Carrol Cox wrote:
>What's to regret? Anything that hurts the DP simply reduces the barrier
>to the growth of a mass movement in the U.S.
-I almost voted for Bloomberg for just that reason - that an essential
-prerequisite to even mildly progressive politics in NYC is the
-destruction of the Democratic Party, at least in its present form.
What "present form"? The players who mattered in this election were mostly not "the Democratic Party" but the labor unions, Sharpton and a range of other civic groups who organize based on the candidate not some imagined monolithic party.
Bloomberg switched his registration because it allowed him to avoid the original multi-candidate pileup and runoff on the Dem side and buy himself a ticket to a one-on-one rematch with the eventual winner. He could have just as easily run in the primary as a mildly conservative Dem.
Bloomberg's win matters no more than if he had won the primary. Within city democratic politics, I doubt Bloomberg's win will matter at all in the long run. It will help national Republicans since it will allow them to do occasional photo-ops with a big city mayor (although cause some ideological heartburn as well).
But other than that, I don't think Bloomberg's nominal party label will matter much at all. What will matter is that his politics are likely to be less pro-labor and less progressive than Green's.
All this bizarro second-hand "destroy the social fascists" lineage of theoretical discussions of politics is just completely irrelevant to real existing politics, which in the US are candidate-driven backed by a whole shifting mosaic of organizations deploying as their interests dictate.
Bloombert's focus on gaming the system to avoid the runoffs should clue lefties into what is important-- not abstract party labels but worrying about how the structure of runoffs effect the best strategy to win. The basic rule has always been that centrists love to avoid primaries and pick the easiest path to be in the general election, while more ideologically strong candidates (both rightwing and left) do better in primaries where they can knock off opponents with pluralities in multiple candidate races.
Third party candidates defy this rule (both right and left) and all fail miserably.
-- Nathan Newman