agenda unless the party wins a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Furthermore, it’s hard to see how this idea that progressive policy needs a “fighter” for president is borne out by history.  Krugman often invokes FDR, but he hardly seems like a perfect example of the sort of partisan scrapper Krugman seems to require in his heart.  FDR was actually at his least effective when he was most combative— remember how well his court-packing scheme worked out?  Besides, in reality, he was never what you’d call a progressive activist.  One of Roosevelt’s major complaints against Hoover in the 1932 campaign was that the feckless Republican overspent; it was only after his own brain trust suggested that deficit spending was just the thing (Keynsian theories on economic stimulus being rather newfangled) that FDR changed positions on the subject.  Furthermore, the New Deal, like all relatively progressive presidential agendas, was fraught with compromises and half-measures.  The fact that it accomplished so much good ought to be an argument, not merely for progressive policies in general, but for the wisdom of getting one’s foot in the door with fairly modest reforms rather than insisting on the whole deal and winding up with nothing.  If Hillary Clinton had done that in 1993, who knows, we might have national health insurance today.

Likewise, as Clinton herself pointed out, it took that ultimate political pragmatist, LBJ, to get the Civil Rights Act passed.  Of course, the real work was done for years leading up to that day by activists working on the ground, suffering ridicule, persecution and imprisonment for their efforts.  Johnson only took advantage of what was, as Clinton would later call it, “the politics of the possible.”

Smart activists already understand this.  After all, most of the good work being done by progressives today is decidedly unglamorous, virtually anonymous, and largely thankless.  The Ralph Nader of old understood this back when he was forcing auto makers to build cars that didn’t turn routine traffic accidents into bloodbaths, or helping to jump-start the modern environmentalist movement.  But many of the old ways—the protests, the demonstrations, the Quixotic public campaigns—just aren’t very effective at changing public opinion.  In a Law-and-Order-obsessed society, such tactics seem only to alienate the mainstream.  Politicians, due to the limits of their game, tend to accomplish things incrementally, not dramatically (and yes, this is also true of the neoconservative movement; you may hate them, but they worked hard— stayed after school, banged erasers, did extra credit, and blew the teacher under the desk when necessary to get where they are today).  A great deal of the monumental change that takes place in this country escapes the notice of the average voter; what really changes things, in a perverse way, is Americans’ ability, for better or worse, to normalize absolutely everything.  Progressives have been well aware since 1968 that this is how decline takes place; but it’s also typically the face of progress.  People thought it would be the end of the world if women or minorities voted; if workers unionized; if interracial couples married; if the government administered a minimal pension program or health care for the elderly.  The fact that the world doesn’t end enables us to accept the change and move on to the next one.  It’s not heroic.  Hell, it’s not even very inspiring.  It often happens too slowly to do a lot of people much good.  But it’s what we’ve got.