Pinpointing where it went wrong: Donna Brazile vs Paul Begala, May 6, 2008

On the evening of May 6, 2008 on CNN, Donna Brazile took a knife to the Democratic party and deftly excised the parts that were no longer needed:

You can read the whole exchange here. Here’s the money quote from Donna:

BRAZILE: Well, Lou, I have worked on a lot of Democratic campaigns, and I respect Paul. But, Paul, you’re looking at the old coalition. A new Democratic coalition is younger. It is more urban, as well as suburban, and we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics. We need to look at the Democratic Party, expand the party, expand the base and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Paul Begala had a “Are you MAD, woman??” response but the Obama contingent was so giddily orgasmic, no one was paying attention.

Then the crash happened and the Great Recession when a lot of the old coalition lost their jobs. The ACA was not the panacea we were told it was. The policies are very expensive still, not everyone gets a subsidy, the deductibles are too high and the networks too stingy.

But the new coalition told us to suck it up because the pre-existing conditions were covered. And who could argue with that? It was a neat guilt trip that was played on us.

In the subsequent years, there have been a lot of things that have happened to the working class and the people who are in the middle class but just one devastating layoff from sliding out of their socio-economic group. Oh sure, there are jobs now. But there are also a lot of contingent workers, part time workers, full time contractors without benefits. Ooo! But now you can buy one of those expensive new ACA policies on the exchanges.

There are now two classes of employees out there, the ones that are covered by an employee health plan and the suckers who aren’t. When you are in the second class, you really feel the difference and it can cause resentment and anger. I have *been* there, people. I have had snooty, lucky liberals look down on me and tell me that if I don’t maintain an expensive health insurance policy on my low contractor worker’s salary, then I was being irresponsible, the equivalent of a dead beat. This after years of paying the equivalent in taxes to what I was then making in salary for one year. Yes, the fortunate were telling me I was irresponsible after all the money I paid year after year before Pharmageddon and we all lost our jobs. It’s hard to forget that. I was =><= close to feeling the Bern.

Let’s not even start on who retires with a full pension today and who doesn’t and who is forced to put their retirement savings on the global craps table controlled by the finance industry when not even one banker went to jail. Dodd Frank means nothing if there’s no punishment in sight and the malefactors of great wealth get off with a tidy payment of weregild.

Meanwhile, the old coalition shambles by on $10/hour jobs with Medicaid for their kids.

And for the last eight years, they’ve been told that if they complain about their shitty lot in life, they’re racists. I don’t know how many times I have read Paul Krugman or Digby or some former Obama campaign troll tell me this. I think the last straw was when Digby accused the Republicans of being racists for not approving Merrick Garland’s appointment to the USSC. The reason they weren’t going to approve Garland is because they are Republicans and they didn’t want to tip the balance of the court in a progressive direction. It had nothing to do with racism or at least not directly. Witness the approval of Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor. They didn’t have a problem with those two new justices for Obama. And Garland is a white guy. He’s Jewish but so are Kagan and Ginsburg. So, it wasn’t a race issue or a religious issue. It was purely a power issue.

And yet, Digby told us over and over and over again that it was racist for the Republicans to not approve him. It was the last straw that made the out of touch voices on the left lose all credibility.

I think the Democrats took us for suckers for many many years. I am a Democrat and I worked almost every weekend since July to get my party’s representatives elected. I truly believe that Clinton was the best presidential candidate that we have ever had. I have no regrets working to get her elected. She made me proud to be a Democrat.

But I will not miss the Obama years and the tone deaf assholes who wrote off the “old coalition” and dismissed the anxiety of the Bernie Sanders middle class voters I met. Clinton did her best to reach out to them and wisely adopted much of the Sanders’ platform. That is to her credit and many Sanders volunteers recognized that.

But she could not overcome the insults to the intelligence and the invalidation of the feelings of so many working class people of all races and ethnicities. When Obama wrote off Appalachia and the rust belt and Donna praised the new coalition and put the old coalition on an ice floe, it was only a matter of time before the old coalition’s future looked dire enough to strike back.

They were wrong, of course. They didn’t drain the swamp. They just got more swamp monsters and these are going to eat them. But if I learned anything from Hillary and Bill it’s that you can’t afford to alienate anyone in politics.

It’s a lesson the Obama contingent is only now starting to understand.

More on The Rage, misogyny and the media’s shameful part in this catastrophe from Todd Gitlin at Moyers.

The Genius of Obama’s Magic Donor List

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about how and why Black Obama was shoved down America’s throats and all the attendant events surrounding the Obamenon of the Obamanationization of Omerica.  I think of how he came out of nowhere with money grown on trees dripping out of his ass, beloved of all though none had yet met him, and I go, “Huh?  What the fuck is up with that?”  Then I marvel at how fortunate he is to appear black on the anniversary of so many noteworthy events in black history that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, like the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.  There’s not much doubt that were it not for the monumentousness of the historic nature of a having a candidate who appears to be black run for president, that one might have come and gone without proper deference being paid.  I mean, in normal, non-monumentally historically natured times, who the hell makes a big deal about a 45th anniversary?  So, right there, you have a reason to be thankful that there is Obama.

Then, there’s the inescapable fact that without the awe-inspiring presence of the Inspirer of Awe, black Americans like me might have continued to go about our business blissfully unaware of our longing for our collective, unspoken need to validate ourselves be fulfilled by installing a man who appears to be black in the Oval Office.  Without the Obamessiah deigning to play Joshua to Dr. King’s Moses, black Americans might still be inclined to lobby and petition the government for things previously denied, but now obviously guaranteed them, like, jobs, education opportunities, access to health care services and equal treatment under the law.  Thank God we don’t have to worry about stuff like that anymore.

Yet, the most wondrous of things to behold is the sheer genius, nay intellectual artistry, employed by the architects and engineers of Obamania.  A political campaign propelled by a new media source whose birth, growth and development mirrors the candidate, now president’s own, how lucky is that?  A campaign designed by a man as notorious for his ability to create faux grassroots support on his clients’ behalf, creating the illusion that the poison they spew is desired by teeming hordes of consumers, as he is for getting black guys elected, meets a candidate who appears to be black and whose past, failed attempts at community organizing can be exploited as a dedication to grassroots organization, are you kidding me?  Match made in Heaven my ass!  This…is…Kismet!

And, in the ultimate stroke of genius, corporate sponsors desperate for up close and personal access to power to buttress their inflated sense of self importance can be recruited as co-conspirators in this win-win good-for-everybody exercise in democracy at work by encouraging them to subvert the campaign donor laws while contributing massive amounts of cash necessary to promote the wondrous goodness of He Who Would Come To Be Known As The One to the huddled masses yearning to be seen as tolerant of black people.   By breaking up the obscene amounts of money being funneled into the campaign by corporate entities into individual employee donations, the campaign Astroturfer can not only grow the campaign donor list, he can inform the conveniently nascent alternative media sources of the wonders of perpetuating the small donor myth now afforded him by the swelled numbers of individual contributors.  In addition, the black man manipulating Astroturfer now possesses an alternate, invaluable tool for indoctrinating the gullible, since the real campaign donation sources include individual  mainstream media information disseminators among other purveyors of influence.  Thus, at any time, thousands of media and other influential employees of institutions of higher learning, government, and finance, can be directly contacted at a moment’s notice and given information, talking points and marching orders straight from the Astroturfer’s mouth.

Direct access to the validation seeking black Americans and their fellow hopeless country-men and -women desperate for change via the Bullies of the Blogosphere and the Mainstream Media Maniacs by way of the White House in 1 easy step through the courtesy of Corporate America.  Thousands of employees of Citigroup, JP Morgan, Pepsi, Time Warner, MTV, BET, Dreamworks, Microsoft, Stanford, Columbia, etc., along with the other “small donors” on the list, now get to hear straight from the Astroturfing man with the office next door to the president any time he feels like telling them something.  Now we know why Obama 2.0 wants us all to have stimulus package house parties.

Combine that with daily talking point exchanges between the White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel and two of CNN”s “Democratic strategists,” Paul Begala and James Carville, and you’ve got the country on information lockdown.

Gotta love that.

Now if I could just figure out who hired the Astroturfer in the first place…

X-posted at Cinie’s World

Wednesday: There is no unity without FL and MI, Don-na

Donna Brazile did an awful lot of eye-rolling last night. I caught her doing it on several occasions when Paul Begala pointed out the obvious. But it wasn’t Paul that made the outrageous statement of the night. It was Donna herself:

BRAZILE: Well, Lou, I have worked on a lot of Democratic campaigns, and I respect Paul.*** But, Paul, you’re looking at the old coalition. A new Democratic coalition is younger. It is more urban, as well as suburban, and we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics. We need to look at the Democratic Party, expand the party, expand the base and not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

***There are a couple good reasons to respect Paul Begala, Donna. He has actually won the presidential campaigns that he’s worked on. You, unfortunately, have not. I think you ought to listen to him.

This is what followed:

Ok, now let’s think about what Donna has just said: *WE* are part of the “old coalition”. We are working class, hispanic, women, seniors, asians. We cut across all socio-economic and education levels. We are over-represented in Florida and Michigan. What sets us apart is that we vote for Clinton. Therefore, we MUST be white trash Bubbas and Archie Bunkers. You can almost hear the contempt she has for us in her voice. That word “old” probably has a double meaning for Donna. (BTW, I happen to fit the Obama demographic but at this point, I’m beginning to think my mom is right. He is the anti-Christ, just with a lot less experience and the inability to win a debate.) Just where does Donna think the “old coalition” is going to go? And how about all of the women in that “old coalition”?

But this is not the only thing that bothers me about Donna. No, I think the thing that bothers me most is her consistent threat that if African-Americans don’t get Obama, bad things will happen. As if race is permitted to triumph over every other criteria we should use to pick a president. And Obama’s campaign has done the most despicable thing you can do to a fellow Democrat He’s destroyed Clinton’s character by manipulating her words and calling her and her supporters racists. But as we can clearly see from the election results, it is the African-American community that votes based on color of the skin, not content of the character. This is the sordid truth behind his win in urban areas, NC and other southern states where he holds 90+% of the African-American vote. In IN, we have the Gary’s mayor deliberately sitting on votes for hours. We can only speculate what was going on there but it doesn’t look pretty.

And here is Obama’s “new coalition”: college students, DINKS, African-Americans and crossover troublemaking Republicans who will not vote for him in the fall. It isn’t a new coalition. It’s a losing one without us. And without Michigan and Florida, it’s an illegitimate nomination. As Begala said, “Count me out”. Oh, that’s right, Donna already has.

Donna needs to be fired.

One More Thing: This race is not over. There is still KY and WV next week. But the late call for Clinton for Indiana didn’t give her the moment she needed last night to make a triumphant speech and ask for money. Forgive my tin foil hat but for all I know, the votes were withheld for just this reason. Now’s the time to make up for that. If you have a few dollars, throw it her way. Contribute here.

One more thing x 2: Yesterday during one of the breaks in my all day meeting, I had several people approach me to say they would never vote for Obama. They are not politicos and the statements were delivered without any prompting from me. They just flat out said, “We’re voting downticket but will skip the presidential if Obama is on the ballot.” So, Donna and Dean better get control of this situation and soon. There are many, many people who do not appreciate being drowned out by caucuses and the monolithic racial Frankenstein’s monster that Obama created.