Hunting The Muse

One of the things I've learned about politics the last few years is that of political oxygen. Political oxygen is basically the space there is for an idea.

It's one of the things that makes truth such a frustrating subject in politics. Oftentimes, truth is irrelevant because there isn't the oxygen for it.

There can be many reasons for a lack of oxygen. Sometimes it is bullying. Sometimes it is momentum. It almost always seems to be about timing. It's never just about what you say, it's also about when you say it. We all remember the leadup to the Iraq war, and how infuriating it was trying to speak the truth about WMD and the inspections. Any effort to speak the truth was met with a dogpile of accusations - of disloyalty, of delusion, even of treason.

All professional politicians get pretty good at dealing with political oxygen. They need to in order to survive. In general, their approach is to operate within the confines of the available oxygen. It's why many Democrats voted to authorize the war. The basic approach is to use the available oxygen and slowly work to increase the oxygen for the other bits of truth that you defend, and withhold that truth until there's enough oxygen for it.

You will also see it in the news cycle. Think about all the leaks that came from the CIA and the State Department about things going poorly in Iraq. Think about if they had come out at times when Bush clearly had the momentum - they wouldn't have had as much of an impact.

It's also what makes conspiracy theories so difficult. There was plenty of murmurings about what "really happened" with 9/11. But there wasn't the oxygen for it. Even if it is true the buildings were wired for explosives and that the government planned it all and Osama is just some guy in a New Jersey warehouse, the momentum is just so much against believing it that it's irrelevant. Just the same as how right now, there isn't really the oxygen for dealing with the touch screen voting machines - it will have to take a hell of a stunt or smoking gun to create it.

There are other ways to deal with oxygen. One way is to be antagonistic enough to create the oxygen anyway. For example, Michael Moore. He was completely derided when he appeared with Wesley Clark and mentioned Bush being AWOL. (Clark was too.) It ended up creating the oxygen to investigate it though, even when the issue had already been out there for months. A similar thing happened with Fahrenheit 9/11. The cost is that you are seen as an agitant. That's fine by Michael Moore, but politicians are really scared of it because it opens them up for attack by their opponents. The advantage Michael Moore has is that his opponents don't matter - he can't be thrown out of office. But politicians get punished for rocking the boat too much. You have to be extremely careful doing it in order to get the occasional success, as Feingold did in his lone vote against the Patriot Act.

The other main way to deal with oxygen is to just be in denial and basically assume you have it when you don't. For instance, Nader. Kucinich to a lesser degree. It's so difficult to admit, but their problem is that they speak truth at the wrong time. It's this awful reality of truth without credibility - they just don't go hand in hand.

The reality is that most of use these past few years have been a combination of the Nader type and the Moore type. We've tried really hard to create more oxygen by being agitators. And we've also convinced ourselves that we had more oxygen than we really did. We looked at America and saw it as something different than what it was. Call it projection, call it a big bubble, the point was that we just didn't have the oxygen.

So, if you're going to be active in politics, you're almost reduced to accepting that truth is relative. Altruism isn't relevant, it's just a bonus, and sometimes it's just an extra burden. It really only comes down to market forces - there is what's required, and there's what people want. You accept the requirements as your restrictions, and then you give the people what they want. There's not really any need for truth.

What was our problem? This election was lost before we even started. That's what is most bitter about this. We gauged what oxygen there was, and fit our objectives into the available oxygen. We were monstrously efficient and filled all the space perfectly, and it wasn't enough. We just didn't stake out enough territory from the very beginning. I think the dynamics of the 2000 election got in the way of that. We never accepted that we were beaten. We completely ignored 2002 and chalked it up to our invalid President misleading the nation. We just invested all this energy into something that wasn't even engineered to have a solid chance of winning. I know that electorally speaking we were close. But in order for us to have won just barely, everything would have had to have gone absolutely perfectly. And nationally, we're down by four million votes.

So I guess I'm caught. Should we have abdicated more of our beliefs for more potential oxygen? Or should we have agitated more?