TARPLEY.net
November 3, 2014
Washington, Nov. 3, 2014 — The stakes in tomorrow's election for Congress and state governors are far greater than most people imagine. On the agenda is in fact a giant step towards the Republican strategy of setting up a permanent dictatorship of endless war and genocidal austerity against the American people, all done while respecting and legal formalities to con voters into passivity, apathy, and resignation. In particular, Republican control of the United States Senate will almost certainly mean an immediate shift towards wider war in the Middle East, combined with draconian cuts in social programs, causing many Americans to lose their lives.
Most voters are unaware of these high-stakes, partly because of the determination of the Wall Street media to prop up the Republicans as a force for austerity, and partly because of the impotence of the Democratic Party in calling attention to these outrageous and scandalous statements. Where, one might ask, is the Democratic War Room? Where is the coordinated messaging from the White House and the cabinet? Where is the withering barrage from Democratic members of Congress? The Democrats, it would seem, are suffering from the long hangover from the broken promises of Obama's 2008 messianic campaign, which have long since been supplanted by the daily reality of weakness, recklessness, and relentless capitulation to the demands of Wall Street. Even so, Obama still represents less war and less austerity than his Republican challengers. It makes no sense to attack Obama when politicians like McCain and Graham are issuing lunatic demands for bigger debacles.
Democrats Have No Job Creation Program
The main responsibility for the low ebb of Democratic fortunes belongs to Obama. The only way to defeat Republicans is by fighting them on the basis of a strong populist economic program designed to help struggling working families at the expense of Wall Street interests. But the position of the Obama administration in the second term has been the foolish assertion that the depression is over, the recovery is in full swing, and that therefore a job program or credit stimulus program is no longer necessary. Instead, Obama has given great attention to the Republican War on Women, and to Republican hostility towards immigrants and immigration. Because of this misplaced emphasis, Obama's occasional attempts to gain traction on the minimum wage and the related issue of income inequality have not been successful. Notwithstanding this, the Democratic campaigners who have done best in the current environment are those who have built their own efforts around anti-Wall Street economic populism.
McCain Promises US Divisions in Iraq and Syria, Eyes Ukraine
The best kept secrets of the 2014 election come, first of all, from the lunatic warmonger Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has formally pledged to use GOP control of the Senate to embroil our nation in more catastrophic foreign adventures. Speaking of Obama’s Middle East policy to a mid-October gathering of the Pacific Council on International Policy, McCain declared: "Frankly, I know of no military expert who believes we are going to defeat ISIS with this present strategy…. We may be able to 'contain,' but to actually defeat ISIS is going to require more boots on the ground, more vigorous strikes, more special forces, further arming the Kurdish peshmerga forces and creating a no-fly zone and buffer zone in Syria." Here is an open demand for infantry and tank divisions to be committed once again to this graveyard of empires, coming from the politician who will chair the Senate Armed Services Committee in case the Republicans win. This is a voting issue, and would already doom the Republicans to decisive defeat, but the American people, sick of war as they are, have not been informed of what is in store for them. Nor is the warmonger McCain the only voice calling for a new land war in Southwest Asia. As Huffington Post has pointed out, similar calls for the extensive deployment of land forces against ISIS have already been issued by such top GOP figures as House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). (Huffington Post, October 20, 2014) "Vote Yourself a War" would be an honest election slogan for the GOP.
McCain Cavorted with Cannibal, Kidnapper, and Caliph
Not only has McCain committed to wars far wider than those of Bush and Obama, he has been caught red-handed fraternizing and collaborating with the deadly enemies of the United States. Authoritative photographic evidence, readily found on the internet (try TARPLEY.net for starters), shows McCain, meeting under the auspices of suspect Hill staffer Mouaz Mustafa in April, 2013 in Idlib, Syria with Ibrahim al-Badri, who was at that time already operating as boss of the ISIS terrorist movement under the name of al-Baghdadi, and who would shortly begin masquerading as Caliph Ibrahim of the self-styled "Islamic State" — the person who will answer at Nuremberg for the repeated and public massacres he has ordered. Also on hand for the festivities with McCain was none other than Abu Sakker, the cannibal whose face is all over the Internet as he greedily devours the heart and lungs of a slain victim. Among those present was also the brigand guilty of kidnapping and extortion in the case of 12 Shiite religious pilgrims held by the terrorist "Northern Storm Brigade" under the accusation of working for Hezbollah. (see LiveLeak) In a sane society, the question would be when McCain's treason trial would begin, or when he would be dragged off to the Leavenworth stockade. Instead, in the current madhouse, McCain is in line to become even more influential over US foreign policy and military actions abroad. Widespread rage against "Walnuts" McCain has been expressed on twitter in the #ArrestMcCainForISIS campaign. We must also remember that McCain is every bit as big a warmonger in Ukraine against Russia as he is in the Middle East. McCain's mania for confrontation with Russia makes him a direct threat to the lives and the future of every man, woman, and child in the United States and around the world. If McCain is not jailed for treason, he should at least be committed to the nearest insane asylum.
The Neglected McConnell-Koch Secret Tape
Then there is the question of a further descent into deadly and futile austerity. The Nation magazine has surfaced a tape of remarks made by Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the presence of reactionary moneybags David Koch. Here McConnell makes clear that he will promote brutal and draconian austerity, and that there will be no increase in the minimum wage, no extended jobless benefits, and no help for students currently crushed by $1.3 trillion of high interest student loans. McConnell is reported as saying:
"And we're not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. That's all we do in the Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage (inaudible)—cost the country 500,000 new jobs; extending unemployment—that's a great message for retirees; uh, the student loan package the other day, that's just going to make things worse, uh. These people believe in all the wrong things."As for how the Republicans intend to administer their congressional lockstep, McConnell revealed his intent to use extraneous riders attached to essential budget legislation, combined with the reactionary coordination of House-Senate conference committees on the budget, all in the framework of a budget reconciliation process which does not allow filibusters and which can therefore be railroaded with the bare minimum of 51 votes in the Senate – which is what McConnell thinks he will have. Here it is straight from the horse’s mouth:
"So in the House and Senate, we own the budget. So what does that mean? That means that we can pass the spending bill. And I assure you that in the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what's called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that."As recently as the 2012 presidential elections, a similar tape — in which the plutocratic Republican nominee Romney sneered his contempt for working people — turned into a major factor in the reactionary defeat. But this time the Democrats and their allies have been impotent to orchestrate any similar attention for these secret pledges by McConnell to Koch.
Ebola: GOP Austerity Spreads Plagues
A third point of acute Republican vulnerability is the impact of draconian budget cuts on the capabilities of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. NIH head Dr. Francis Collins has suggested that, were it not for the senseless Republican budget-cutting mania expressed in the sequester and in other suicidal measures, the United States might already possess a cure for the dangerous Ebola virus. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who is hoping to unseat the incumbent Democrat Pryor, is a good example of one of the many reactionaries who voted against the Pandemic Protection Act in recent years on grounds that it represented "big guvmint." As a result, US facilities for isolating Ebola patients are pitifully few.
Incredibly enough, the pro-austerity Republicans have sought to blame Ebola on Obama — despite the obvious fact that the focus of the epidemic here in the United States is the godforsaken state of Texas, where the budget cutting, contempt for science, and animus against public health workers on the part of troglodyte Governor Rick Perry have created one of the worst public health systems in the United States. The incompetence and bungling of Dallas hospital authorities show what happens when medical professionals are either vilified or left to their own devices. The Democrats needed to point out that the Centers for Disease Control is in no way a regulatory agency, since it issues purely advisory and informational material, and that hospitals remain under the regulatory authority of the states — meaning in this case, Rick Perry's Texas.
The Secret Program of the GOP for Congress in 2015
One of the greatest gifts on the part of the controlled media to the Republicans has been the willingness of broadcasters and reporters to let the GOP off the hook on the most crucial question of the day: we know that they hate Obama, but what exactly do they propose to do for or to the American people if they take control of the Senate? The controlled media have displayed almost no curiosity about this central issue of Republican intentions. Everything has been focused on the vapid horse race. On the rare occasions when the Republicans have been asked, they have successfully evaded the question by mumbling a few things about building the Keystone XL pipeline, a new round of tax cuts for the rich in the form of reductions in the federal corporate income tax and other business taxes, and another round of deregulation. In an article published in USA Today in mid October, the fascist Cruz offered 10 priority issues for Republicans, including tax cuts for the rich in the form of a flat tax for individuals and a xenophobic policy towards immigrants, not to mention the famous Keystone XL pipeline.
In an interview published in the Washington Post on the day before the election, Cruz stressed his desire to begin a neo-McCarthyite witchhunt against Obama over issues of "Abuse of power, executive abuse, regulatory abuse and lawlessness that has sadly pervaded this administration." Cruz also wants to strip many millions of Americans of the healthcare they have now obtained under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. If there were a fighting president in the White House, it would be easy to predict the ignominious demise of hyenas like Cruz. But Obama is feckless and likely to cave, even on the most vital issues, especially if he can be convinced by his czars that rotten compromises that sellout his most devoted supporters will be seen by historians as a legacy of statesmanship. For Obama, everything notoriously comes back to himself.
Pillars of the Permanent Dictatorship of War and Austerity
Given this evidence, we can further refine the concept of the Permanent Dictatorship of Endless War and Genocidal Austerity which we have been developing in recent years. This Permanent Dictatorship represents the response by Republican leaders to the clamor from their privileged electorate to maintain rent-seeking in the midst of world economic depression, and at the same time to permit the survival of the Republican Party itself, which is doomed by demographic trends – except if the right to vote in the United States can be drastically limited. The main ingredients of the Permanent Dictatorship include the following:
The limitation of the right to vote, through the voter identification poll tax, purging of the voting rolls, the limitation of early voting, inadequate facilities for voting on election day, problems with absentee ballots, rigged election machines and massive computer-generated vote fraud of the type attempted by Republicans in 2004 and 2012. The goal here is to suppress voting by blacks, Hispanics, the young, the poor, students, and other Democratic-leaning groups.
Continued control over the Supreme Court by the RATS cabal of Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, first by making it into the KRATS cabal through the permanent absorption of Justice Kennedy, and then through further court packing with fascist judges as the situation allows. The forces of dictatorship require a court, which will rubber stamp its approval of measures to restrict and deny the voting franchise, and also to cripple or eliminate completely the role of trade unions and similar professional associations. The ability of plutocrats to buy elections must also be maintained.
With unions crippled, money from Koch on the one hand, and Soros and Omidyar on the other will dominate elections at all levels, assuring both an outcome acceptable to oligarchs in general, as well as Republican ascendancy in the short to medium run.
Forces favorable to the Permanent Dictatorship is see the future of the United States as a low-wage economy with a declining living standard and diminished access to higher education, advanced healthcare, and other advantages. This stands in sharp contrast to the American tradition of high wages and a rising standard of living. The austerity cools have seriously miscalculated, since the United States will scarcely be able to compete with Vietnam or Thailand in a race to the bottom for wages and working conditions. The American tradition calls for a high wage, high standard of living, high value-added, high technology, high capital intensity, and high energy intensity form of production. The austerity mania and Malthusian prejudices of Wall Street are leading politicians to imagine a future of undercutting China, when the only path to survival is a policy of developing a workforce capable of competing with and surpassing powerful high-end exporting nations like Germany and Japan.If the Republicans seize control of the Senate, they will have taken a giant step towards the Permanent Dictatorship, for which they could begin laying the groundwork in 2015 with measures for voter suppression and union busting. The final consolidation of dictatorial rule, hidden under the trappings of traditional parliamentary process, could then be completed after the 2016 presidential elections. The Republican Recipe
The fundamental contention here is that Republican rule will impose the same kind of ideological savagery which led to the government shutdown and near-default of the United States in October 2013, mostly over the Ted Cruz demand for the repeal of Obama care. The other main component is the union busting and low-wage policies of governors like Walker, Snyder, Kasich, Scott, Corbett, Brownback, and others. Cuts to education will be particularly severe, since the goal here is also to destroy the teachers' unions as the only organized formations willing to fight for a policy of free, universal, compulsory, quality education – the institution which, perhaps more than any other, has provided the bedrock for American survival.
Imagine then a regime which is two parts Ted Cruz, one part Rand Paul, three parts Walker, three parts Snyder, two parts Scott, two parts Brownback, two parts. Corbett — and you get the idea. It will be a lethal, toxic brew, which many will not survive. Do not listen, therefore, to NPR commentators who say that the stakes in this election are minimal, since gridlock will go on no matter what happens on November 4. Do not listen to foreign degenerates like Russell Brand, who are trotting out the old anarchist bromides against voting, all in the service of their paymasters in the London financial community.
Wall Street Media Give Reactionary Republicans a Free Ride
Campaigning for the midterm elections has been characterized by an unprecedented media assault on the Obama presidency, with relentless negativity and pessimism for Democratic prospects coming from news organs like the Washington Post, CBS News, the Cook Political Report, and many others. The general media narrative with which these pressstitutes hope to brainwash the American people is that Obama is desperately unpopular, and Republicans are therefore destined to win. As pollsters like Stan Greenberg have pointed out, the media narrative ignores the obvious fact that the Republican Party is far more hated than the Democrats, both in Washington and in the various state capitals. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is especially hated because of its gridlock, obstructionism, reactionary ideological posturing, and reckless imposition of a dangerous government shutdown a year ago, which almost turned into the national bankruptcy and default of the United States (and did in fact lead to the downgrading of US debt by credit ratings agencies) — all over and ideological tantrum stoked by the sallow-faced hypocrite Ted Cruz, the Tartuffe of modern US politics.
A recent glance at Real Clear Politics shows that Obama's approval rating is currently about 42%. Compare that to the average approval of the House of Representatives, which is controlled by the Republican Party and generally identified as a Republican fiefdom, which is at about 12%. So Obama is doing 30 points better than the House Republicans — a situation which few viewers of current news coverage would ever suspect. And even here, the Republicans are benefiting from the massive anti-Obama, pro-GOP media barrage of recent months. Before the election campaigns moved into high gear, the Republican house was garnering approval ratings in the range of 6% to 8%. Even today, the most recent Wall Street Journal – NBC News poll shows the generic ballot expressing preference for which party should control the House as tied at 48% to 48%. The week before that, a Fox news poll showed the Democrats leading in the generic ballot by one percentage point– an advantage, destined, of course, to be nullified by Republican-dominated post-2010 gerrymandering.
Backlash Against Republican Governors: The Untold Story
The situation in various state elections contradicts the national brainwashing media narrative even more. Here, a large number of Republican candidates won governorships in the Tea Party agitation of 2010. These new governors had largely concealed their real plans for after they had taken power. Once ensconced in their statehouses, they began a shocking reactionary offensive of union busting, austerity cuts, the demolition of public education, sabotage of vital infrastructure projects, and similar shenanigans – all dictated by a combination of Koch brothers ideology and the oligarchical greed which refuses to be taxed for the general welfare. The two most extreme examples of this were firstly Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who moved immediately to deny collective-bargaining to most state employees, unleashing a statewide mass strike and later recall attempt by the labor movement and its allies. Walker has been correctly identified as the most divisive figure in Wisconsin politics since the scoundrel Senator Joe McCarthy back in the 1950s. Secondly, Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan humiliated organized labor by making Michigan, historically one of the most unionized states, into a paradise for union busters by outlawing the union shop, setting labor up for accentuated secular decline. Snyder also imposed emergency managers — appointed dictators, called by some "Little Hitlers" — on many depressed cities in his state, culminating in the bankruptcy of Detroit under just such an austerity dictator.
The same general pattern was followed by numerous reactionary Republican governors, including Scott of Florida, LePage of Maine, Brownback of Kansas, Deal of Georgia, and others. In Ohio, the reactionary Kasich tried to deprive state workers of collective-bargaining rights, but was forced to submit this measure to a 2011 statewide referendum in which he was stunningly defeated by an aroused labor movement, 61% to 39%. As a result, Kasich has moderated his anti-union and anti-worker fervor, allowing the expansion of Medicaid to low income workers in his state under the Obamacare law. Ironically, the result is that Kasich is not so threatened by the anti-Republican backlash, which is likely to topple governors in Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Alaska, Pennsylvania, Florida, and elsewhere.
Victorious Minimum Wage Referenda Show What Americans Want
This year, control of statehouses may look quite different from what happens in Washington, and is already diverging far away from the media narrative. Another measure of this will be found in the state referenda concerning an increase of the minimum wage, something which reactionaries like Walker have fanatically opposed. Tea Party Republicans in the house have stubbornly blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage of a wretched $7.25 an hour, so the idea is to take action at the state level. Increases of about one to two dollars per hour will be on the ballot in red states like Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, where they are all likely to pass despite overt or covert Republican hostility. A minimum wage increase will also be on the ballot in Illinois, where Democratic Governor Pat Quinn tried living on the minimum wage for a week last summer in a highly effective political stunt. Quinn's hopes for reelection hinge largely on issues of this type. Organized labor, in the shape of the SEIU, has been demanding $15 is the minimum necessary for human dignity in modern America, and here they are on firm ground. Still, support for an increase in the minimum wage, even in Republican-dominated states, shows a deep vein of economic populism which only the Tax Wall Street Party has been willing to fully tap.
The question remains: if Obama was seen in 2008 by many media figures as a figure rich with messianic and utopian overtones, how has he become the Typhoid Mary of 2014, the lame duck from whom almost all Democratic candidates must flee?
Mechanics of Wall Street’s Control of Two-Term Presidents
The explanation lies in the basic methods of oligarchical (i.e., Wall Street) control over the modern presidency. Wall Street is determined to control the presidency, but the inherent constitutional powers of the president are always a potential threat to the zombie bankers, who therefore try to weaken, sabotage, and discredit government as much as possible – helped along by useful idiots calling themselves libertarians. Truly, the modern Republican Party has fully earned the title of Party of National Sabotage on any number of issues. During the first term of any president, the incumbent can be controlled by his need to get money from Wall Street in order to run for reelection. But, given the absurd and crippling two-term limit passed by Roosevelt-hating Republicans, how can the president be controlled in a second term, when he is unconstrained by the financial demands of a future campaign?
The answer is obviously that Wall Street and the controlled media control the second term president through scandals and negative publicity. This is the secret of Sherman Adams and the vicuna coats which plagued Eisenhower, the Watergate scandal which ousted Nixon, the Iran Contra affair which almost brought down Reagan, the Whitewatergate and Monica Lewinsky affairs against Clinton, the media attacks on George Bush the younger over his policies of war and depression, and the many real or imagined scandals which beset Obama. We must focus in particular on the virtual attempted coup d'état to deny Obama a second term in November 2012, which involved the staged Benghazi October surprise in September along with vote fraud piloted by Karl Rove and other GOP heavyweights. The failure of this coup led to the firing of a score of flag officers in the US military who had apparently gone along with this caper. The current anti-Obama deployment includes a number of turncoat officials like Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and others who are joining with defeatist generals more hostile to Assad of Syria than to ISIS terrorism, who are all trying to maneuver Obama into yet another catastrophic land war in Southwest Asia.
GOP More than Ever Under the Thumb of Koch
The GOP donor class was shocked and demoralized by the defeat of Romney in 2012, despite personal assurances from Karl Rove that Obama was doomed. Those with inside knowledge of the dark pools of Republican money – including emphatically foreign money from hostile powers – now say that many Republican moneybags have not returned to the fray. The result is that the Koch brothers are carrying a very large share of the Republican financial burden, meaning of course that the Republicans coming to Washington in January 2015 will be owned lock, stock, and barrel by the infamous reactionary brothers. Fake populists like Walker of Wisconsin and newcomer demagogue Joni Ernst of Iowa are especially dependent on support from the Koch interests.
Populism comes in two brands. The first is economic populism, which has contributed much to human progress, from the time of Plato all the way down to Franklin D Roosevelt. A fighting economic populist could go far in the current environment. The other kind of populism is cultural populism, a poisonous demagogic mixture. Cultural populism depends on resentment against the elites, status panic, racism, hatred and fear of outsiders, and the irrational glorification of localism and particularism. Republican theorists from Kevin Phillips to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove have extolled the powers of cultural populism when it comes to manipulating gullible voters. A leading exponent of cultural populism in the current cycle is Joni Ernst, a Tea Party passionaria from Iowa. Joni Ernst attracted national attention for her first campaign ad, which discussed her vast experience in cutting pork, specifically by castrating hogs. She has also flirted with the open advocacy of the violent overthrow of the United States government, by lauding her Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol as her means for dealing with government officials who do not consider her rights "important." Inevitably, it turns out that this good old farm girl is a satellite of the Koch Empire. Back in 2010, the Tea Party candidate for Senate in Nevada was the infamous Sharon Angle, who severely wounded her own campaign by raving about "Second Amendment remedies" she thought available to those who were willing to shoot government officials. Sharon Angle was duly torn to pieces in the media for these incendiary remarks. This time around, Joni Ernst is every bit as subversive as Sharon Angle, but Joni has paid a far smaller price for her verbal excesses. This shows once again that the news media are following the pro-Republican Wall Street line for 2014, and the Democrats are demoralized and disoriented.
In addition to their status as warmongers and austerity ghouls, Republicans have also held fast to their signature tradition of racism. In 1988, George Bush the elder used the racist Willie Horton ads against the feckless Dukakis. The equivalent in this cycle is considered to be the desperate attack ad by Nebraska Republican Lee Terry, who is facing imminent defeat at the hands of Democrat Brad Ashford. Terry's ad accuses Ashford of freeing a black convicted robber with time off for good behavior, after which the convict carried out for murders. As in the case of Willie Horton, the visual effects of the ad amount to a blatant appeal to racism, itself a subset of cultural populism.
Economic Populism Needed, Not Cultural Populism
The atmosphere for the current elections is radically anti-historical. Otherwise, voters might remember that cultural populist tricks, props, and dodges have been the tools of manipulation since time immemorial. Ronald Reagan cultivated jellybeans. George Bush the elder installed a horseshoe pit at the White House. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee ran for president based on the fact that he wore a plaid shirt. George Bush the younger had a hobby of clearing brush at his rented ranch when cameras were near. Other candidates have used motorcycles to show how folksy they were. Scott Brown, currently a carpetbag contender in New Hampshire, took Ted Kennedy's old seat with the famous prop of a pickup truck. Of course, once he got into office, Scott Brown drove his pickup truck through the already weakened provisions of the Volcker rule contained in the Dodd Frank legislation, all in the service of his owners, including the State Street Bank. Cultural populism, in short, is nothing but a con job used to dupe the suckers that do indeed seem to be born every minute.
Example of what an economic populist pitch might sound like in the current cycle, making due allowances for the inherent weakness of the Democratic Party, comes from Mitch McConnell's highly disciplined antagonist, Ms. Grimes. Here is her reaction to the Revelation of the McConnell-Koch secret tape:
"Just this morning, The Nation released shocking new audio that sheds more light on what and who Mitch McConnell is fighting for: the Koch brothers and their radical agenda against working families. We’ve always known Mitch McConnell was on the side of millionaires and billionaires, but we never knew just how willing he'd be to sell out hardworking Kentuckians in search of power for himself when he thought no one was listening. These millionaires and billionaires are paying him back: his campaign is bankrolled by shadowy outside groups. You better believe they want something in return for the tens of millions of dollars they're pumping into our race…. The fact that he was caught on tape selling out working families just to raise money for his party is more evidence that we simply can’t trust Mitch McConnell to fight for us. He just doesn't get it. McConnell promised his party's rich backers that he stands with them and against raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment insurance and helping Kentuckians with college affordability, no matter the cost to Kentuckians and this nation. McConnell's radical agenda will devastate working families. We deserve better and we've got to stop him."Whatever the obvious limitations seen here, this approach is much better than a campaign based on global warming, campaign finance reform, or various petty bourgeois process reforms.
Ironically, the oligarchical dynasties which dominate politics, especially in southern states, may end up helping the Democrats. Candidates with names like Nunn in Georgia, Landrieu in Louisiana, Pryor in Arkansas, Begich in Alaska, and the just-cited Grimes in Kentucky all represent entrenched family-centered political machines which may provide a margin of survival for these candidates.
The other side of the coin is that many of these same candidates have chosen to stay on the defensive and repudiate Obama, rather than assuming the necessary offense of posture of attacking Republicans for gridlock, government shutdown, killer austerity, warmongering, and a host of other obvious issues. In particular, white female Democratic candidates like Nunn in Georgia, Landrieu in Louisiana, Hagen in North Carolina, Grimes in Kentucky, Shaheen in New Hampshire, and quite a few House candidates are desperately appealing for support from black voters, even as they belittle Obama, whom the black community overwhelmingly supports. This paradoxical situation has required Obama to go on black media and personally urge his backers to disregard the slurs coming from these white women, and vote for the Democrat nonetheless, since they support his program.
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