Politics & Power Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

Blumenthal’s sentence is less a diagnosis than a campaign memo in disguise: politics as the management of memory. He’s urging Democrats to build a simple comparative storyline - not “here’s our policy,” but “look at the timeline.” The key move is “markers”: a word borrowed from surveying and science that implies objectivity, as if progress can be pegged to mileposts everyone can see. That’s strategic. It frames Democratic achievements as measurable reality, not partisan interpretation, and it turns the argument into a before-and-after chart the public can read at a glance.

The subtext is anxiety about narrative drift. If voters don’t feel “progress,” it didn’t happen, at least electorally. So the party has to remind people “of where [we were]” - a tacit admission that lived experience has been overwritten by newer fears, new wars, new headlines. Blumenthal’s repetition - “where we were… where we are… where we’ve fallen” - is a deliberate downward staircase, designed to attach the Bush presidency to loss: decline not as a momentary setback but as a trajectory.

Context matters: Blumenthal is a Democratic-aligned journalist and operator speaking from an era when Bush-era debates (Iraq, civil liberties, deficits, disaster response) were being translated into a broad verdict on competence. The intent isn’t neutral analysis; it’s to make the election a referendum on regression. Progress becomes a contested artifact, and the party’s job is to curate the exhibit: “markers” on one wall, “decline under Bush” on the other.