A quick glance at my diary history will demonstrate that I’ve decided Virginia cannot afford for Terry McAuliffe to win the Democratic nomination for governor. It’s long past time we put a stake through the heart of the transactional politics that came to define the 1990’s Democratic Party under McAuliffe’s cancerous leadership.
Yes, I chose the word cancerous carefully. Cancer, as you know, is characterized by abnormally aggressive growth by one organ or group of cells within a body. Under McAuliffe’s 1990’s leadership, that’s exactly what the Democratic Party "enjoyed". For a sustained period under McAuliffe, the party’s fundraising apparatus thrived; its coffers overflowed with fat-cat cash. The privileged paid for, inter alia, overnights at the White House and drinking coffee with the President. In return, they found that their whims and agendas were at least heard, if not diligently pursued. Too often, it was the latter. Whether it was Marc Rich or Robert Rubin’s pals on Wall Street, those with money had an inside track to policy success. In the long run, the Democratic Party, and more importantly, our country, suffered tremendously.
Of course, all that money held enormous appeal; Terry McAuliffe was lionized by the left and targeted by the right for his enormous "successes". Of course, today, conservatives should be thanking him – and, indeed, perhaps they are. While bankers, defense industry executives and media titans enjoyed unprecedented access to President Bill Clinton and his policy teams, community activists, good-government groups and other "dirty fucking hippies" looked on from afar. Clinton passed windfall deregulatory regimes for the corporate media and banking, credit card, and insurance industries. The result was a narrowing of the differences between the two major parties, so much so that by 2000, the press – and in large part, the public – had come to see Presidential politics as a game. Al Gore’s "wooden" stump personality vs. George Bush’s down-home demeanor characterized "serious" media coverage of the 2000 election. Ralph Nader found millions of people receptive to his argument that there wasn’t "a dime’s worth of difference" between the candidates. We’re all aware of the disastrous consequences...
Like a cancer, McAuliffe’s transactional politics nearly killed its host. Until 2002, the Democratic Party floundered horribly. Until Doctor Dean introduced the slow-acting but time-honored cure of people-power, it appeared as if George Bush, Karl Rove, Tom Delay and the most extreme elements of the Republican Party had a real chance to install their coveted "permanent majority". Nobody could tell if Dean’s prescription – coupled with the rise of the blogosphere and new distributed organizational models employed by groups like MoveOn – would be "too little, too late". In fact, until 2006, the Democratic Party reeled from election to election.
Today, we look back on our deathbed and it seems like ancient history.
But...
The cancer remains with us.
Terry McAuliffe has risen again. And it seems like he’s learned no lessons.
Yeah... We all know he chaired Hillary Clinton’s campaign and at least had a hand in the strategy that called for raising a lot of money early and inflicting a single knock-out blow on Super-Tuesday. And we all know how well that worked out. For many of us, we were gratified and hoped that the death of Clinton’s lobbyist-coddling campaign would mark the end of the McAuliffe model.
It didn’t. Remission was short-lived. The cancer is back.
Today, McAuliffe has his sights set on the Virginia state-house and he’s dipped into every one of his old tricks.
As I noted last week, he’s booked fundraisers with the same odious Republicans and corporate Democrats he’s always been close to. One of them, Steve Elmendorf, is particularly worth bringing up again:
"The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections. The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left." Markos Moulitsas, head of The Daily Kos blog, replied: "Here's notice, any Democrat associated with Elmendorf will be outed. The netroots can then decide for itself whether it wants to provide some of that energy and money to that candidate. There's nothing 'extreme left' with demanding Democrats act like Democrats, no matter how much these out-of-touch and self-important beltway insiders think it is."
Cancer is serious business; every time it returns it needs to be unceremoniously destroyed. And we have to be ever-vigilant, because cancer is one sneaky bastard.
In my last diary about the VA-Gov race – the one that told y’all about McAuliffe’s scheduled fundraiser with Ed Rogers – a few commentors appeared to defend their candidate.
Something interesting was pointed out to me. The most vigorous McAuliffe defenders had user-id’s of 204840, 204842, 204844 and 204845... They had each, according to jotters Impact Diary series, registered on DailyKos within the last week. None had any kind of diary history.
Like I said, cancer is one sneaky bastard.
For years and years, Terry McAuliffe and his band of merry money-men had little use for the netroots. He represented the Democratic establishment; we were the dirty fucking hippies that needed to be co-opted for campaigns, but otherwise kept well under-foot.
Today, all of that has changed. McAuliffe has assiduously courted bloggers; several high-profile Virginia netroots all-stars have been charmed into his camp. To me, it’s really scary stuff. It demonstrates that, at least in Virginia – a state that takes pride in its civil discourse and effective government – memories are short when it comes to how bad transactional politics is for the Democratic Party.
If anything, I’ve always believed that as the beating progressive heart of the Democratic Party, the Netroots would act as a form of white-t cell – an immune system that would detect and obliterate cancer before it got off the ground. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Between the attack by high-user-id interlopers and the co-opting of some formerly reliably-progressive bloggers, Virginia is endangered.
So I’m asking for two things:
- Be wary of Terry McAuliffe defenders. We don’t know who these people are and as I’ve demonstrated in previous diaries, McAuliffe seems incapable of shame... He’s never respected the Netroots and if winning the nomination is the spoils, I suspect he’ll piss all over us with a legion of interloping defenders if that’s what it takes to win.
- Get to know the Brian Moran and Creigh Deeds campaigns. I’m leaning toward Moran; he seems to be the more progressive of the two. You can show your support for him by signing up to his new campaign website here: http://www.brianmoran.com/...