Filibuster....too little too late!...continued

In the comments section of Filibuster....too little too late! below Kari Chisholm asks the following question:

Isn't a filibuster exactly the high-stakes drama that Democrats can use to get the attention of the American people - and show them that it's their values at stake?

An excellent question but I think the answer is NO. Over at Running Scared Jazz directs us to this post by John Aravosis, Why I Oppose The Filibuster. Go read the entire thing but this is important.

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3. Why is it bad politics? Why not just go ahead anyway? Isn't it better to fight and lose than do nothing at all?

a. If you launch a filibuster and don't complement it with a smart well-funded campaign to get the public on your side, the public will think even less of the Democrats than they do now, and that will hurt us in the polls now and in November when we want to take back the Congress. Why will they think less of us? Because they'll see us as obstructionist rather than as standing up to defend a noble cause. The only way they'll see us as noble is if we have a public relations campaign to educate them to that fact. But we don't have that campaign, so the public will likely not agree with what we're doing. That will hurt our standing in the polls, and could hurt us in November. And doing something today that hurts us in November is not helpful.

Oh, and the conventional wisdom criticism against the Democrats is already beginning. This from Newsweek's Periscope "conventional wisdom" meter:
Ted Kennedy and John Kerry's quixotic Alito filibuster campaign is typical Democrat slapdash failure. Next time, try planning.
And before you say you don't care if Newsweek likes what you're doing. You'd better care. They influence a lot of people, and their conventional wisdom meter is quite often spot on. In politics, the public's perception matters. And that doesn't mean you don't do something just because the public doesn't agree with you YET, but you most certainly don't do it when you have NO PLAN whatsoever to win the public over.

b. If you launch a filibuster and don't get the public on our side, you give Senator Frist a perfect opportunity to launch the so-called "nuclear option" where he takes away our right to filibuster, permanently. Frist has threatened before to launch the nuclear option, but then backed down, because he didn't have the public's support to go ahead and kill the filibuster. If we launch a filibuster without also launching a campaign to convince the public we are right, we are handing Senator Frist the perfect opportunity to kill the filibuster once and for all. It is counterproductive to make a move that helps Frist take away the filibuster.

c. If you launch a filibuster without getting the public on your side, the public will very likely savage the Democrats who support the filibuster - per se if we don't win the public over, they're not on our side. That makes it much less likely that the Democrats (who are already pretty spineless to start with) will support a filibuster in the future, even if sometime in the future we actually have a REAL campaign to make that future filibuster work.

Why? Because those Democrats won't realize that the filibuster failed this time around and blew up in their faces in terms of public opinion because we didn't have a real public relations campaign supporting the filibuster. Rather, those Senators will conclude that it was supporting a filibuster per se, ANY filibuster, that did them in - i.e., they'll conclude that it's dangerous to support filibusters, as a rule. And that will make them less likely to support filibusters, or fight back more generally, in the future - even less likely than they already are now. How it's a good strategy to do something that convinces Democrats to be even MEEKER in the future?

d. By launching a campaign that isn't well thought out, that doesn't have a public relations plan supporting it, and therefore, ultimately, won't have the support of the public, you set the Democrats up for a public relations disaster. And who do you think the Democrats are going to blame afterwards? Those "crazy bloggers" and their crazy "far left" followers.

Now, I couldn't give a damn if someone criticizes me or us or you. That's not the point. The problem is that the right, and many inside the Democratic party, are hell-bent on portraying the Netroots as a bunch of far-left kooks. They want to make YOU the third rail of politics. Crazy people who shouldn't be listened to. This kind of a campaign, where the Netroots forces the Democratic party into fighting a battle it isn't prepared to fight, only helps convince the party, the media, and the rest of America that working with us, listening to us, is dangerous. And that doesn't help us accomplish our agenda one bit. Again, it's not about winning a popularity contest, it's about our voices and our concerns being taken seriously. I think this effort undercuts that.

As I have said before a filibuster now will not make up for the fact that the Democrats were unprepared to fight the Alito nomination and will accomplish nothing. Jazz also directs us over to Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast who says:

I'm not convinced that we have the time or the ability to do this before the Bush unholy combination of fascism and royalism comes to pass and we no longer have choices because we are At War In Perpetuity. But if you aren't as much of a pessimist as I am, and if you believe that we will continue to have elections that aren't completely rigged, the fact of the matter is that the Old Guard of the Democratic Party must go. This means John Kerry and Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and every pussy-ass Democrat who is content to nibble table scraps from the corporate table as long as it means re-election must be dumped from office as quickly as possible, replaced by candidates who fight for Americans, not corporations. We want elected representatives who can clearly articulate why progressive values are the values Americans want, and who can remind them that the things they take for granted as emblematic of the good life in this country were all progressive initiatives -- public education, clean water, clean air, public transportation, Social Security, Medicare, Head Start, voting rights -- all progressive triumphs.

Amen Jill, the Democratic Party on the national level is a lost cause. When we are throwing the Republican bums out we should throw out most of the Democrats at the same time. The Kerrys, Bidens and Clintons don't represent the American people anymore than the Republicans. I will support the party on a local level because that is the way to clean up the party on a national level.