Do You Think Chris Christie Is Mainstream, A Centrist? He Wants You To. How About AOC?

In the video above, Morning Joe regular, Mike Barnicle, asked Chris Christie how he felt about the neo-fascist CPAC convention giving the announcement of Senator John McCain's death a standing ovation. Barnicle's soft ball: "Is that your political party?" Watch Christie's pivot into an attack on the figure the right-of-center establishment fears most in the whole country. "No, that's not people I would agree with," establishes a rapport with the audience who would also not agree with Nazis cheering the death of John McCain either. "You know, Mike, there's always been elements of my party that I haven't agreed with." Oh, he's such a bipartisan centrist (just like me... my kinda guy). Now that he's got your attention and sympathy... the pivot:

I think that's normal for any political party. I'm sure there are folks who have heard some of the things that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is saying that are mainstream Democrats who say 'no, that's not the party that I belong to, even though that may be where the energy is right now in the Democratic Party.'... Both parties...

Which "things that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is saying" are comparable to a bunch neo-Nazi Trump supporters cheering the death of John McCain? A 70% margin tax rate on annual income over $10,000,000? The Green New Deal? Medicare for All? Replacing ICE? What does she say that is so offensive to self-labeled "centrists?" That "people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be drafting health care legislation and that people who are taking money from oil and gas companies shouldn't be drafting climate legislation?" I understand exactly why that enrages congressional criminals like Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD). I can see how it drove that worthless slug Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who was kicked out of office by voters in Missouri in part because she took $1,671,164 from the healthcare sector, denounce a reformer like AOC. She doesn't make establishment career criminals comfortable. Nor does she want to. And they want her DEAD.

Yesterday Mehdi Hasan's Intercept essay, AOC, Sanders And Warren Are The Real Centrists Because They Speak For Most Americans, made a lot more sense that the garbage you normally hear fromBeltway media sellouts using the word "moderate" to describe conservatives. Hasan is as angry about this as I am. He asks his readers-- one of whom you should be-- to "Google the words 'moderate' or 'centrist' and a small group of names will instantly appear: Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, and, yes, Howard Schultz. Bloomberg is considered a 'centrist thought leader' (Vanity Fair). Klobuchar is the 'straight-shooting pragmatist' (Time). Biden is the 'quintessential centrist' (CNN) and the 'last hurrah for moderate Democrats (New York Magazine), Shultz is gifted with high-profile interview slots to make his 'centrist independent' pitch to voters." Blood boiling yet? Hasan:

Now Google the freshman House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s been dubbed a member of the “loony left” (Washington Post), a “progressive firebrand” (Reuters), and a “liberal bomb thrower” (New York Times).

Got that? Biden, Schultz and Co., we are told, sit firmly in the middle of American politics; Ocasio-Cortez stands far out on its fringes.

This is a brazen distortion of reality, a shameless and demonstrable lie that is repeated day after day in newspaper op-eds and cable news headlines.

“It’s easy to call what AOC is doing as far-lefty, but nothing could be farther from the truth,” Nick Hanauer, the venture capitalist and progressive activist, told MSNBC in January. “When you advocate for economic policies that benefit the broad majority of citizens, that’s true centrism. What Howard Schultz represents, the centrism that he represents, is really just trickle-down economics.”

“He is not the centrist,” continued Hanauer. “AOC is the centrist.”



Hanauer is right. And Bernie Sanders is centrist too-- smeared as an “ideologue” (The Economist) and “dangerously far left” (Chicago Tribune). So too is Elizabeth Warren-- dismissed as a “radical extremist” (Las Vegas Review-Journal) and a “class warrior” (Fox News).

The inconvenient truth that our lazy media elites do so much to ignore is that Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren are much closer in their views to the vast majority of ordinary Americans than the Bloombergs or the Bidens. They are the true centrists, the real moderates; they represent the actual political middle.

Don't believe me? Take Ocasio-Cortez’s signature issue: the Green New Deal. Former George W. Bush speechwriter-- and torture advocate-- Marc Thiessen claims that the Green New Deal will “make the Democrats unelectable in 2020.” The Economist agrees: “The bold plan could make the party unelectable in conservative-leaning states.” The Green New Deal “will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them,” a testy Diane Feinstein, the senior and supposedly “moderate” Democratic senator from California, told a bunch of kids in a viral video.

But here is the reality: The Green New Deal is extremely popular and has massive bipartisan support. A recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University found that a whopping 81 percent of voters said they either “strongly support” (40 percent) or “somewhat support” (41 percent) the Green New Deal, including 64 percent of Republicans (and even 57 percent of conservative Republicans).

What else do Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and Sanders have in common with each other-- and with the voters? They want to soak the rich. Ocasio-Cortez suggested a 70 percent marginal tax rate on incomes above $10 million-- condemned by “centrist” Schultz as “un-American” but backed by a majority (51 percent) of Americans. Warren proposed a 2 percent wealth tax on assets above $50 million-- slammed by “moderate” Bloomberg as Venezuelan-style socialism, but supported by 61 percent of voters, including 51 percent of Republicans. (As my colleague Jon Schwarz has demonstrated, “Americans have never, in living memory, been averse to higher taxes on the rich.”)

How about health care? The vast majority (70 percent) of voters, including a majority (52 percent) of Republicans, support a single-payer universal health care system, or Medicare for All. Six in 10 say it is “the responsibility of the federal government” to ensure that all Americans have access to health care coverage.

Debt-free and tuition-free college? A clear majority (60 percent) of the public, including a significant minority (41 percent) of Republicans, support free college “for those who meet income levels.”

A higher minimum wage? According to Pew, almost 6 in 10 (58 percent) Americans support increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to (the Sanders-recommended) $15 an hour.

Gun control? About six out of 10 (61 percent) Americans back stricter laws on gun control, according to Gallup, “the highest percentage to favor tougher firearms laws in two or more decades.” Almost all Americans (94 percent) back universal background checks on all gun sales-- including almost three-quarters of National Rifle Association members.

Abortion? Support for a legal right to abortion, according to a June 2018 poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, is at an “all-time high.” Seven out of 10 Americans said they believed Roe v. Wade “should not be overturned,” including a majority (52 percent) of Republicans.

Legalizing marijuana? Two out of three Americans think marijuana should be made legal. According to a Gallup survey from October 2018, this marks “another new high in Gallup’s trend over nearly half a century.” And here’s the kicker: A majority (53 percent) of Republicans support legal marijuana too!

Mass incarceration? About nine out of 10 (91 percent) Americans say that the criminal justice system “has problems that need fixing.” About seven out of 10 (71 percent) say it is important “to reduce the prison population in America,” including a majority (52 percent) of Trump voters.

Immigration? “A record-high 75 percent of Americans,” including 65 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, told Gallup in 2018 that immigration is a “good thing for the U.S.” Six in 10 Americans oppose the construction of a wall on the southern border, while a massive 8 in 10 (81 percent) support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

How much of this polling, however, is reflected in the daily news coverage of the Democrats, which seeks to pit “leftist” activists against “centrist” voters, and “liberals” against “moderates”?

How is it that labels like “centrist” and “moderate,” which common sense tells us should reflect the views of a majority of Americans, have come to be applied to those who represent minority interests and opinions?

How many political reporters are willing to tell their readers or viewers what Stanford political scientist David Broockman told Vox’s Ezra Klein in 2014: “When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want. Within both parties there is this tension between what the politicians who get more corporate money and tend to be part of the establishment want-- that’s what we tend to call moderate-- versus what the Tea Party and more liberal members want”?

The center ground-- if it even exists-- cannot be found on a map; it is not a fixed geographical location. You cannot get in your car, type the address in your navigation, and then drive to it.

It moves, it shifts, it reacts to events. The center of 2019 is not the center of 1999 or even 2009. You want to know where it is right now? You want to find the moderate middle? Then ignore the right-wing hacks, the conventional wisdom-mongers, and the donor class. Go check out the policy platforms of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.

You may not recall Brad DeLong, the subject of an interesting piece by Zach Beauchamp for Vox yesterday. He's a UC-Berkeley economist, who served as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration and is widely considered "one of the market-friendly, neoliberal Democrats who have dominated the party for the last 20 years. The term he uses for himself is 'Rubin Democrat'-- referring to followers of finance industry-friendly Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin." Zach reports that "DeLong believes that the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong wrote. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.” Good; I hope that's one less vote for Status Quo Joe.

The core reason, DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to shift. Rather than being a center-left coalition dominated by market-friendly ideas designed to attract conservative support, the energy of the coalition should come from the left and its broad, sweeping ideas. Market-friendly neoliberals, rather than pushing their own ideology, should work to improve ideas on the left. This, he believes, is the most effective and sustainable basis for Democratic politics and policy for the foreseeable future.

​The Liberal Meritocracy at Work

Liberal meritocracy in action. Slick new buses like these ferry high tech workers to and from Bay Area jobs, using city bus stops as pickup points. The city gets "a pittance" for each "stop event" while the city's less-connected citizens get no right at all to ride them (source).

by Gaius Publius

Thomas Frank has made the point many times that the modern Democratic Party has abandoned the working class, and indeed most of the middle class, and that today its true constituency is really just the "professional" class, the upper 10%, more or less.

That makes a kind of sense if, cynical electoral financing decisions aside, people who actually run the Democratic Party inhabit a culture that considers only the "smart" and "accomplished" truly deserving. Consider the constant praise from mainstream Democrats, for example, of the "entrepreneurial" or "creative" class and how these wannabe billionaires — riders of Google Buses in San Francisco, a kind of alt-transportation system to which only high tech workers have access — can be counted on to lift the rest of the country out of the depths and into a new age of job creation (in China).

There could not be a more striking example of this kind of meritocracy than the following email from the Podesta Wikileaks archives (h/t commenter John Wright in this Naked Capitalism thread). It was sent from Clinton supporter and UC Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong during the primary season to Clinton supporter and Center for American Progress chief Neera Tanden:

From:brad.delong@gmail.com
To: ntanden@americanprogress.org
CC: john.podesta@gmail.com
Date: 2015-07-31 15:42

Subject: So my 25-year-old Michael DeLong has applied for a Firearms Safety Policy job at CAP…

Dear Neera (and John)—

So my 25-year-old Michael DeLong has applied for a Firearms Safety Policy job at CAP…

I think he is a very, very strong candidate on the merits, given what he has been doing in Portland at Ceasefire Oregon in the three years since he graduated from Reed College, and how effective he has been there. But I find myself somewhat anxious [that] somebody already in Washington and with better connections might crowd him out…

May I beg you to reassure me?

Yours,

Brad DeLong

When the working class does this, of course, it's called nepotism. I'm sure at Neera Tanden's level it's called "networking."

There were several notes about DeLong's son's job availability sprinkled among the Podesta emails that involved Professor DeLong, and it's certainly true that fathers and mothers everywhere have attempted to ease their children's entry into the job market by asking for a boost from friends. I don't fault the act.

What makes this stand out, though, is not DeLong's interest in seeing his son hired, but his stated fear that his son would be lose his slot at CAP, not to someone better qualified, but to someone better connected.

Thus the "meritorious" competition seems recognized as not between the talented and connected; just between the connected. "I find myself somewhat anxious [that] somebody already in Washington and with better connections might crowd him out… May I beg you to reassure me?"

A small thing perhaps, and certainly not a strike against DeLong for asking. Every father should love his children, and DeLong's son does sound accomplished.

Nevertheless, this is a striking reminder of what concepts like "democracy" and "rights" mean to mainstream (Clinton wing and Obama wing) Democrats as a group, as they struggle with the problem of offering to the rest of us — or working to deny it — the same "rights" that the Party elite and its servicing ecosystem already enjoy as privileges of class, like access to affordable, quality medical care.

Schedule note: I'll be reading but not writing for about two weeks, restarting after Labor Day.

GP
 

Somehow we've got to change the idea that in economic issues the so-called "serious" people can be trusted

"The old Soviet Union had two newspapers, Pravda and Izvestia -- Truth and Light -- and the saying in Moscow was, 'Where there is Truth, there's no Light. And where there is Light, there's no Truth.' It's clear now that the Soviet Union didn't really end.

"The walls came down, and we became them."

-- economist James K. Galbraith, in a blogpost
tearing the Catfish Commission report to shreds

by Ken

As Howie and I, along with scads of other commentators on the Left, have been pointing out repeatedly, under cover of the economic meltdown they themselves did so much to cause, and from which they have managed to get the government to largely extricate their personal interests, the American megacorporate oligarchy has been stealthily advancing a political agenda that even those greedy sons of bitches probably never dreamed they could get away with. I suppose you have to admire the sheer gall.

The fights over the and the Catfood Commission's secretly crafted deficit-reduction proposals and the issue of the expiring Bush tax cuts tend to merge in our minds because they really are part of the same agenda. The same agglomeration of writers has been pointing out since the spawning of the Catfood Commission that it was always devised, not to solve real economic issues -- of which I believe there actually are genuinely critical ones -- but to complete the restructuring of the American economy begun in the Reagan administration, and since then only marginally slowed down, and in many ways actually advanced, by the theoretically ideologically contrary Clinton administration, which in fact shared many of the same assumptions about whose interests should be paramount in the restructured economy.

"Deficit hawks" is the shorthand description for the ideologues of corporate governance who see the deficit as their opening for establishing once and for all who's in charge. And the makeup of the Catfood Commission left no possible doubt that it was commissioned to produce a report that would be a deficit hawk's wet dream. There are pandering pols who profess to be impressed by the commission's "bipartisan" 11-7 vote affirming for the report. Since the ground rules of the commission called for a minimum of 14 "yes" votes, and Bowles and Simpson were unable to drum up more than 11, despite what I assume must have been a fairly intense campaign of "persuasion," suggests how one-sided their document is.

What most disconcerts me about the developing debate about what to do about the deficit is the seemingly universally accepted determination made by our Village political-and-media nexus and for a couple of decades now applied to pretty much any issue that arises, as to who qualifies as a "serious" participant in the discussion. If you swear an oath to Village Principles and Assumptions, you're serious; otherwise you don't even exist. You're consigned to history's future "who could have foreseen?" invisibles. Think of the political and economic catastrophe of the Iraq war and the economic catastrophe of the housing bubble. Plenty of people foresaw both, but even after they were proved right, they not only weren't rewarded, they weren't listened to any more than they had been. Instead generous rewards were given, and the cleanup was entrusted to, the very people who got us into those messes.

The "serious" people.

On the specific issue of the Catfood Commission, economist James K. Galbraith is developing into a "go to" voice of sanity. In a New Deal 2.0 post yesterday, more widely circulated on AlterNet as "Moment of Lies: Galbraith Attacks Lack of Evidence for Frantic Deficit Fear Mongering" (with the subhead "The sky is falling, but not enough to tax the rich apparently"), he began:

The report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, issued on December 1, 2010 by Chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is entitled “The Moment of Truth.” The words appear in block caps on the second page, weighty and portentous. They reappear in the first paragraph of the preamble:

“Throughout our nation’s history, Americans have found the courage to do right by our children’s future. Deep down, every American knows that we face a moment of truth once again.”

These sentences set the tone. The first is a bald-faced lie, as a Westerner like Senator Simpson knows perfectly well. To the contrary, we have often fallen under the sway of robber barons, water barons, oil barons, bison-killers, clear-cutters and strip-miners, hell-bent on maximum pillage in the shortest time. Only occasionally have a few heroes like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and Harold Ickes Sr. emerged to battle for the most precious physical elements of our heritage — and then only with limited success.

In the next paragraph, the Commission states the threat:

“Our challenge is clear and inescapable. America cannot be great if we go broke.”

Exactly what it might mean for America to “go broke” is not explained. Nor is it anywhere in the report. . . .

By all means check out Galbraith's post for the specifics of the bogosity of the commission report. My immediate point is the contrast between the "serious" people whom Village pundits are now crediting with being "realistic" about the deficit, as against an economist as respected as Galbraith, who has nevertheless been relegated to the Party of the Invisible. Remember, he was asked for input by the commission, which he provided in the form of a scathing report, which was strenuously ignored. Some of the hardest work the commissioners seems to have performed was ignoring all realities that don't accord with their designated agenda.

And I'm afraid, once again, that anyone looking to the president as a "centrist" compromiser, someone we might hope will stand up at least in part for Americans who aren't tied to the corporate oligarchy, is living in a dream world. Our friend Ian Welsh made this point once again in a blogpost yesterday:

Obama isn’t about compromise

People, Obama is not and never has been a left winger. Nor is he a Nixonian or Eisenhower Republican, that would put him massively to the left of where he is and to the left of the majority of the Democratic party. Instead his a Reaganite, something he told people repeatedly.

Until folks get it through their skulls that Obama is not and never was a liberal, a progressive or left wing in any way, shape or form they are going to continue misdiagnosing the problem. That isn’t to say Obama may or may not be a wimp, but he always compromises right, never left and his compromises are minor. He always wanted tax cuts. He gave away the public option in private negotiations near the beginning of the HCR fight, not the end. He never even proposed an adequate stimulus bill. He bent arms, hard, to get TARP through.

He’s a Reaganite. It’s what he believes in, genuinely. Moreover he despises left wingers, likes kicking gays and women whenever he gets a chance and believes deeply and truly in the security state (you did notice that Obama administration told everyone to take their objections to backscatter scanners and groping and shove them where the sun don’t shine, then told you they’re thinking of extending TSA police state activities to other public transit?)

Let me put it even more baldly. Obama is, actually, a bad man. He didn’t do the right thing when he had a majority, and now that he has the excuse of a Republican House he’s going to let them do bad thing after bad thing. This isn’t about “compromise”, this is about doing what he wants to do anyway, like slashing social security. The Senate, you remember, voted down the catfood comission. Obama reinstituted it by executive fiat.

If the left doesn’t stand against Obama and doesn’t primary him, it stands for nothing and for nobody.

For the record, let me say that I am prepared to believe we indeed have, not so much a "deficit" problem as a "borrowing" problem -- namely that Americans have been encouraged to take on so much debt that our economy, which now produces hardly anything with which we might be able to pay off what we owe, is in for a mighty fall. We have our own economists screaming about it hear Europeans screaming about.

You know, people like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and Brad DeLong, people who not only could but did foresee the housing bubble, but whom the Chicago nitwits, not to mention the coalition of megacorporate media and political whores, continue to pretend never existed. We hear it more and more from Europeans -- that is, those of us who occasionally hear Europeans, whom the Right has worked so hard to reduce to bogeypersons to be reviled, presumably for this very purpose. A coming cataclysm in the American economy surely has to be on the minds of the Chinese who own so much of our increasingly dubious paper.

So yes, I am prepared to believe there's a potentially devastating reckoning up ahead. Unfortunately, the people who have been anointed, or have anointed themselves, as "serious" are the last people we should want presiding over it -- or anywhere near it.

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