This line from a front page Dailykos diary made me want to throw my two cents in: "Point is, our media machine is tiny."
The right-wing media machine, on the other hand, is bigger, better established (look at right-wingers writing columns or doing commentary in the mainstream media versus liberals), and much better funded. They don't base their commentary and reporting on the facts, but on a narrative they construct about how things should be and pump this narrative out for the tens of millions of Americans, who tune them in as their primary news source.
What does this mean for liberals?
We need to realize there is a large well funded focused opposition to anything and everything we try and do. They are bigger than us by the numbers of people, who listen to Limbaugh every week and who watch Fox News daily. They have been around longer and are better established than us. Just look at right-winger commentators on Sunday morning news shows and on the opinion pages of newspapers, versus their liberal counterparts. They will push their agenda, irregardless of what their agenda actually does.
When liberals focus on what parts of our agenda haven't been done only helps right-wingers.
We need to get the message out as loudly as possible about the positive things that have happened in the last one year and how we are better off today, than we were on January 19, 2009, because of the liberal policies President Obama and the Democratic Congress have implemented.
If we don't do it, who will?
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, et. al.? I don't think so.
The mainstream media? It's not their job to do publicize and promote our goals.
The assault against President Obama by liberals only undermines any hope we have of meaningful change, because the non-tuned in non-political junkies, who flip through websites, newspapers, etc. only hear the negative about what's going on in America today from both the left and the right.
The Right-Wing Narrative
I spent some time around Christmas and New Years driving around a bit and tuned in right-wing talk radio, just to hear what they were saying. What struck me about their style was they did not talk about facts, they built a narrative about how things should be and wove the facts of the day to fit their narrative.
For example, Rush Limbaugh was hospitalized, while on vacation in Hawai'i.
One comment Rush made, that's gotten some attention is a common theme among right-wingers, America has the greatest health care system in the world:
"The treatment I received here was the best that the world has to offer," Limbaugh said. "Based on what happened here to me, I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy."
http://thinkprogress.org/...
He's coming from a narrative on his radio show, that we don't need reform, because eveything's fine and dandy the way it is and people need to be more responsible:
Ladies and gentlemen, I was taken to the emergency room where I was treated, and anybody who had what I had would have been treated. It could have been some troll underneath a bridge. If they'd been found with this kind of problem and put in an ambulance, the law requires that the person get treated in the emergency room. You don't need insurance for it.
See everything's find and dandy folks.
He goes on to add an argument of the rugged individualism conservatives idealize, while ignoring the fact he an 8 year, $400 million dollar contract, which makes him much wealthier than most folks.
I'm not running around asking anybody else to pay for it, and I don't have an attitude in my head that somebody else ought to have to pay for it. I budget this. I figure that these kinds of things are going to happen as you get older, so I set money aside for it.
And goes onto interject a sweeping generalization, with nothing to back it up:
we don't need to spend $2.5 trillion to insure these 47 million.
We could take unspent stimulus money and insure all the people in this group without changing the health care system at all! Again, I want to reiterate this one point.
With this sort narrative about how great our healthcare system is, how people who can't afford their bills get what they deserve by not being able to pay their bills or afford treatment, and a simple statement that fixing things is easy lays the groundwork for opposition to the change in the minds of his millions of listeners.
There's a right-wing narrative cutting down everything we are trying to promote and absolving themselves of responsibility for every right-wing screw up.
For example, have you ever heard a Republican or right-wing chickenhawk say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake? I haven't.
The prolonged occupation of Iraq helped destroy George W. Bush's Presidency, yet they the people framing the right-wing narrative about what's good for America don't waste time admitting how bad a decision it was. They still defend it, from a January 19, 2010 Fox News opinion piece by Jeffrey Shapiro:
Whether actual weapons were found or not, the war in Iraq was legally and morally justifiable, and necessary.
All that matters in the right-wing media is justifying their narrative, whatever that narrative may be, no matter how wrong their policies have been and they have the reach in the media to push their narratives.
The Nexus of Right-Wing Media and Republican Politics
From Media Matters, during the debate on the stimulus bill last February:
Limbaugh, Hannity, and the GOP: an iron triangle of stimulus misinformation
On any given day during the current congressional debate over the economic recovery plan, chances are good that Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity will say something false about the administration's or congressional Democrats' efforts to pass a bill. And they do not promote these falsehoods in isolation; they are often promoted concurrently with each other and with Republican members of Congress.
To this day, Republicans are going all out attacking the Obama Administration. This past Sunday, on Meet the Press, Mitch McConnell chimes in with this to say about the Stimulus Bill:
Look, we passed a stimulus bill. The, the goal there was to keep unemployment at 8 percent. It's now 10 percent, in my state 10.6 percent. Let's concentrate on what the American--you showed the survey earlier in your program of what people would like for us to be working on, and that's job creation.
You have right-wing media trumpeting the point that the Stimulus Bill didn't keep unemployment from skyrocketing this year and therefore Obama's policies are a total failure, from a December 2009 Media Matters article:
Right-wing media figures have used the upcoming White House jobs summit to claim that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has failed to stimulate the economy and thus that the Obama administration should not continue to pursue such policies.
What does this have to do with me?
From the same Media Matters article:
In fact, a broad consensus of economists have agreed that the Recovery Act has boosted gross domestic product and reduced unemployment in recent months; moreover, numerous economists have stated that the ARRA's flaw was that it was not large enough, and that additional federal stimulus is needed to continue the economic recovery.
If all liberals do is bash President Obama for not including a Public Option or getting single payer advocates into the health care reform negotiations, or attack him for not repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell", or for beefing up the U.S. presence in Afghanistan (which Obama said he would do going back to 2007, when he entered the Presidential race), and host of other things liberals are jumping on Obama for "betraying" them, we give the Republicans and right-wingers an open invitation to take back power.
Somewhere out there, we need to start trumpeting the positives President Obama has accomplished in his one year in office, because if we, the people who voted for him, organized for him, and helped fund his campaign don't do this, who will?
If we want to see more direct investment by the government in our future, we need to trumpet the jobs created by the Stimulus Bill, because in the Stimulus Bill there's the biggest investment in renewable energy America's had in a generation.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- On a mountain top 80 miles northeast of Bangor, Maine, in country where houses and gravel pits are mere pinpricks on a map green with forest, Paul Gaynor is making stimulus work.
Gaynor, chief executive of First Wind, is using $40 million in federal funds to help build a wind farm that will produce enough power for 13,000 homes and has created 200 construction jobs.
Without stimulus, First Wind's project -- and most renewable energy projects across the country -- may not have happened
http://money.cnn.com/...
We've thrown up diaries about how people have struggled with the current state of health care. Why not post diaries about anyone you know, who has gotten a job or kept their job because of the Stimulus Bill?
Why not post any progress made for working women because of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which President Obama signed into law?
Why not post diaries about the success of Cash-for-Clunkers, because I guarantee you, if Republicans regain power the only thing they will propose to stimulate the economy are tax cuts and rebate checks because that's the only thing that fits the right-wing narrative about what is needed to fix the economy.
We're in serious problem and for whatever flaws President Obama and the Democrats have (no one is perfect), they are proposing changes to the way things were done under George W. Bush and the Republican Party.
The Republicans aren't going to change, even though what the did at the start of this decade led to the worst disaster in our economy since the Great Depression, because it doesn't fit the narrative they and their enablers in the right-wing media have created about what works in America.
As Kos wrote today: our media machine is tiny. Their media machine is huge, in comparison.
We need start touting how President Obama is bringing positive change, after eight years of George W. Bush and Republican misrule in our country. As bad as things in are right now, they aren't hopeless and more positive change can happen.
I don't think we should stop trying to push for better health care reform or financial regulations, but we aren't going to get any progress if we don't start informing Americans about the good things our liberal agenda has done for them this past year.
Because if we don't tout the good things President Obama has done for America, who will?
If we don't tout how we need more government investment in infrastructure, government funding for renewable energy, and other things we believe in that are being done on a too small scale right now, who else will pick up the banner to champion for these things?
There's a lot at stake right now. Too much, in my opinion, to just shut out the good things that have started and need to be expanded, to waste our tiny media machine on tearing this Administration apart.