Features > May 26, 2008
Why Democrats Won’t Stop the War
By David Sirota
The nationwide opposition to the Iraq War is based on a host of populist impulses. Some people hate it because they think lives are being sacrificed to pursue the oil industry’s agenda. Some despise it because, without a military draft, the U.S. casualties — 4,000-plus and counting — are disproportionately working-class kids. Still others abhor the war because it drains scarce resources away from pressing priorities at home. And yet, despite this groundswell of antiwar sentiment, the campaign to stop the war is adrift and dysfunctional.
On the one side are groups like United for Peace and Justice, that head what progressive activist Matt Stoller has deemed “The Protest Industry” — a clan “made up of those who decided that participation in the system was immoral” because they “have seen ‘compromise’ many times before and think they know where it leads.”
At Protest Industry rallies against the war in Iraq, you will find no effort to hone a basic message. You will see a sea of signs demanding (1) the end to a war with Iran that hasn’t happened, (2) the impeachment of President George W. Bush, (3) the arrest of Vice President Dick Cheney, (4) the elimination of the death penalty, or (5) the overthrow of the U.S. government by Maoists who reason that the “world can’t wait to drive out the Bush regime.”
These demonstrations are boisterous but ephemeral displays whose chaos and lack of message reinforce a self-defeating fringe image.
On the other side of the antiwar movement is a group of organizations and apparatchiks that have launched an operation called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI) — a coalition of mainly Washington, D.C.-based advocacy groups, pooling cash and staff for “a major, multimillion dollar national campaign to oppose the president’s ‘surge’ proposal to escalate the war in Iraq,” as its website says.
Within the uprising against the war in Iraq, AAEI and its allies are the “professional” side of the antiwar effort. Consider them The Players.
The Players imagine that the war will end not after a massive investment in long-term, on-the-ground local organizing against war, but by the short-term coordination of a few elite actors — political consultants, donors, politicians and maybe one or two organization heads — in front of a map of media markets and congressional districts.
The Players make their moves with campaign contributions, TV spots and PR campaigns — the conventional weapons in a media war — and they are playing their game in Washington for Washington. In contrast to the Protest Industry, they believe the only way to effect change is to play an inside game.
Hollywood for ugly people
Media coverage is currency in the nation’s capital. There, celebrities are people like Washington Post columnist David Broder, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Time magazine’s Joe Klein — people known to almost no one in the country at large.
Within the Beltway, however, they are influential celebrities because they appear on obscure chat shows, from C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to Fox News’ “Special Report” to MSNBC’s “Hardball.”
Our nation’s capital has become Hollywood for ugly people.
Washington’s self-absorbed fetishization of tiny-audience TV shows might be funny — except that the Iraq War was largely started because of this closed-circuit media obsession.
In the march to war, neoconservatives, like The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, staked out beachheads on Fox News sets, while so-called liberal hawks, like The New Republic’s former editor Peter Beinart, dug trenches in CNN studios. These pundits established support for the war as a criterion of political respectability and a mark of worthiness for media access.
Now, out in the real world, beyond the confines of the TV studios, it’s all gone to shit — all of it. The American public — which was ambivalent about supporting the unilateral invasion — is now firmly opposed to continuing the conflict.
Many of Washington’s pro-war TV “celebrities” are trying to flee their previously televised warmongering. Klein of Time magazine, for instance, appeared on CNBC a month before the Iraq invasion to state, “War may well be the right decision at this point — in fact, I think it probably is.” By 2007, he claimed with a straight face, “I’ve been opposed to the Iraq War ever since 2002.”
In light of this, The Players believe that by funneling money into organizations like AAEI, pulling PR stunts and putting attack ads on television against pro-war legislators in Congress, they can make this antiwar uprising successful without organizing millions of Americans into a cohesive long-term movement. They believe, in short, that if a war can be started because of Washington’s obsession with television, it can be ended because of that same obsession.
Washington’s rules
Both the Protest Industry chanting on the Mall and The Players scheming in their downtown Washington offices are necessary parts of an effective antiwar uprising. The outraged rabble provides the boots on the ground that can pressure lawmakers in their local communities. And that popular ferment could be enhanced by a professional presence playing the Beltway’s media game.
The crippling problem for The Players is the increasing difficulty of operating in Washington without being corrupted by it. As blogger Chris Bowers says, “In Washington, D.C., for those who run the government, the public is quite distant and faceless.”
If the rules of Washington were written down, the first one would say: Anyone wishing to play its games has to sign up big-name political consultants who are perceived to have “influence.” That buys you instant credibility with politicians and reporters there — “those folks who write the stories, and appear on television and radio to talk about the state of play in Washington,” as the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza says. “Like it or not, the opinions expressed by these people tend to set the parameters of the debate when an election year rolls around.”
As a Washington pundit, Cillizza’s analysis inflates his own importance. But as biased as he is — and as much as his statement reeks of elitism — inside the Beltway his self-aggrandizement is a religious doctrine that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This poses a problem for even the best-intentioned advocacy organizations in D.C. The same consultants they need to hire to play this Washington game and to influence these people who “set the parameters of the debate,” are often simultaneously paid by the very politicians who should be in their crosshairs.
The result is that ideological organizations become fused to the partisan political structure they seek to pressure.
Hot Pocket politics
Take the leadership of AAEI. The group is guided by Hildebrand Tewes, a consulting firm named for its original partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes — both longtime Democratic Party operatives.
The firm is one of a new breed of companies that attempts to bring to uprising politics the ease of microwave TV dinners. Don’t feel like making dinner? Throw a Hot Pocket into the microwave. Don’t feel like doing the hard work of local organizing to build a sustaining, durable movement that lasts beyond the issue du jour? Put together a pile of money to hire a firm like Hildebrand Tewes and you can have your instant “uprising” — one that provides about as much nutrition to your cause as microwaved junk food provides to your body.
While the firm is supposedly leading an independent antiwar uprising by pressuring politicians in both parties, about half its employees — including the firm’s two principals — were staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the re-election arm of the same Democratic U.S. senators that the antiwar uprising now needs to pressure to end the war.
But the conflict of interest only starts there.
At the same time Hildebrand Tewes is working with AAEI, the firm is being paid by various Democratic politicians for its services — Democratic politicians who have a vested interest in avoiding attacks from the antiwar uprising.
The consequences of such incestuous overlaps between party and uprising are best exemplified by Brad Woodhouse, the Hildebrand Tewes consultant leading AAEI. He came directly to Hildebrand Tewes after years as the DSCC’s chief spokesperson and a mouthpiece for Democratic candidates. This supposed antiwar champion is the same guy who, as a campaign staffer, bragged to newspapers just before the Iraq invasion that the Democratic U.S. candidate he was working for, Erskine Bowles (N.C.), was more pro-war than the Republican candidate.
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