Firing Squad Looms for the Dem Party Oligarchy
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com Posted on August 23, 2006, Printed on August 24, 2006 http://www.alternet.org/story/40744/
Question: Are bloggers too powerful?
Answer: Do I think they're important? Yes. Do I think the [bloggers]
and Al Sharpton alone are the future of the Democratic Party? No!
Welcome in, contribute, but it's about winning in November and moving
the country forward, not about a firing squad in a circle.
-- Q&A with U.S. representative Rahm Emmanuel, Aug. 28 issue of New
York magazine
I badly want to move on to another topic in this column space -- there
is very little in the world that is less interesting than the
Democratic Leadership Council and their ilk -- but this stuff is fast
becoming just too unbelievable to ignore.
What exactly does self-appointed congressional mega-celebrity and
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emmanuel mean
(says a friend of mine in congress of him: "He's an amoral,
showboating cock") when he says, "Do I think [bloggers] and Al
Sharpton are the future of the Democratic Party?"
That's actually not hard to figure out; it's political hack-ese for
the human sentence bloggers = Al Sharpton. As for what he means by
that: just think about the thought process that had to go into
Emmanuel's adding of the phrase "and Al Sharpton," when Al Sharpton
wasn't even part of the question. Ask yourself if you really believe
Emmanuel isn't aware that he's addressing the mostly white, Upper West
Side readers of New York magazine when he "offhandedly" ties bloggers
to the legendary gold medallion-wearing icon from forty blocks north
in Harlem.
These DLC types are amazing, they really are. Their pathology is
unique; they all secretly worship the guilt-by-association tactics of
Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, but unlike those two, not one of them has
enough balls to take being thought of as the bad guy by the general
public. So instead of telling big, bold whoppers right out in the
open, they're forever coming out with backhanded little asides like
this one, apparently in the hope that only your subconscious will
notice. I won't be surprised if they respond to the next electoral
loss by a DLC candidate by having Bruce Reed argue in the Wall Street
Journal that "bloggers, Queer Eye, and Arabs with syphilis are not the
future of the Democratic Party."
Then there is the phrase, "Welcome in, contribute, but..."
Welcome in? What is this, a political party, or a house in the fucking
Hamptons? Who died and made these people gatekeepers to anything?
What Emmanuel appears to be saying here is that "bloggers" -- by which
he really means "people who voted against Lieberman" -- are welcome to
"contribute," but not welcome to actually decide elections. In other
words, we'll take your votes, but we'll decide who you vote for. An
admirable sentiment for an elected official. How is it that these
people have avoided being pitchforked to death for this long?
Finally, the "firing squad in a circle" line has been a DLC favorite
for years. DLC chief Al From has been pimping it at least since the
last presidential race. It's time we officially retired this line,
which is really just a sorry take on the lame old high-school
guidance-counselor saw: "Now, Jimmy. When you shoot spitballs at Vice
Principal Anderson, you're really shooting spitballs at yourself." And
little Jimmy thinks: No, actually, I was shooting spitballs at Vice
Principal Anderson...
What's amazing about the "firing squad in a circle" line is that it is
inevitably used less than five seconds after the DLC speaker has just
finished dumping on Michael Moore, peace activists, or whoever the
party's talking-points-vermin of the day is (In this case, Sharpton
and bloggers). He denounces Michael Moore as a disgrace to the party,
then turns around and says that when we attack the party leadership,
we're only hurting ourselves. These tactics are so transparent and
condescending that one longs for some kind of cosmic referee to just
drop down from the heavens and unilaterally disqualify their users on
the grounds of their overwhelming general wrongness -- but the
maddening thing about these DLC creatures is that that referee never
arrives, and Al From is back on page one again the next day, shaking
his head and grumbling piously about "unity" and "consensus" and "the
lost art of bipartisanship."
The unspoken subtext of this increasingly bitter debate between the
Democratic Party establishment and the supporters of people like Ned
Lamont and Hillary Clinton's antiwar challenger, Jonathan Tasini, is a
referendum ordinary people have unexpectedly decided to hold on the
kingmaker's role of the holy trinity of the American political
establishment - big business, the major political parties, and the
commercial media. The irony is that it's the political establishment
itself that has involuntarily raised the consciousness of its
disenfranchised voters.
The surge in support for Lamont initially came from people motivated
by two simple things -- a desire to protest the war in Iraq, and
physical revulsion before the wrinkled, vengeful persona of Joe
Lieberman. But the party, in fighting back, attacked not on the issues
but on the means of protest -- blogs, grassroots activism, Lamont's
independent wealth. In doing so it threw into relief the essential
parameters of the problem, which is this; the Democratic Party has
been operating for two decades without the active participation of its
voters.
It raised money by appealing directly to companies in private
fundraisers, and it used the commercial media to enforce its policy
positions, in particular its desire to "clearly reject our antiwar
wing," as Al From put it a few years back. It's a simple formula for
running one-half of American politics; you decide on John Kerry two
years before the presidential vote, raise him $200 million bucks, and
let CNN and the New York Times take care of any Howard Deans who might
happen to pop up in the meantime. The same greased track is being
prepared for Hillary Clinton right now, and we can be quite sure that
guns are already being aimed at Russell Feingold.
It's been an essentially oligarchic system of government, where all
the important decision-makers have been institutions, with any
attempts by ordinary people to circumvent the system coldly repressed.
Remember 2000, when Ralph Nader was not only not allowed to debate
with Al Gore and George Bush, but wasn't allowed in the building --
not even allowed in a second, adjoining hall in the building, not even
when he had a ticket? Well, we have a replay of that proud moment in
hour history going on now, with Hillary's Senate primary opponent
Tasini being shut out of debates by New York's NY1 TV channel (owned
by TimeWarner) which is insisting that qualified candidates not only
reach five percent support in the polls (Tasini is at 13 percent and
rising) but raise or spend $500,000. Said NY1 Vice President Steve
Paulus: "All Tasini would need is for each [New York state registered
voter] to send him a dollar. Right now, with the money he's raised, he
does not represent the party he claims to represent."
So a war chest is now the standard for representation? In order to get
on television, you need a dollar from every voter? (Are we electing a
Senator or holding a Girl Scout raffle? What the fuck?) And this is
decided by... an executive for a corporate television station? One
that recently sent a reporter [Adam Balkin] to Japan to do features on
high-tech toilets? In other words, NY1 will pay to put an exotic
Japanese toilet on a few million or so New York television screens --
but insists on seeing a half-million dollar deposit before it will put
a Democratic candidate with 13 percent support in a televised debate?
Am I missing something?
This schism within the Democratic Party is the most interesting thing
to happen in American politics in decades, because due to a system
error, people have temporarily been allowed back into what had been a
totally closed process. They're working round the clock to fix the
loophole, though, because the Emmanuels of the world know what's
coming if they don't. The firing squad. And this time it won't be in a
circle.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/40744/