Angry

It seems to me that "angry" has become the most overused word in America.

"Angry Democrats" is an expression that had been bandied about for a while, but the critical mass point was reached after the 2004 Iowa primary, after John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, and the DLC tag-teamed Howard Dean to knock him out of the race. Legend has it that the now-infamous "Dean Scream" demolished Dean's campaign, but the reality of the "scream" (the distortion of which was later admitted to by Diane Sawyer, after it was safely too late to make a difference), was a result of this:

David Jones, an avid fundraiser and organizer for the Democratic National Committee and a staunch DLC patron who garnered money for centrist New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Al Gore, founded an anti-Dean group that ran vile ads attacking him early on in the Iowa contest. Deceptively called "Americans for Jobs, Health Care & Progressive Values, 2004 Election Cycle," Jones' group conducted a poll, which found that most Americans championed Dean's Iraq war stance. But few knew of his support of NAFTA, Medicare cuts in the mid 1990s, or his endorsements from the NRA.

"The first spot, on Dean's NRA endorsements, ran Dec. 5-12 in Iowa," The Chicago Sun Tribune reported on February 19, 2004. "The second ad ran Dec. 12-19 in Iowa and hit Dean on his NRA backing and NAFTA and Medicare stands. By this time, Jones did not have much money left."
Jones' group raised in excess of $600,000 from numerous Democratic insiders, including former New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli whose political career ended abruptly fell victim to ethics violations. Torricelli donated $50,000 to Jones' group.

As The Washington Post reported on February 16, 2004, "The [Jones' donor] list makes clearer than ever that the rules need to be changed to provide timely disclosure-to ensure that voters know who is behind this kind of attack advertising in time to factor that into their decision-making, should they so choose. We learn now that unions that had endorsed Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) contributed $200,000 of the group's $663,000 in donations. Two top Gephardt backers also contributed: Leo Hindery Jr. of YES Network ($100,000), who served as a national finance co-chair, and Swanee Hunt ($25,000), who was a national campaign co-chair.

While Mr. Gephardt's backers [including Jones during the late 1990s] constituted the bulk of the donors, they weren't alone: Slim-Fast Foods founder S. Daniel Abraham, a major Democratic donor who contributed to his home state senator, Bob Graham (Fla.), and to Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), gave $100,000. J. McDonald Williams, a former chairman of the Trammell Crow construction company and a donor to the Bush-Cheney campaign this year, though to Democrats in previous cycles, gave $50,000 Mr. Torricelli, you will remember, had the cash to spare because he was forced to quit his reelection race after being 'severely admonished' by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting expensive gifts from a campaign donor he was doing official favors for. Now a champion at collecting special-interest money is gathering checks for Mr. Kerry, who's busy railing against those interests."

As it turns out, the Post article doesn't even tell the full story. In reality, the ties between Jones' organization, the Kerry campaign, and DNC chair Terry McAuliffe were much stronger than suggested.

As Marc Brazeau pointed out on the online political site Joe Hill Dispatch, a closer examination reveals "that the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & From was paid $18,000 for legal work by the group and the e-mail contact for Americans for Jobs" ended in skadden.com.

Why the fuss? It just so happens that skadden.com was the email tag for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & From-a firm that has donated $176,575 to John Kerry's presidential campaign as of mid-June 2004. To put things in perspective, this is more money than any other big Kerry backers, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Microsoft have donated since the inception of Kerry's campaign.

"And while the Post points out that Leo Hindery had ties to Gephardt, it should be noted that he testified before Kerry's communications committee as well.

So you have a $50,000 contribution from Kerry fundraiser Robert Torricelli, legal expertise provided by Kerry's largest contributor, and a major donor from an industry that Kerry was responsible for regulating," Brazeau explained. "Those are the dots. Connect them how you like."

Given this, it's abundantly clear that the grassroots efforts of Howard Dean, Inc. were being taken on by insider money.

And for the record, here's the video of the "Dean Scream" taken by someone who was actually there in the crowd:

...and here is what was broadcast into homes all over the country:

Kind of a difference when you hear it in context, right? But after all, what is the truth when compared to the need to frame a story?

Eric Saltzman of CBS News put it thusly:

Before Dean came out onstage, communications director Tricia Enright worked the press in the back of the hall. "He's going to be fiery," she told reporters. She said Dean would walk out on stage, take off his jacket, hand it to Sen. Tom Harkin and roll up his sleeves. Dean, she said, was fired up.

The rest, by now, you know.

What you might not know, because it doesn't play 30 times a day on the cable news channels, is what was happening in the rest of the room. You don't see the visual and you don't hear the audio. The television crews recording the event plug into an audio source picking up Dean's microphone, not the sound of the room. The cameras focus in to a tight shot of the candidate, not the rest of the room.

What you are not hearing is a room with thousands of people screaming and cheering.

What you are not seeing are hundreds upon hundreds of American flags waving.

What you are not hearing are members of the audience shouting out state names urging Dean to list more.

What you are not seeing is the way Dean's supporters were lifted out of their slump by the speech.

In a nutshell, you are not seeing that Dean's speech fit the tone of the room.

Not that the speech was a good idea; clearly it has created problems for Dean, but not because he's a loose cannon or a little off kilter. Dean is actually a rather straight-laced, staid person. The Iowa speech has become a problem because Dean's aides either failed to recognize or failed to convince their candidate that when he speaks to a roomful of people, he is not speaking to a roomful of people: he is speaking to a television camera.

That camera might pick up an entire speech, but it will only disseminate sound bites; quick, interesting, entertaining, news-making sound bites.

For months, pundits have been suggesting that the only person who could stop Howard Dean is Howard Dean. And pundits like to be right.

Even when they're wrong. Even when they lie. If the public trusts the media to tell the news as it is, and the media willfully gets it wrong, then where do Americans who don't read blogs find out what's really going on?

Now it's John Edwards' turn to be branded as "The Angry Candidate:"

• Roger Simon, Politico: "John Edwards has found a theme: He is angry and he is on your side. He is bold and he will use his boldness for you."
  
• Mo Rocca, AOL Newsbloggers: "Everyone played their parts: John Edwards was angry and shrill. (When will Democrats learn that righteous indignation never wins elections? Be sunny. Be optimistic. Bush proved that you can be dumb as a box of rocks and still get people to vote for you if you seem like a happy guy.)"
  
• Stephen Thomma, McClatchy Newspapers: "John Edwards had an even worse night, seen by voters and analysts as too angry in attacking his party's front-runner."
  
• Even Chris Dodd has joined the meme party: "I am surprised at just how angry John has become,"
  
• Foon Rhee, Boston.com: "John Edwards' second TV spot in his make-or-break state of Iowa focuses on healthcare and his sort-of-angry populism."
  

I'd go so far as to say that if you AREN'T angry, there's something wrong.

One of the things that's made me angry recently is John Kerry deciding NOW to fight back against the Swift Boat Liars in the wake of T. Boone Pickens' pathetic attempt to regain the spotlight by offering a million dollars to anyone who can prove the group's 2004 claims false.

Now, I'm all for fighting back, even if it has taken Kerry three years to learn that you have to do it. But there's something very "yesterday's news" about it that makes it seem like a hollow, symbolic gesture. By all means -- if Pickens is trying to revive the Swifties, they should be squelched as quickly as possible, but I think John Kerry has a real opportunity here to use his experience, his national influence (and some of his cash) to expand beyond his own experience and work to organize a real rapid response operation to get out front of all of these bogus claims, to push our way onto the gasbag shows that perpetuate them, and keep pushing the media to stop being paid shills for Republicans. This is what Media Matters professes to do, but MM's reach doesn't seem to extend beyond the web, and something more high profile is in order.

My mention of Media Matters is deliberate, because it illustrates what can happen when someone who made an even more egregious error than Kerry's 2004 inaction and refusal to insist on an accurate vote count decides to redeem himself. David Brock was at the forefront of the Arkansas Project, and a key figure in the trawling net that resulted in the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about sex in a civil case that never should have been brought. Brock also was the perpetrator of the "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" slur against Anita Hill. But today he's a staunch advocate for truth, and while there's still no overestimating his fault in the 1990's scandalmongering atmostphere, he's done yeoman work in trying to do something to counteract the damage he did. If John Kerry can take a rapid response concept beyond clearing his own name, and by recognizing the collusion between the right wing and the mainstream media, prevent what happened to him from happening to Democrats in the future, it'll be a long way towards redeeming him in my eyes.

I think, though, that Kerry is representative of entrenched Democrats in that he truly doesn't understand the outrage that many of us progressives still feel about the 2000 and 2004 elections. He's like Tom Glavine, shrugging his soldiers after the Mets' devastating collapse and saying "You learn and you move on" -- not understanding the utter devastation many of us feel when our candidates don't get the job done year after year after year. Blind rage accomplishes nothing, but there's been so ittle progress in the last seven years against what we know about how Republicans run campaigns and how they govern. Our candidates should know better. And they don't. And now we see a party apparatus that is clearly poised to try to do to Barack Obama and John Edwards in Iowa what they did to Howard Dean in 2004, thereby making the 2008 election safe for the party hackocracy. The only irony here is that while in 1992 the Clintons and their entourage were regarded as the hillybilly arrivistes, today THEY are the hackocracy. And the hack-in-chief, Hillary Clinton, thinks that when other candidates point out very real, substantive differences in just whom government should represent, it's "piling on."

And the expectation is that once the corporatist Democrat has defeated the insurgent(s), progressives will once again fall in line and vote for someone who doesn't stand for our values on the assumption that we have no place else to go.

Think I'm being overly dramatic? Last night Lawrence O'Donnell had this to say on Countdown last night on this very topic. No video available, I transcribed this myself:

O'DONNELL (referring to Congressional Democrats and why they don't force the filibuster): So they fear looking ineffectual in one way and they fear looking like showboats in another way and they're not getting where the left side of their party wants to go, and they're just hoping that they will have forgiveness from the left side of their party on Election Day in 2008.

OLBERMANN: Any chance that they wont? And what happens to the left side of the party if it doesn't support the Democratic candidate in 2008?

O'DONNELL: The Democratic calculation in the Senate, Keith, is always the left has nowhere to go but the Democratic Party. I've never been in a meeting in the Senate where there was any other presumption.

And that, my friends, is what the party we're expected to blindly support, the party in which we're not supposed to have any squabbles, lest we play into Republican hands, the party we're supposed to focus on putting into power thinks of us.

"...the left has nowhere to go but the Democratic Party."

So if you think that the party apparatchiks give a rat's ass about what the so-called "left side of the party" thinks -- that side of the party that just happens to represent the majority of Americans in that we want to stop all of our jobs from going overseas, end the Iraq War, stop funnelling more and more wealth into the pockets of corporate bigwigs and their cronies, that wants universal healthcare and education for their kids -- guess again.

We put these Democrats in charge so that they would get us out of Iraq and stop the metamorphosis of the United States into a feudal society where a few wealthy families own everything and the rest of us are crawling on the ground scrambling for scraps. Not only haven't they done that, but they have no motivation to do so, because like the kinds of men who beat their wives, they believe that we have noplace else to go, that we will continue supporting these people who claim to be on our side and screw us over again and again and again, "...because we have noplace else to go."

Angry? You're Goddamn right I'm angry. If I wasn't angry I'd be a Republican. And instead of giving every Democrat a goddamn medal just for not being a Republican, I'm going to hold these people's feet to the fire every waking minute until they start doing what we pay them for.

Fighting back against the right-wing noise machine is a start. But it isn't enough all by itself.