Josh Koenig's blog

With Labor Day weekend past, schools all over the country are back in full session, barbecues are being stowed safely away from fall rains, and it's officially go time for presidential primary campaigns. The period between Labor Day and Thanksgiving is a hot and heavy one. In the next couple months, traditional media coverage will intensify and many citizens who have been ignoring the whole horserace -- or at best tracking headlines -- will start tuning in in earnest. Here are some things I'll be looking for:

Personnel Changes
As the campaign really heats up, we can expect some candidates to drop out. Those who have little cash on hand (Walnuts?) and are unable to gain traction in the polls will increasingly face questions as to how/why they're continuing to run. Those like Kucinich and Tancredo who have issues at the heart of their candidacies will stick with it to "change the debate." Others, like Joe "Running A Cabinet Position" Biden will face a more serious existential crisis.

Also, Fred Thompson will make his entry into the race official this week. With early buzz so far not mixing well with reality, Thompson's campaign reminds me more and more of Wes Clark's bid in 2003. Both were pitched as saviors of troubled parties and took off quickly in the polls. Clark crashed and burned when the participatory movement that drafted him into the race bucked and crumbled under the direction of an "official" campaign. Thompson has no such movement management problem, but his image-vs-reality issues may lead to a similarly messy meeting between the rubber and the road.

Gloves Coming Off
As media coverage drives name-recognition of all top-tier candidates into the 90th percentile, candidates looking to pick up support are increasingly going to have to look at who they can take it away from. At the polls, politics boils down to a zero sum game and those who win do so at the expense of those who lose. I expect more risky stances, more aggressive attacks, and of course the opening of mudslinging season, as campaigns in need start digging into their opposition research files, either directly or (see below) working through functionally-independent surrogates.

Frontrunners like Sen. Clinton will start taking serious incoming fire from multiple parties, but also look for 2nd and 3rd place candidates to try and pick off issue-based support from non-contending candidates, or to siphon off demographic support based on endorsements.

Independent Expenditures
This is about the time last cycle when "independent" operators started to make waves in the primary states. Remember the "Latte-sipping, volvo-driving liberal freakshow?" Expect more of that as interest groups enter the fray.

From the left, MoveOn and other groups have already run ads targeting members of congress, mostly tied to Iraq and Bush-support, but they may soon start setting their sites on Rudy McRomney and Hollywood Fred. Now is the time for opponents to define one-another's public perception, and those playing the long game are already looking at how this primary season will set the stage for next November's final showdown. In the end, there can be only one.

Shake It Up!
All in all, I'm hoping the increased pressure will shake up what has been a relatively stagnant race. I'm also curious to see who (if anyone) makes a strong play for (or possibly against!) the Millennial generation as a homestretch maneuver. I'll have more on that soon.

What are you looking/hoping for?

Much to my chagrin, HBO canceled John From Cincinnati, cowardly snuffing out the show in 10 episodes rather than even letting it run the usual 12. They must have been looking for the quick score following up on the Sopranos, and instead they got art with more Deadwood-level ratings, and it spooked the suits. I thought getting dusted wasn't going to be an issue? Whatever.

Well, the point is I had the voice of John Monad in my head today when I found a blast from the past come across my screen: Ari Fleischer, G-dubs OG press secretary, is getting back in the game.

For those who weren't hooked on the political junk back in Bush's glory days of 2002-03, it's hard to explain just how good Ari Fleischer was at his job. Tony Snowjob is a garden-variety AM radio hack, and I'm pretty sure Scott McClellen really is a robot, but Ari motherfucking Fleischer was the drum-major kingpin of that press corps when he manned the podium. He bossed those stenographers with such ease and grace that even as he was being arguably fascistic -- telling reporters, for instance, that "people better watch what they say" or "those fuckin' towel-heads are going to get themselves eradicated" -- you sort of had to love him. He made the whole macabre free-fall more like watching well-choreographed dance.

So, I was sad to see him go when he had the foresight to bail out back in 2003, right after the Iraq invasion popped off, right at the zenith of Bush's presidency. He gave it up for a six-figure corporate job and a wife about half his age, but hey, it was all in keeping with his mastery of the system. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Well, now he's back, this time fronting for a $15M pro-Iraq-surge campaign being run by a coalition of former Bush Administration officials. "For those who believe in peace through strength," says Fleischer, "the cavalry is coming." Hoo-rah!

They're basically going to run a shit-ton of ads propping up Republicans (and some Bush Dog Democrats) by exploiting wounded veterans to make people feel guilty about "pulling out." Oh, and of course reminding everyone that if we don't "finish the job" "over there", "they" will "attack us again over here."

Cue burning Twin Towers footage. 9/11 is huge.

I can't say I'm truly glad to see him back though, at least not like this. He looks like he's put on weight, and re-running essentially the same narrative he left off with four years ago just reminds me of an ugly time in our history, an ugly time to be a New Yorker. While I'm reluctant to bet against his special egg-headed deadpan judo, I just don't see how the old 2003 playbook with a splash of revisionist history Vietnam angst is going to turn things around for the Bushies.

Ari Ari Ari! I expected so much more. But still, I got my eye on you, buddy.

Hey all. Hopefully you’re noticing a new look here at Future Majority. Thanks to the design inspiration of Jon Berger, we’ve got a fresh face.

There are probably some things to fix, so feel free to use this thread as a place to post feedback. If you see something broken, please post the full URL, as well as telling us what browser you use, including the version number.

In addition to the new design, we’re feeding in YouTube videos and fresh content from some of our favorite blogs. There’s more to come, but I hope you all enjoy the new look and feel.

The Senate is preparing to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. This is a chance to strip some very harmful law from the act which prevents students with drug-related convictions from receiving financial aid. Students for a Sensible Drug Policy have a novel video modeling what it's like to do the activism:

I think this is probably a really smart thing to do: video yourself doing a little lobbying, and I hope it works. This rule is one of the most counterproductive, knee-jerk pieces of "law and order" legislation out there. It was passed in 1998 under Clinton and is a particularly good example of how ineffective and culturally insensitive his "third way" really was. Check out the personal story from Jesus' General, who got busted hooking up some informants w/pot in 1979:

We haven’t said anything here on FM about the disintegration of Don Imus, but I’m going to pipe up, because I think this is an issue that speaks to the culture of the media/political establishment, and gives us a real point of differentiation between Millenials and Boomers. That’s part of our beat, right?

I’ve been catching coverage of this on my normal blog rotation lately, but it wasn’t until I was on a Jetblue flight and picked up my monthly dose of cable news that I realized how big a deal it was. I have to admit my general reaction is one of confusion. To me, Imus seems like a borderline pathetic fake-ass old man (why the fuck does he wear that cowboy hat?) and yet the response from his “gang” of journalist buddies — Howard Feinman, Paul Begalia, et al — seems to suggest above that all else they really think he is cool, and they want to make sure he (and we) know it. Which blows my mind. It’s like the he’s captain of the GD football team.

I mean, who are these people? Does anyone else remember Tom Oliphant (another genuflector) as the terminally nerdy journalist from Going Upriver, that biopic that made John Kerry seem inspiring for a second? This tweedy geek (and I don’t often use that term disparagingly) comes on the Imus show with “Solidarity forever" as his opening line. What. The. Fuck? How did these foobs become the arbiters of our national discourse, and why do they kowtow to Don Imus?

I’m at this open-source conference, which excites my radical blood, and there have been a couple things that crossed my radar lately which I want to talk about, but I haven’t had time to distill my thinking. In a post down below, Mike was talking about the likely forward movement in youth organizing, saying something along the lines of, “it’s not as sexy as Revolution!, but it’s important nonetheless.” This is true, but I miss the sexy parts.

Two posts I want to discuss soon:

• Along the lines of our Faith and Politics thread, Zack Exley reports from within the evangelical Revolution, and it’s very interesting stuff.
• In a recent post on MyDD, everyone’s favorite bomb-thrower Matt Stoller discusses turning away from the National Security State in pretty radical language.

I’d like to blog more about these themes and my own Big Revolutionary Thoughts soon. Is this of interest to others on the site?

My man Samuel Taylor has a really interesting post giving his perspective on religion and politics:

My point, simply: Jesus rapped for the ones that Johnny Cash wore the black for.

And behind the curtain: my agenda is not to convert you to Christianity. Ecgh. Disgusting. I’m trying to reconfigure some of the assumptions [people] (seem to) have about Christ and Christians. I think that’s important, partly because we will never have meaningful change in this country until we have a reevaluation of Christ, and how the secular left treats christians has a lot to do with whether or not that reevaluation is possible.

Emphasis is mine.

I think this is a really important topic. I was raised outside any spiritual tradition (my religion is “Hippy”) and so I more or less line up with “the secular left”. But I agree with everything Samuel has to say, and as the son of a preacher man he’s got some cred. I want to help us get on with this reevaluation he speaks of. I wonder what it will take.

It seems clear that Barack Obama is the candidate who generates the most excitement among Millennials, but I have no trust or understanding for the man. I don’t really find his speaking to be that inspiring, though certainly better than Hillary and a bit stronger (if a bit more vague) than Edwards.

It’s his lack of specificity most of all that leaves me feeling rather “meh.” I think the intensity of his support is largely from people projecting their own political hopes and dreams onto Obama, and I think he knows this and uses it to his advantage. The cypher thing. It’s potentially very smart electoral politics, but it doesn’t make me trust him or want to help put him in power.

My honest opinion is that it’s very unlikely that “our people” will be meaningfully integrated into any official presidential campaign this cycle as anything other than pawns. It takes not only a political outsider, but also someone willing (in fact needing) to take risks to open up their campaign in the way that happened in 2003/04. In spite of his freshman status and his positioning against “politics as usual,” Obama does not read as an outsider to me, and he’s certainly not one for taking risks.

My sense is that most official campaign or campaign-backed efforts are going to be square and bland; milquetoast. Like Trippi, I sense regression…

Via the provocatively-named Die, Boomer, Die, I found an interesting piece from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about the challenges and opportunities of integrating Millennial-generation employees into workplaces and businesses which were created and dominated by Boomer thinking:

In the workplace, [Millennials] are going to expect responsibility, independence, creativity and respect. They may express a preference for working in teams. Most expect to hold four to six jobs in their lifetime.

They will want a voice in things that affect them, and they may request job sharing and telecommuting opportunities.

And the onus will be on employers to satisfy — or lose — them.

This is interesting, and it reminded me of something I read way back in 2001 in the now-defunct Context magazine, with Royal Dutch Shell Executive turned London Business School Prof. turned Social Philosopher Charles Handy talking about the paradigm of the Elephant and the Flea, about how the most winning players in the economies of tomorrow would leap away from elephantine corporate employers to strike out on their own:

It seems to me that large organizations are increasingly going to be young places. Starting out, people will have apprenticeships in large organizations. After 10 to 20 years, they will either jump or be pushed out of large organizations and live a more independent life.

Five years ago, 66% of corporations in Britain had just one person in them.

This is less common in the U.S. because medical insurance is so expensive. That is a huge drawback that deters people from going out on their own. This is something that must be reformed soon because I believe the future belongs increasingly to the independents.

…

Being a flea isn’t all bliss. Adapting to life as a flea is dramatic.

You need to belong to something. If other people don’t matter to you, you don’t matter to them. So, you have to build your own community of mattering with friends and colleagues. But, if it becomes too formal, you constrict yourself.

Handy may have mis-calculated with his prediction that younger workers would spend a decade or two toiling as corporate apprentices — in fact, it seems more likely to me that corporations will become increasingly grey places — but his predictions of independence and self-defined communities seem to be bearing out so far.

This is all pretty interesting to me because I’m a business owner and the “old man” of the company at the age of 27. My experience of employment and workplace is a-typical, but it seems clear that things have changed quite a lot over the past twenty years or so. Corporations are no longer objects of trust, and the rise of the Creative Class seems to be a real phenomena. At the same time, the servitude industry (McDonalds, Wal*Mart, the GAP) still dominates many people’s career options.

What are your thoughts about the future of work and employment for our generation? What about unions? Are self-employed and freelance unions the future, or will we see some new form emerge to organize workers around their mutual self interest?

Over at MyDD, Stoller has an interesting suggestion: let Current TV televise a Democratic primary debate. He’s positing this as an alternative to FoxNEWS’s broadcast of the Nevada debate:

When real political candidates show up at a forum, they legitimize that forum. If Fox News can host a Democratic Presidential forum, it becomes a real news outlet. Democrats are forced to watch our leaders pay respects to a group of people who regularly use their bullhorn to call us traitors. That’s bad, and we don’t like it. We’ve made our voices heard about that, and Reid is probably hoping that if he ignores us we’ll go away.

But the flip side of this is that CurrentTV can also be legitimized as a real news outlet if real political candidates show up at a forum. Reid and the Nevada Democrats could play a critical role in building a new communications platform for Democratic politics by pointing at Current’s citizen involvement and youth focus, and saying ‘more of this please’. Imagine the creativity and innovation CurrentTV and the internet can bring to the Presidential debate process, integrating video podcasts, blogging, public discourse, and fundraising. It would crack the debate wide open.

I don’t know if it will be possible to dump Fox — there may already be contractual obligations, etc — but the general idea of Current holding a Dem Primary debate is exciting. In fact, if the NewsCorp deal can’t be avoided, I’d like to propose some agitation for Current TV to take the traditional “Youth Debate” away from CNN and Rock The Vote, who were utterly embarrassing last time around.

Current’s got Democratic cred thanks to Al Gore’s involvement. Their angle on participatory media is also good, and I think for politically-engaged Millennials their programming and the outlook they represent is more on-target than Pimp My Ride or the latest teenage-hookup drama to be pumped out of Viacom’s cubicle-farm.

What do you think?