When it comes to the media, or the Village, they are like a child that has dropped and shattered a cookie jar all over the kitchen floor and doesn’t want anyone to come sweep it up. ‘Mistakes were made’ they say, and think that can be the end of it. Take a look at Stu Rothenberg:
Democrats must decide whether they want a candidate who is angry and confrontational, and who sees those favoring compromise as traitors (Edwards), or a candidate who presents himself as a uniter (Obama), or a candidate who presents herself as someone who understands the ways of Washington and can get things done (Clinton).
While Clinton and Obama both acknowledge the importance of working with various interests, including Capitol Hill Republicans and the business community, to come up with solutions to key problems, Edwards sounds more and more like the neighborhood bully who plans to dictate what is to be done.
The ‘ways of Washington’ have brought us to this pass. Shards of crockery are all over the floor. The three candidates under discussion here all have the same kind of experience on the ‘ways of Washington’ because they are all, or have been, U.S. senators. Edwards, like Clinton, has been part of a national campaign. Clinton might have a better understanding of what goes on in the East Wing of the White House, but there’s little to no real difference in the candidates’ respective experience with the ‘ways of Washington’.
They all know that you can’t pass major legislation in Washington unless you have at least a little bipartisan support. The only way to get around that requirement is to have the White House, 60-plus senators, and a healthy majority of the House. The Democrats have an outside chance of obtaining those three prerequisites of unipartisanship. But it’s unlikely that Edwards will move in on Pennsylvania Avenue and find that he doesn’t need to work with Republicans to get things done. He knows that. What he is doing now is asking for a mandate for change, so that if he gets elected he can say that the people want certain things done. Above all, Edwards wants to clean up the crockery. But he also wants to overcome big business’ blockage of meaningful energy, environmental, and health reforms. What distinguishes Edwards’ rhetoric is his insistence that we cannot overcome big business by compromising with them. We must defeat them. I’ll come back to this in a moment, but let’s look at some more Rothenberg:
The former North Carolina senator is running a classic populist campaign that would have made William Jennings Bryan (or Ralph Nader) proud. Everything is Corporate America’s fault. But he’s also portraying himself as fighting for the middle class and able to appeal to swing voters and even Republicans in a general election.
Edwards certainly would dispute that there is an inherent contradiction between his populist rhetoric and his alleged middle class appeal. But his approach to problems is likely to frighten many voters, including most middle class Americans and virtually all Republicans.
What’s interesting here is that Rothenberg reveals a bias. He thinks a populist campaign, by definition, promises nothing for the middle class, won’t be supported by the middle class, and then he concludes that a populist campaign will frighten the middle class. It’s a strange way of looking at things. Rothenberg must think the middle class is comfortable, happy, and complacent. Yet, poll after poll shows that the American people are unhappy with the direction of the country, pessimistic about the economy, and pessimistic about the future. Energy, health, and education costs are through the roof, and income disparity has reached pre-Great Depression levels. People are losing their homes and the value of their homes. We’re bogged down in an unpopular war in Iraq and we’re not doing well in Afghanistan. The world increasingly dislikes us. They have a more favorable opinion of China than the United States.
Let’s go back to those nasty corporations. A look at Edwards’ rhetoric will show that he’s angry with corporations for specific reasons: health care coverage, energy emissions standards, etc. He’s not opposed to the existence of corporations or to their profitability. He thinks they have undue influence and that the interests of the American people and the world are in conflict with the interests of big business in specific cases. Edwards doesn’t want to destroy Exxon/Mobil, he wants to beat them politically and get something done.
But Rotherberg doesn’t see it that way.
Scare the stuffing out of Corporate America and watch the stock market tumble. That’s certain to make retirement funds – including those owned by labor unions and “working families” – happy, right? Stick it to Wal-Mart, and their 1.8 million employees are at risk. Beat up on IBM, and you are beating up on their 330,000 employees. Take a pound of flesh from General Electric, Citigroup, Home Depot and United Technologies, and you’ve put the squeeze on just under 1.2 million employees.
It’s easy to see the logical fallacy here. Rothenberg is suggesting that a president can’t make Corporate America nervous without it hurting the very people a populist sets out to aid. Even the suggestion that corporations might have to pay more for what they pollute, for example, is bound to cause massive lay-offs and a collapse of the stock market. If Wal-Mart has to abide by reasonable labor standards, those jobs will just be lost. Rothenberg sets up rules where the little guy can never win. And he wants to impose those rules on the electorate, whom he considers middle class, but not unhappy for being so.
Edwards portrays himself as a fighter for the middle class, but his message is decidedly working class and left. The North Carolina Democrat’s message seems well-suited for 1933 or 1934, but not nearly as ideal for 2008.
What is unintentionally ironic here, is Rothenberg’s assertion that Edwards’ policies would be appropriate in 1933 (in the midst of the Great Depression) just not in 2008. We might ask whether FDR’s policies might have been appropriate in 1928 before the extremes of the Gilded Age led to worldwide calamity. After all, income disparity is right back at 1928 levels. And Rothenberg isn’t just talking about what will sell here, he’s saying that Edwards’ policies are bad. Here’s his conclusion:
But let’s be very clear: Given the North Carolina Democrat’s rhetoric and agenda, an Edwards Presidency would likely rip the nation apart – even further apart than Bush has torn it.
I’m tempted to just say, “WTF?”. Edwards wouldn’t rip the nation apart, he’d rip the Village apart. He’d change the status quo in the ‘ways of Washington’. At least, that’s what he’s looking for a mandate to do. And I think the middle class is feeling quite ‘working class and left’ at the moment. They’re ready to sweep the kitchen floor.
what the hell is surprising? Its just beginning Boo!
Any percieved threat to the corporatocracy is totally unacceptable. Simple. AND- any means must be used to destroy the candidate that reps that position! This will be the most disgraceful and violent cycle in this countries history. As they say: we ain’t seen nuttin yet!
Just as you say, neither Rothenberg, nor any other member of the Village is willing to admit to their role in the destruction of the country.
Nothing like a strong pro-corporate message to prove that populism won’t work. There is a falseness to the way Rothenberg goes about making his argument, he doesn’t really choose to argue his central premise that:
He just asserts it and hoped that we won’t notice that his entire essay hinges on a statement that he admits Edwards would dispute.
That said I think that Edwards goes to far is saying that even talking to corporate interests in somehow yielding to them. To my mind the problem isn’t that the corporations have a seat at the table, its that they have too many and other interests do not have enough. Simply listening to someone does not yield them power.
I said almost the exact thing right after I finished writing this piece, i.e., I realized I’d left your point unsaid.
I don’t whether Edwards’ absolutist stance is a tactical error or not, although it obviously makes certain quarters quite nervous. But, on the merits, I think he’s basically correct. Of course, there is no reason to literally shut big business out of the discussion, but they should come to the table as one player, not the player. If you calibrate what Edwards is saying with the reality of what is possible, he’s actually in the right place.
And it’s because he is in the right place, somebody who actually would like to see Americans run by the people and not by just the wealthiest .01% of the country, that he’ll be destroyed and dismantled.
The populists are being attacked by the Village here with a week to go before Iowa because there is no way the power and influence of the elites — or of the Village who shills for them — will survive a populist President intact.
It’s wholly within the self-interest of the elites to tell the plebeians constantly that the only valid choice must continue to be the plebeians voting against their own self-interest, otherwise the poor plebs will draw the ire of said elites.
You’re absolutely right when you say it’s a no-win situation. It’s been designed that way.
So why do you call it “absolutist”? He’s barely to the left of the most rightwing major parties in the rest of the developed world. His view is simply that of any pragmatic observer.
I’m referring specifically to his comment “I will never–never!–sit down at a table with them.”
‘Them’ in this case is Big Business. That’s an absolutist statement that cannot be taken literally.
Do you have a link/ref to the statement? I’d bet it was more nuanced in context.
If you “calibrate” then there is not difference between Edwards’s rhetoric and Obama’s. That is one of the things I find frustrating in this campaign, they all have similar policies just different ideas about how to get them done. Different initial negotiating positions and different ways to trust the candidates to do what they have said.
… as that, as much as necessarily being oversimplified in an aggressive sounding way … in a large part because complicity and collaboration with corporate dominance of political decision making is itself portrayed as such a reasonable and commonplace activity.
The question is, of course, which “table” is Edwards talking about when he says you don’t given them a seat at the table, or they eat all the food. Is it the bargaining table? Or the design table?
Well, go back to President Clinton’s UHC proposal. Certainly, there were large numbers of corporations who had bought themselves a seat at the bargaining table, and were loudly saying, “no deal … no way, no how”.
But before that, when the UHC system was being designed, there were health insurance companies who were consulted to see what they would oppose and what they could live with. Indeed, while much of the complexity of the proposal was due to the complexity of the problems it was addressing, some of it was due to the compromises made in the design stage in order to get some of the health insurance companies on board.
Except, they weren’t “on board”. They just didn’t fight it and hung on the sidelines. Meanwhile, while other corporations in the industry poured massive funds into an aggressive fight to kill the program.
A second, much more recent, example, is the process leading toward the Lieberman-Warner climate change legislation. There such strong “bipartisan” support for Lieberman-McCain that it ended up as the “ambit claim” for legislation to address the climate crisis. This meant that the proposal that really took the problem seriously, the Boxer-Sanders bill, was effectively side-tracked.
This is a process that we have become used to from Democrats … surrender big chunks of what we want up front in the name of compromise, then compromise again in the name of getting something through … but the fact that it is a habit is not sufficient argument for continuing to do it.
So I agree strongly that the important thing to understand is that expressing this in these terms creates a much stronger ambit claim, backed up by the mandate argument.
Of course the final outcome will fall short of the ambit claim … but a weaker ambit claim will result in a final outcome that is even worse.
Everybody knows that you don’t — ever — negotiate with kidnappers and terrorists. Aren’t Big Rx and Big Med Care of the same ilk?
They are scared to death of this guy. Just like they were in 2004. Edwards really is their biggest fear. I think it’s because he may actually be able to win with a landslide and therefore a gigantic mandate. Like we haven’t seen since Reagan. Really.
Did you read Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism? I didn’t agree with everything in it but it has stuck with me in this later campaign season. And I’ve hoped that Edwards’ rhetoric is just that – rhetoric. He never really talks about how he’s going to accomplish all of these great things.
The reality is that the only way change will be made is by bringing the corporate interests to the table with a deal that they believe affects all of them equally. That way if they have to raise prices to cover whatever the deal is – they raise them equally. Or if they have to take a hit on earnings, each industry takes it across the board and so no individual corp. gets hammered by the analysts.
Personally I think Edwards is smart enough to know this. I just don’t know if he has the experience to get them to agreement in the back rooms where these things need to be done.
I don’t know if Obama has the wherewithal to do it either – and as you say, without the populist rhetoric he doesn’t go in claiming a mandate.
I think Hillary has the wherewithal but not the will. She’s s not likely to want to make these kinds of deals to affect progressive change — unless she’s the 2008 version of Nixon going to China. Which of course is not something that can be predicted in advance.
The main stream media suffers from “Stockholm Syndrome”.
The only plausible explanation.
Stockholm Syndrome is when a hostage begins to identify with the hostage-taker. The pundits and talking heads are not members of the middle class; they are relatively wealthy. They are identifying with the hostage-takers because they are members of that class. They are serving the people they are paid to represent: other wealthy people.
The message of the wealthy from the dawn of time has been this: “Rich people are good for you, even essential. Rich people do their part just by being rich. If it wasn’t for rich people robbing you blind, you’d be even poorer than you are now.”
They are compelled to repeat that message as often as possible because otherwise, people might notice that rich people are not, in fact, necessary, and are generally not assets to the societies they parasitize.
Exaclty – MSM journalist are held by hostage by the plutocracy.
Wow. I rarely read Rothenberg, so never realized he’s such a complete asshole. His perspective, like that of Bush/Cheney and the gang is, literally ideological fascism: replacing the Good King with the Good CEO and not making him mad.
Rothenberg’s grasp of history seems to be minimal. FDR didn’t rip the nation apart because he was the moderate, the one who could co-opt the genuine revolutionaries. Edwards would have to play catch-up to even match some of FDR’s proposals. Obviously Rothenberg thinks “the nation” exclusively inhabits the boardrooms — after all, that’s where he makes his living, so it must be the sum total of reality. His doomsaying brings to mind all the dire predictions about how the end of Jim Crow would rip the nation apart — not to mention social security, Medicare, unions, letting the not-white and not male vote, and on and on and on.
The real question is, why does anybody pay the slightest attention to mendacious fools like Rothenberg? Haven’t we suffered their wisdom enough?
I think Edwards clearly understands a bit of common sense that, bizarrely, seems to not to be commonly known to Democratic leaders — if you want to succeed in negotiations, you start by staking out a position that’s more than what you want, and signal that you’re going to be a tough negotiator.
The current generation of Republicans are always playing hardball, so it mystifies my how our leaders repeatedly go and work out a compromise proposal that they think everyone can agree on, use that as their starting position, and then are surprised when they get screwed. I’m looking for a presidential candidate who’s not going to make the same mistake.
Exactly Redshift.
My problem with Edwards 2.0 is that I well remember Edwards 1.0, and the change would be much akin to a chastened Goldwater running in ’68 on a platform that promoted the Great Society.
Color me a non-believer.