Protesting the First 100 Hours

An article in today's Washington Post highlights just how much work Democrats have ahead of them in their first 100 legislative hours and beyond. Winning the midterms was a terrific victory, but it seems that two Democratic groups in particular are at risk of regressing. The rank and file needs to embrace ways of solving problems that don't include protesting, and the Democratic elites needs to learn that there are other ways of seeking the middle than doing something half-way between what they actually want and what Republicans would do.

The protesters described in the WaPo piece are planning demonstrations surrounding the swearing in of the 110th Congress tomorrow. They will reportedly demand more focus on the things they think dragged on Bush's approval ratings the most in 2006: Iraq, civil liberties, and human rights. Holding these protests is tactically inadvisable.

For starters, the activists in question aren't giving Democratic leaders the chance they deserve. The 100 Hours initiative might as well be called the Low-Hanging Fruit Initiative. Everything on this list is so obvious and has so much support that there should be little opposition, and most things are relatively simple problems with similarly simple solutions.

• Lobbying reform - this is a gimme because it was a huge part of recent Republican corruption scandals, meaning its opponents will not be bold. It is sound policy because the Supreme Court keeps ruling that campaign contributions oughtn't to be regulated; lobbying reform is a great way to get around the regulation of contributions.
  
• Implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission - duh.
• Minimum wage increase - just about everyone thinks this is a good idea. If we are serious about promoting the social ideal that working is the ticket out of poverty, we need to make it so that working actually can lift you out of poverty.
• Fixing the Medicare drug supplement - only a drug company could appreciate restricting Medicare's power to negotiate drug prices. Even conservative values, which ostensibly favor market competition, ought to support this measure. In the real competitive marketplace, Wal*Mart is huge and can negotiate lower prices; Medicare is bigger than Wal*Mart, so restricting it from negotiating is tantamount to a price support, which true economic conservatives hate.
• Stem cell research - unless you define human life as beginning at the moment daddy first winks at mommy and she asks her roommate to walk her dog tomorrow morning, you favor this.
• Cutting interest rates for student loans - student loans are crucial for the middle class, so the original Republican ploy to save a couple hundred million by making them more expensive seems chintzy and shouldn't be hard to repeal.
• Energy independence - again, you'd have to be an oil company to think this was a bad idea.
• Fighting against privatizing social security - this isn't really a proactive agendum, but large majorities are opposed so why not put it on your list?
  

So Democrats have this list of easy-to-get things that everyone wants. They can use it to establish a baseline of productivity for themselves and build up a head of steam heading into the real battles over Iraq, rights, and liberties. The protesters are basically protesting the lack of their favorite projects on this particular list.

Tactically, this puts the protesters at least two steps behind. Back in the pre-1994 days, when Democrats had reliable and safe majorities in the House, liberal groups learned to try to claim as large a slice of the pie as they could by competing with other liberal groups. Everyone's project was the one that couldn't wait - abortion or gun control or the environment was the one big thing that had to be taken care of first. Liberal groups had to fight against each other for attention. That was Step 1.

Step 2 was the 12 recent years when Democrats were out of power. Liberal groups kept working against each other, and Republicans kept winning. Groups like NARAL and Sierra Club might support a Republican, like Lincoln Chafee, if the Democratic candidate didn't meet the requirements of their issue checklist. Meanwhile Republican groups were maintaining power by having weekly breakfast meetings with Grover Norquist. In these meetings, they would cooperate and take turns because they knew that eventually flag burning or tax cuts or anti-abortion would make it on the agenda. Step 3 for Democrats cannot be a return to Step 1.

But getting back to protest as a tactic, well, there is a time and place for everything and this is neither for protesting. Protesting works when (1) you are frozen out of conventional channels of power to which you have some claim and (2) you have something specific to accomplish, which is usually joining those channels.

• Works: Gandhi successfully protests British rule in India because Indians are not permitted to participate in shaping their national future, leaving protest as the only option for self-determination.
  
• Doesn't work: no amount of free concerts in the park is going to convince China to let you participate in the discussion about Tibet. Freeing it is probably a great idea, but U2 has no recognizable moral inside track on wanting it so.
  
• Works: Cindy Sheehan didn't end the Iraq occupation by camping out in Crawford, TX during August 05, but she did a great job of putting the pressure on the entrenched wielders of power because she had a legitimate claim to some answers about her dead son.
• Didn't work: protesting the beginning of the Iraq war failed to have any effect on the course of the war because peace supporters were not at a moral disadvantage in society, they were just being bowled over by better organized forces.
  

Protesting tomorrow will not do anything good either. At this point, the people doing it look childish because they are renouncing any power to work within the system - they could have legitimate influence over sympathetic lawmakers who are now in charge, but they choose to protest instead. They look childish because they want their issue dealt with now, before everybody else's issue. And they look childish because they just protest everything on a knee-jerk basis, protesting almost just for the sake of protesting. And looking childish plays right into W's trap of acting fatherly.

Here's the catch, though. Just because protesters are tactically wrong doesn't mean they are wrong about their fundamental assumption - Democrats need to pressure Bush on civil liberties, human rights, and Iraq. Democratic lawmakers are indeed threatening to abandon the strong moral principles that swept them into office by embracing the weak principles which kept them out for so long. Let's check in with Sen.-elect Ben Cardin (D-MD):

"The Democrats have to be careful not to fall into these [partisan] traps that I think paralyzed the Republicans," Cardin said.

Of course no one is arguing that Democrats should fall into traps. But what Cardin is saying comes dangerously close to the pre-2006 Democratic tactic of trying so hard not to offend anyone that everyone gets offended anyway. True, the Republicans were ultimately undone in part by their partisan zeal. But if everyone always agreed on everything, we wouldn't need leaders. Leadership comes from taking positions that not everyone completely agrees on.

Bush seems to recognize this truth, as he is banking on a "surge" in troop levels that is opposed by roughly two thirds of the country to rescue his occupation and his presidency. Democratic legislators need to rise to his challenge by vigorously opposing such an escalation. As Yousir puts it in his most recent special comment, saying "surge" implies temporary, when in reality it will be the most permanent thing conceivable for the next brave young man or woman to die in Iraq.

So everyone has a little cooling down and reassessing ahead of them. The protesters need to back off a little, but legislators need to remember the essential moral issues being protested as 2007 and 2008 unfold.