Which Side Are You On?

David Sirota posted 2 videos from Friday's cable news shows that shows the disconnect in what Sirota calls market populists and grassroots populists.

On one side, you have what Thomas Frank has called "Market Populism" - the portrayal of Wall Street's agenda as an impassioned mass-based populist movement. Check out this clip from CNBC, where the network's correspondent, Rick Santelli, is literally on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange surrounded by multimillionaire traders railing on the Obama administration for trying to help struggling homeowners, and berating people who are getting foreclosed on as "losers." Santelli is praised as a supposed "revolutionary" and the mob of financial elites around him is whooping and hollering, pretending to be a populist mob of regular Joes:



Now watch Virg Bernero, the mayor of Lansing, Michigan, presenting the antithesis of Market Populism - let's call it Grassroots Populism. Bernero demands to know how anyone can be calling for wage/benefit cuts for workers at a time the government is taking workers' tax money and handing it to the very speculators that Santelli is whooping it up with:



After watching these two clips, the question is the same question that's always been at the heart of economic politics: Which side are you on? And the answer, if you look at the hard data, is that most Americans are Grassroots Populists: those who think Wall Street and the government are colluding to rip off taxpayers, and who think the crumbs of aid for so-called "losers" that Santelli is ragging on is way too small - not way too much.

Thursday's Highlights From the Democratic National Convention

Iowan and Olympic Gold Medalist Shawn Johnson started the day off by leading the pledge of allegiance.

Bill Richardson outlined how McCain has consistently changed his position on numerous issues and then nailed McCain on wearing $520 pair of Italian loafers, saying...

John McCain may pay hundreds of dollars for his shoes, but we're the ones who will pay for his flip-flops.

Al Gore spoke last night and had this great line...

Today, we face essentially the same choice we faced in 2000, though it may be even more obvious now - because John McCain, a man who has earned our respect on many levels, is now openly endorsing the policies of the Bush-Cheney White House and promising to actually continue them, the same policies all over again?

Hey, I believe in recycling, but that’s ridiculous.

Then a group of everyday people who were Republicans, but are now supporting Obama spoke. One of these people was Barney Smith from Marion, Indiana who summed up the difference between Obama and McCain...

We need a president who puts the Barney Smiths before the Smith Barneys.

I will write more later about Obama's speech, but this article by David Sirota sums up Obama's speech, saying that Obama has made an economic populism the key theme to this election.

Jim Webb: The Fire Breathing Economic Populist

The Economist takes a look at Sen. Jim Webb possibly being Obama's running mate.

Webb has great resume on foreign policy issues and opposed the Iraq War from the beginning...

In his prescience on this issue, Mr Webb, who is now a senator, has much in common with Barack Obama. The difference is that Mr Webb is a military man. He attended the Naval Academy (also John McCain's alma mater), was decorated four times and wounded twice in Vietnam, and served as Ronald Reagan's secretary of the navy. His father was in the air force; his son served in Iraq. No one, therefore, can accuse Mr Webb of being an effete peacenik.

Webb comes from a swing state and is a Washington outisder...

He is from Virginia, a battleground state with 13 juicy electoral votes. At 62, he is reassuringly older than Mr Obama, but he has been a politician for less than two years, which fits nicely with Mr Obama's message of freshness and change.

However, they conclude that Webb would be a poor choice because he is a fire breathing economic populist.

The main worry about Mr Webb, however, is that he is a genuine fire-breathing economic populist. He appears actually to believe the sort of stuff that Mr Obama only says during Democratic primaries. Since vice-presidents sometimes become presidents, this matters. American workers, says Mr Webb, “are at the mercy of cut-throat executives who are vastly overpaid, partly as a consequence of giving [the workers'] jobs away to other people.” Illegal immigration and globalisation “threaten to dissipate” the American middle-class way of life. He predicts that, unless the government acts to restore “economic fairness”, America “may well go the way of ancient Greece [or] greed-ridden Rome”.

I think that might be the biggest reason why Webb should be Obama's VP.

The Uprising

I have been reading The Uprising by David Sirota. Sirota was on PBS's NOW last week to discuss the book.

Huckabee's TV ad in Michigan Targets Working Families

Mike Huckabee's latest TV ad in Michigan highlights the struggles of working families and the loss of jobs.

The best line...

I believe most Americans want their next President to remind them of they guy they work with, not the guy who laid them off.

Economic Populism Thunders on the Campaign Trail in Iowa

EJ Dionne of the Washington Post has a story out about the economic populist themes of John Edwards and Mike Huckabee's campaigns. From my experiences talking to Republicans about different issues, one thing we can agree on is that government policy favors corporations and the wealthy over the interests of average people and that big money has too much influence in the process.

Dionne has this quote by Huckabee at a recent campaign event in Iowa...

"I'm not exactly the pick of some of the East Coast establishment Republicans," the former governor of Arkansas said in a nice bit of heartland understatement. "I think they don't understand a lot of us who don't live in their world."

"If you ask a hedge fund manager what's he worried about, he's going to give you a very different answer than a guy who just lost his job in a factory in Orange City," Huckabee continues in a quiet voice, referring to a town in the western part of the state. And then he speaks up for "the guy in Orange City" who is alarmed by the price of gasoline, the rising costs of college and health care, the inexorable increases in "deductibles" and "co-pays."

Dionne concludes...

Since the Reagan era, the heroes of the nation's economic story have been valiant entrepreneurs who "took risks" and "created wealth." This narrative advanced the Republican cause and seeped deeply into the Democratic Party. If Iowa is any indication, there is a new narrative in which the old heroes are cast as the goats of the story and the new heroes are people like "the guy in Orange City." There is a thunder out of Iowa, and it is shaking both parties.

Don't Move to the Middle, Progressive Needs to be Partisan

Paul Krugman has an article that shows how the country is becoming more liberal. He cites polls that show Americans agreeing with liberal positions and the elections of progressives in red states in 2006.

Krugman then discusses the need for progressives to take advantage of that shift by pushing ahead on bold ideas.

The question, however, is whether Democrats will take advantage of America’s new liberalism. To do that, they have to be ready to forcefully make the case that progressive goals are right and conservatives are wrong. They also need to be ready to fight some very nasty political battles.

And that’s where the continuing focus of many people on Bush, rather than the movement he represents, has become a problem.

Krugman concludes...

So, here’s my worry: Democrats, with the encouragement of people in the news media who seek bipartisanship for its own sake, may fall into the trap of trying to be anti-Bushes—of trying to transcend partisanship, seeking some middle ground between the parties.

That middle ground doesn’t exist—and if Democrats try to find it, they’ll squander a huge opportunity. Right now, the stars are aligned for a major change in America’s direction. If the Democrats play nice, that opportunity may soon be gone.

As Ned Lamont stated no one is looking for a moderate to run their company, they want someone who stands up for their strong beliefs. The idea of a moderate is a trap because the term moderate is defined in the political dialogue today means “being in the middle of elite opinion in Washington, D.C.”

The dismal approval ratings of the President and of Congress shows that Americans are overwhelmingly disappointed in their government. This is not because of partisan bickering, but because it seems that both parties represent corporate profit instead of the people that elected them.

The 2006 elections showed that candidates that run on a platform of economic populism win regardless of what state they come from. People are looking for candidate that have the courage to push big ideas, not ones that run to the middle.

A Populist/Progressive Message

Mike Lux takes an in depth look at swing districts. His overriding theme is that...

a populist/progressive message tends to out-perform a traditional John Kerry-esque establishment/liberal message in most swing districts. This goes against conventional wisdom that swing voters tend to be "office park dads" and other Mark Penn/DLC swing voter constructs.

Lux tested his theory by looking at districts that are held by Democrats, but lean Republican in Presidential elections.

I counted 22 members of Congress who have clearly run either progressive message campaigns, been champions of progressive issues in Congress, or both. They include some newcomers like Hodes and Shea-Porter from NH, Braley from IA, Hall and Gillibrand from NY. And they include some of the best populists in Congress who have been around for a while, like Obey from Wisconsin, DeFazio from Oregon, Doggett from Texas and Allen from Maine, members of Congress who survived many big Republican elections years. They include people like Phil Hare from the working-class Quad Cities area of Illinois, who beat back the Republican for an open seat in the Republican year of 2004, replacing another great progressive hero, Lane Evans, who had won that very marginal district election after election since 1982 despite being one of the most progressive members of Congress.

To claim, as many establishment Democrats do, that strong progressives can't win or keep marginal seats in Congress is simply not true. We need to constantly challenge that kind of conventional wisdom, and do our own candidate recruitment drives to get strong candidates.

Iowa's 4th District would definitely fit into this category. Hopefully, a candidate steps up and runs on a strong populist/progressive message.

Edwards and Obama Vying to be the Most Popular Populist

David Sirota has a great post about John Edwards and Barack Obama battling it out for the Populist mantle. Sirota takes a look at the populists stances each has taken and writes...

But now, Obama is taking Edwards more seriously, trying to match -- if not one-up -- Edwards in the race for the populist mantle. It really doesn't matter whether you think Obama's moves are principled or whether you think he is just politically calculating and can't really be a populist because his campaign is overrun with Wall Street cash and Washington insiders. The point here is that there is clearly a competition going on -- and that's a good thing not just for the candidates in question, but for a political debate sorely lacking in any real discussion of the major economic forces that shape -- and hurt -- America

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Economic Populism is the Democratic Party of the Future

The message of economic populism helped Democratic candidates earn victories in the 2006 election. One of those candidates that pulled off an upset was James Webb who won his Senate race in Virginia.

David Sirota writes about this quote from Webb in today's Washington Post...

“He criticized what he called ‘the Rubin wing of the Democratic Party,’ after Robert E. Rubin, former President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, saying those Democrats share the same problem as many Republicans: ‘We’re not paying attention to what has happened to basic working people in the country.’ He said of the freshman Senate Democrats, six of them take a ‘populist’ view, and said they are bringing needed reinforcements to the Senate: ‘We’ve got a number of us that pretty well see the economic issues the same way. I think that’s the Democratic Party of the future.’”

Moving to the Left

EJ Dionne of the Washington Post has an article today about the country moving to the left. He has a couple interesting points...

Today's left is not talking about nationalizing industry, abolishing capitalism or destroying the rich. What passes for "left" in American politics is quite moderate by historical standards.

He cites popular Republicans governing with moderate views and Democrats embracing economic populism doing well at the polls...

Economic populism is no longer marginal or antique. Frustration over growing economic inequalities, excessive compensation for executives, the privileged role of hedge funds and the disruptions caused by globalization are mainstream concerns. Newly elected Democratic senators as diverse as Jon Tester of Montana, Jim Webb of Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota all sounded populist themes in 2006.

Today's Republican Party

This is the 3rd video today I am posting from YouTube. I am thinking I will just make this a YouTube day. I have a couple more that I get to posting, depending on how interesting the NCAA tournament games are tonight.

This video pretty much tells you everything about what is wrong with the Republican Party and George W. Bush.



Is this the same Republican Party of Eisenhower?

Here are some related posts...
Forget the Death Tax. What about the Birth Tax?
Tax Cuts for the top 3.5% of Americans!
Bush is Crippling Unborn Children with Debt and Giving the Rich Tax Cuts

Homework

Here are some good articles that I have found the past few days that I recommend...

Kos of DailyKos has posted some thoughts on the 2008 race. There isn't really a conclusion, but some interesting ideas.

It is always great when Steve King is in the news. Here is a look at Steve King's views on immigration and other wacky stuff he has said.

David Sirota has a story about the new era of populism.

From the Iowa Fiscal Partnership, Iowa needs universal health care coverage. They say forget the bandaids, Iowa needs a totally new health care system that takes the burden off employers.

Welcome Economic Populists!

The mainstream media would lead you to believe that many of the Democrats that won on November 7th because they are more conservative. In the past, I have asked where does moving to the center get us? A look at the candidates that won, it looks like centrism gets us no where and the key to succes is economic populism.

That economic populism extends, for many candidates, to a new emphasis on expanding health coverage. Congressional Democrats who lived through the Clinton administration’s failed effort to create a national health insurance plan, which many believe was a crucial factor in the Democrats’ losses in 1994, have been wary of broad health legislation for years. (And being in the minority, they were unable to do much about it, regardless.) But the class of ’06 is adamant that something major can, and will, be done.

The media says many of the Democrats elected were Centrists because they only see things on a Liberal - Conservative line and they say that Bob Casey is pro-life (so he can't be that much of a Liberal and must be centrists), Jon Tester is pro-gun (so he can't be that much of a Liberal and must be a centrists), and Jim Webb is pro-military (so he can't be that much of a Liberal and must be a centrsits). Democrats can't fall for the centrists trap.

Many of the democrats elected on Tuesday are progressive populists. The Progressive Caucus membership in the House is going to increase by from the low-50's to 64, with many holding important positions on committees. In the Senate, Bernie Sanders, Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, Sheldon Whitehouse, Bob Casey, and even Jim Webb are progressive populists that believe in a balanced budget, health care for all, a strong and an intelligent fight against terrorism, and most importantly Fair Trade agreements that keep jobs in America.

This November, Americans voiced their disapproval of the Iraq War and disaproval of the corporate agenda. Centrists Democrats push the corporate agenda and put profit before people just as much as Republicans do. Luckily, for the common Americans out there, these newly elected members to congress hold different views. Views that put wager earners before wealth and put people before profit.

That economic populism extends, for many candidates, to a new emphasis on expanding health coverage. Congressional Democrats who lived through the Clinton administration’s failed effort to create a national health insurance plan, which many believe was a crucial factor in the Democrats’ losses in 1994, have been wary of broad health legislation for years. (And being in the minority, they were unable to do much about it, regardless.) But the class of ’06 is adamant that something major can, and will, be done.