"What has to be defeated is not just their agenda, but their modus operandi"

I keep thinking about this meme on the left that what would work to shut down the tea partiers is President Obama making better use of the bully pulpit. Or, as Drew Westen said, he needs to tell the American people a more compelling story.

...Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety.

I know that the President has recognized that he immersed himself too much in the sausage-making process of getting health care reform done during his first two years and neglected to communicate often and clearly enough with voters during that time. But as I've pointed out before, during this last round about the debt ceiling, he gave 10 speeches/press conferences in one month - some of which were very compelling.

The trouble is, as Ezra Klein pointed out a while ago, no one listens to the President. But that's not just a problem in our politics. I run a small non-profit and part of my job is public relations. I know this challenge well. We mail out materials, have a web site, are on Face Book and do everything we can to tell our story. Overall, do the majority of people in our community pay attention...no.

We are all flooded these days with access to information. And most of the time, we ignore it because its just too much to absorb. When it comes to the news of the day, most of us political junkies turn to sources that confirm our own biases...be it on the left or the right. For those without that inclination, they want summaries and mostly get stories of the false equivalency variety from the MSM. This leads to the American public being sorted into 3 general categories: left, right, and a pox on both your houses.

This is the media world in which we live today. And its different than how politics has been conducted in the past. Its time we all recognized the reality and started to come up with solutions. That's because our current environment plays right into the hands of the GOP. The pox on both your houses crowd is their ace in the hole. We know in poll after poll that most Americans agree with Democratic solutions. But they're disgusted with the political gamesmanship they see going on in Washington and are constantly fed the idea that both sides do it.

Taking this on is exactly what President Obama is trying to do. Its where his passion lies. That's why I think Andrew Sullivan's response to Westen is so spot-on.

What Westen seems to have wanted was the Democratic version of George W. Bush, contemptuous of his opponents, ruthless in his often unconstitutional determination to get his agenda through, divisive and polarizing. But Obama would not have won election on those grounds and did not have a mandate for that. He was elected as a moderate Democrat, prepared to engage any pragmatic solution to obvious problems, while not splitting an already polarized country even further.

That he has tried to do, against an opposition party that decided to double down on polarization, on politics as warfare, on politics as a game, and bereft of any ideas except taking us back to before the New Deal. What has to be defeated is not just their agenda, but their modus operandi. Only by patiently out-lasting and out-arguing them will Obama be able to do this. And it says a lot about the utopian left that they do not see the wisdom and responsibility of this strategy.