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Impeachment Democrats, Antiwar Democrats, Count-Every-Vote Democrats VS. Democratic Party Leaders
by BAR Managing Editor
Bruce Dixon
“Leading
national Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and
Nancy Pelosi are in deep, longstanding and fundamental disagreement
with Democratic voters.”
The Democratic party won the midterm elections of 2006. But did Democratic voters?
A
sneaky and unscientific ABC News poll in late October lifted the lid
on the dirty secret shared by Democratic party leaders and the
nation's corporate media. The poll showed a wide majority of
respondents in favor of impeaching the president. Of course the poll
was unscientific because it was taken online, and dishonest because
ABC News
jiggered
the questions in
a vain attempt to lower the pro-impeachment numbers. But both ABC's
naked duplicity in trying to rig the survey against impeachment, and
the survey's result despite their efforts are congruent with the very
small number of scientific
polls on the subject. Polling organizations in the Bush era have
been extremely reluctant to take scientific polls asking direct
questions on impeachment, support
for the Iraq war,
or similar matters, lest they reveal the true extent of popular
opposition to the president, his policies and his war, and highlight
the vast gulf between Democratic party leaders and Democratic voters.
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So
why didn't leaders of the national Democratic party campaign on
impeaching the president and vice president for their long list of
crimes? Why did Nancy Pelosi declare impeachment “off
the table”
weeks before the election that made her Speaker of the House? The
answer is that leading national Democrats like Hillary Clinton,
Barack
Obama, Harry Reid, Joe Biden
and Nancy Pelosi are in deep, longstanding and fundamental
disagreement with Democratic voters, and most of all with African American voters
on a broad range of issues.
Why
did Nancy Pelosi declare impeachment “off the table”?
How
is this possible? It's possible because U.S. political campaigns are
conducted with private instead of public dollars. It's possible
because broadcast and print media often devote fewer resources to
news coverage during campaign season than at other times, forcing
candidates to spend huge sums donated from private sources in order
to get any message out to the public at all. It's possible because
America's political processes are so fundamentally corrupt that the only way you
get to be Speaker, minority or majority leader or senate
president in a state legislature, in the US Senate or the House of
Representatives is not because of your persuasive powers, your lofty and
encompassing vision or your mastery of the details of governance.
Legislative leaders in every state house, the US Senate and the
Congress are in those slots because they attracted more campaign
donations from wealthy individuals and corporations than their fellow
lawmakers. Legislative leaders in Congress and state houses are
chosen to zealously guard the interests of the already wealthy, by
passing the bucks on to their colleagues in the same party who play
the game, and recruiting new candidates for office who understand and
play by the crooked rules.
Hence
Democratic voters - again, black ones most of all -
overwhelmingly oppose the war in Iraq. But in preparation for this election, leading House Democrats devoted a river of cash from many of the same sources that bankrolled
Republicans to knocking anti-war congressional candidates out of
Democratic primary elections. As a result, according to John
Walsh in
Counterpunch, in 20 of the closest 22 congressional districts, the
Democratic candidate was pro-war. The gap between these pro-war
corporate Democrats and Democratic base voters was so wide that some,
like Tammy Duckworth in Illinois managed to lose to real Republicans.
This was the doing of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, head of
the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC
On
the Senate side, New York Senator Chuck Schumer and the Democratic
Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC)
played the same role, ensuring that Senate candidates who threatened
to represent Democratic voters much too well in states like Ohio and
Tennessee were eliminated long before the November election. If
Tennessee's Harold Ford had been someone else entirely --- an honest
and genuine black candidate with the integrity to represent his
people and other Tennessee Democrats, rather than a
pro-privatization, pro-torture, pro-war Bush sycophant craven enough
to claim his
own black grandmother was
actually white to get a few more white votes, he might well have won
the open Senate seat in that state, and become the first black US
Senator from the South since Reconstruction.
But
for the Democratic party elite, representing the wealthy and
privileged has always been more important than representing
Democratic voters.
Democratic
voters, when anyone bothers to ask them, lopsidedly favor a more
even-handed policy toward the aspirations of Palestinians. But among
old and new faces in Democratic party leadership, from wannabe
presidential nominees like Clinton, Obama and Biden to shot callers
in the House and Senate, not a one opposed Israel's merciless bombing
of Lebanon earlier this year, the construction of its apartheid
wall, or its
current shelling and slow starvation
of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza.
In
the few instances they have been polled, Democratic voters also favor
universal
single payer health care.
But you'll search a long time before you find a leading national
Democrat to speak up for single payer. Barack Obama used to,
when he represented the South Side of Chicago in the Illinois State
Senate. But that was before he was anointed by the corporate media
as possible presidential material, before billionaires Warren Buffett
and
Oprah became his best friends. In fact, Democratic party honchos
seem to be little more than foreign objects, grafted onto supposed
“leadership” of millions of Democratic voters whose interests
they do as little as possible to represent, while the do pay constant
and careful attention to the whims of corporate campaign cash, and to
corporate media. Nowhere has this disconnect between Democratic
leaders and Democratic voters been more apparent than in Black
America.
“Democratic
party honchos seem to be little more than foreign objects, grafted
onto supposed ‘leadership’ of millions of Democratic voters whose
interests they do as little as possible to represent.”
The
man-made disasters attendant to Hurricane Katrina cost uncounted
thousands of lives and depopulated and dispersed a black city of more
than half a million. Leading white Democrats, afraid to be
identified in the eyes of whites as too close to the interests of
African Americans, made no attempt to stop the dispersal. They even
forbade black members of Congress from bringing Gulf Coast residents
to the nation's capital to speak on their own behalf. Among them,
only Georgia's Cynthia McKinney had the integrity to defy this order.
In an aftermath nearly as shameful as Katrina itself, what passes
for “black leadership” showed its impotence and disconnection
from black masses by being unable or unwilling to conduct any sort of
mass-based mobilization to protest the dispossession and dispersal of
black New Orleans, or to insist on their right to return, to rebuild
and remain.
This
does not bode well for the ability of the Democratic base to make
Democratic leadership represent them in the new Congress. In
contrast to the Latino community, which proved able to take hundreds
of thousands of people out of school and off the job and put them in
the streets for a few weekends in protest of unjust immigration laws,
black America's leaders, and the leaders of the Democratic party seem
to serve other masters. Is there any hope that Democratic party
leaders somehow be made to serve actual Democrats?
“What
passes for ‘black leadership’ showed its impotence and
disconnection from black masses.”
If
the last few elections are any guide, credible reports will surface
in the wake of this week's election of massive purges of minority
voters, widespread tampering with results and ingenious methods of
selective disenfranchisement of Democratic voters, who everybody
knows are disproportionately black. In 2000, in '02 and '04 national
Democratic leaders were quick to throw away the votes of black
constituents, conceding elections before the ballots were even
counted.
If
a change is gonna come, it will not be from leaders like these. A good start would be for antiwar Democrats,
for impeachment Democrats, for count-every-vote Democrats and
post.Katrina Democrats, if there are any, to refuse to sit down, to
refuse to shut up. It's time to refuse to accept the statesmanlike demurrals
and reaching "across the aisle" nonsense of the Clintons and Obamas and
others.
It's time to get and to stay in the faces of Democratic
party leaders and aggressively fight for peace, for justice, for the
right of New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents to return, rebuild and
remain, for the double impeachment Cheney AND Bush, for an end to the
war, for a "small d" democratic media and for the right to be
heard.
The Democratic party may have won the election this week. But Democratic
voters now must confront their supposed leaders, and get ready for the real fight.
Bruce
Dixon can be reached at Bruce.Dixon
(at) BlackAgendaReport.com.
When sending email do remember to substitute the "@" character
for (at).
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