Saturday, November 13, 2004

Name Names!

Josh Marshall has some good points here, though I imagine he has some specific people in mind...

If you've lived in Washington for any length of time you know it's laughable to imagine that the Republican operators are any less well-heeled or disconnected from lives of most Americans than their Democratic peers. Indeed, increasingly over the last decade, the big torrents of easy money flow into Republican hands. (With Congress in GOP hands, business has much less need to hedge its bets.)

But the Democrats do have an aristocracy of operatives --- and the ‘a’ word is appropriate on a number of levels. Some have been around for decades, a few of the best came up with Clinton in 1992, and others came in during the '90s when the getting was good and mistook the power of incumbency for their own skill.

More than anyone or anything else they are the Democratic party. With organized labor as diminished as it is and party organizations at every level less institutions than conduits for political money, these folks are the power-brokers, the institutional memory, most of everything that persists over time, cycle after cycle, long after the race horses (i.e., the candidates) are put out to pasture.

So for all these reasons there is something rich and precious about hearing some of these folks sagely noting how the leadership of 'the party' is out of touch with the Red States when they are the party, when they're the folks who've been in the drivers' seat for years. If there’s a problem and especially if it revolves around being out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans, then by all means the first place to start is for some of these folks to say a collective, my bad, my time has passed and depart the scene --- especially if their proposed remedies are as clichéd and pathetic as the ones many of them are offering.



And, he's spot on with his previous (and presumably related) post regarding such people who would go after Kerry. Whatever one thinks of Kerry or the campaign that was run, it's only the fragile egos of the terminally pathetic which are served by trying to kill the candidate a second time. I'm all for learning from mistakes, but the greater cause isn't served by throwing feces at the guy you were supposed to be working for. Anyone remember a thing called "loyalty?" And, right now Kerry is the effective leader of the Democratic party, though how long that will last and how much he makes of it remains to be seen. We've heard noises about him taking a prominent role - we'll see what he chooses to do - but at least for now he's the only one in the position to do so.


But, the good news is I hear that some of the powers that be are a bit fed up with their backstabbing brethren, and do indeed know who they are... Let the purge begin!