The cynical and counter-democratic nature of marketing has done a great disservice to the Republic in this election cycle, as it always seems to. "Change" versus "Experience" has become Coke versus Pepsi, just with particular consumers of each sniping at other in the blogosphere over which tastes better, becoming conditioned to a myopia where no other ideas, much less beverages, exist outside this dialectic.
Coke and Pepsi pretty much taste the same, yet if Coke's formula contained the cure for cancer, you would think they might incorporate that into their millions of dollars worth of brand communications.
The shit of it is, somebody damn well should be promising the cure for cancer, at least figuratively, insofar as its figurative Bushian cells and their money-driven cronyist orthodoxy have infested the country and too much of the globe.
What we're told way too often, however, is that to vet people on whether they are pro-cancer or not in this endeavor is just impolitic, or, worse, unrealistic. When some of us demand actual, hard, legislative redress against the sins, even crimes, committed against us or in our names, we somehow become wiggy, starry-eyed dreamers. Advocating we hold the collaborators in our midst accountable gets painted as quixotic at best, at worst treasonous.
Ed Fallon, economic populist, 14 years a state representative here in Iowa and candidate for governor in 2006, wants that kind of accountability, and is unsurprisingly getting so painted, yet his candidacy for Iowa's 3rd District Congressional seat has already disproven that cynical ascription. A good eight months prior to election, it prompted The Des Moines Register to assess real vulnerability of a 12-year incumbent Congressman, Blue Dog Democrat Leonard Boswell, this in a year when his party is set for a national sweep, an almost unheard of electoral conundrum. The story began illuminatively enough, "Splits with more traditionally liberal Democrats have hardly been rare for U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell during the 12 years since the Des Moines Democrat first was elected to Congress."
Fallon's assets are many, but as important as anything is his commitment to cutting the real cancer out of American politics, "the influence of corporate money in politics, something that obstructs progress on issue after issue," as he wrote at DownWithTyranny last Friday . . . More viscerally, Fallon's bid to unseat Boswell has already spurred the latter to shuffle leftward [towards the mainstream], assenting to a withdrawal timetable attached to war funding, publicly reconsidering his previous stalwart NAFTA support, and recanting on his previous toeing of the Bush line on telecom retroactive immunity. He now sits on the reconciliation committee drafted to make the Senate's gutless and prostrate FISA bill somehow mesh with the House's Constitutionally supported version. But if he simply assents to the Senate bill, like many in his Blue Dog cell have vowed, it would be another ominous step towards suspending the Constitution of the United States, which, outwardly-- and stacked with his appalling previous record on the issue-- would appear a betrayal of the oath Boswell took upon assuming office.
The crux of the Fallon-Boswell contest lies here: can you sell out your constituency and get away with it just because you're packaged as Brand D, or can you be held accountable for your actions, as most healthy, functioning societies require?
The rest of the story on one little district in the heartland and the battle to save the soul of the party at today's DownWithTyranny.
And desmoinesdem has had covered the race exhaustively at her page here.