Back to Basics — the populist message
True Blue Populists
PAUL KRUGMAN
Monday, November 13, 2006
Senator George Allen of Virginia is understandably shocked and despondent. Just a year ago, a National Review cover story declared that his “down-home persona” made him “quite possibly the next president of the United States.” Instead, his political career seems over.
And it wasn’t just macaca, or even the war, that brought him down. Mr. Allen, a reliable defender of the interests of the economic elite, found himself facing an opponent who made a point of talking about the problem of rising inequality. And the tobacco-chewing, football-throwing, tax-cutting, Social Security-privatizing senator was only one of many faux populists defeated by real populists last Tuesday.
Ever since movement conservatives took over, the Republican Party has pushed for policies that benefit a small minority of wealthy Americans at the expense of the great majority of voters. To hide this reality, conservatives have relied on wagging the dog and wedge issues, but they’ve also relied on a brilliant marketing campaign that portrays Democrats as elitists and Republicans as representatives of the average American.
This sleight of hand depends on shifting the focus from policy to personal style: John Kerry speaks French and windsurfs, so pay no attention to his plan to roll back tax cuts for the wealthy and use the proceeds to make health care affordable.
This year, however, the American people wised up.
True to form, some reporters still seem to be falling for the conservative spin. “If it walks, talks like a conservative, can it be a Dem?” asked the headline on a CNN.com story featuring a photo of Senator-elect Jon Tester of Montana. In other words, if a Democrat doesn’t fit the right-wing caricature of a liberal, he must be a conservative.
But as Robin Toner and Kate Zernike of The New York Times pointed out yesterday, what actually characterizes the new wave of Democrats is a “strong streak of economic populism.”
Look at Mr. Tester’s actual policy positions: yes to an increase in the minimum wage; no to Social Security privatization; we need to “stand up to big drug companies” and have Medicare negotiate for lower prices; we should “stand up to big insurance companies and support a health care plan that makes health care affordable for all Montanans.”
So what, aside from his flattop haircut, makes Mr. Tester a conservative? O.K., he supports gun rights. But on economic issues he’s clearly left of center, not just compared with the current Senate, but compared with current Democratic senators. The same can be said of many other victorious Democrats, including Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Sheldon Whitehouse in Rhode Island, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. All of these candidates ran on unabashedly populist platforms, and won.
What about Joe Lieberman? Like shipwreck survivors clinging to flotsam, some have seized on his reelection as proof of Americans’ continuing conservatism. But Mr. Lieberman won only through denial and deception, for example, by rewriting the history of his once-fervent support for the Iraq war and Donald Rumsfeld. He got two-thirds of the Republican vote, but managed to confuse enough Democrats about his positions to get over the top.
Last week’s populist wave, among other things, vindicates the populist direction that Al Gore took in the closing months of the 2000 campaign. But will this wave be reflected in the actual direction of the Democratic Party?
Not necessarily. Quite a few sitting Democrats have shown themselves nearly as willing as Republicans to bow to corporate interests. Consider the vote on last year’s draconian bankruptcy bill. Mr. Lieberman voted for cloture, cutting off debate and ensuring the bill’s passage; then he voted against the bill, a meaningless gesture that let him have it both ways. Thirteen other Democratic senators also voted for cloture, including Joe Biden, who has just announced his candidacy for president.
The first big test of the new Democratic populism will come over reform of the 2003 prescription drug law. Democrats have pledged to repeal the clause in that law preventing Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices. But the fine print of how they do that is crucial: Medicare reform could be a mere symbolic gesture, or it could be a real reform that eliminates the huge implicit subsidies the program currently gives drug and insurance companies.
Are the newly invigorated Democrats ready to offer a real change in this country’s direction? We’ll know in a few months.
Molly Ivins: Now They’re All for Bipartisanship
Molly Ivins
Nov 14, 2006
AUSTIN, Texas×?’Having watched election coverage nonstop all week, I sometimes wake up screaming, “Bipartisanship!” and scare myself.
Of all the viral members of the media who have been suggesting that the Dems cooperate with their political opponents, the one who rendered me almost unconscious with surprise was Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich, the Boy Scout. Newt Gingrich, the man who sat there and watched Congress impeach and try Bill Clinton for lying about having an extramarital affair while he, Newt Gingrich, was lying about having an extramarital affair. (This all took place during his second marriage. The first one ended when he told his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment.)
This is the level of Republican hypocrisy that reminds us all how far the Dems have to go. I tell you what. Let’s all hold hands together and sing, “Oh, the Farmers and the Cowboys Should Be Friends!” Just not, please, Newt Gingrich, the man whose contribution to civility was to recommend that all Democrats be referred to with such words as cowards, traitors, commies, godless, liars and other such bipartisan-promoting terms.
Please, anyone but Newt.
Now, from my hours spent battered and half brain-dead listening to the fatuous, self-important commentators of our nation, I learn that the people of this country did not elect liberals to Congress last week. Nope, they elected populists! Well, gosh all hemlock. I’ll be go to hell. Populist! I AM one. Honest×?’been a populist so long I’m on my third bottle of Tabasco.
Who knew? I thought all said I was chopped liver. Populist. Like Tom Frank of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” fame. Jim Hightower. We can even draw our lines of political genealogy×?’via Ralph Yarborough and Bob Elkhart.
A populist is pretty much for the PEOPLE and generally in this case exactly the same as a liberal×?’we just put the em-PHA-sis on a different syl-LA-ble. We also tend to be more fun. We do not vote to hurt average Americans, even if the corporate payoff is really big. Even if it’s just a little bit×?’like the bankruptcy bill.
We tend to focus less on social issues and more on who’s gettin’ screwed and who’s doin’ the screwin’. In my opinion, Americans are not getting screwed by the Republican Party. They are getting screwed by the Large Corporations that bought and own the Republican Party.
The word populist was misused, abused and co-opted by right-wingers for years, ever since we were all forced to read Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Bad history can do a powerful amount of damage. Most of us stopped at the painful news that Tom Watson, leader of the late-19th century populism, went on to become a raging racist bigot. Populism itself took on the connotation of bile and nastiness, a la Father Coughlin.
If you read back to the beginning of the populist movement, however, you will find Andy Jackson and the West set against all those dreary snobs of the East. When Andy opened up the White House and let in the people, all the snobs had the fantods.
OK, it’s not the 19th century anymore, but it is always the right time to point out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Honest. There stands George W. Bush, buck nekkid. We want to help him out of this fix because he’s dragging the whole Army, the country and the world down with him. But don’t ask us to call those clothes.
Even in Defeat, Bush Is Myopic
Marie Cocco
Nov 8, 2006
WASHINGTON×?’Understand that the Democrats are saying what they mean×?’and they mean what they say.
The talking heads have talked themselves into believing that the resounding Democratic congressional victories on Tuesday night were a referendum on President Bush and the Iraq war, a primal scream from voters in despair over the futile carnage half a world away.
It was that, for sure. But only the most insulated of insiders could perceive that it was only that.
Yes, it was Iraq and Republican corruption and the unnerving sense, from corner to corner across America, that Bush’s policies haven’t made us safe from terrorism. But when people were asked as they left the voting booths about the issues that were “extremely important” in determining their choices, a concern that roils middle-class neighborhoods emerged: the economy, stupid.
Just about as many voters cited the economy as a pivotal concern (39 percent, according to network exit polls) as corruption (42 percent) and the war on terror (40 percent).
The irony of this election is that the perilous issue of Iraq seems to have a ready avenue for political solution×?’at home, if not in the bloody precincts abroad. Bush at last announced the overdue departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And the ultimate exit strategy may come in the recommendations of the bipartisan committee of elders led by former Secretary of State James Baker III and former 9/11 commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton.
Bush repeatedly indicated at his news conference Wednesday that he is looking to the Baker panel to provide him with relief on Iraq. Rahm Emanuel, chief of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a hard-nosed architect of the party’s stunning House victories, sees the commission as providing at least the beginning of a way out. “Democrats stand ready and eager for the Baker-Hamilton report, so we can get working on a strategy,” Emanuel told journalists during an election eve conference call on Monday. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid called on the White House to convene a bipartisan summit on Iraq; soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concurs.
The clarity of the voters’ message seems to have provided a light out of the darkness in Iraq.
But since Bush took office six years ago, yawning divides have opened up between the haves, the have-nots, and those who have just enough to get by. The latter two are the Americans to whom Democrats appealed on Tuesday. They now expect the Congress they elected to make good on its campaign promises to raise the minimum wage, fix the Medicare prescription drug benefit by government-industry negotiations to lower prices, provide college tuition help and enhance retirement security.
Not a single senior Democrat who took the microphone at the party’s jubilant parties Tuesday night failed to mention this agenda. “We’re going to make them recognize once again that in America, there’s a middle class,” Reid shouted at one point. A host of Democratic candidates×?’too many to count×?’also campaigned on a pledge to somehow ameliorate the national shame of 47 million without health insurance.
The president is befuddled. “The economy’s strong,” he protested at his news conference, ”… and yet, obviously there was a different feel out there for the electorate.” He attributed the negative outlook to “the toughness of the war” in Iraq. He didn’t pause to consider whether times are tough for millions at home.
And he refused×?’pointedly×?’to take the partial privatization of Social Security off the table. It was, of course, Bush’s endeavor to change the social insurance system from one of dependable government benefits to one dependent on the whims of Wall Street that unified Democrats thoroughly. It marked the beginning of their political comeback. “Preserving Social Security is something we’ll do every day that we are here,” Pelosi said at her own news conference.
The barricades around the president’s policy in Iraq have fallen, torn down by an angry electorate that feels duped and frustrated by the spilling of American blood for a catastrophic mistake. Using the war as a political cudgel has failed Bush miserably, and forced him to consider the counsel of those outside his inner circle.
But the president still cannot see the depth of the other discontents the voters so acutely feel. The Democrats do.
NYT: Dems Learn Difference Between Dobbs’ Populism & Faux Centrism
David Sirota
I have a review of Lou Dobbs new book “War on the Middle Class” in today’s Sunday New York Times (the review is attached). The piece is entitled “The Pinstriped Populist.” I was initially miffed that they weren’t going to publish it before the election, but now I’m glad - because what I say in the review is even better borne out by Tuesday’s results.
As I say in the review, the basic premise of Dobbs’ book (and his television show) is simple:
- “Cultural liberalism focusing on social issues that have only varying degrees of support among the general population is far different from full-throated Dobbs-style economic populism. It is undeniable that aside from Dobbs and a few politicians, America’s political debate is almost entirely devoid of economic populists. ‘War on the Middle Class’ confronts this problem head-on ×?’ and thanks to Dobbs’s passion and charisma, it succeeds in sounding an alarm that cannot be ignored.”
Dobbs-style populism, along with opposition to the Iraq War, was the overwhelming theme of the 2006 elections. There is no denying it. In the last few days, there have been a barrage of right-wingers and DLCers trying to hide this very simple fact. They have said the election was about Democrats pretending to be Republicans, citing people like Virginia Senator-elect Jim Webb - even as Webb himself recently appeared on Dobbs’ show to give voice to the very kind of economic populism many of us have been pushing for years. And, of course, even in the face of the New York Times’ own news page admitting the rise of populism this week, we are asked by the Establishment revisionists to simply forget about the election of red-region economic populists like Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, Heath Shuler, Nancy Boyda and others.
Writers like Tom Frank, Chris Hayes, Matt Taibbi, Bill Greider and I have for years been pushing this brand of politics, and for our efforts we have all been attacked by Washington insiders and Big Money interests. I remember vividly the DLC attacking me for publishing “The Democrats’ Da Vinci Code” back in 2004 that proposed a populist national campaign strategy, citing real-world examples of how this strategy works in red regions of the country.
But we have stuck to our guns because polls show populism (aka.challenging economic power) is the “center” position in the public, even though it may not be the “center” position in a K-Street-owned ashington, D.C . On Tuesday, the true “center” won out over Washington’s faux “center” - whether our status quo opponents in ashington’s think tanks, cocktail parties, congressional cloakrooms ad lobbying firms like it or not.
Oh, sure, there will continue to be efforts to revise history. We can look no further than the recent New York Times Sunday Magazine piece about populist leader Brian Schweitzer that shows just how desperate those Big Money representatives who have run the Democratic Party into the ground really are:
“‘He’s as much a prairie centrist as he is a prairie populist,’ Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council told me. Schweitzer has the ability to reduce a complicated issue to a few sharp lines, reframing it with themes of patriotism and underdog know-how. ‘I was a critic of Nafta, I was a critic of Cafta and I’ll be a critic of Shafta,’ he says of free-trade agreements, long the hobgoblin of even the most articulate liberal politicians. ‘Why is it that America supposedly creates the best businessmen in the world, but when we go to the table with the third world, we come away losers?’”
It’s true - Schweitzer is a “centrist” in that he is at the center of American public opinion in his efforts to take on Big Money interests and give voice to Americans’ justifiable anger at the sellout trade policy pushed by the DLC. But that’s not what Reed is trying to say - he’s trying to claim Schweitzer as one of the DLC’s own, implying that the Montana governor is yet another mushy corporatist - an insult to what Schweitzer and other red-state populists have built. Still, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at this kind of revisionism. Dishonesty knows no bounds when irrelevance and rejection is in the air.
To be sure, I go after Dobbs for his refusal to comprehensively address immigration in a way that actually deals honestly with the problem. He prefers to use the issue as a crude cultural bludgeon, instead of connecting it to all the other economic issues he focuses on. Similarly, I chide him for repeating some of the most tired right-wing stereotypes about the media.
But all in all, there is no denying that if Democrats want to hold a governing majority for the foreseeable future, they cannot continue to deny the populist outrage seething all over the country and highlighted by Dobbs book. They cannot continue to listen only to the former Clintonites now on K Street. They cannot continue to listen only to executives on Wall Street. They cannot continue to openly brag about how close they are to corporate lobbyists. They must see election 2006 for what it was: a mandate for economic populism and a battle cry against the hostile takeover of our government and against the War on the Middle Class.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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