Here's another one of those books that says we Democrats are struggling to define our program for the future. Reviewed in the NY Times on Tuesday, "The Argument" by Matt Bai is my current political reading. The subtitle is "Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics."
Bai was a co-moderator of the presidential debate forum at the YearlyKos bloggers convention in Chicago early this month, and is clearly well-versed in the short history of the netroots world and its impact on politics. Those of us who saw Simon Rosenberg's presentation last spring on the dawn of the new politics will be pleased to see that he had an important role in getting concerned people together and leading them toward the Howard Dean wing of the party.
Not too far into the book yet, I'm dubious about Bai's comparing the Democrats to General Motors in the '70s. Seems like apples and oranges to me. Bai is afflicted with the NY Times writer's problem with inapt connections, such as Tom Friedman's "The World is Flat." No, Tom, even if you say so, it's not.
But there seems to be plenty of good history and analysis, and I'm plugging ahead. Sometimes I wonder if this incessant demand that we postulate a new philosophy is a way to keep us from concentrating on analyzing the world and deciding how to fix it. Philosophize, or act? Is that the question?
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
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Yikes! I snookered myself into uttering an opinion a lot like what David Brooks writes in the Sunday NY Times Book Review: "The best way to win votes ... is to offer people an accurate view of the world and a set of policies that seem likely to produce good results." This is in the conservative columnist's review of a new book, "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation," by Drew Westen. Brooks didn't much like the stress on emotion, preferring rationality.
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