Taibbi:
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 CouncilYou 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.