If the Democrats in Congress were all drinking water from the same
faucet, there might be a clue to their chronic fear of the craven and
cruel corporatist Republicans who dominate them.
If
this is the best the Democratic Party can do, says Nader, they risk
losing the presidency -- and much more -- to the most ideologically
radical Republican Party in history.
But they don’t, so we have to ask why their fear, defeatism, and
cowering behavior continues in the face of the outrageous GOP actions as
the November election approaches.
The explanations go back some years. The Democrats have long receded
from the Harry Truman days of “give ‘em hell, Harry”. But their
political castration occurred in the late seventies when the Democrats
were persuaded by one of their own, Congressman Tony Coelho (D-Calif.),
to start aggressively bidding for corporate campaign cash.
Victory in politics often goes to those who have the most energy and
decisiveness, however wrongheaded. The Republicans have won these races
for years. To paraphrase author and lapsed Republican, Kevin Phillips,
the Republicans go for the jugular, while the Democrats go for the
capillaries.
The Democrats are tortured daily by Republican leaders, Speaker John
Boehner and Eric Cantor but they do not go into these politicians’
backyards in Virginia and Ohio to expose the unpopular agendas pitched
by these Wall Street puppets.
One would think that politicians who side with big corporations would
be politically vulnerable for endangering both America and the American
people.
These corrupt politicians promote corporate tax loopholes and
side with insurance and drug companies on costly health care proposals.
They defend the corporate polluters on their unsafe workplaces, dirty
air, water and contaminated food, push for more deficit spending in the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars, neglect Main Street based public
works-repair-America-jobs programs, support high-interest student loans,
cover for oil industry greed at the pump, and are hell-bent on taking
the federal cops off the corporate crime beats.
Instead, Democrats let Boehner and Cantor peddle their unrebutted
torrents of falsehoods to the voters in their districts. I’ll bet their
constituents would not like their representatives regularly kowtowing to
harmful fat cat lobbyists.
The Democrats should be landsliding the worst Republican Party in
history. Talk about extremists. There are virtually no moderate or
liberal Republicans left in Congress after being driven out by their own
party hard-liners. So this Republican Party, united over their
extremism, should be very easy to challenge.
Wrongful Republican initiatives should be boiled down to their vicious essence for public diffusion.
It is not happening. Though rolling in promotional capability, the
Democrats still have not come up with a clear list of the hundreds of
Republican disastrous proposals – passed in the House or proposed. These
wrongful Republican initiatives should be boiled down to their vicious
essence for public diffusion. Instead, the blue dog Democrats are
constantly, and with impunity, giving Republicans cover –recently 17
Democrats supported a rash political move by Representatives Boehner,
Cantor and Issa in citing Attorney General Eric Holder for contempt of
Congress.
It is also remarkable how the Democrats keep letting the Senate
Republican leader Senator Mitch McConnell intone, day after day, the
“American people” want, do not want, demand, oppose this and that, to
camouflage his plutocratic programs.
In December 2010, with 99 senators agreeing to unanimous consent to
pass the auto safety legislation, the Democrats let one Senator Tom
Coburn (R-Okla.) sink it. President Obama, ready to sign this
life-saving bill, declined to use his powers of persuasion on Coburn,
his avowed close friend in the Senate.
It is the Democrats’ defeatism that is the most self-corrosive.
Veteran Democratic legislators openly tell those who ask that they don’t
think the party will regain control of the House in the November
election though, they add, the Republicans have a terrible anti-people
record.
Politics are about credibly answering the question “whose side are
you on and whose side is your opponent on?” That means drawing a bright
line between the two parties. Unfortunately, on military and foreign
policy there isn’t much of a difference. So the bright line will have to
be on domestic issues.
Here the president, the omnipresent political consulting firms
looking for their 15 percent cut on insipid political television spots,
and the frenzied focus on raising evermore money contingent on quid pro
quo understandings with avaricious donors, combine to form a lethal mix
of strategic stupor, message staleness (“to restore the middle class”)
and time-wasting paralysis.
Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. and two dozen progressive
co-sponsors are behind a bill called “Catching Up To 1968 Act of 2012”
(H.R. 5901). This would raise the federal minimum wage, depleted by
inflation over the years, from $7.25 to $10.00, thereby helping thirty
million workers and boosting the recessionary economy. Neither the
Democratic leadership nor President Obama have come out in support of
such popular (70 percent in the polls) legislation that historically has
been identified with the Democratic Party since the first minimum wage
law in 1938.
Senior staffers in the House complain on behalf of their bosses that
the President does not communicate with them. “Boehner will give us
nothing,” was one staffer’s inadvertent summing up of the party’s
defeatism. Imagine Gingrich talking in that supplicant manner when he
was in the House minority. He toppled House Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.)
and took control of the House of Representatives in 1994.
Most of the elected Democrats seem interested in themselves and less
so with their party’s victory and mission for America. Attendance at the
regular meetings of the House Democratic Caucus is way down. President
Obama operates as if he cares only about numero uno, even though not
regaining the House and keeping the Senate will freeze a second term
into acrimony and inaction.
There are plenty of bright-line issues for the Democrats. Get tough
on Wall Street and corporate crime, protect pensions, end the wars, tax
the corporate and wealthy tax-escapees, launch community-based public
works programs, provide full Medicare for all, expand health and safety
programs, to name a few.
Perhaps one story is most telling: President Obama has been more
reticent in his nomination of federal judges than his predecessors. In
meetings between outside support groups and White House-Justice
Department staff, the nominees hailing from the ranks of labor and
public interest lawyers, as well as law professors, are received coolly.
The Obama staff want what they call “stealth candidates,” – that is
corporate lawyers with some enlightened pro bono tendencies. Why
directly take on the Republicans for the future of the federal judiciary
when you can settle for the corporate status quo?
Who’s fooling whom? The coming days await a new and open jolting push
by prominent outside Democrats who fervently want to wrench their party
back from the abyss, from its own self-imposed sense of dread before a
devastating, self-inflicted November defeat.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is,
Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is
The Seventeen Traditions.
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