Time for Team B -- And a Movement

Robert Kuttner 
Co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect 

The Huffington Post
November 7, 2010 08:32 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/time-for-team-b-and-a-mov_b_780136.html

In the 1970s, the CIA appointed a "Team B" to challenge
prevailing assumptions about national security. Since then,
there have been other Team B exercises to question
prevailing views.

This is a smart move. An in-group of experts often becomes
an echo-chamber, reinforcing their own prejudices and
excluding people with different views. If you are inside,
you demonstrate your own loyalty by not frontally
challenging the top people, no matter how disastrous. This,
of course, is the road to foreign policy debacles like Iraq
and Vietnam.

But the same thing happens in politics and domestic policy.
As we've just seen, Obama's A-Team of political advisers did
not exactly shine.

It's not that others failed to warn of the disaster in the
making. Countless posts and articles in the past year have
pointed out that Obama had no coherent narrative. That he
failed to squarely place the economic blame on the
Republicans. His own signature initiatives did not do enough
to restore jobs and prosperity for him to credibly campaign
on them. His health bill may have represented incremental
progress on insurance reform, but it was a political
albatross. And he got much too cozy with Wall Street at the
expense of his credibility with Main Street.

Columnists like Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, public opinion
experts like Drew Westen and Stan Greenberg, scores of
bloggers, as well as labor leaders like Rich Trumka, have
been flagging these problems since mid-2009. I've been known
to argue something of the same. And you heard this complaint
privately from many Democrats in Congress.

This failure spans policy, politics, and messaging. So here
is an idea: Obama should do a Team B exercise. He should
invite in about six or eight smart people who have a very
different view of how he should be leading.

He should give them an extended opportunity to make their
case, without his usual advisers in the room. Then David
Axelrod, Pete Rouse, Jim Messina, Valerie Jarrett et al.
should be given a chance to rebut.

But Obama needs to hear the B-Team views, directly,
uncensored, without the team that failed him undermining the
critique. Then we'd have a real Team of Rivals, and maybe
save his presidency.

And that's not all. If any team was a bigger disaster than
the political team, it was the economic one.

Larry Summers, now back at Harvard, and Tim Geithner have
been fond of arguing that their strategy in early 2009 of
propping up insolvent banks (and bankers) rather than
cleaning them out was vindicated by events. It wasn't. The
policy kept Wall Street rolling in profits, but bequeathed a
Japan Scenario of prolonged stagnation to the rest of the
economy -- and of course gave a huge political windfall to
the faux-populist Tea Party.

So let's bring in an economic B-Team to do the same
exercise: Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman; Rob
Johnson of the Institute for New Economic Thinking; Damon
Silvers of the AFL-CIO; Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy
Institute; Jamie Galbraith of U Texas; Bob Reich of
Berkeley; Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute; and Jane
D'Arista or Robert Pollin of the Political Economy Research
Institute, to name a few.

Even Paul Volcker, to whom the President turns only as a
last resort, is an honorary B Team member. Several of these
would make a better treasury secretary than Geithner, and
Obama needs to hear their views unfiltered through
appointees who have every reason to be defensive.

A final thought: I am weary of writing pieces whose theme is
"Here's what Obama needs to do." Just between us, I'm not
sure the man is paying attention.

So my next posts will be about what we need to do. And here
is the general point: We need to build a movement--a
movement that politicians and the media can't ignore.

If you are like me, you have been in dozens of conversations
lately in which smart people ask each other, "How come there
is no real grass-roots progressive movement?"

Among plausible answers I've heard are these:

Ordinary people are beaten down and fearful. Remember the
expression, "a revolution of rising expectations"? This is a
counter-revolution of depressed expectations.

Young people got their hopes sky high during the 2008
campaign. They built a movement. But then the Obama
presidency extinguished O for A as an independent movement
by bringing it under the Democratic National Committee,
while Obama himself was far less inspiring as president than
as a candidate. You think that's inevitable? Think Franklin
Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan.

Young adults are so economically stressed that they don't
have time for a movement. If you want to find a place where
economically pummeled people logically should be organizing,
look at community colleges. But there people are juggling
work, family, and classes, and have no spare time go to
meetings.

Young people who do have spare time think that volunteering
for charitable causes is the same as movement building. It
isn't.

Movements are pass,. It takes an unpopular war plus a draft;
or a once in a century cause like civil rights. Folks today
are too busy being entertained with social networking.

And speaking of social networking, the internet, absent
strong political leadership, is not the medium of a real
movement though it can be tactically useful. MoveOn, in its
prime, was the germ of something real. But progressives have
too many parts, and no coherent whole. The Colbert-Stewart
sanity rally was a hoot, but no movement.

The one enduring mass movement on the progressive side, the
labor movement, is still feisty but because of corporate
union-bashing it is a shadow of its former self.

There is a formidable immigrant rights movement, a model of
progressive movement-building, but it speaks for only one
segment of the economically vulnerable.

Okay, fine. But somehow, none of this stopped the Tea Party
from working with Fox and Limbaugh on one side, and the
billionaire Koch Brothers on the other, to organize a mass
movement.

Sure, the Tea Party phenomenon is partly a fake but it's
also partly real. There is a lot of anger out there, and the
right is capturing it. The right is more demagogic, more
disciplined, more in synch with its media messaging, more
relentless.

So all of the alibis on the progressive side are only
partial truths. In circumstances like these, it is possible
to build a movement. The Tea Party proves it, and what's
doubly galling is that most of these people are voting
against their own economic self-interest.

Given that reality is on our side, where's our movement?

More on all this next week. Comments welcome.

[Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a
senior fellow at Demos. His latest book, "A Presidency in
Peril," published in May, warned that Obama was setting
himself up for failure. He wishes he had been proven wrong.]

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