Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Howdy, y'all! & The Non-Explanation

Welcome to Left In Dixie.  I hope to integrate news, political commentary, extra-political interests, and debate into one accessible site.  Of primary interest, I will be exploring what I believe to be the last stages in takeover of the Democratic Party by corporate interests.

As Arianna Huffington has described the bank bailouts, Democrats and Republicans--in the sort of bipartisan spirit for which the corporate media longs--socialized the risk and privatized the profits--amounting to lemon socialism.  Obama™ and Congressional Democrats took single-payer, or at least the notion of a public option leading toward single-payer, off of the table from the beginning so as to weaken their bargaining position.

One can look at the bank bailouts, the stimulus package, the climate change legislation, the Employee Free Choice Act, and health care reform as evidence of political ineptitude or weakness on the part of Democratic politicians.  Such explanations don't strike me as being true.  However, there are numerous counterexamples of Democratic tenacity.  The Obama™ campaign had no problem portraying Hillary Clinton and her supporters as racists.  And despite their protestations on the contrary, the administration, its congressional allies, much of the party apparatus, and those "liberal" stalwarts in the media (like Chris Matthews) have taken part in a campaign to disparage the South as uniformly parochial.  These members of the "creative class" wring their hands at their supposedly helpless state of electoral dominance and an enormously patient public, having to contend with the joke that is their partisan opposition, but jump ship when it comes to actual leftist policy outcomes--even those supposed "progressives" (this word will be the subject of a later entry) we thought we could count on.  Fists come out swinging and the "creative class" opens its wallets (I guess they have more now that they're not shopping at Whole Foods!) as formidable opponents like Joe Wilson and Glenn Beck make fools of themselves.  The "progressives" aren't afraid to fight in such instances.  They do so with a political savvy embodied in pressuring companies to cease sponsorship of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, ActBlue pages to raise millions for a conservative Democratic opponent to Joe Wilson, and health care rallies where no ultimatums are made and no insurance/pharmaceutical companies are designated as the enemy.

In short, we have reasons to suspect that policy outcomes and rhetoric coming from the Democratic Congress and Obama™ administration are NOT the result of weak knees or lack of political savvy.  We will explore an alternative explanation in a future posts.

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