Category Archives: elections

Questions

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There is so much good commentary floating around, and so many thoughts in my head, I hardly know where to start. So I’ll just jump in with a list of still-unanswered questions.

Is Barack Obama for real? He makes a good speech, but his record as a junior senator from Illinois is not all that inspiring. Even so, Charles Peters writes in today’s Washington Post that he accomplished remarkable things in the Illinois legislature.

Is George Bush relevant? Dan Froomkin writes,

In his 30-minute Reuters interview, Bush also explained his strategy to remain relevant in the coming year, as attention shifts to the question of who will succeed him. The strategy involves making sure Republicans in Congress don’t break ranks. (See my Dec. 13 column, Congress Goes Belly Up.)

Said Bush: “[M]y challenge is to remind the American people that while they’re paying attention to these primaries there is a President actively engaged solving problems. …”

Yeah, he figured out how to change the light bulb in his desk lamp.

Has Ann Coulter flown home to Planet Ogle-TR-56b? Her web page today as of 2 pm features a rerun of her infamous Kwanzaa column. Nothing about current political news.

Who’s in denial? Michael Gerson says Democrats are in denial because they want to undo all of George Bush’s popular and successful policies. Um, who’s in denial, Mr. Gerson?

Will the real next Ronald Reagan please stand up (and then sit down)? All of the GOP candidates claim to be the next Ronald Reagan. One says he will cut taxes just like Ronald Reagan did (before he raised them). Another says he will stand up to foreign enemies, real and imaginary, just like Ronald Reagan did. But John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin write at The Politico:

Huckabee’s message will be the most unorthodox, at least as the Bush-era GOP goes.

He’ll use class-based rhetoric to reach out to disaffected members of his party and those “Reagan Democrats” who are socially conservative but economically more populist. But his lynchpin is social issues — Huckabee’s success will validate the role of Christian conservatives in the GOP tent.

Certainly a lot of Reagan’s initial appeal was that he played the role of Wyatt Earp, riding into town and cleaning up the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The part Reagan actually played in that sorry episode is another matter entirely. But the Reagan mythos and the Reagan reality never did live in the same neighborhood. The myth is that his tax cuts brought about the best economy the nation ever saw and that he single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union. The truth is that he raised taxes as much as he cut them, his economy was based mostly on a housing bubble, and the Soviet Union brought itself down, more or less, after Reagan had left office.

Reading what Harris and Martin wrote, it struck me that Reagan’s appeal really never was about what he accomplished in office — his record overall was not bad, but not outstanding either — but about his persona. He was very good at playing the role of POTUS. His genius was in reading the public mood and giving the people the performance they wanted at the moment. And white working-class Americans embraced him as their friend and champion, even though (based on his record) he really wasn’t. He communicated to them that he understood — and thereby validated — their fears and their anger and their biases. He reached out to the disaffected.

That’s not a role Mitt Romney can ever play, no matter how many taxes he promises to cut.

Huckabee has stumbled badly in the foreign policy area, true, but other than bringing their sons and daughters home from Iraq I don’t know if most working-class Americans give a bleep about foreign policy at the moment. And, yes, the Republican establishment hates him because of the populism angle. Even suggesting that government might be put to use to make life more fair and secure for average Americans is the blackest of heresies among the GOP elite.

But Molly Ivors writes at Whiskey Fire that evangelicalism has become the refuge of the disaffected.

Religion, specifically the evangelical religion which replaces all sorts of community and cultural structures, has a pretty clear appeal for a lot of people who see in it an answer. Our own brilliant chicago dyke, who posts at corrente, once explained how this works:

    … Republicans have spent the last 25 years doing away with all the things that once made America a great place for the working class: decent public education, secure manufacturing and farm jobs, responsible government that meets the basic needs of the people, a critical media that calls out politicians who don’t, and balanced public political and social discourse that addresses the concerns of the little guy. These things are effectively dead in rural America today, and if you’re in Kansas or upstate Wisconsin or delta Mississippi, times are tough, and have been for a long time. I grew up in the country, and I cringe every time I go back, to see just how poorly a lot of folks are doing these days. The problem is that for many, they don’t even really know that once, life in rural working class America was much, much better.

The evangelical movement, in providing an identity and community for the hard-pressed, has essentially replaced American civic life for a lot of people. And Huckabee is the result.

Evangelicalism and civic life have been wound up together for generations in most Bible Belt communities, but I agree something seems different now. And I also think that what Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh and Rich Lowry never understood is that working-class Americans never really took their corporatist/imperialist brand of conservatism to heart. All along, they were just looking for a leader who could understand and validate their fears and anger and biases.

Thus, I think it can be argued that Huckabee is filling that part of the Ronald Reagan role better than anyone else at the moment, and that’s why he won in Iowa.

The question is, how much of the electorate is still looking for the next Ronald Reagan?

Well, Well

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Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.

The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.

As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?

There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.

There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.

___________________

Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.

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Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:

With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.

Strangleholds

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Michael Tomasky at the Guardian and Paul Krugman at the New York Times both point to the same phenomenon within the GOP — that the Republican presidential candidates are nearly all promising to continue George Bush’s policies, even though the public hates those policies.

Krugman writes,

All in all, it’s an economic and political environment in which you’d expect Republican politicians, as a sheer matter of calculation, to look for ways to distance themselves from the current administration’s economic policies and record — say, by expressing some concern about rising income gaps and the fraying social safety net.

In fact, however, except for Mike Huckabee — a peculiar case who’ll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention — the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why? Because the G.O.P. is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.

And Tomasky writes,

It’s pretty astonishing, really – we’re at the tail end of a failed presidency, and the people running to succeed it are promising to continue its failed policies.

Now, many observers would say, well, they’re just pandering to their party’s rightwing base, and once one of them secures the nomination, he will tack to the centre. Undoubtedly, he will, for tactical reasons. But the real question is how the next Republican will govern should he happen to win. And the answer to that question is that there’s every reason to assume that he will be just as a conservative as Bush for one simple reason: the interest groups that run the GOP will not brook much deviation from the standard line.

Those interest groups are three. The neocons run foreign policy – the Iraq disaster has not affected their influence in the GOP one whit. The theocons run social policy. And the radical anti-taxers run domestic policy. Until forces inside the GOP rise up to challenge these interests, any Republican administration will be roughly as conservative as Bush. The candidates have slightly different theories of stasis, they will tinker around this edge or that, but that’s about all you can say.

Both Tomasky and Krugman point to John McCain as someone who has utterly sold out. Krugman writes,

Mr. McCain’s lingering reputation as a maverick straight talker comes largely from his opposition to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which he said at the time were too big and too skewed to the rich. Those objections would seem to have even more force now, with America facing the costs of an expensive war — which Mr. McCain fervently supports — and with income inequality reaching new heights.

But Mr. McCain now says that he supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Not only that: he’s become a convert to crude supply-side economics, claiming that cutting taxes actually increases revenues. That’s an assertion even Bush administration officials concede is false.

Oh, and what about his earlier opposition to tax cuts? Mr. McCain now says he opposed the Bush tax cuts only because they weren’t offset by spending cuts.

Aside from the logical problem here — if tax cuts increase revenue, why do they need to be offset? — even a cursory look at what Mr. McCain said at the time shows that he’s trying to rewrite history: he actually attacked the Bush tax cuts from the left, not the right. But he has clearly decided that it’s better to fib about his record than admit that he wasn’t always a rock-solid economic conservative.

(See also “McCain’s Unlikely Ties to K Street.” The boy has utterly sold out every principle he ever had. He stood up to torture but not to the GOP Powers That Be.)

Tomasky:

And yet, by and large, the Republican candidates are running on exactly the same policies that Bush has pursued. Consider this list. All the major Republican candidates want to “stay the course” in Iraq, denouncing any discussion of withdrawal as evidence of pusillanimity. All see the fight against terrorism in more or less Bushian terms. All want to make the Bush tax cuts, now scheduled to sunset in 2010, permanent – even John McCain, who at the time voted against them. All have promised the leaders of the Christian right that they will appoint supreme court judges “in the mould of” Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

What this euphemistic language means is that whatever a candidate’s previous positions on abortion and gay rights – Rudy Giuliani, for instance, has supported both – the leaders of the religious conservative movement have exacted commitments from all the Grand Old Party candidates to appoint the kind of judges they want, and that matters far more than past positions.

There’s more. Healthcare is a priority in this election. But to hear these Republicans, you’d never know it. Their healthcare plans range from cynical to inadequate. Climate change? They barely acknowledge the problem and are particularly loath to acknowledge that human activity has contributed to it. They continue to insist, as Republicans since Ronald Reagan have, that the only real domestic enemy the American people face is the federal government, which they continue to want to starve.

Of course, the GOP candidates are not coming out and saying they are going to continue George Bush’s policies. From what I’ve seen (from a distance, here in New York), they are pretending George Bush doesn’t exist. But they’re singing the same old song Republicans have been singing since Reagan — cut taxes, shrink government, love God, hate minorities, and kick foreign ass.

These viewpoints long have been sponsored by the Moneyed Elite, who have used their vast media infrastructure to persuade un-elite Americans that these are the opinions they should have, too. And they’ve gotten away with this for a long time. But E.J. Dionne says there’s a different wind blowing in Iowa:

Us-vs.-them economic rhetoric is often said to be out of date, impractical, even dangerous. But in the closing days of a very tight race, Edwards has his opponents, particularly Barack Obama, scrambling to make sure a trial lawyer from North Carolina does not corner the market on populism.

Obama is vying with Edwards for the non-Clinton vote, and the Illinois senator was on the air yesterday with an Edwards-like television ad assailing the flow of American jobs abroad. Obama spoke last week of “Maytag workers who labored all their lives only to see their jobs shipped overseas; who now compete with their teenagers for $7-an-hour jobs at Wal-Mart.” He had heard from seniors “who were betrayed by CEOs who dumped their pensions while pocketing bonuses, and from those who still can’t afford their prescriptions because Congress refused to negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available price.”

Even Hillary Clinton, whose discourse is typically longer on policy details than egalitarian wrath, told an appreciative crowd in Story City last week that the “interests of working middle-class families” had been “subordinated to the interests of the wealthy and well-connected” and that the Bush administration acted on the mortgage crisis “only after Wall Street began to feel the credit crunch.” She promised to “end the student loan industry’s scams, which have ripped off families” and condemned “no-bid contracts,” “cronyism” and “corruption.”

Since the Reagan era, the heroes of the nation’s economic story have been valiant entrepreneurs who “took risks” and “created wealth.” This narrative advanced the Republican cause and seeped deeply into the Democratic Party. If Iowa is any indication, there is a new narrative in which the old heroes are cast as the goats of the story and the new heroes are people like “the guy in Orange City.” There is a thunder out of Iowa, and it is shaking both parties.

Of course, the majority of the punditocracy, especially the ones who are incessantly on television, will not notice this trend. They will continue to insist the American people want tax cuts more than they want health care, and if economic populism does determine the outcome of the 2008 elections, the bobbleheads will be caught totally off guard. And then they’ll come up with a reason why the elections weren’t really determined by economic populism. Just watch.

What is harder to predict is what will happen to the GOP if it loses the White House and more seats in Congress by a decisive margin in November. In a normal world, such a defeat would cause a massive re-alignment of power within the Republican Party, allowing “moderate” (i.e., possibly not crazy) Republicans to come to the forefront and take over party leadership. But the Moneyed Elite will still own the party, so it’s possible that can’t happen no matter what.

Going …. Going ….

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The good news today is from the Wall Street Journal: Rudy Giuliani has lost his lead for the GOP nomination in national polls.

After holding a double-digit advantage over his nearest rivals just six weeks ago, the former New York City mayor now is tied nationally with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 20% among Republicans, just slightly ahead of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 17% and Arizona Sen. John McCain at 14%. Other polls show Mr. Giuliani’s lead shrinking in Florida, one of the states he has built his strategy around.

Certainly the entire GOP field is a sorry mess, but Rudy truly frightens me.

Josh Marshall writes,

When Rudy Giuliani’s soft lead in the national polls evaporates, suddenly he’ll be just another GOP hopeful lining up to get his head sliced off in the first big primary and caucus contests. … the big picture is clear: Rudy’s lost his nationwide lead wide.

And the downward momentum will probably push him still further too.. With dismal numbers in the early races and lukewarm numbers nationwide, what’s his political strategy again? Is there any rationale for still calling him the frontrunner?

Yesterday Giuliani was admitted to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for “flu-like symptoms.” I’m not predicting this, exactly, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Giuliani suddenly develops more health problems that will force him to withdraw from the race, particularly if his poll numbers continue to slide. See Down With Tyranny on this point, also. When Giuliani dropped out of the 2000 Senate race because of prostate cancer (and other things), Hillary Clinton had gained a 10-point lead over him in the polls.

Adam Nagourney’s account in the New York Times recalls a campaign in trouble:

Mr. Giuliani’s campaign began to falter in March. New York police officers shot and killed an unarmed black man, Patrick Dorismond, after he ran from undercover agents who asked if he had any drugs to sell. Mr. Giuliani authorized the release of Mr. Dorismond’s sealed criminal records from when he was a juvenile and went on Fox News Sunday, where he proclaimed that Mr. Dorismond was “no altar boy.” The remarks ripped across an already polarized city.

Mr. Clinton had already been scheduled to appear the next night at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Harlem. The church was packed with cameras and reporters as Mrs. Clinton, clasping hands with prominent black leaders, walked in singing “We Shall Overcome,” before delivering a speech accusing Mr. Giuliani of dividing the city.

Mr. Giuliani headed upstate, for a Republican dinner in Binghamton. He spoke for exactly 22 minutes, stood for an eight-minute news conference, and then turned for home. Less than a week later, he abruptly canceled four upstate events because, he said, he wanted to attend the rescheduled opening game of the Yankees.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign pounced. Overnight, aides arranged a trip for her to the cities Mr. Giuliani had snubbed and worked the telephone with upstate reporters to stoke the story.

The End

By the time Mr. Giuliani stepped in front of the cameras to announce he was dropping out, Republicans had already concluded that the mayor would not stay in the race: indeed, many were praying he would not. His cancer seemed almost beside the point.

If Rudy is trailing as the big primary days approach, I wouldn’t be surprised if he finds some excuse to drop out. I’m not saying he will; just that it wouldn’t surprise me.

Tar Pits

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Speaking of tar pits and the critters who sink into them, I just saw this head and blurb on the Los Angeles Times site:

Props to Pax Americana

Jonah Goldberg: Does being the leader of the free world make the U.S. an empire? Who cares?

I can’t bring myself to actually read it. You can, if you have the courage. I just want to ask … Has he not noticed that “Pax Americana” turned into “Bellum Americana” (excuse my Latin) some time back? Does he not realize that the “free world” would not follow Dear Leader even to a buffet table? Does he not know what an empire is? And does Goldberg make a bag of hammers look brilliant, or what?

Well, don’t get me started.

And then there are Democrats. Bob Herbert has a gloomy assessment of the current field of presidential candidates.

A friend of mine, talking about the Democratic presidential candidates, tossed out a wonderful mixed metaphor: “This is awfully weak tea to have to hang your hat on.”

The notion that Bush & Co. had fouled things up so badly for Republicans that just about any Democrat could romp to victory in 2008 was never realistic. What’s interesting now, with the first contests just weeks away, is the extent to which Democratic voters are worried about the possibility that none of their candidates have the stuff to take the White House.

This election, the most important in decades, cries out for strong leadership. The electorate is upset, anxious and hungry for change. But “weak tea” is as good a term as any to describe what the Democrats are offering.

I can’t say I disagree.

Bush-bashing is not enough. Unless one of the Democratic candidates finds the courage to step up and offer a vision of an American future so compelling that voters head to the polls with a sense of excitement and great expectation, the Republican Party could once again capture the White House (despite its awful performance over the past eight years) with its patented mixture of snake oil and demagoguery.

The G.O.P. game plan is already being pieced together. The White House hopes to inoculate Republican candidates on the Iraq war issue by bringing home a significant number of combat troops in the middle of the general election. And the demagogic issue of choice for 2008 is immigration.

The Willie Horton ugliness of 1988 will be like nothing compared with the concerted attack to be unleashed by the G.O.P. on illegal immigrants next year.

The Democrats will have to figure out a way to counter that with an appeal to the better angels of our nature, and that will require courage.

Of the current field, I think Barack Obama is the one most likely to catch fire with the vision thing. When he’s on his game, he’s electrifying. But his campaign so far hasn’t shown as much spark as I anticipated it would. Maybe he’s pacing himself.

At the Washington Post, Andrés Martinez makes an interesting observation:

I remember being in Europe on the eve of the 2000 election and seeing polls that showed about 85 percent of the people in Holland favored Al Gore. And that was back when Bush was known as a compassionate conservative who worked well with Democrats and talked about a “humble” foreign policy. His “popularity” in Holland has taken quite a hit since then.

There is no way around it: Bush’s departure will be a good day for the U.S. “brand” around the world. And while wanting to be liked isn’t the sole criterion on which to base your vote, it’s hard to deny that the election of a Democrat would result in a a bigger boost to America’s international brand. …

… On the whole, change will likely be welcomed around the world. And setting aside any other merits or demerits of Barack Obama’s candidacy, given his life story I do think the conventional wisdom is right: His taking the oath of office on Inauguration Day would count as a massive propaganda coup for the United States.

That’s the single biggest reason I’m rooting for Obama. That does not count as an endorsement, however. Presidential candidates always should have caveat emptor stamped on their foreheads. In past history, many sparkling candidates proved to be disappointing presidents, but a few have exceeded expectations.

I’m actually not too worried. Our guys may be a pack of mutts, but theirs are … well, you know.

Of Licenses and Lizards

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The headline at The Trail — “Spitzer Drops License Plan, But Damage to Democrats is Done” — has rekindled hope among the wingnuts. I just want to point out that Gov. Spitzer’s policy, although unpopular in New York, had little impact on the recent state and local elections here, even though Republicans campaigned on it heavily.

I agree with Taylor Marsh —

It was clear to me after the debate that Clinton backing Spitzer was because she refused to push a fellow Democrat under a bus. I applauded that action, but knew this issue would evolve as it has. Equally clear was that backing Spitzer on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants was going to cause her a lot of grief in the general election, but also in the primary because the press eats this subject up. It sells papers. Rumors are that some of Clinton’s team were furious with Spitzer for putting Clinton in this spot, so he pulled his immigration plans. It’s over, just in time for the CNN debate. …

… This is one of the most emotional issues there is and one easily opened to demagoguing. Democrats made Spitzer wake up, because those against his plan are the types who come out to vote. That’s the bottom line.

The emotional value of illegal immigration has two sides. It doesn’t matter which one is right during election season, because feelings are as they are and you can’t change an electorate who won’t listen. While intending to solve the challenge of undocumented or illegal immigrants, Spitzer finally acknowledged that you can’t move a country to follow your lead until you’ve convinced them you understand and respect their feelings. You also need a Democratic president to get it done.

Immigration is the number one right-wing red meat issue. The mere mention of the “I” word causes complete cerebral cortex failure in a wingnut, allowing the reptilian brain complex to take over. One might, then, forgive them for not understanding that a state’s driver’s license policy is not a matter to hang around the necks of candidates for national office. After all, lizards are not famous for their higher reasoning skills. I don’t let media off the hook, however.

Steve M:

Hillary Clinton is still not flip-flopping on drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants. She was not for these licenses before she was against them, or against them before she was for them.

She has merely tried to say that the problem needs a federal solution (a comprehensive immigration reform law), while trying to weasel out of making a plain statement of support or opposition to the Spitzer plan. She never wanted to say she didn’t support it (which might have alienated certain blocs of voters), so she kept saying she understands it.

And her new statement is quite consistent with her old statements — including the evasion. …

… She says as president she won’t support licenses for the undocumented, but that’s not quite being categorically against them. She says she’ll fight for comprehensive reform. And she’s merely supporting Spitzer’s withdrawal of the plan — she’s not saying it was wrong and he never should have put it forth.

Way too nuanced for lizards, of course.

Jeralyn of TalkLeft has been blogging about this issue for a while. A post from 2004 gives good reasons to allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses. More here. But Taylor’s right when she says “It doesn’t matter which one is right during election season, because feelings are as they are and you can’t change an electorate who won’t listen.”

Even so, immigration is not the number one concern for citizens at large. This issue is not the Achilles’ heel for Dems the wingnuts believe it to be.

Update: David Broder says the immigration issue could sink the Democrats. This is solid proof the Dems need not worry too much about it, since Bwana is as clueless as they come.

Update: On the Unified Field Theory of Hillary Hatred

Bring Back the Smoke Filled Rooms

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This is a textbook example of why We, the People, no longer matter in American politics, from Jonathan Martin at The Politico.

It could be an episode of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story.” Mitt Romney was announced from the podium Saturday afternoon as the winner of the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Straw Poll,” narrowly edging Mike Huckabee.

But it turns out that the 5,775-vote total included thousands of people who had voted online, and could have become eligible by paying as little as $1 to join FRC Action, the legislative action arm of Family Research Council.

Although the audience at the Washington Hilton was not told, the crowd favorite among the 952 attendees who voted in person turned out to be Huckabee by a mile. He got 51 percent of the in-person votes, compared to just 10 percent for Mitt Romney.

This led one rival to suggest the headline, “Romney Win$ Straw Poll.”

I would just love to ask some of the people who actually attended the FRC shindig how they feel about this. Used, one suspects.

I’ve been wondering why there doesn’t seem to be more movement toward Huckabee in the ranks of white conservative evangelicals. It turns out that whenever white conservative evangelicals get a close look at Huckabee, they flock to him like pigeons to bread crumbs. It’s the leadership of the “values voters” movement who aren’t flocking. I can only guess why that might be, but I suspect that power and money are factors, somehow.

The various Powers That Be like to go through the motions of asking us ordinary people what we think, but ultimately they don’t care. Eventually they’ll settle on whatever candidates promise them the most perks and influence, and then they’ll go about marketing those candidates to the rest of us, like toothpaste. Meanwhile, any candidate who fails to meet with their approval simply will not get the media exposure he or she needs to be competitive.

Note that I’m not saying I want Huckabee to be the nominee. Underneath Huckabee’s nice-guy exterior is a five-alarm whackjob. The point is that what went on at the FRC exemplifies how we’re all being jerked around.

Once upon a time there were no presidential primaries. The nominee was chosen at the party conventions, usually through a process that combined the opinions of delegates with behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing in the famous smoke-filled rooms. States began holding primaries as a way to “popularize” the nominating process. But the people at the top of the power pyramid have learned how to jerk the rest of us around and manipulate what “we” think. Most people go to polls knowing no more about the politicians they vote for than they do about what’s really in their toothpaste. All they know is that it tastes like mint and the people in the television ads have real nice teeth.

Out of the Fire, Into the Frying Pan

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In his column today, Paul Krugman explains why the GOP is losing the support of Big Business and Big Corporations, and I’d like to comment on that later today. But here’s the down side —

According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.

The sudden burst of corporate affection for Democrats is good news for the party’s campaign committees, but not necessarily good news for progressives. …

… Right now all the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are running on strongly progressive platforms — especially on health care. But there remain real concerns about what they would actually do in office.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing that makes you wonder: yesterday ABC News reported on its Web site that the Clinton campaign is holding a “Rural Americans for Hillary” lunch and campaign briefing — at the offices of the Troutman Sanders Public Affairs Group, which lobbies for the agribusiness and biotech giant Monsanto. You don’t have to be a Naderite to feel uncomfortable about the implied closeness.

I’d put it this way: many progressives, myself included, hope that the next president will be another F.D.R. But we worry that he or she will turn out to be another Grover Cleveland instead — better-intentioned and much more competent than the current occupant of the White House, but too dependent on lobbyists’ money to seriously confront the excesses of our new Gilded Age.

Candidates Most Likely to Turn Into Grover Cleveland are, IMO, senators Clinton and Biden. Biden has little chance of being the nominee, however, so let’s talk about Senator Clinton.

Although I will support her if she’s the nominee, I’ve still got my fingers crossed that she isn’t. And I ask myself if I’m being unfair to her, or if I’ve been subliminally influenced by wingnut propaganda, and I honestly don’t think so. In fact, the animus the wingnuts have for her would tend to make me like her more, if anything.

A paragraph from a Gail Collins column (“None Dare Call It Child Care“), speaks volumes:

This is Hillary Clinton’s Women’s Week. On Tuesday, she gave a major speech on working mothers in New Hampshire, with stories about her struggles when Chelsea was a baby, a grab-bag of Clintonian mini-ideas (encourage telecommuting, give awards to family-friendly businesses) and a middle-sized proposal to expand family leave. Yesterday, she was in the company of some adorable 2- and 3-year-olds, speaking out for a bill on child care workers that has little chance of passage and would make almost no difference even if it did. Clinton most certainly gets it, but she wasn’t prepared to get any closer to the problems of working parents than a plan to help them stay home from work.

Clintonian mini-ideas! That should become an established catchphrase. Bill was good at those too, as I recall. Bill was a good manager and a political genius, but an FDR he was not.

But this is what I fear from a Hillary Clinton Administration: She’d be an effective manager of the office and certainly would patch up much of our soured international relations, but her domestic policy would amount to tweaks. And Big Business and Big Corporations would love her, for the obvious reasons, and the rest of us would benefit from the crumbs of whatever goodwill they feel moved to sprinkle upon us.

And if he’s still around, Ralph Nader would no doubt pick up votes in 2012.

I admit none of the nominees look like FDR to me, but Edwards and Dodd have the potential to be FDR Lite. It’s harder to say if Obama or Richardson would turn out to be other than corporate-sponsored tweakers. (I’m sorry to say that, for all his good intentions, I have major doubts about Kucinich’s management abilities, so I can’t take him seriously as a candidate. And I’m not entirely sure what planet Mike Gravel is from, although I’d love to have a beer with him.)

Eugene Robinson writes in his column today that lots of women across America are drawn to Clinton because she would be the first woman president. I wish I could share that excitement, but I don’t.

Update: Prairie Weather —

The Democratic party is both empty and overbearing. It lacks, as Matt Bai pointed out, a central “argument,” a driving ethos, any social and political passion that relates to America’s needs. Rove-like, the party has come to depend on stealing some issues from the Republican right and to mimic the hopes and passions of its own left. But that leaves an empty center. Most Americans have not the slightest clue whether Democrats can be trusted to do any more than a little better than George W. Bush.

This was not always true of the Dems, mind, although you have to be damn old to remember when it wasn’t. I wrote about how the change came about in “How the Democrats Lost, Period.”