>Sort of puts Clinton's trial out there as a racist coup.
Interesting story on the front page of today's New York Times reporting that a bunch of big campaign contributors gave the Republican leadership a talking-to yesterday for pushing impeachment. Interesting in itself as a piece of news, but also from the theoretical point of view - about who's behind the impeachment, and the role of money in politics. From the lead:
<quote> Many of the Republican Party's most influential financial backers have castigated the party's chairman and congressional leadership at closed-door meetings here in the past few days, warning that they were sacrificing voters by failing to articulate a clear message while focusing on scandal and impeachment.
The views on the impeachment of President Clinton are not uniform. Some of the biggest donors told their party chairman on Thursday night that the impeachment trial had to be brought to an end. But a more common view was that Republicans in Congress have an obligation to see impeachment through. The mistake, the contributors said, has been allowing their battle with Clinton to drown out all other issues, the contributors said. </quote>
If the moneybags really controlled the agenda from the get-go, then would these chats be necessary?
The relation between politicians and their ultimate owners was elucidated towards the end of the story:
<quote> Sembler, who made his fortune building shopping centers, and several other business executives here likened the private meeting he had with Eagles to that of stockholders standing up to their corporate board. "These are our investors, these are our stockholders," he said, adding that they asked him and Nicholson, "What are we going to do to improve our performance?"
Some contributors were not satisfied with the answers.
"It felt like a shareholders meeting," Luellen said. "The participants were reporting some quarterly losses. But the leadership seemed to focus on their accomplishments instead of all the things that aren't going well. In business, that's how you fail." </quote>
Sounds like the politicans, like corporate managers, have a degree of autonomy until they fuck up, when the owners come in to complain.
Doug