the food was lousy and the portions were too small
Fri Dec 14, 2007 at 08:22:45 AM PDT
A friend of mine told me about a conversation he overheard between two coworkers about a restaurant one of them had visited, the one said to the other, "the food was lousy and the portions were too small."
Think about that for a second. (taps foot... but not like Larry Craig)
It seems to me that the comment that she made may be applicable to another conundrum that's been bugging me lately.
"The Democrats in Congress are spineless, useless, strategically challenged, bought off by corporations, etc. - and there aren't enough of them."
Like a lot of folks, I've been scratching my head over this one. Logically, it makes little sense to reward bad behavior - and it's fair to say that we should have seen this coming. David Sirota nailed it before the 2006 election. He talks about Steny Hoyer bragging about his own "K Street Project," and how in anticipation of electoral success Democrats were positioning themselves to take in corporate cash and supporting corporate-friendly policies:
At the same time that leading Democrats have been publicly berating the GOP for corruption, they have been privately ramping up their own corporate fund-raising operations, and large numbers of Democratic lawmakers have provided the critical votes to pass some of big business’s most sought-after prizes. The energy bill, the bankruptcy bill, the Central American Free Trade Agreement and the class-action "reform" bill—all of these were written by the industries they benefit, and all required the support of key Democratic legislators in order to pass.
A "BUSINESS AS USUAL" STRATEGY—Democrats have made strides in addressing the criticism that their style, tone and language make them appear to look down on voters. But now, with polls showing Republican approval ratings plummeting, some in Washington’s Democratic circles seem to be looking at the last year and a half and gleaning a lesson that most directly insults voters: that Democrats can say one thing, do another, and still win elections. That might explain why Democratic Party politicians and insiders are more openly talking out of both sides of their mouths.
There's a lot more good food for thought in Sirota's article - there's a discussion of how the entrenched media feel about the netroots/people. Sirota pointed to a David Brooks article Party no. 3, that I think is worth looking at in greater detail than Sirota did to demonstrate the establishment's disdain for people like us:
There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.
All were on display Tuesday night...
And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.
Get that? There's a problem with the primary system, it gives people like us too much power, the corporate candidates are vulnerable during primaries to, well, um, the people.
Brooks finishes off by explaining that we, while well intentioned initially are extremists:
Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.
Bloggers = extremists! Check out the article, later he calls us jihadists. Brooks uses pretty bold language for a guy who tries to appear to be the voice of calmness and reason.
One more thing from the Sirota article about the DLC struck me. Sirota describes a meeting of the DLC, one of their so called "national conversations," the July prior to the 2006 elections:
Yet the media coverage of its most recent such "conversation," in Denver this past July, tells the real story. The New York Sun noted that the meeting focused on pondering "how to counter the netroots"—i.e., how to counter the millions of grassroots Democratic Party voters who use the Internet to advocate for a more democratic political system. Perhaps most telling of all was the Rocky Mountain News’s note that the DLC’s supposed "national conversation" at the Hyatt Regency Hotel was, in fact, "not open to the public."
So what we've got here after "our" big win in 2006, is a Democratic party awash in corporate cash, giving our issues lip service while giving corporate donors another kind of service (nice kneepads, Steny!). The things that we elected them to do remain undone and the excuses are flying like loose trash in a hurricane. We've also got a corporate media that wants us to believe that we voters can't be trusted to decide whom to represent us.
The things that stand out for me though, are: 1) We have found a way to exploit their vulnerability in primaries. That seems to be the time that we can really make a difference. 2) Where we have yet to really make a dent is in finding a way to counter or coopt the omnipresent voice of the corporate media in the public mind. I fear that until we find a way to do that more effectively, our gains will be severely limited.
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