Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie
Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie
Instead of a reality check for the party, it'll be smugness redoubled
By Matt Taibbi
June 9, 2016
They should be freaked out, cowed and relieved, like the Golden State Warriors would be if they needed a big fourth quarter to pull out a win against Valdosta State.
But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn't just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey).
The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders this year were equally a blistering referendum on Beltway politics. But the major-party leaders and the media mouthpieces they hang out with can't see this, because of what that friend of mine talked about over a decade ago: Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.
In D.C., a kind of incestuous myopia very quickly becomes part of many political jobs.
Voter concerns rapidly take a back seat to the daily grind of the job. The ideal piece of legislation in almost every case is a Frankensteinian policy concoction that allows the sponsoring pol to keep as many big-money donors in the fold as possible without offending actual human voters to the point of a ballot revolt.
This dynamic is rarely explained to the public, but voters on both sides of the aisle have lately begun guessing at the truth, and spent most of the last year letting the parties know it in the primaries. People are sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances who only get whatever policy scraps are left over after pols have finished servicing the donors they hang out with at Redskins games.
Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they'll convince themselves that, as Hohmann's Post article put it, Hillary's latest victories mean any "pressure" they might have felt to change has now been "ameliorated."
The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.
This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.
Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is.
This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag.
But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.
I agree with Taibbi’s analysis 100%. Democratic Party Leaders think with Trump running they can relax a little and dismiss the voter discontent as something they can let slide while they go back to business as usual governing: servicing the wants of their donors and throwing “whatever policy scraps are left over” to their constituents.
Do take the time to read the whole piece.
Last night during her interview Senator Warren had this to say about the Beltway Bubble:
“Why hasn’t it happened? The answer is Washington that place we are now, it is the Bubble. It’s the Bubble that’s created by the money. It is the Bubble created by the contributions, by the Lobbyists, by every part of that tight little circle.” ~ Elizabeth Warren
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