As I've noted over the past week, the Beltway media really makes no effort to do anything other than parrot totally out-of-touch conventional wisdom - no matter how inane, stupid and ridiculous it is. Charlie "Let Me Regurgitate What I Watched on Hardball Last Night" Cook and Stuart "I'll Just Read Back The Washington Post To You" Rothenberg are only the two most high-profile examples of this, but today we get another glimpse.
The Hotline - the ultimate Beltway publication - has a little blurb on the open seat race for Congress in Illinois' 6th district. Rep. Henry Hyde is (thankfully) retiring, and this is a winnable district for Democrats. Yet, the Beltway media claims it is only winnable essentially by a sellout, split-the-difference Democrat, without providing any proof that's the case at all. Here's the excerpt about one of the potential Democratic candidates in the race:
"If she runs on a centrist/pro-business economic platform without being reflexively anti-war -- this has the potential to be an interesting candidacy."
Where is the proof that you have to run this way to win? There is none - but this is the standard crap that's peddled in Washington as "strategy." And over the years, Democrats have listened to it (just look at votes earlier this year on major economic issues to know that), to their detriment. The fact is, the country overwhelmingly opposes the Iraq War, and supports a far more progressive economic and trade agenda anyone (other than a few courageous heroes) in the Washington bubble wants to admit. And the sooner Democratic Party realizes that this kind of spin is baseless nonsense that costs them elections, the sooner they will be on a real path to a lasting majority.
The fact is, the party over the years has been too focused on making the Beltway cocktail party circuit happy. That means the embrace of a non-confrontational ideology where the best we can ever hope for is handing over huge amounts of taxpayer money to already-wealthy corporate interests as a bribe to get them to start behaving themselves. We get this ideology (euphemistically called "pro-business") instead of a truly progressive one (dishonestly labeled "anti-business" by the pundit/elitist class) - one that recognizes the role of government to be an authority that protects ordinary people, makes large economic interests play by rules, and enforces those rules with action - no matter how confrontational.
We get this ideology (euphemistically called "pro-business") instead of a truly progressive one (dishonestly titled "anti-business" by the pundit/elitist class),
Thankfully, we are starting to see Democrats re-assert themselves, be more confrontational, and reject the Beltway mentality. We've seen it in recent Democratic demands for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil, their demand for a crackdown on CEO rip-off schemes, and the recent actions on the war by people like Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Harry Reid (D-NV).
This is what we have to encourage, because as we see with this Hotline piece, there is an entire pressure system designed to keep Democrats emasculated. With President Bush's poll numbers in the tank (even in the reddest of red states), and Republicans in chaos, the truth is, seizing the political moment, rejecting the B.S. conventional wisdom and pressing a new brand of aggressive progressive politics that is very mainstream outside the Beltway is long overdue. As a famous philosopher once said, "If not now, when?"