Not Dead

Not even locked out.

I've been dealing with a lot of real life issues the last two weeks, which hasn't given me much blogging time. Also, there hasn't been a lot to comment on. I know a number of pro-Hillary bloggers have been targeted for shut down by reporting them as spam sites. I don't know whether to feel relieved or insulted that the Obamacans haven't tried that on my blog, but I have already reserved my Wordpress blog, just in case.

Overall, the trend I am seeing is that, with Hillary out of contention, the Blogger Boyz have abruptly noticed The Precious is not what they have claimed him to be or, rather, they are finally having to acknowledge that we HRC supporters were right about the mendacious little bastard all along. Which simply points out that they were more interested in defeating Hillary than in supporting a progressive candidate. What a surprise! Not.

Then there are the fundraising issues dogging Democrats. The DNC is about ready to hold bakesales, Obama is seriously underperforming his targets, and support groups are not getting money by order of The Precious. Polls aren't looking too hot, either.

It's going to be a long summer.

Anglachel

Judging Cordelia

Bob Somerby's post today is a must read. He discusses in detail two examples of the double standard the media used when "reporting" on Hillary vs. slobbering all over Barry's shoes. The first example shows how the press is trying to prevent considerations of foreign affairs from being used to Obama's detriment jusxtaposed with the blatent use of Bhutto's assassination as an attempt to damage Hillary.

The second example looks carefully at Obama's lie that he was going to use public financing in the general in order to use that "pledge" as a club on Hillary. The Blogger Boyz, naturally, lapped up the high-minded approach of their love object, just as they have on pretty much everything else The Precious has shoveled out of his bullshit bag into their mouths agape with wonder.

Somerby dispenses some judgment of his own. I have cut out the newspaper quotes, though I encourage you to give Bob traffic and read them:

JUDGING CORDELIA: Did Obama reverse his previous stand when it comes to public financing of the general election? In our view, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t. (On Sunday, we thought people looked fairly silly when they said he hadn’t reversed.) You have to slice the meat mighty fine to find escape hatches in Obama’s statements about this matter during 2007. We don’t think his change in stance is the end of the world. But for ourselves, we wouldn’t claim that he didn’t reverse on this matter.

In today’s column in the Post, E. J. Dionne states a similar view. (“Obama’s choice has been criticized by reformers such as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), and even by normally sympathetic editorialists, because his new position contradicts his old one, which was that he would accept public funds...”) But Dionne also says that Obama made “the right call” last week when he eschewed public money. As a general matter, we agree with that too. But we disagree with Dionne’s use of the word “opportunistic:”

...

“Opportunistic?” Why get so hot and bothered? But for the record: If something like “opportunism” was ever present during this long-running financing drama, it was present during 2007, not in this recent decision.

Presumably, Obama will gain an advantage over McCain by making this decision. But in current discussions of this matter, an earlier fact has rarely been noted; Obama gained an advantage over Clinton during the primaries by taking his previous stand. All during 2007, those “normally sympathetic editorialists” compared Obama favorably to Clinton because he was taking a high-minded stand—and because she wouldn’t follow. Let us stress: This wasn’t a giant part of the coverage, but we think it’s worth noting.

....

No, this wasn’t a major part of the primary coverage. But the “Goneril and Regan” aspect of this episode was lightly echoed in other areas—in the press corps’ coverage of “no preconditions,” for example, or in the remarkably unbalanced treatment of the driver’s license issue. (Especially at MSNBC, whose working-class, lunch-bucket journalist heroes were devoted to unvarnished truth. By their own admission.)

Lear loved Goneril and Regan best, because they kept telling him things that weren’t true. Cordelia refused to follow suit. How would “editorialists” at the Post have treated Cordelia’s vile stand?

One of my favorite essays ever is Stanley Cavell's magnificent work on King Lear, "The Avoidance of Love". In it, one of his themes was that love, and those virtues that are related to love, such as honor, responsibility, respect, loyalty and honesty, are not things that can be claimed or spoken. They must be demonstrated. They are, to grab some graduate school lingo, performatives, made actual in the doing, and they bear a difficult relationship to language because they are difficult to represent in that way. Declarations of these virtues, most of which either are also political virtues or else have a political correlate, stand in tension with the actions of the one who declares - the act of declaration is an invitation to judge.

Cordelia was willing to suffer curses and abuse from Lear precisely because she loved him in a way that did not allow her to prostitute that love for gain, exactly in the way that her sisters did. Her love (and thus her integrity) was present in the enactment of it, obeying her father and king's unjust banishment but coming back to try to defend him from the treachery of her sisters, for whom a declaration of love was simply a way to seize power.

The avoidance of love (and it's been a few years since I read the essay), was Lear's downfall. He would not be content with the ordinary expression of this relationship - and the inevitable disappointments of it - avoiding the mundane claims this interaction laid upon him. He purposefully sought what could be counted out in gold, something that he could alienate from himself and thus avoid investing his emotions, and when that transaction was completed, found himself on the losing end of the political power struggle.

Cordelia's love was ordinary, quiet and steady. It did not change to suit the situation, even as she could see the fate that might befall her unless she submitted to her father's imperious demands. Lear was not the only person in the room passing judgment.

I think Bob picked his example very well.

Anglachel

The Heart of Their Culture

Bob Somerby has never lost sight of the violence the media inflicts on our public life with its deeply disturbed game of "Who's in the club today?"

Alone among the political bloggers, he has no wish to be a member of the Village. Every other blogger above a certain visibility level wants to be part of the crowd, associated with a high-profile website, regurgitating the stories of the MSM, featured in celebrity interviews in papers and magazines, and appearing in the talking heads venues of cable, broadcast and radio.

Somerby knows that to have an independent and critical voice about the media you must be independent and unrelentlingly critical of that media. In order to do this, it also means criticizing the enablers of the media, the social and political insiders who hold the cocktail parties, pick up the phones, provide the spin, and, most of all, enforce their narrative of how the world works. The "creative class" on the left has never relinquished the fantasy that somehow the press is on "our" side, secretly harboring fantasies of being the next Woodward and Bernstein. It is all about catching someone in an act of wrong-doing, not about presenting a corrective context to the agendas presented to them. It's all about "gotchas". Their counter-parts on the right have never relinquished those fantasies, either, and they have been strikingly successful at taking over the media while asserting that the media is a hopelessly biased tool of the liberals. The chief difference between these two groups is that the right has used the media to consolidate its hold on power while the left has cheerfully assisted the right in achieving that goal. They both delight in playing "gotcha" with Democratic figures.

His five part (to date) response to Tim Russert's death is an incredible, blistering analysis of this self-serving relationship. While other people (myself included) have focused on Russert himself, either to lionize him or reject him, Bob has taken the occasion to use their own words to expose their solipsistic adulation of their own dishonest culture. The last paragraph of the first post lays it out succinctly:

The guy [Russert] who wrote those books about dads is the same guy who gave those embarrassing answers in that interview with Bill Moyers. (In fairness, we’re inclined to think that Moyers overstated one alleged problem.) Predictably enough, Tim’s colleagues told you about the books; that interview got disappeared—along with the (inevitable) human shortcomings behind it. And no, they didn’t necessarily do that out of respect; it’s what they do in every circumstance. The instinctive refusal to tell you the truth lies at the heart of their culture.

Let's repeat that: The instinctive refusal to tell the truth lies at the heart of their culture.

Read all five of Somerby's posts. They are somewhat repetitive, but they build to his ultimate criticism, which is of the netroots and those who claim to be liberal voices.

1. The instinctive refusal to tell you the truth lies at the heart of their culture
2. Three pundits staged a rare discussion
3. Tim always knew who the phonies were, Brokaw oddly explained
4. Put the novels aside!
5. This was quite a week for press watchers

The way in which the allegedly oppositional netroots reporters have handed their credibility over to the MSM without a struggle is their unwillingness to tell the truth when it clashes with their desire for how the world should be. Like the MSM, they have picked sides based on a script handed to them by the movement conservatives, and now, when the dust clears, they are left backing someone very like themselves, someone with an instinctual refusal to tell the truth.

Anglachel

Compromising Our Rights

Paul Krugman blogged:

My biggest concern about an Obama administration is that, in the end, he won’t make universal health care a priority. My second biggest concern is that “Unity” means never having to say you’re sorry: that in the name of putting past partisanship behind us, the next administration will sweep the abuses of the past 8 years under the rug, the same way Bill Clinton did in 1993; the result of that decision was that the very same people responsible for Iran-Contra showed up subverting our democracy all over again.

Obama’s support for the FISA bill intensifies my second worry. He did say some of the right things, promising to work to get rid of telecom immunity and hold people accountable. But caving on this bill is nonetheless not a good sign.

FISA

(My emphasis) Paul Krugman distills what I have been trying to say for months, which is probably why he is a world renown and internationally respected professor at Princeton and I'm just a cranky blogger in the hinterlands.

The problem with Democratic compromises is that they are over things that should never be bargained away, such as privacy, a social safety net, transparent government responsive to the citizenry, and other fundamental principles of liberal democracy.

Compromises are for making choices between acceptable outcomes, but where one may be more to the liking of one party than the other choices. Our rights, such as freedom from unlawful search and seizure, are not on the table.

Anglachel

Privacy

So the Democratic Congress could not resist sacrificing our 4th Amendment rights on the altar of FISA. Providing immunity for corporations to do the bidding of a corrupt and power mad Republican administration. Other bloggers have focused on the immediate effect of this craven legislation that gives tyrants carte blanche to intercept your communications and its chilling effect on freedom of expression and political opposition. For me, I am looking at the larger political fish being fried, which is the conservative assault upon a right to privacy as such.

The 4th Amendment doesn't quite cover the concept of personal privacy:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It is closer to property rights, placing physical security in the same bucket as security of personal possessions. Thus, in this way of thinking, the problem is not the government (or another entity) knowing what you have said, but taking possession of the mode of communication - letters, emails, stone tablets, etc. The content of these instruments is not protected. While you are free to say or think whatever you like, a right to free speech, you have no constitutional right to private communication of such thoughts.

The conservative assault on Roe v. Wade has virtually nothing to do with abortion and everything to do with privacy. People of means will always find ways to be rid of an unwanted pregnancy. I believe it was Bob Barr (someone please correct me corrected) who, during the farcical attempt to impeach the Big Dog, was uncovered as not only having had an affair but also of paying for his mistress wife to have an abortion. The part about Roe that frightens the conservatives is the idea people may do as they wish without having to report to and get the consent of a (paternal) authority, making the intimate fabric of their lives a legitimate object of scrutiny and control.

Before Roe there was Griswold, declaring that birth control was not something subject to state control. The emphasis on reproduction and control of one's body is not an accident in the court battles over privacy. If privacy is the right to be free of intervention in how you conduct your life, and if you already have at least partial property rights in your body, then the wedge to use to undermine privacy - and ultimately related rights such as freedom of speech, worship and property rights - is to target those interactions where bodily integrity is argued to be compromised, most obviously in pregnancy but also in sexual acts, disease control (key in harassment of gays) and general medical procedures. In other words, they try to establish some kind of property right or material interest in your body that is defensible in court.

The invasion of modes of communication can be seen in this light, with the government claiming to have a material interest in communications as such, just as they claim a material interest in the pregnant or homosexual body as such, to legitimize intervention in the content of those communications. The approach is turning it into a property issue in which an external entity has some defined material interest. A Telco owns the transmission medium, an ISP owns the servers, etc.

Objection to universal health care must be examined from this perspective. If everyone, everywhere must be insured, then there is no longer such a need for the insurance and medical companies to know intimate details about you. It means they no longer have a property right in your personal data and thus lose claim on that part of your intimate life. They then lose the right to exchange and sell your data, making money by selling you out.

The same dynamic underlies the infuriating condition of identity information. People should not have to opt out of having their identity (name, sex, age, address, purchasing habits, travel itineraries, etc.) sold to the highest bidder. When identity and health information get combined, the individuals are the losers. You don't even need to posit a fascist government (though that is what movement conservatism aims for) to see how the lack of an explicit right to privacy is used to undermine the efficacy of other civil rights.

Hillary Clinton is a proponent of privacy rights, no doubt in part because of how profoundly her own have been violated over the last several decades, but I would wager even more so because of her life-long work in defense of the most vulnerable people in society. I cannot find the link now, but I know I have read about her support for constitutional amendment to enshrine a citizen's right to privacy. Reproductive rights, which are more than just abortion rights, would finally have a presumption of privacy instead of trying to make certain situations and procedures protected. Marriage would also fall under the protection of privacy. Your health records and your economic transactions would be yours, not the property of corporations. And so forth.

What I want to ask the Obamacans is why should we expect The Precious to defend any of our fundamental personal rights, let alone push for the unequivocal foundation of another, if he is the candidate of the same Democrats who are now flushing our civil rights down the toilet? Obama is the Establishment candidate. He is a member of the club that is failing to defend us now.

Where is his commitment to our right to privacy?

Anglachel

NOTE: A final sentence has been added to the paragraph beginning "Before Roe there was Griswold" to make the argument more clear. Several people have commented and emailed that they were uncertain what I mean in that paragraph.

National Fourth Amendment Defense Day

June does not have enough proper holidays. This one sounds just right. From Lambert on Corrente:

The Fourth Amendment, along with the other amendments to the Constitution that form our Bill of Rights, came into effect on December 15, 1791.

The Framers of our Constitution — and the voters in the states that passed the Bill of Rights — understood how tyranny worked, and they took a dim view of King George breaking into their homes, rummaging through their desks, opening their mail, and reading whatever the Fuck he wanted, whenever the fuck he wanted to, without going to a judge for a warrant, and without having to explain what he expected to find when the warrant was executed. The Framers had already had a bellyful of kings.

The Framers understood tyranny, even though they didn’t have computers in 1791. And if the Framers had computers, it’s plain as day they wouldn’t have wanted King George breaking into their hard disks, rummaging through their desktops, or reading their data—whether the data was email, documents on your hard disk, your telephone calls, your Google searches, or the sites that you surf.

Tyranny is tyranny, no matter the technology.

So it’s simple and crystal clear: The Fourth Amendment means that the government doesn’t get to read your data—to the Framers, “paper” without a warrant.

It’s simple. And anybody who tries to make it complicated is trying to fuck you.

Read the whole thing.

Anglachel

Exercise in Logic

Certain Blogger Boyz like Kevin Drum and Greg Sargent are absolutely, 100%, no doubt about it, yesirree Bob convinced that Hillary Clinton ran a racist campaign because.... well, because! Isn't that enough for you? Everybody says so! No one would keep saying this if it wasn't true, would they? Anyway, we all know poor white people are racist and they voted for her, therefore she obviously was making racist appeals to get their votes. If they say something different, they are lying. How could there not be racism if all the talking heads and Jesse Jackson Jr. said there was racism?

If that is so, then why is the Congressional Black Caucus trying to make Obama put her on the ticket as VP? Why are African American voters more likely to say they want her on the ticket than any other Democratic group? Could it be they know that the accusations of racism were untrue from the start, seeing as millions of Hillary voters saw, that this was a campaign tactic, and are actually perfectly happy to support Hillary?

Gee, do you think this could all have been a bunch of lies that the Clinton hating media was more than happy to babble over and over?

Anglachel

At Last

It was a day to celebrate in San Diego today, home to one of the largest GLBT communities in America, as marriage was finally opened to all people. From the SD Union-Tribune:

For years, Peter Storniolo told himself it was just a piece of paper. It didn't mean anything.

That changed Tuesday morning after he traded marriage vows and shared a long embrace with his partner of 19 years, high school teacher Paul Esch, in front of about 30 friends and family members.

“We never thought we needed it, but these last few days thinking about it, it's kind of weird how important it's become,” said Storniolo, 43, a woodworker who lives in Golden Hill. “Nobody can take it away. Nobody can tell us it's not there.”

Scenes of gay couples exchanging vows, rings and kisses across the state marked a watershed moment in the battle for gay equality that many compared to a 1948 state ruling that lifted the ban on interracial marriage.

County's gay marriages go off without a hitch

Some counties, such as Kern County, in California refused to allow any weddings to be held rather than allow any gay or lesbian couples to be married.

Earlier in the year, one of my co-workers tried to get me to sign a sheet to get the anti-gay amendment to the state constitution on the June ballot to qualify it for the November ballot. She absolutely believes that gays being able to marry is an infringement of her civil rights. Sadly, the initiative did go through and will be up for a vote in the fall. This is a widespread attitude in California and will bring out the haters in November. It could turn the state red because of an otherwise apathetic electorate.

To keep California blue, the Democratic voices need to be unified and adamant that this right will not be overturned. We need "No" votes to defeat the haters. Who is going to be a strong voice in defense of this right?

Who will defend the civil rights of these couples?

Anglachel

Update: And more fun pictures, courtesy of the LA Times. Plus one of my dear friends is getting married next month!

Cash Cow

Rendell, who plans to campaign on Obama's behalf and raise money for him, said tonight's event in Philadelphia is a joint fundraiser for Obama and the cash-strapped Democratic National Committee.

But in a sign of the urgency to raise campaign cash, Rendell said Obama didn't want to reschedule tonight's fundraiser, even though the governor warned him that many Philadelphia donors were headed to the New Jersey shore for the weekend. Rendell said Obama told him: "We don't need the people. We just need the checks."

And there, in a nutshell, is the Obama campaign. The Cash Cow has replaced the Unity Pony. Who needs people when you can just collect checks?

I'm reminded of the height of the housing bubble in California when real estate agents would have basket at an open house where would be buyers would deposit checks in the faint hopes of getting the house. The sight of the competition encouraged bidding wars to see who could hand over more money for a crappy and worthless abode.

How much of the money given to Obama is actually going to end up with the DNC? Not that much, I'll wager. Some people are going to get very wealthy this campaign season.

Anglachel

Paul Krugman Doesn't Drink Koolaide

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur

I saw this phrase in Alan Furst’s new book The Spies of Warsaw; it means “The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.” A good slogan for the Bush years - but not only in reference to Bush.

I just read Naomi Klein:

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”

followed by a rant against Jason Furman.

Look, Obama didn’t pose as a Nation-type progressive, then turn on his allies after the race was won. Throughout the campaign he was slightly less progressive than Hillary Clinton on domestic issues — and more than slightly on health care. If people like Ms. Klein are shocked, shocked that he isn’t the candidate of their fantasies, they have nobody but themselves to blame.

Oh, no, The Precious is just another lying politician, what ever shall we do?

Paul Krugman and the rest of us sane Democrats have been trying to tell you kool-aide swilling fools that Obama was further right than the rest of the Democratic field. Millions of voters tried to show you the error of your addled ways by voting their economic self-interest and choosing the lady with the concrete socio-economic policies. Hundreds of bloggers typed their fingers to the bone explaioning that you were projecting your fantasies onto this cypher, pointing out his economic team is not very progressive, that his major donors are all Wall Street financial people, and that he never met an economic measure favorable to the middle class that he didn't want to compromise on. You got snookered by your own irrational fantasies.

Hope you like kool-aide. Me, I drink Maker's Mark, just like Hillary.

Anglachel

Tim Russert - Good Riddance

Bob Somerby offers what is probably the most honest statement about Tim Russert I have yet read:

Based on what we saw first-hand, we would guess that Brother Russert really was the nicest guy in the world.

Sometimes, though, “nicest guys in the world” are the last to challenge conventional wisdom—even when it desperately needs to be challenged, examined, hollered about. In Tim’s case, we think he showed poor judgment in various instances over the years, as we’re all inclined to do. Chris Matthews touched on one possible error in judgment in his comments from Paris on Friday’s Countdown (text below). For once, we think Chris’ lack of impulse control served the public understanding—although he’s getting beaten up for his comment at various spots on the web.

Over the weekend, other members of the mainstream press corps did the thing that comes natural inside their group; they went on the air and told Group Tales, tales which reflected quite wondrously on Tim’s journalistic work—and, of course, by extension, most importantly, on them. Telling the truth is pretty much the last thing that enters these people’s heads. And so, they handed out novelized tales about Tim’s always brilliant work—failing to make the slightest attempt to be balanced, objective or truthful.

For the record, we’re talking about the way they described Tim’s work—not the way they described his decency as a person, a person they loved.

This isn’t really the week for such topics, though Tim’s death—more precisely, the torrent of industry propaganda it unleashed—demands that such topics be discussed. We’ll plan to look at some of those issues next week. In the meantime, we’ll suggest that you ponder a real possibility: The possibility that a guy who showed a fair amount of bad judgment—as we all do—may also have been the nicest guy in the world, just as you’ve seen him described.

I'm glad Russert is gone, never to return. All I know about this man is what I could observe on TV, and it was revolting. He was one of the people who enabled the hunting of President Clinton, eagerly helped take down Al Gore, and urged our nation into a criminal and unjustifiable war against Iraq.

Whether he was "a nice guy" doesn't matter to me. What matters is the harm he inflicted upon this nation. Being nice in a private context does not counterbalance the violence he did to the world we have in common.

Anglachel

Personal notes in the comments

Just a reminder to commenters that if you write me a personal note in comments, I have no way to reply privately because Blogger does not give me your email address.

There is a link in the right hand sidebar (you have to scroll) that leads to a "Contact Anglachel" form. Please use that if you would like a private reply. I don't promise to answer, but I will read your email and I will not publish or distribute your email.

Reminder: I have all comments on moderation. No exceptions. On weekdays, I try to review at lunch time, but may not get to them until after I'm home from work, such as today. Also, I do not publish all comments, so yours may not get shown.

Anglachel

Logistics

If the DNC has already relocated to Chicago, as reported by the commenter Molly in the Hillary Clinton Forum, then the plan to move was approved months ago.

I've been involved in the merger of two good sized US corporations. It's not something that can be done at the drop of a hat. Costs have to be scoped, budgets established, plans made, landlords current and prospective contacted, vendors hired, bills paid, accounts closed in DC and opened in Chicago, equipment purchased, staff relocated, reassigned and/or terminated, letterhead and business cards printed, signage created, phone service changed, and that's just the stuff off the top of my head.

I'm not buying the claim that it was a recent decision, quickly executed. Who knew about the merger and when did they know it what remains to be unearthed. Not a word of this was out in the blogs or in the news before this week thatI am aware of. How did such a major logistical operation remain under wraps?

This casts the repeated insistence that Florida and Michigan not be allowed to change the outcome in a new light. If the DNC had agreed to relocate, but Obama lost the nomination, that would have made for a lot of explaining as to the DNC itself taking sides. It also makes the silence of top party leaders over the brutal treatment of Hillary by the press more explicable - they needed her to lose in order to give their own machinations some cover.

Over the last few months I have tried to express my concerns for what the Obama campaign is doing to the Democratic Party. While I am a dyed in the wool Hillary supporter, my objections to what Dean, Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy, Obama, et. al., are doing to the party are swiftly growing larger than whether or not Hillary was treated fairly in the campaign or even whether she was cheated out of the nomination. We are talking about a hostile takeover of the party.

Anglachel

Update: I've been getting some comments and emails that indicate people are confused about the DNC move. So am I. That's why I'm taking my time thinking about it. My first alert to it came from Riverdaughter's post on the Confluence, Hmmm, this is not a good way to achieve Unity, which references a Politico post on the matter. I've seen a few oblique references in new reports, and oddly enough a few political cartoons talking about the move. I read blog posts, most of which reference RD's post or the Politico post. What I'm trying to do is consider the behavior of DNC actors over the course of the campaign in light of the news that a merger has occurred.

Not everything has been or will be shut down in Washington - that was part of the Politico post. There is still staff in DC and the national phone number still works. There are probably legal reasons as well as organizational ones to maintain a formal headquarters. Referencing the merger I was part of, the original company was sold to an international firm which was in turn sold to an American industry competitor. There are still offices in the original location and at the international location, all the brand names are intact, most consumers have no clue that a merger took place, but the business is now run from the headquarters of the final purchaser.

My point here is that the political operations have been merged with a specific candidate's campaign (See post Representation) and that this merger cannot have been considered, agreed to and implemented in a single week's time. This is something that requires logistics, not to mention money and legal sign-offs. This points to two key issues: first, the party leaders have been intending to do this for some time (how far back is yet to be established), which casts their behavior towards *all* candidates in an uncertain light; second, it means that they have subsumed the party to the political objectives of a particular person who has been shown through his campaigning to be divisive and antagonistic to a significant portion of the party rank-and-file.

Through my writings going back before this campaign, I have repeatedly discussed the role of independent institutions in both creating power and defending people from the abuses of power. The behavior of the DNC in this electoral cycle indicates to me that it is not maintaining the party as an independent operator, which reduces its power. The antagonism shown to life-long Democratic voters, right up to the latest sneer that women should just get back to their knitting if they don't like what is being done, indicates to be that the DNC is not terribly interested in defending its constituents against abuses of power.

This is what concerns me and frankly it is more important than whether Hillary got the nomination, even as it is inextricable from her attempt to win it. Along with writing about institutions, I have been writing on the long time divide in the party. I think we are watching the Stevensonians trying to purge the Jacksonians. This is categorically different than simply trying to finagle votes while not really delivering the goods, which has been the behavior up until now. It's why I talk about Whole Foods Nation, the fantasy of a purified "Left" that has hobbled the party since Stevenson.

OINC

The new name for the Democratic National Committee:

Obama Idolaters National Committee

All lined up at the trough, ready to scarf down whatever swill The Precious dumps in.

Anglachel

Representation

The consolidation of Whole Foods Nation under The Dear Leader in Chicago has me and the spousal unit going "Hmm".

I've written before about the Obamacan demand that Democratic money be brought under the Chicago Combine's control, but subsuming the entire DNC to a single candidate's campaign is both horrifying and fascinating, kind of like watching decomposition. As there are more confirmed details, I'll be writing more, but one little gem stood out for me, which is the way the state operations, the ones that promote the downticket candidates, are being rolled up into the Obama operation.

In Mississippi, a candidate won a special congressional election this spring, but had to run at least one ad and do some talking to distance himself from Obama because of the Wright and bitter/cling comments. If Obama controls the purse strings and the operations people, he can probably enforce a demand that down ticket candidates shut their mouths and risk defeat rather than allow them to distance themselves from his questionable background and political behavior. Might he yank money and support from Democrats who backed Hillary, preferring to punish enemies than expand a majority? Will he write off down ticket campaigns, particularly for state and municipal offices, preferring to concentrate the money and the people hours on his own success?

One of the reasons to have an independent party operation, one that is not a wholly owned subsidiary of a particular candidate or faction, is its ability to deliver money and support to lower level, less sexy contests where the shift of a few seats might mean capturing a statehouse or taking over a city council of a large city. The interests of the party have to be wider than any particular candidate, and a diversity of voices prevents tunnel vision or a distorted view of the electoral landscape.

Does a downticket candidate represent the interests of her constituents, or does submission to the political ambitions of The Precious override obligations to the voters?

Anglachel