You'll Never Work In This State Again

A few days ago I got a phone call from Jacob Engels, editor of the East Orlando Post about an e-mail he had gotten from DCCC Communications Director Matt Thornton. The DCCC, which recently fired their southern regional director, Andrew Piatt, is still in freakout mode over the inadvertent admission that they blackballed a top Democratic donor and former Florida Democratic Party chairman, Bob Poe, because he's white. DWT helped break the scandal here in February. Short version:

A DCCC staffer, Jermaine House, insisted that Bob Poe, who is white and gay, "does not have the right racial makeup for the district" so they're stepping on a progressive African-American state senator, Florida civil rights icon Geraldine Thompson, and a respected Latina attorney, Fatima Rita Fahmy, so they can support a conservative religious nut who also happens to be African-American, the controversial Val Demings. The district is 27.1% voting age African-American, 22.8% voting Hispanic, 44.3% voting age white and I was unaware Pelosi countenanced this kind of racial game-playing. The DCCC press secretary for the Southeast, Jermaine House, actually said, "We will never support Poe because he's white." I'd like to hear Pelosi defend that little DCCC statement. On top of that, the DCCC is complaining Poe "can't buy this election" when the hallmark of the DCCC in the last decade has been to always favor wealthy candidates over middle class candidates. The hypocrisy is overwhelming.

Since several members of Congress have mentioned to me that DCCC staffers have told them that I made up the story, I suppose Lujan told Thornton to go right to the horse's mouth-- Jacob Engels, the guy to who House made the remarks. Engels confirmed to Thornton in writing that every word of my story was true and that House had told him everything I reported that he said.

I wasn't even going to write about this on the blog but changed my mind when a friendly political operative was threatened by Debbie Wasserman Schultz's hatchet-man, Steve Paikowsky. People call he her "hatchet-man" since a) that describes his function and b) no one seems to know what his actual title is. Wassermann Schultz seems to feel he is key to her sleazy operations because he works on her campaign and at the DNC and as an extremely well-paid "part-time employee" for her congressional office, and employees Paikowsky's daughter as a $30,000/year "legislative correspondent."

Thursday, when Wasserman Schultz could no longer take the pressure for illegally withholding Democratic Party voter information access (VAN) from Tim Canova, the progressive reformer seeking to oust her in the August primary, and raised the white flag and surrendered the data, I laughing sent out a couple of tweets that offended Paikowsky enough to threaten the poor young operative with unemployment.

Your tax dollars at work. This is what the Democratic Party has devolved to-- the party that transformed the working poor into the great American middle class that built the greatest country in history, is now the party of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Paikowsky, Jermaine House and Ben Ray Lujan! This week, the History News Network asked Georgia State University History Professor Mike O'Connor to review Thomas Frank's brilliant new book, Listen Liberal-- What Happened To The Party Of The People? which deals with this transformation of the Democratic Party from a party espousing the interests of the 99% to a party espousing the interests of the top 10%, what Frank refers to as the "professional class" basking in the glories of meritocracy.

Frank locates in inequality “the reason why some people find such significance in the ceiling height of the entrance foyer and the hop content of a beer while others will never believe in anything again.” Over the last thirty or forty years, he avers, the lives of working people have become “wretched” and “precarious.” Yet in the face of such a catastrophe, argues Frank, Democrats “cannot find the conviction or imagination to do what is necessary to reverse” the tide of inequality. Instead, they emphasize the role of impartial, uncontrollable factors like technology and globalization, arguing that these problems can best be faced by obtaining the training and skills necessary to compete in the modern workplace.

While Democrats may believe that these positions represent the new face of liberalism, Frank argues that they abandon and even reject traditional liberal priorities. Higher levels of education will not create jobs or increase the strength of labor unions. And by emphasizing the “inevitability” of technology and globalization, liberal politicians minimize the extent to which those developments are shaped by public policy. Such an analysis absolves them of the responsibility to harness the power of government to shape the way that economic and technological factors influence the working class. Another longstanding liberal value has been that of collective action. Yet the Democratic emphasis on education and training heaps the entire burden of economic upheaval upon the individual displaced or soon-to-be-displaced worker.

Frank argues that the source of the Democratic Party’s change in priorities has been a shift in its self-understanding. The party of Franklin Roosevelt once defined itself in class-oriented terms, as the representatives of workers in their battle against the “economic royalists.” Today, however, the party owes allegiance to a different group. “The deeds and positions of the modern Democratic Party,” Frank argues, “can best be understood as a phase in the history of the professionals.” The interests of the working class once defined the Democratic Party, but that time has passed. Today, it is the concerns of the professional class that set the Democratic agenda.

Professionals sit atop a hierarchy, but it is not one of wealth, but of knowledge. “Teachers know what we must learn; architects know what our buildings must look like; economists know what the Federal Reserve’s discount rate should be; art critics know what is in good taste and what is in bad.” Today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of many interest groups, but “professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail,” according to Frank. Indeed, “it is not going too far to say that the views of the modern-day Democratic Party reflect, in virtually every detail, the ideological idiosyncrasies of the professional-managerial class.”

The political values of professionals only occasionally align with those of workers and the poor. Thus, instead of challenging the idea of meritocracy that underlies this stratification, Democratic policies tend to celebrate it. Since movements such as civil rights, feminism and gay liberation all exist to knock down barriers to meritocracy, they can be incorporated into the contemporary party’s priorities. But Frank points out that inequality will never be a concern of the professional class because meritocracy makes no sense without it. “Professional-class leaders … feel precious little sympathy for the less fortunate members of their own discipline-- for the adjuncts frozen out of the market for tenure, for colleagues who get fired, or even for the kids who don’t get in to the ‘good’ colleges.” In particular, there is no real sympathy in this class for organized labor. “The idea that someone should command good pay for doing a job that doesn’t require specialized training seems to professionals to be an obvious fallacy.” ... For Frank, the decline of Democratic interest in cultivating organized labor served as the source of many of the party’s problems. “Closing the door on working people’s organizations also meant closing the door on working people’s issues.”

The central figure in this narrative is, of course, [the odious] Bill Clinton. The nation’s 42nd president found his positions by “triangulating” between liberal and conservative views, articulating a new “third way” of American politics... To Frank, though, Clinton was responsible for the death of an essential part of liberalism. “Erasing the memories and the accomplishments of Depression-era Democrats was what Bill Clinton and his clique of liberals were put on earth to achieve.” One of the president's favorite sayings was that “the world we face today is the world where what you earn depends on what you can learn.” This reflects, in Frank’s interpretation, the core New Democratic principle that “you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.” Given such a premise, which is “less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it,” it is hardly surprising that Democrats have little interest in championing the cause of workers.

Frank is critical of Clinton-era developments such as the president’s emphasis on balancing the budget in the face of a recession, the appointment of Goldman Sachs alum Robert Rubin and Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan to prominent positions, the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), the draconian crime bill that both Bill and Hillary Clinton now disavow (1994), welfare reform (1996) and the termination of Glass-Steagall (1999).

These are the politics that make a petty tyrant like Steve Paikowsky or Matt Thornton possible or that put as loathsome a figure as Wall Street-owned hack Chuck Schumer at the head of the Senate Democrats.