Do Status Quo Joe And Mayo Pete Have Dreams Beyond Their Own Career Trajectories?

I don’t want to imagine what kind of horrible cabinet a conservative like Biden-- or even Mayo Pete-- might select. Both represent the transpartisan status quo establishment and, as Biden, famously assured a roomful of Wall Street banksters as he kicked off his campaign, if he’s elected nothing would fundamentally change. On Thursday, writing for Common Dreams, Norman Solomon warned that neither Biden or Mayo can be trusted.

In a recent New Yorker profile of Pete Buttigieg, one sentence stands out: “Watch Buttigieg long enough and you notice that he uses abstraction as an escape hatch.” Evasive platitudes are also routine for Joe Biden, the other major Democratic presidential candidate running in what mainstream journalists call “the center lane.”

Jim Hightower has observed that “there’s nothing in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos.” Or, we might say, party lines and deadening politics.

Like other so-called “moderate” politicians, Buttigieg and Biden dodge key questions by plunging into foggy rhetoric. They’re incapable of giving a coherent and truthful account of power in the United States because they’re beholden to corporate-aligned donors. Those donors want to hear doubletalk that protects their interests, not clear talk that could threaten them.

“Forty billionaires and their spouses have donated to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, according to an analysis of federal election filings, making the South Bend, Indiana mayor a favorite among America’s richest people,” Forbes reported last month.

…Buttigieg is a very new darling of corporate America compared to his main centrist rival. Biden-- who has a decades-long record of scarcely legal corruptio while serving corporate interests in Washington-- is also heavily reliant on wealthy donors and foggy abstractions.

But the basic contradiction-- between serving enemies of working people and claiming to be a champion of working people-- is an increasingly difficult circle to square. And a barrier to credibility with many voters.

...That was a subtext when Biden declared in May 2018: “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble... The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” (At last count, 44 billionaires and their spouses have donated to Biden’s campaign.)

Abstractions and evasions of the sort practiced daily by Buttigieg and Biden amount to papering over class conflicts. In sharp contrast, Elizabeth Warren and even more so Bernie Sanders (whom I actively support) are willing to name the names of corporations and billionaires growing even wealthier in ways that undermine the lives of most Americans.

It’s understandable that corporate-backed candidates don’t want to be cornered by questions that touch on realities of political and economic power. They’d much rather take evasive action than be candid. It’s not enticing to name victimizers when they’re funding your campaign.

Imagine who either would pick to be Secretary of the Treasury. In fact, imagine who either would pick to be Secretary of just about everything. Yes… nothing would fundamentally change.

I want to recommend a piece Danny Goldberg wrote for The Nation this week, Madam Secretary, RIP. “in the age of Trump,” he wrote, “middle of the roaders also have elusive dreams, some of which were dramatized for the past six years in the CBS TV series Madam Secretary which aired its series finale on December 8th.”

For the most part, the mainstream press either ignored or condescended to the political drama which starred Tea Leoni as Secretary of State for the first five years. Keith Carradine played the President who appointed her until the show’s final season when his successor, Elizabeth McCord, became America’s first female President. In an affectionate farewell, Margaret Lyons of the New York Times nevertheless referred to Madam Secretary as “the least hip of shows,” and downplayed its political relevance.

Yet the “conservative” website MRC (whose slogan is “Exposing and Combatting Liberal Media Bias” and which Breitbart often links to) published three separate attack pieces about the show in the last few months beginning with the snarky exhortation “Liberals rejoice! Your dream of a Hillary Clinton presidency is finally coming true.”

That right-wing focus may have been as a result of the fact that in the increasingly fragmented video playing field, old school TV networks remain a surprisingly big fragment. At its peak, Madam Secretary was seen by over fourteen million viewers-- more than triple the number who watch the highest-rated cable news programs. A fictional series about Washington is not “news,” but in a culture in which a large percentage of voters make decisions based on emotions, a drama that directly addresses political issues is one part of the mosaic that forms contemporary mythology. Although the show’s creator Barbara Hall told me that she had not kept track of its demographics, she agreed that a large part of Madame Secretary’s audience was the kind of older, educated suburban women who are responsible for Nancy Pelosi being Speaker.

Hall, who previously produced Joan Of Arcadia, based Madam Secretary on the template of The West Wing: intelligent idealistic characters who like to banter (no anti-heroes among them), earnest attempts to present political issues, but with enough humor and family drama added to avoid the feel of a civics lesson. Madam Secretary depicted a Washington in which conservatives and liberals had principled arguments which strained credulity even during the Obama administration when the series began-- and which increasingly seemed like a fairy tale in the Trump era.

Hall initially set the series in the State Department, believing that setting would allow the characters to avoid tribal arguments about domestic issues. But Madam Secretary’s concept of the foreign policy “center” included a sentimental view of imperialism. Both McCord and her husband Henry (played by Tim Daly) had worked for the CIA earlier in their careers. The premiere of the 2018 season included cameos by Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, and Hillary Clinton.

Madam Secretary’s primary story arc in its final season revolved around election interference by Iran—which in real life has been the favorite bogeyman of neo-conservatives. Unlike Trump, McCord knows nothing of a foreign country’s meddling, was outraged when she found out, and cooperated unreservedly with Congressional investigations. There was an unsettling aftertaste of “both sides do it” in this convoluted formulation.

On the other hand, the series included critiques of the military-industrial complex on issues that rarely get attention from the mainstream media. In one episode, McCord pushed for “de-alerting” of nuclear missiles to reduce the chance of an accidental war, persuading the Russians to reciprocate. Hall recalls “That’s one of the big aspirational swings we took. It would be an enormous undertaking to actually make that happen.” In another episode which was informed by research from Human Rights Watch, McCord prevented the military from deploying “autonomous weapons,” robots on the ground that are programmed to kill.

Near the end of the series, the drama depicted a “deep fake” video that made it look like the President and her husband were insulting to the Korean president, a deception that temporarily delayed a trade deal. McCord delved into the website YourVid (a fictional version of YouTube) and recognized that the site had an algorithm that led viewers from the fake to a series of increasingly radical right-wing memes. She despairingly told her husband “It all leads to white nationalism.” When McCord confronted the CEO of YourVid, the response echoed the kind of disingenuous free speech arguments that Mark Zuckerberg has been making lately.

The right-wing media site MRC indignantly wrote, “Madam Secretary subscribes to the theory that fake videos not only spread lies but radicalize people into racists as well.” Yet I suspect the complaint obscures the actual reason that a painstakingly centrist drama was the source of so much libertarian ire. Madame Secretary’s real sin was that it portrayed an effective female President who oversaw an executive branch populated by earnest hardworking policy wonks who worked for the greater good of the United States. Most of the issues dramatized by the series will fade in relevance over time, but its sympathetic vision of the foreign service will live on via Netflix (which also offers all seven seasons of The West Wing). The show’s aspirational portrayal of government service is probably what triggers the rage of Trumpists-- and what makes Madame Secretary, neo-liberal warts and all, a subterranean dream worth re-visiting.