Conservatives In France Completely Repudiated-- What About In Savannah And Utica?

Reactionary Blue Dog John Barrow (GA) may well be the first victim of last night's healthcare reform vote when he faces Regina Thomas in July 20th's Democratic primary. And in New York the primary isn't until September 14-- with filing open until July 15-- so the rumors about brilliant Columbia University professor Les Roberts mounting a populist challenge against anti-healthcare Blue Dog Mike Arcuri could turn into either a primary challenge or a run on the Working Families Party line. We'll be watching... closely. In fact, this coming Saturday, Regina Thomas will be live blogging about her primary at Crooks and Liars (2pm, EST).

But there was another important vote yesterday besides the one in the House. It was in France and the conservatives got absolutely wiped off the face of the map by the French people. The ruling conservatives lost every single region except for Alsace, tantamount to the Republicans losing every state but... Alaska, Idaho or... Arizona, someplace off in a corner by itself.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's center-right party was soundly defeated in the final round of France's regional elections held Sunday, in a sign of widespread disapproval of the administration two years before the next presidential election.

A coalition of left-wing parties successfully garnered 54.3% of the vote, versus 36.1% for the right, according to an Opinion Way preliminary poll. The far-right National Front party won 8.7% of national votes, but took more than 20% of votes in certain regions... Sarkozy's lavish vacations and expensive clothing as well as some occasionally vulgar outbursts caught on tape have fueled disapproval, she said.

The government's attempts at cutting back on spending, including state-financed jobs, while threatening to increase the age of retirement have also not helped its popularity.

When the economy is in crisis, people tend to "favor leftist policies, because they want more state protection . . . and now they think the Socialists will protect them," said [political analyst Isabelle] Veyrat-Masson.

Isabelle comes at lot closer to the problem that the snark about the fancy clothes and vulgar behavior. In my latest report from the Thom Hartmann/Adam Curtis intellectual front, we saw how America and British elites-- about 1% of the population of each country-- had managed to grab up 50% of the national wealth and how FDR's New Deal had scaled that back and helped create a vibrant middle class, until Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton (plus Thatcher and Tony Blair) came along-- in what Hartmann identifies as a coup from the elites-- and turned things back to a point where "the top 0.1 percent of U.S. wage earners are back up over 6 percent-- a 100 percent increase over the 1940-1980 New Deal era-- and the wealth owned by the top 1 percent is now back over 50 percent." And you saw how adapt they were yesterday at making angry white brainwashed people dance to their tune at the outrage of Democrats trying to-- basically-- tax the rich to provide healthcare for all.

It's a coup that most Americans and Britons don't even know happened, although citizens are often baffled when they look at today's French-- where the elites were not able to pull off the coup-- and see in France a strong middle class, one of the world's best healthcare systems, free college education, and a more equitable distribution of both wealth and income. (Although, with the election of neoliberal [that's a way of saying "conservative"] Nicolas Sarkozy, the coup is now under way in France, too.)

But it just hit a huge speed bump.