[lbo-talk] Blue Dog victory? No says Nathan

ravi ravi.bulk at gmail.com
Thu Nov 9 10:10:17 PST 2006


At around 9/11/06 12:12 pm, Carl Remick wrote:
>
> At a press conference before his address to a Jewish National Fund
> dinner, Clinton noted: "I think the American people prefer, first, a
> government that gets things done and is not mired in partisan gridlock."
> ...
>
> Clinton told the dinner crowd that Americans, while more "culturally
> conservative" than Canadians, are at the core "a practical people,"
> adding, "It would be a big mistake to read the results as some big move
> to the left in America." ...
>

This is the meme that the DLC and others within the Dem party have converged on, I think. Anthony Weiner was on WNYC this morning pushing the same talking points.

I fail to see their reasoning. From what I can tell this is not a Dem win (based on "pragmatic" choice) but a combination of a GOP loss and party-line voting. And it was a GOP loss because this GOP house, senate and administration are ideological (corruption -- abuse of power -- being part of that ideology). But if the voters wanted "pragmatism" etc, then why would they boot out Chafee? Why wouldn't they vote in Kean? Why would they vote for Hevesi? The Democratic guy whose congressional office was raided?

People either voted party (and ideology) line (Corker(TN), Ferguson(NJ), Menendez(NJ), Hevesi(NY), etc), or they revolted against a party (most of the anti-GOP anti-corruption, anti-racism, anti-Iraq, etc vote: Casey, Webb, etc), or they voted an alternate ideology or a combination (Sanders, Sherrod Brown, etc).

The DLC are not pragmatists, they are centrists. Or put another way their pragmatism is not a pragmatism about solutions but a pragmatism about status quo politics. They (the DLC, the politicians and the pundits) think in terms of "gridlock", etc... I claim that the general public does not. We had close to 6 years of a gridlock free government (as close as you can get) and that is the one that got voted out. Anyway, to talk about "the people" as a monolithic entity seems a strange thing to do at a time of fairly strong polarisation.

--ravi



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