E-mail a friendMatt Bai
original airdate September 7, 2007
Matt Bai is an observer of the American political scene and trusted authority on the Democratic Party. He writes for The New York Times Magazine and has also authored a book on Democratic politics, The Argument. Bai began his career as a city desk reporter with The Boston Globe, and previously worked for Newsweek and RollingStone. His international experience includes coverage from Iraq and Liberia. Bai co-moderated the recent progressive bloggers' presidential candidates forum.
Matt Bai
Tavis: Matt Bai writes about national politics for "The New York Times Magazine" where he's currently covering the 2008 presidential campaign. Prior to his post, he served as national correspondent for "Newsweek." His new book is called "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics." He joins us tonight from Washington. Matt Bai, nice to have you on the program.
Matt Bai: Nice to be here. Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: My pleasure. Every now and then, I get a book where it really behooves me to start the conversation by breaking down the title because I think therein lies a good jumping off point for our conversation. So let me start where your text is concerned by asking about the title. What is "The Argument"?
Bai: Well, let me tell you this way. It starts for me about four years now when I went out to Iowa with Howard Dean. As you recall, he was a very little-known presidential candidate at the time. I was really fascinated by the crowds he was drawing, the amount of emotion, the sort of pent-up fury, the intense feeling that average Democrats had out in the Midwest not just about the Bush years and what had occurred, but what was going on inside their own party.
I got a little bit obsessed with it and I spent the next couple of years trying to understand this emotion and patching together what I would call the first true political movement of the twenty-first century, the progressive movement inside Democratic politics, the self-identified progressive movement.
The point I'm making with "The Argument" is both about the argument that exists between this movement and the Democratic Party and its establishment in Washington, but also the fact that successful political movements need to have larger arguments about the future, about how government adapts to the challenges of the moment. This movement, in its nascent stages, is still really searching for what that argument for the future is really going to be.
Tavis: Let me ask then, given what you just said, how you define progressive movement. Not that they have to, but I'm not sure your definition and my definition agree on what progressive means. What do you mean, since this is your conversation, by the word progressive?
Bai: Well, I'm using it really because that's how all of these folks who are part of this confederacy essentially inside Democratic politics identify themselves as progressives. They do so hearkening back really to the early twentieth century movement that was very successful in American politics, but also because they've sort of abandoned the word liberal, as you know, because liberal has become a little bit tainted, so they call themselves progressives.
As the title of the book indicates, what we're talking about are wealthy donors, millionaires, billionaires throughout the country, bloggers, folks who've become very influential inside Democratic politics, average everyday progressives who are on MoveOn.org or connecting through similar membership organizations, Democratic activists in the state, people outside of Washington who are just beginning really to coalesce into a very powerful movement.
I think, to understand the 2008 primaries and the place we're at now inside Democratic politics, you do need to understand the emergence of this movement because it's a very powerful, very influential one.
Tavis: I hear your intimation earlier, Matt, that liberal is a dirty word; in many circles, a four letter word. I don't mean in just Republican circles (laughter). The word liberal is a four letter word. I understand that, though progressive a nice replacement.
Some would call this inside politics. I don't think so. I think language has meaning. So their embrace of the word progressive, before we go further, versus their embrace of the word liberal says what, if anything, about their politics and about their political agenda?
Bai: Well, that's an excellent question, Tavis. My answer would be what it tells you is something about the priorities of this movement. What I mean by that is this. It is an entirely tactical movement. That is, its conversation internally is almost all about how you win, how you lose, how you stop Republicans.
It's about message, it's about framing, it's about voter turnout, it's about investment in infrastructure. It's about a lot of things that really boil down to how your team beats their team. So the use of the word progressive is essentially a tactical maneuver because the word liberal doesn't poll well, frankly, and isn't well-received, as you point out. Therefore, the movement adapted the term progressive.
Tavis: And yet, Matt, I'm glad you responded that way because what I want to get at here is that whether one likes or loathes the word liberal. I certainly, again, understand and you and I agree that it's become the death nail. That word cannot come out of your mouth if you're trying to advance something and I hear the point there.
The word liberal used to mean that you stood for something. Now one could agree or disagree, but I knew what the agenda was, I knew what the plan was. What I'm getting at is that the word liberal was not just about winning. So I take your point now that progressive means that we want to beat the other guy. It's a tactical thing. We want to win here. But I hear a distinct difference, though, between a liberal agenda meaning something and the word progressive standing for wanting to win by any means necessary.
Bai: Well, I don't think you'll see a lot of ideological difference inside the movement. In other words, while they may call themselves progressives, most of the people engaged in this sort of insurgency against the Democratic establishment are not in fact, you know, new people entirely in politics or kids, but baby boomer-era Democrats who were engaged in politics in the 1960s in what you would call traditionally liberal politics, who were sort of inaugurated into Democratic politics through the war, through the civil rights movement, and who largely sat out the 1990s because they felt marginalized, because they couldn't subscribe to Bill Clinton's brand of centrism, because they didn't quite like the direction the party was going in.
They feel that they were vindicated and they've come back, you know, very strongly and passionately through organizations like MoveOn and through the blogs or, if they have a lot of money, through this organization called the Democracy Alliance that I write about which is really a club of millionaires and some billionaires.
These folks would have identified as liberal many years ago, but this new term, progressive, really comes to specifically talk about this new movement, what it wants to achieve and what its dissatisfaction is both with Republican government and perhaps more significantly with the Democratic establishment of their own party.
Tavis: Okay, enough of the language then and the argument language and around the agenda here. Let me jump right now to the sub-title here, who these billionaires and bloggers are. Let's talk first about these billionaires.
Bai: Okay. Well, you have this organization, as I say, called the Democracy Alliance. It's been, until now at least, a very secretive organization. It's got about a hundred millionaires and some billionaires. You know, it's obviously primarily people who have millions of dollars. It's primarily bi-coastal in nature, although there are people from all over the country.
They have donated to this point close to a hundred million dollars into what they would call progressive groups, essentially Democratic groups, to create what they would call an infrastructure, which is the kind of array of groups outside the party structure that they believe have been instrumental in the success of conservatives in winning elections and taking power in the country.
Tavis: Things like think tanks?
Bai: There are some think tanks and the main one being the Center for American Progress in Washington. But as I point out again, predominantly this has been a tactical exercise and so most of the money and most of the conversation has revolved around monitoring the media, bringing voters out and registering them in the process, building up message machinery and tactical machinery, framing.
So there's a lot of money spent here on the shorter term mechanics of winning elections, even though the stated purpose originally when this was formed a couple of years ago was to think long-term about building not just a tactical infrastructure, but an idea and an intellectual generator as well.
Tavis: Let me ask about the bloggers and let me preface it by saying this before I get your response here. I may get in trouble for this (laughter). I think in a very real way that blogging at the moment is over-rated. That's my own personal view, that blogging is over-rated on the one hand. I'm sure I'll hear about that on some blogs tomorrow.
On the other hand, I'm concerned about it and I don't want to dismiss blogging because most of the bloggers happen not to look like me. That is to say, they're not persons of color. So here again, another vehicle that we now have to impact the process, but people of color don't really fit into that matrix.
So I'm concerned about that so much so that I don't want to write it off and yet I feel like blogging is over-rated. Tell me where any of that makes sense, if any of it does.
Bai: Well, you're probably right and you're wrong, in my view, at the same time. In other words, yes, blogging can be over-rated because we are really at the end of the day talking about a handful of Americans who largely are homogenous - as you point out, not just demographically or racially, but of course, in their views - talking to each other in a pretty closed conversation. Yet we all, you know, as a media and in the political conversation, we can get very carried away with what's said on the blogs.
Personally, I'm a little like you. I don't spend a lot of time looking about what gets written on the blogs. If I did, I'd get terribly depressed about myself and my life. A lot of it's unkind. But here's the thing and here's why it matters. It actually takes a very small number of people to have a very big political impact.
When you consider the Daily Kos, the largest of the progressive blogs, gets more readers on an average day - it's something like five to six hundred thousand - than, say, all of the traditional progressive media combined, that is, all the magazines or journals that you would think of as liberal or progressive media or whatever you want to call it, then you have to understand the fact that this blog movement, this online political movement - and you can throw MoveOn in with that, which is huge, over three million members - is really a bulletin board for the entire progressive movement and, in a sense, for the Democratic grassroots. This is the clubhouse where people go and connect.
Now as you point out, not really the entire movement because it's very racially homogenous and that's true. I think that that's not been pointed out as strongly because there's really been no disunity and there's really been no conflict between what the folks on the blogs think and, say, what African American or Latino lobbies in Washington are talking about.
But if you have to govern, when you have to make decisions, if you have to come up with an argument for the future and for how you want to actually take the country in one direction, then I think that could become very significant because then there are disagreements about where you want to prioritize and then you do need to have a much deeper intellectual conversation than the one that's happening right now.
Tavis: When you bottom line it, while talk radio certainly has many more listeners than the blogisphere has readers, fair to say that, as talk radio has become a conservative citadel, that the blogisphere belongs to the progressives?
Bai: Well, yes. I think that's a fair comparison that people have made. I would make a slightly different comparison, if I could, which is if you look at this progressive movement as analogous to the conservative movement that was so dominant in politics in the 1960s and 1970s and created the moment we've been living in today, then you could see where the different constituencies break down.
If you look at that analogy, then a figurehead like a Howard Dean who's probably the real political icon of the movement is a little bit like, say, Ronald Reagan who lost the 1976 campaign in the primaries, but who inspired so many movement conservatives to get involved and take over their local parties.
MoveOn is a little bit like a National Rifle Association. It's a membership-based organization that really exerts disproportionate influence in the political conversation around this. In this case, the bloggers really would be not so much like talk radio, but really more like the religious right in a sense.
They are talking to the most passionate audience. They are bypassing the traditional media. The people who are respected in that community have a tremendous amount of credibility with their followers. They're obsessive. They're online 24/7 and they're preaching a very strong gospel for the party that is having a real impact on the conversation in Washington.
Tavis: The new book by Matt Bai is called "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics." Matt, nice to have you on the program. Thanks for a provocative book, and I enjoyed talking to you.
Bai: I appreciate it, Tavis. Nice to be here.
Tavis: My pleasure.
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