"Can I speak freely about the liberal whiners?" asks a well-connected Democratic strategist. "These are the same people who have never participated in, much less won, a campaign, who have no idea what it takes to maintain a majority and keep a speaker of our party, who want Obama to kowtow to the loony Left, and then they're going to be the ones who say, 'What happened?' in November 2010, when we lose the House and possibly the Senate and maybe a lot of governorships." (Source)
When I read comments like this, what I really hear is "Don't these people who care about the public interest understand that if we Dems are going to win in 2010 we have to do the will of entrenched corporate power?" The "conserva" in conservadems has far more to do with being bought
than it has to do with political principle or ideology.
In this political environment "conservative", whether in reference to
Republicans or Democrats, means you dance with them that bought you. It
has nothing to do with conservative political principle except as a
pretext used by these politicians to justify their having been bought.
They're bought by the Defense Industry, the Pharmaceutical industry,
the Insurance industry, and Wall Street. Who am I missing?
Whatever–there's simply not a lot more you need to understand.
The Dems are
split more than the Republicans not by some logic of liberal or
conservative, but according to which of these two constituencies they
care more about. I'm really tired of the media analysis that looks at the split within the Democratic Party as ideological–that the Dems who come from the redder states simply have to vote more conservatively to keep their seats. No–the Dems have two constituencies, and for the conservadems the less important of them is the voters. The more important constituency is corporate entrenched power. Beltway Republicans don't have this problem–they are not split the way the Dems are: only one of these constituencies matters to them.
The Dems are split primarily between progressives and the conservadems in the Blue Dog and DLC caucuses. The conservadems care more about their good standing with entrenched power than they do with a fickle electorate. They calculate that they will get the money they need from those that bought them to swamp challengers, and if they lose their seat, they always have a higher paying job waiting for them in the "private" sector.
Any analysis that does not take this fundamental dynamic into consideration is obtuse. How else can you explain why a Democratic administration has allowed Goldman Sachs to run the treasury, or why the administration cut the deal with Big Pharma, or why the conservadems in the Senate won't vote with the rest of their party for a sensible public option that hurts only one constituency–the insurance industry? And let's not even get into why it's so hard to get out of the Middle East. If this is what it takes for Democrats to win, it's clear that at least on these issues their winning has little to do with the public interest.
I'd be more sympathetic to the Dem strategist quoted above if he said, "Look. It's tough to get anything done here. Half the party is bought by entrenched power, and any strategy we develop that has any hope of success has to be in part about feathering these corporate shills' nests. We're looking to support primary challengers who will work more for the public interest to challenge the worst of these sellouts in 2010 and beyond."
But I doubt that's what this guy is really thinking. And for that reason, he has no reason to call "liberals" whiners when they stand on principle and demand that Obama live up to his campaign rhetoric. And even if he'd get behind the sentiment expressed in the previous paragraph, it still doesn't explain what the positive electoral
political calculation in having Geithner and Summers in this Dem
administration? Whose interests are they serving? How does it make electoral sense to give all that money to Wall Street and not much more to jobs and infrastructure and home owners. They've given the tea-party folk good reason to get riled up, and in that, at least, I agree with them. Because for us whiners it's not about Democratic or Republican; it's about who's for the public interest and who's for entrenched power?
Because the Republicans have no split loyalties, they have party discipline and can more easily stay on message. Because they unambiguously serve the interests of entrenched corporate power–and because they have found an effective culture-war formula to manipulate enough low-information voters, they have been successful the last thirty years in getting themselves elected. So when I hear guys like the Dem strategist quoted above complain about the loony left, I hear him saying, "Why can't a Democrat be more like a Republican?" He apparently doesn't see that the problem in the party lies precisely in that too many are.
UPDATE: Anybody know anything about this legislation? First I've heard about it.
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