I've just read two scathing attacks from the left on Obama, the Democrats and their pretensions to reform. First, here's a bit of Frank Rich from yesterday's Times:
Obama's promise to make Americans trust the government again was not just another campaign bullet point; it's the foundation of his brand of governance and essential to his success in office. At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far he has to go. Americans' continued suspicion that Washington is in cahoots with powerful interests in joints like Tosca is contributing to their confusion and skepticism about what's happening out of view in the battle over health care reform.The public is not wrong. The administration's legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. UnitedHealth's hired Beltway gunslingers include both Elmendorf Strategies and Daschle, a public supporter of the public option who nonetheless does some of his "wink, wink" counseling for UnitedHealth. The company's in-house lobbyist is a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. Gephardt consults there too.
Here's Thomas Frank -- again, a liberal -- in the Wall Street Journal, attacking the culture of Democratic lobbying in DC, and the Washington Post's celebration of it :
But it's not just prudery or populist distaste for fancy risottos that turns the public against lobbying: It's the deep venality that makes possible jokes about senators being bought like lunches. It's the debasement of politics from a matter of persuasion to one of money and connections. And it's because the capital's main journalistic watchdog seems perfectly content to see politics made into a kind of financial transaction--so content, in fact, that the paper's publisher planned dinner salons that would apparently have put the Post itself on a partial pay-to-play footing.These are uncomfortable times in Washington. The laissez-faire shibboleths of the last 30 years are in pieces on the ground; the Republican Party is a shadow of its former self; and energy, finance, and health care are all targeted for reform by a president elected last fall with a powerful mandate. And so it falls to our lobbyists to keep reality at bay--to step forward in this awful moment, when history itself is daily giving us such stark lessons, and make sure we do nothing to upset the order that keeps them so well fed.
We know that the Republicans, in their current form, are pretty much good for nothing. Now it's becoming clear even to smart partisan liberals like Rich and Frank that the Democrats aren't much better. Ross Douthat points out in his column today that income inequality is actually continuing to worsen, but that the Democrats aren't likely to do anything about it, in part because they're too beholden to corporate and wealthy interests, but also because they represent constituencies (pro-immigration Hispanics, teacher's unions, those who reject the normative nuclear family) who have a stake in continuing policies that increase income inequality. Excerpt:
Inequality is also driven by the collapse of the two-parent household, which disproportionately affects the poor and working class, depriving them of the social capital they need to rise.But today's Democratic Party increasingly represents "unmarried America" -- the single, the childless, the divorced. This makes it an unlikely vehicle for policies that discriminate, whether through tax code or the welfare state, in favor of the traditional nuclear family.
And so we drift. I like to quote on this site a definition of "decadent" I read somewhere: when an institution knows what needs to be done to rescue itself, but is incapable of doing it. Our politicians know, and so do we all, that we cannot continue to live this way, spending far beyond our means. We know that special interests -- corporations, financiers, interest groups, favored demographics -- own the government, and paralyze politicians. We know that sooner or later, there's going to be a crash, that this cannot go on forever. What then? What happens when people lose faith in the Democrats, as they've lost faith in the Republicans? Serious question.
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"The Democrats aren't much better"???
My goodness; they're horrible! One read-through of Michelle Malkin's NYT bestseller "Culture of Corruption: Obama & His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" lays much of it out quite well.
Meanwhile, we are aghast at the arroagance of congress, which is spending money and putting the nation into massive debt further everyday and thinking nothing of it. They are absolutely tone-deaf to the people who express concern about it. They are awash in credit-card "so-what?" mentality. They make up fairy tales about new trillion-dollar "health care" plans that will supposedly "save money", etc. It is a colossal joke. They are completely out of touch and can't seem to help themselves with their out-of-control debt-spending. God help us all.
Crustacean: T-shirts?? I hear they have a big supply of no-longer-needed "Chicago 2016" orange shirts for all the Obama fans.
Crustacean
In addition to once being the party of Flint, Michigan and Youngstown, Ohio, the Democratic party used also to be the party of places like Atlanta, Georgia, where no Republican governor or legislature ever presided, other than during Reconstruction, till the year 2000.
This is totally wrong, and a rather amazing misunderstanding of Georgia history. Are you a Georgian, or someone commenting from the outside?
After the civil war, as soon as the South could elect whoever they wanted, they started elected Democrats. Again. I don't really want to get into this, except to point out Lincoln was a Republican.
This continued until the 1960s, where the Republicans and Democrats split in half along regional lines, with southern Democrats becoming Republicans and southern Republicans become Democrats...at the national level.
It, for some reason, did not happen at the state level, because the 'good ole boy' system was in full effect, Georgia essentially had primary elections, for Democrats, that were the real elections. These guys were, for all intents and purposes, Republicans running on the wrong ticket.
Around 2000 or so, that system melted down, the Democratic party fell out of conservative control, and all the conservative Democrats happily flipped to the actual Republican party and stayed in office.
There was no rejection of Democrats principles whatsoever at the state level. Because there was no acceptance of them to start with.
I've never had to explain how conservative my state is before, it's weird. Usually I'm arguing that people here are actually more liberal than they think. But, regardless, of that, they still vote conservative, except...
Whereas now the Democratic party is an organization whose elites define themselves largely in terms of animus toward cities like Atlanta, states like Georgia, and especially toward the socially conservative, the morally traditional, and the Christian beliefs that people in cities and especially in states like that are more likely to hold than people are in states and especially in cities like those from which the Democratic party elite is drawn.
You are so amazingly wrong it isn't funny. Atlanta has had a Democratic mayor for fifty years. (Although the race is officially non-partisan.)
And not the conserva-Dems that the state elects. Actual liberals. And four African-American mayors for the past 35 years, to boot.
The current mayor is making an strong environmental push, having cleaned up the sewers and has managed to push Atlanta from having one of the lowest percentages of LEED certified buildings to one of the highest.
Man, this is the strangest post I've made in a while, having to argue against some parallel reality where Georgia was liberal a decade ago and Atlanta is now conservative!
Re: The South-bashing, Christophobic strategy was good enough to get Barack Obama elected
South-bashing I will accept, but "Christophobic"? Come on, every Democrat running for any major office hastens to assure us of his/her piety, if not as a Christian then as a Jew or (very rarely) Muslim. Even in the Democratic party atheists are less electable than gays. Recall that when a smear ad in North Carolina last year hinted that Kay Hagan might be an atheist, she very ostentatiously pointed out that she was a Sunday school teacher (and got a boost apparently from having her honor falsely asailed in the matter). Both parties do their proper geneuflection before the altar of religion.
Crustacean
I merely point out in contradiction to this view that the Southeast and the rest of the country voted more or less the same way in every election held in the third of a century following on from 1968, that every Democratic president during that period was from the Southeast, and that every Republican President during that period was from the West Coast or from the Northeast.
So, in short, Republicans get elected from liberal areas, and Democrats from conservative areas. What that actually means is that people who can appeal to someone outside 'their area' tend to get elected. Welcome to Politics 101.
Republicans get votes from the south because they're Republicans, they get votes from liberal areas because they're from liberal areas. And vis versa with Democrats.
Carter and Clinton both got enough southern votes to win because they were
And Reagan likewise carried California because he was a much-beloved governor of it.
Although California was Republican anyway at that point, so I'm not entirely sure what your point is there. You seem to be confusing cause and effect a little. The Southern Strategy slowly made the Republican party into a regional party, it didn't magically make all non-southerners instantly not vote for Reagan. It worked fine for Reagan, and Bush I. (Although half that was his opponent.)
It took a decade or two of veiled talk about 'states rights' and and 'welfare queens' and 'confederate flags' before white people started sorta sidling away from the Republican party, like when your grandparents use racial slurs at your cousin's wedding. (Black people, of course, figured it out a lot quicker.)
Likewise, the same thing has happened recently with talk of 'immigrants' and 'English as an official language'.
Heck, everyone saw what happened when Bush tried to deal with illegal immigration (The only policy of his I liked, and the only policy of his I think was actually his.) and half the party went crazy trying to prove how 'serious' they were about it, and the other half sorta hid under the bed and hoped none of their Hispanic voters were listening.
The punchline, of course, is that both black and Hispanic voters tend to be more socially conservative than white voters, although a bit less fiscally conservative. So could easily be Republicans. If they were, you know, crazy enough to join a club that won't have them.
The causes of that divide are a conscious decision by left-liberal elites -- mostly in the Northeast and on the West Coast -- to try to drive out the remaining Southern contingent from the Democratic party, so as to move the party has a whole away from the center or even the center-left and toward the left to far left.
Wait, wait, wait. Did you just actually suggest the Democratic party, as it currently is, is in the center? Or at least was until recently?
I find it very strange that I actually agree entirely with your paragraph there, except for the 'elite' nonsense about the driving force of this change (It's actually the other way around.), and yet you clearly think we should be appalled that the Democrats might make some effort to move slightly to the left of center.
So, um, anyway...where are the Republican located, if the Democrats are in the center? Just wondering.
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