My friend Jason Rosenbaum recently wrote the following on Huff Post:
Progressive bloggers need to stop complaining about the economic recovery package and start prodding their readers to make phone calls.... There's a lot of writing about the economic recovery plan on blogs like Daily Kos, OpenLeft, Americablog, Crooks and Liars, and Talking Points Memo, but something is absent. Not one post is asking readers to pick up the phone. Or write a letter. Or visit their Member of Congress. People definitely have something to complain about. But now that the Senate is debating, the time for complaining is over. It's time for action.Well, I can't speak for the other guys, but I do know that here at AMERICAblog no one asked us to lift a finger to help on the stimulus package until yesterday. And even then, the request came from some outside groups - we've never been contacted once by anyone in the Obama administration or the Democratic Congress about the stimulus package generally, or about how we can help in particular.
What's odd is that neither the Hill nor the Obama campaign showed any reticence previously in asking for our help. Yet now, not a peep. It's not a small leap to infer that, for whatever reason, they don't want our help.
Now, you might say, John, don't wait to be asked, just do it! There's a problem there. You can't just go willy-nilly contacting members of Congress without any guidance as to who needs to be contacted, and who doesn't. Sometimes, you want hundreds of people calling Congressman X, while Congresswoman Y may need the softer touch of behind-the-scenes work by lobbyists and others (and it will only tick Y off if she gets lots of calls). Passing legislation is an art. It's not as simple as just picking up the phone. So, yes, Joe and I could have posted a "call Congress now!" action about the stimulus package weeks ago, but who would we have had you call? What would the message be? No one in the administration or Congress has bothered telling any of us anything about what's going on with this legislation - we get our updates from the AP. Perhaps we should call AP and ask them who we should lobby.
I've written about this before, the notion of political autarky - that the Dems are so good at what they do, they don't need our help. Well, God bless 'em, because if they're so good, why didn't we have this bill passed weeks ago, before Obama was sworn into office?
Until we get those answers and more, Joe and I will remain by the phone, like a pair of virtual Maytag repairmen, just waiting for that call.
