The Black Commentator - Cover Story: Left Margin

If the Democrats fail to win the 2008 Presidential election, guess who will deserve the blame? Black people. That’s the way some people in the top leadership of the party, and at least one pundit, apparently see it. Why? Because in the wake of this year’s Congressional election, the party faces “irreconcilable demands in a zero-sum game” and it’s going to tear them apart. So wrote columnist Tom Edsall in the New York Times Nov. 18. You see, some “Strikingly liberal African-Americans have used seniority to win control of at least four committee chairs and one top leadership post, after an election in which Democratic victory was crucially dependent on a surge of moderate voters, particularly white men, defecting from the G.O.P.” The party’s problem results from having “pledged both fiscal austerity and new spending on middle-class benefits, including broadened access to health care…”

You get the picture. The party’s future lies with the “swing voters,” mostly these white males who allegedly split from the Republicans principally over the war, corruption and lax morals in the GOP and are stalwarts for “fiscal austerity” as opposed to “the majority (60 to 65 percent) of Democratic voters who are disproportionately poor, African-American or Hispanic, and in grave need of material assistance.”

Edsall, who teaches journalism at Colombia University in New York, was previously at the Washington Post and now writes for The New Republic and The National Journal. As guest columnist for the Times (he happened to take the post for the post-election period) has managed to spread this nonsense – along with a couple of swipes at organized labor, the other force in the party that was key to its victory - over at least three offerings.

Never mind that that the pundit presents no evidence that these white men are opposed to increasing access to healthcare or does he mention that its accelerating cost is driving millions of working people and families into desperation, causing many to forego timely medical attention for themselves and their children and sinking many into ever-increasing debt and bankruptcy. Never mind that the majority of people in our country support a single-payer healthcare system and are solidly behind giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prices with the drug companies. Edsall is alarmed because these issues are being pressed forward by a growing popular movement articulated best in Congress by one of those “strikingly liberal African-Americans” who have “used” seniority to “win control” of a Congressional Committee: Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, chair-to-be of the House Judiciary Committee.

I’m frankly aghast that there has been practically no outcry over the fact that every member of Congress specifically invoked by Edsall as a threat to “a re-emergent center” is African American. Some “very liberal senior House Democrats now have vastly enhanced power to add inflammatory provisions to bills moving through their committees (think Rangel and the draft),” Edsall wrote.

The others indicted are generic categories. “Many Democratic constituencies -- organized labor, minority advocacy organizations, reproductive- and sexual-rights proponents -- are reliving battles of a decade or more ago, not the more subtle disputes of today. Public sector unions, for example, at a time of wide distrust of government, are consistently pressing to enlarge the state.” This threat is exacerbated, according to Edsall, because of “Web access to each committee and floor vote under new Congressional transparency rules, and the development of aggressively partisan outlets in the blogosphere.”

Horrors, the peasants with their pitchfork are on the prowl.

There should be no mystery as to where this viewpoint springs and why it is being presented in such stark terms. Neo-conservatives inside the Democratic party are alarmed and apprehensive over what they see as the implications of the November balloting. Close to a progressive majority already exists inside the party and could be evolving in the country as a whole and that’s the last thing they want to have happen.

And there should be no mystery as to who these people are. Edsall writes: “Only two members of the House leadership are intuitively attuned to such problems: Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic caucus, and Steny Hoyer, the majority leader. But Emanuel has limited influence, and relations between [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and Hoyer are distant at best.” And you wondered what that Murtha-Hoyer brouhaha was all about? Alas, it fell to Edsall to inject race into the picture and I’ll bet its not the last time we will be visited by the specter of those “Strikingly liberal African-Americans.” The party will just have to choose, it will be said, between them and what they represent and the aspirations of “newly affluent Asian-Americans and Hispanics; and patriotic, socially centrist, mostly white voters.”

During the course of this year’s election campaign the neoconservatives in the elite circles of the Democratic party left few stones unturned in their efforts to thwarts the efforts of progressive candidates and boost the fortunes of those they identify as being of the “center.”

“For the Democratic Party to revive, major tenets of American liberalism, economic and sociocultural, will have to be discarded,” the Times columnist wrote. “The party can join Studebaker and the Glass Bottle Blowers union, it can trudge along as No. 2, or it can undergo a painful transformation -- without guarantee of success.” That’s quite a mouthful coming, ironically, from some named “Edsall”

Well, perhaps not so ironic after all.

A D.C. blogger, The Master Cylinder, who writes from a place called boztopia, recently compared Edsall to a well-know prosperous rapper, both of whom are “putting out new shit thinking the world hasn't changed and everything fits their worldview.” In Edsall’s case, he writes, “(H)ere's a guy who puts on his 3-D glasses and sees 1994 when it's clearly 2006,” and is “completely blinded by the handwringing of the corporatist, centrist wing of the Democratic party, which is absolutely out of touch with the broad-based support of economic populism and social progressivism that helped fuel the takeover of Congress.” The Congressional election, offers Cylinder, “was a vote for populism and liberalism just as it was a vote against six years of the Worst President Ever and twelve years of corruption, indolence, and crass failure to perform effectively.

“People like Edsall are so disconnected with reality that they can't even understand how dramatically the narrative has changed, and so they struggle to reinterpret things in the comfortable, familiar view they know.”

Well put.

BC Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.