Wall Street Democrats vs Real Democrats-- In South Carolina?

Hutto with deranged teabagger Lee Bright-- 2 ineffectual Lindsey Graham opponents

South Carolina state Senator Brad Hutto announced yesterday-- just before the filing deadline-- that he is a candidate for the Democratic nomination to oppose Lindsey Graham. A conservative, Big Business-friendly Democrat, he will be up against Jay Stamper who has been endorsed by Blue America but is not a favorite of the party Establishment. Last year, Hutto was rated 100% by the Chamber of Commerce, one of only two Democrats in the state legislature willing too suck up to Big Business to that extent.

Unlike Stamper, who has chosen to draw a clear line of distinction between himself and the conservative Graham, Hutto takes pains to paint himself as the kind of Republican-lite candidate that depresses Democratic turnout.

Hutto, 56, said he thinks he can woo Republicans dissatisfied with Graham with a pitch "that I’m a practical middle-of-the-road guy."

“I have no aversions to working with Republicans,” Hutto said.

Hutto said South Carolinians liked having U.S. senators from different parties, Republican Strom Thurmond and Democrat Fritz Hollings, for nearly 40 years. “They’d say, ‘We always had somebody to go to,’ ” he said. “Sometimes having people on both sides helps.”

The only way a Democrat is going to win this seat is by offering a real alternative to the slick conservative claptrap Graham has used his entire career to win every election he's run in since 1992. Last night, a reporter on MSNBC explained how Graham had taken a $15,000 campaign "contribution" from mobster casino billionaire and Chinese government agent Sheldon Adelson just before introducing legislation to ban internet gambling, Adelson's #1 domestic agenda item. Stamper will be far better equipped to capitalize on that kind of behavior than the tepid Hutto. But Hutto is hardly the only Wall Street Democrat blurring the lines between what it means to be a Republican and what it means to be a Democrat. In an essay yesterday, Richard Eskow talked about the struggle inside the Democratic party that pits those who serve the interests of ordinary families and those who serve Wall Street and are generally considered the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. "If progressive and populist ideas resonate with most voters, some people have asked, why isn’t the Democratic Party doing better in the polls? Here’s one reason: Some of the party’s most prominent leaders are still pushing Wall Street’s unpopular and discredited economic platform." And he wasn't just talking about little known corporate shills like Brad Hutto.

Recent speeches by former President Bill Clinton and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer showed that Wall Street continues to hold considerable sway in their party, despite the fact that its austerity agenda has failed. Its “deficits over growth” ideology has wounded both Europe and the United States. To hear Clinton and Hoyer speak, you’d think we’d learned nothing from the economic experience of the last five years.

…It’s rather stunning: A former president addresses members of a generation that has been saddled with record student debt and which faces the worst job market for graduates in modern history, and he talks, not of jobs or debt or decent wages, but about deficit reduction.

What’s more, this generation’s woes were caused in large part by the Clinton Administration’s eager collaboration with Republicans and Wall Street executives on deregulation. That collaboration also led to the accumulation of enormous wealth by a number of former administration officials. (Mr. Clinton did pretty well himself.)

And people wonder why Gallup reports that millennials are at or near record levels of alienation from both political parties? When leaders of both parties emphasize deficits over jobs, their disaffection becomes easier to understand… It’s impossible to look into the soul of another person. But it feels breathtakingly cynical for President Clinton to speak to a student crowd about deficit reduction when they, and the rest of the nation, desperately need government programs for jobs and growth-- programs that have been strangled by Washington’s wrongheaded fixation on deficit reduction.

As for Hoyer: Austerity-lite advocates have offered a shifting set of rationales for their deficit fixation, using everything from disproven inflation fears to discredited economic spreadsheets. But Hoyer’s come up with a new one: Cutting the deficit, he says, is the best way for “America to get its swagger back.”

The minority whip was addressing the discredited Wall Street front group that calls itself “Third Way.” While he, too, was careful not to mention his support for Social Security cuts, Hoyer expressed disappointment that the Simpson-Bowles plan was never enacted. That’s saying the same thing.

Hoyer also called for a “big and balanced” budget agreement. “Big and balanced” is a euphemism for the kind of deal that hurts the middle class through Social Security and Medicare cuts, but which also includes tax hikes that Republicans have historically opposed. Fortunately for Wall Street, the increases promoted by Peterson funded groups go easy on the millionaire and billionaire crowd.

In fact, Simpson-Bowles and similar proposals actually offer tax decreases for the highest earners, coupled with reductions in “tax expenditures”-- a phrase often used to describe tax breaks the middle class relies upon, like the home mortgage interest deduction and the employer health insurance deduction.

For years the deficit crowd has tried to create a false sense of panic about government debt. So it was especially ironic to hear Hoyer say that “it’s at this moment, when we don’t have a crisis breathing down our necks, that we have the best chance to lay the groundwork for the hard decisions we will need to make.”

There’s a struggle underway over the future of the Democratic Party. The populist movement has scored some significant recent wins, including the electoral victories of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Its ideas resonate with the public, and are in sync with mainstream economic thought.

But the remarks from Clinton and Hoyer demonstrate that the party’s Wall Street wing is still riding tall in the saddle, despite its discredited ideas and unpopular proposals.

There’s one sure-fire way to give a person, or a country, its “swagger” back: a good job at good wages will do it every time. Too bad these Wall Street Democrats aren’t talking about that.

Jay Stamper has made it clear that he's part of the populist wing of the party. The South Carolina Establishment-- both the political and the media establishment-- can't relate to it. They are much more comfortable with an advocate of the failed Austerity agenda like Brad Hutto.