[Mb-civic] BLUE PRINT FOR MICHAEL MOORE BASHING

Fri Dec 3 18:54:19 PST 2004

A Blueprint for Moore Bashing

By Matt Taibbi, New York Press
 Posted on December 3, 2004, Printed on December 3, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20650/

We've got to repudiate, you know, the most strident and insulting
anti-American voices out there sometimes on our party's left ... We can't
have our party identified by Michael Moore and Hollywood as our cultural
values.  Al From, CEO, Democratic Leadership Council

You know, let's let Hollywood and the Cannes Film Festival fawn all over
Michael Moore. We ought to make it pretty clear that he sure doesn't speak
for us when it comes to standing up for our country.  Will Marshall,
president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the DLC

The first thing I thought when reading these passages  both taken from a
"soul-searching" roundtable held by the Democratic Leadership Council  was
this: Who the hell is Will Marshall?

I couldn't remember seeing his name at the top of anybody's ballot. I didn't
remember which, if any, elections he had ever won. I was a little mystified,
in fact, by the nature of his popular support  who he meant, exactly, when
he used the word "we" to talk about whom Michael Moore does and does not
speak for.

According to the last data I could find, Moore recently made a movie that
was seen by tens of millions of people around the world and has grossed
nearly $120 million in the U.S. alone. Furthermore, it was, according to
exit polls, a much better demographic success than the actual Democratic
party. A Harris poll conducted in July found that 89 percent of Democrats
agreed with "Fahrenheit 9/11," along with 70 percent of independents. That
means Moore outperformed John Kerry among independents by about 19 points,
if we are to go just by the data presented by bum-licking power-worshipper
Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times at the DLC roundtable.

Moore's revenues come from millions of ordinary people paying 10 bucks a pop
to see his film. In contrast, only about 200 people a year visit the DLC at
the box office  only they pay thousands of dollars per ticket, and they all
have names you'd recognize: Eli Lilly, Coca-Cola, Union Carbide, Occidental
Petroleum, BP and so on.

Like Moore, Marshall is a media figure. He is one of the chief contributors
to Blueprint magazine, the flagship publication of the DLC. Despite the fact
that subscriptions to this magazine are included free with membership in the
DLC, its annual circulation still lags slightly behind the gate for
"Fahrenheit 9/11," with about 20,000 readers per year.

An unfair dig, you say: Blueprint is a trade magazine. Seen in that light,
it indeed appears a much better market performer, with only about six times
fewer readers than the industry bible for horror makeup artists, Fangoria.

While it is not exactly clear who else Marshall is talking about in this
quotation, it is fairly clear that he means that Michael Moore does not
speak for him personally. Which makes sense, of course.

In addition to his duties as the president of the PPI, Marshall kept himself
busy in the last few years. Among other things, he served on the board of
the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an organization co-chaired by Joe
Lieberman and John McCain whose aim was to build bipartisan support for the
invasion of Iraq.

Marshall also signed, at the outset of the war, a letter issued by the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC) expressing support for the
invasion. Marshall signed a similar letter sent to President Bush put out by
the conservative Social Democrats/USA group on Feb. 25, 2003, just before
the invasion. The SD/USA letter urged Bush to commit to "maintaining
substantial U.S. military forces in Iraq for as long as may be required to
ensure a stable, representative regime is in place and functioning."

One of just a handful of Marshall's co-signatories on that letter was Bruce
Jackson, who also happens to be the head of the PNAC (whose letter Marshall
also signed) and the founder of the aforementioned Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq. Jackson is not only a neo-con of high rank and one of
the chief pom-pom wavers for the war effort. He was also a vice president in
the weapons division of Lockheed-Martin between 1993 and 2002  meaning that
he was one of the implied targets of "Bowling for Columbine," which came out
in Jackson's last year with the company.

Clearly, Marshall was thinking about the good of the Democratic Party, and
not the integrity of his grimy little network of missile-humping cronies,
when he and Al From made the curious  and curiously conspicuous  decision
to denounce Moore, Hollywood and France at the DLC meeting in early
November.

There were a number of things that were strange about the release of this
obviously coordinated series of sound bites from the DLC heavies.

For one thing, people like Al From, Donna Brazile and DLC president Bruce
Reed  event speakers who are all high-level political heavyweights whose
instinct for spontaneity died with their souls 100 years ago, and would
never say anything without first calculating its potential impact  would
seem to gain very little by mentioning Moore's name at all in the
conference.

To say openly in front of a roomful of reporters that the party has to
disavow Michael Moore is to remind a roomful of reporters that the
Democratic party is still currently linked to Michael Moore. This would be
like George Bush Sr. using the word "wimp" in public, or John Kerry using
the word "effete" or "snob." No alert political operative would recommend
it, under normal circumstances.

Furthermore, as both Marshall and From surely know, there was no effort
whatsoever even this time around by the Democratic Party to associate itself
with Michael Moore. Excepting the brief and mostly unrequited love affair
between Moore and Wes Clark, most of the party candidates recoiled from the
fat director as from a diseased thing throughout the entire campaign season.
They've already kept him at arm's length  why talk about the need to do it
again? Why bring him up at all?

Well, that's easy. It's one thing to avoid public appearances with a Michael
Moore, and to accept his support only tacitly. But it's another thing
entirely to openly denounce him as anti-American, which is what Al From did
last week.

What From, Marshall and the other DLC speakers were doing last week was not
just ruminating out loud about the need to shy away from certain demonized
liberal icons. They were, instead, announcing their willingness to embrace
the other side's tactic  I hate to lean on this overused word, but it is a
McCarthyite tactic  of branding certain individuals as traitors and
anti-Americans. What they were doing was sending up a trial balloon, to see
if anyone noticed this chilling affirmative shift in strategy and tactics.

Well, I noticed. I also noticed that unless something is done about it, this
unelected bund of corporate pawns is once again going to end up writing the
party platform and arranging things to make sure that no anti-war candidate
is allowed to compete for votes in the primaries. It will push one of its
own  probably Harold Ickes, or Brazile  in next year's election for the
chairman of the Democratic Party. And when that person wins, the tens of
millions of Democrats who opposed the war will have to get used to people
like Will Marshall referring to them as "we" in front of roomfuls of
reporters  Marshall, who this year wrote, in Blueprint, an article entitled
"Stay and Win in Iraq" that offered the following view of the progress of
the war:

"Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts
massively in their favor."

Uh-huh. And Michael Moore and Hollywood are the problem with the Democratic
Party.