NEW YORK TIMES
November 13, 2012
Reputation, Reputation, Reputation
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
As Lyndon
Johnson said, the two things that make leaders stupid are envy and sex.
Macbeth
kills a king out of envy. Egged on by an envious Iago, Othello smothers his wife
out of a crazed fear of her having sex with his lieutenant.
Now another
charismatic general has shattered his life and career over sex. When you’ve got
a name like a Greek hero, and a nickname like a luscious fruit, isn’t hubris
ripe to follow?
It’s been a
steep fall for Peaches Petraeus, once the darling of Congress and journalists,
Republicans and Democrats, Paula Broadwell and Jill Kelley.
Washington
is suffused with schadenfreude. Yet President Obama and others felt genuinely
sad to see a man so controlling about integrity and image — he warned protégés
that “someone is always watching” — spin out of control on integrity and image.
As Shakespeare wrote in “Othello”: “Reputation, reputation, reputation.”
As a West
Point cadet, David Petraeus clambered up the social ladder by winning the
superintendent’s daughter; now he has been brought down by his camp followers
clambering up the social ladder.
Even when he
was the C.I.A. director, Petraeus’s ego was so wrapped up in being a shiny
military idol that, according to The Washington Post, he recently surprised
guests at a D.C. dinner when he arrived to speak wearing his medals on the
lapel of his suit jacket.
His fall
started as Sophocles and turned sophomoric, a mind-boggling mélange of “From
Here to Eternity,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “The Real Housewives of Centcom,” and
“Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” It features toned arms, slinky outfits, a
cat fight, titillating e-mails, a military more consumed with sex than
violence, a plot with more inconceivable twists than “Homeland,” and a
Twitter’s-delight lexicon: an “embedded” mistress named Broadwell, a biography
called “All In,” an other-other woman of Middle East ancestry who was a “social
liaison” to the military, a shirtless F.B.I. agent crushing on the losing-her-shirt-to-debt
Tampa socialite, a pair of generals helping the socialite’s twin sister with a
custody case, and lawyers and crisis-management experts linked to Monica
Lewinsky, John Edwards and the ABC show “Scandal.”
“This is The
National Enquirer, ” an alarmed Senator Dianne Feinstein told Wolf Blitzer of
CNN. If only it were that highbrow. Now that erotic activity is entwined with
the Internet, rather than closeted in hideaway Capitol offices and Oval Office
pantries, it’s even more likely to be a trip wire for history.
It is
disturbing that an ethically sketchy, politically motivated F.B.I. agent could
spark an incendiary federal investigation tunneling into private lives to help
a woman he liked and later blow it up to hurt a president he didn’t like.
It’s also
worrisome that the nation’s spymaster — who had presided in a military where
adultery could result in court-martial — could not have found a more
clandestine manner of talking naughty to his biographer babe than a Gmail drop
box, a semiprivate file-sharing system used by terrorists, teenagers and
authors.
It’s
understandable that men accustomed to being away from their families and
cloistered with other men in Muslim countries where drinking and blowing off
steam are frowned upon might get used to cavorting on e-mail.
But Petraeus
should have realized that the Chinese and Russians were snooping and sent Paula
Broadwell an Enigma e-mail: “I would like your insights into the debate over
COIN versus CT in Helmand Province. Our HVT kills are falling a little short of
the mark. Let’s discuss.”
And
Broadwell could have sent ones more like: “I’ve been reading Chapter 3 notes
and the Galula theory of counterinsurgency confuses me. Hope you can clarify.”
The scandal
is a good reminder that, although John McCain and Sarah Palin urge total trust
and blank checks for the generals, these guys are human beings working under
extremely stressful circumstances, and their judgments are not beyond reproach.
Petraeus’s
Icarus flight began when he set himself above President Obama.
Accustomed
to being a demigod, expert at polishing his own celebrity and swaying public
opinion, Petraeus did not accept the new president’s desire to head for the
nearest exit ramp on Afghanistan in 2009. The general began lobbying for a
surge in private sessions with reporters and undercutting the president, who
was trying to make a searingly hard call.
Petraeus
rolled the younger commander in chief into going ahead with a bound-to-fail
surge in Afghanistan, just as, half a century earlier, the C.I.A. had rolled
Jack Kennedy into going ahead with the bound-to-fail Bay of Pigs scheme. Both
missions defied logic, but the untested presidents put aside their own doubts
and instincts, caving to experience.
Once in
Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent conservative hawks from Washington
think tanks. As Greg Jaffe wrote in The Washington Post, they were “given
permanent office space at his headquarters and access to military aircraft to
tour the battlefield. They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes
conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate
bosses.”
So many more
American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that
went on too long. That’s the real scandal.
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
ish, � 1 r s px ��k ps expand and left media outlets thrive, the power to impose government accountability is apt to remain elusive. That power is contingent on organizing, reaching the public and building muscle to exercise leverage over what government officials do—and who they are. Even electing better candidates won't accomplish much unless the base is organized and functional enough to keep them accountable.
Politicians like to envision social movements as tributaries flowing into their election campaigns. But a healthy ecology of progressive politics would mean the flow goes mostly in the other direction. Election campaigns should be subsets of social movements, not the other way around. Vital initiatives to break the cycles of capitulation and lack of accountability will come from the grassroots.
* * *
"Bringing the vibrancy and democracy of activist movement culture to a political campaign is necessary but complicated," said Torie Osborn, a longtime progressive organizer in the Los Angeles area, whose dynamic grassroots campaign for the state legislature nearly advanced to the November ballot. "Activist protest culture is spontaneous, often angry and wildly uncontrollable. Campaigns have to be rigorously disciplined and controllable."
The mismatch takes a toll. "Ultimately one shortfall of our heartbreaking 1 percent loss was that our volunteers did not show up in force until the very end," Osborn told me. "Our field program counted on a 'movement' turnout, but our experience was that the energized volunteers didn't really want to do what the campaign needed. They wanted to be on Facebook, to blog, to go to events, even drive around and put up lawn signs, but not the voter-contact work of walking and phoning—at least not at the scale we were counting on."
Osborn's assessment tracked with my simultaneous experience as a candidate for Congress in California's North Coast district, a mostly liberal area north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Our campaign drew on my four decades of activism and several years of groundwork, including hundreds of speeches and other public appearances in the district. I'd been a member of the state Democratic Party's central committee since 2007, and our campaign had traction inside the party—despite the fact that its hierarchy was hot-wired for my main opponent, Jared Huffman, a five-year state legislator who had boosted his career with major donations from big corporations.
During my run for Congress, I participated in Occupy demonstrations in more than a half-dozen cities across our far-flung district. (Because of my long record as an activist, some local Occupy organizers set aside their aversion to allowing a candidate to speak.) A deft organizer of some of those protests, Pat Johnstone, coordinated much of my campaign's fieldwork. "From the beginning, Occupiers have expressed concern about being 'co-opted' by progressive groups," she observed. "Occupy provided a renewed vision of what is possible when we rise up together. However, the success of any movement depends on building and sustaining capacity. Partnerships and coalitions are an important part of that growth. How strong can any grassroots movement be without the strength of numbers?"
Early on, I announced that our campaign would not accept money from lobbyists or corporate PACs. Instead, we kept our eyes on small donors. I spoke at more than fifty house parties, and we developed a large e-mail list to update supporters while asking for contributions and volunteers. The campaign drew in hundreds of volunteers and more than 7,000 individual donors, raising $750,000. We approached fundraising as an outgrowth of grassroots support—not the other way around.
Our organizing approach and my unabashed progressive positions paid off as our campaign fought for support from unions. The first breakthrough came from the legendary longshore union ILWU, which followed up its endorsement by hosting a fundraiser. I also received solo endorsements from AFSCME locals and the UAW, along with a dual endorsement from the California Federation of Teachers and a triple endorsement from SEIU California. Another major victory came when our campaign jolted expectations by depriving Huffman of a pre-primary endorsement from the California Teachers Association. Those hard-won victories were partly the result of my strong pro-labor commitments, like unequivocal defense of pensions. But sadly, the progressive California Nurses Association stayed out of the race. And the bulk of the labor establishment—including the building trades, the big labor council in the district and the state labor federation (AFL-CIO)—lined up with the garden-variety liberal Democratic politician making his way up the ladder.
I was fortunate to get support from several progressives in Congress. Strong endorsement letters went out from Representatives John Conyers and Raúl Grijalva. Days before the June election, Representative Dennis Kucinich campaigned alongside me. But in the district it was a different story with retiring Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, whose fervent antiwar politics have lost steam when approaching endorsements. In 2010 she went far out of her way to help Jane Harman, a leading pro-war congresswoman and Blue Dog Coalition member, fend off a primary challenge from an antiwar progressive. This year, thirty-six hours after primary election night (with 40,000 votes still uncounted and a small margin between me and the runoff), Woolsey endorsed Huffman—who has never indicated that he will challenge the military-industrial complex. The takeaway: we need to build an independent progressive power base instead of relying on any politician.
After campaigning nonstop for eighteen months, I received more than 25,000 votes in the primary (15 percent) and missed getting into the November runoff by 174 votes. (Huffman finished in first place, with 37.5 percent.) With just two Republicans among the dozen contenders in the "top-two open primary," one of the GOP candidates slipped through to the fall ballot. If I'd gotten past the primary and consolidated progressive support, I would have gone into the general election with an initial base of about 30 percent. At that point, I would have had to pull quite a populist rabbit out of the hat to win.
"Technically, our campaign has ended," I wrote to supporters after the protracted vote count. "Politically, it's continuing—with plans to build an ongoing coalition on the foundation of what we've already done together." Dozens of people involved in my campaign quickly went to work on other ones with heightened skills, knowledge and abilities to draw in volunteers. Meanwhile, our campaign is morphing into a coalition for the long haul (GrassrootsProgress.org [3]), aiding efforts to elect progressives to local office within our district as well as to Congress elsewhere in the country.
* * *
Overall, progressive insurgencies did not perform well in House primaries this year. A few bright spots appeared when David Gill beat the Democratic machine in a central Illinois district and liberal challengers took out centrist incumbents in Texas and Pennsylvania. But even with high-profile support from national netroots groups, progressive candidates—notably Ilya Sheyman in Illinois, Eric Griego in New Mexico and Darcy Burner in Washington State—lost by sizable margins. Each contest had its own dynamics (Burner was outspent six to one by a self-financed opponent who dropped $2.3 million, whereas Griego had a money advantage), but the pattern is grim.
Yes, progressives are usually underfunded, and money matters a lot. But it's hazardous to internalize Mark Hanna's timeworn dictum, "There are two things that are important in politics. The first thing is money, and I can't remember what the second one is." We forget the second thing at our peril. In a word, we need to organize.
For progressives, ongoing engagement with people in communities has vast potential advantages that big money can't buy—and hopefully can't defeat. But few progressive institutions with election goals have the time, resolve, resources or patience to initiate and sustain relationships with communities. For the most part, precinct organizing is a lost art that progressives have failed to revitalize. Until that changes, the electoral future looks bleak.
In my race, basic progress ended up reflected in vote totals to the extent that I was able to reach out and talk with people over the course of years. Yet many of the shortcomings of my campaign were related to fieldwork. Votes slipped through our fingers when we didn't do adequate follow-up with contacts made long before election day. As our campaign grew, so did the dilemmas of time, staff, volunteers and money. By any measure, we ran the strongest grassroots campaign in the race, but it wasn't grassroots enough.
Fragmentation of core constituencies was another problem. From the outset, it was obvious that half of the twelve candidates didn't have a snowball's chance of getting through the primary. With rhetoric that sounded leftish, those six candidates received a combined total of 8.6 percent of the primary vote, while I lost by 0.1 percent. Huffman was no doubt exceedingly grateful to these anemic "protest candidates"; he could go on a cakewalk to the November runoff against a GOP candidate in a heavily Democratic district.
My counsel to prospective candidates: do not launch a campaign unless you can give it your all and plausibly consolidate most of the progressive electorate along the way. Do thorough groundwork for a long time. Keep meeting people and adding to your database of contacts. Listen and learn about political microclimates. Work on building coalitions. Encourage volunteers and treat them with respect. Insist on meticulous, accurate and principled work from staff. Remember that better process is much more likely to result in better decisions; when disagreements flare within the team, strive to assess the clashing outlooks. Keep your eyes on the prize: not only winning but also making progressive activists and groups stronger for the long haul.
A campaign with resonance should keep evolving after the election. Donor files, e-mail lists, working relationships, infrastructure, public good will and more can sustain and expand alliances. High-quality compost from one campaign should invigorate the growth of others.
Winning or losing an election can hinge on the decisions of just one group or even one individual. We may not feel powerful, but an internalized sense of powerlessness represents another triumph for a system that thrives on vast imbalances of power. Let's get more serious—and effective—about gaining progressive power in government, shall we?
Links:
[1] http://www.thenation.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/norman-solomon
[3] http://grassrootsprogress.org/
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