According to the Pew Research Center, a substantial majority of Americans believe that a health insurance reform package will pass before the midterm elections. Here's the problem: Another survey suggests few actually support it, based on an analysis of mid-December Pew numbers. What happened?
According to Pew's numbers, the opposition to reform cuts across political demographics. It's concessions to the right that most easily explain the senate bill's unpopularity:
The most simple reading of these numbers is they are result of a big bill that excludes provisions that would please the left – a public option, lowering the age at which people can join Medicare – while still injecting more government into the system, which the right despises. It offers little for supporters and its very existence angers conservatives.
It’s a rare situation when you have Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic Party, and Rush Limbaugh calling for the defeat of the bill. But a
Indeed. And when the Left gets uppity, the DLC is there to school them. Rarely do we see the degree of introspection noted non-ideologue and DLC hack Joe Klein has provided today:
In the snarkier precincts of the left-wing blogosphere, mainstream journalists like me are often called villagers. The reference, so far as I can tell, has to do with isolation: we live in this little village on the Potomac — actually, I don't, but no matter — constantly intermingling over hors d'oeuvres, deciding who is "serious" (a term of derision in the blogosphere) and who is not, regurgitating spin spoon-fed by our sources or conjuring a witless conventional wisdom that has nothing to do with reality as it is lived outside the village. There is, of course, some truth to this. Washington is insular; certain local shamans are celebrated beyond all logic; some of my columnar colleagues have lost touch with everything beyond their armchairs and egos.
Not to worry, True Believers...the self-reflection ends there. What follows is a relentless parade of horribles: It is the prejudice of the Left that is to blame here, not the insularity of Joe Klein's pampered professional pundit class. Not to worry, of course; loyal Democrat Joe Klein knows that the "denizens of the left blogosphere" are not the all-important "base" that politicians need to respond to:
The denizens of the left blogosphere consider themselves the Democratic Party's base. But they are not. For Democrats, as opposed to Republicans, the wing is not the base; the legions of loyal African Americans, union members, Jews, women and Latinos are. In the end, the sillier left-village practitioners are stoking the same populist exaggeration — the idea that Washington is controlled by crooks and sellouts — that conservative strategists like Bill Kristol believe will bring the Republicans back to power. The perversity of this is beyond comprehension.
Indeed, there is a certain level of perversity on display here. It has been evident for weeks. A (now-deleted) diary proclaimed that "liberal racism" was no longer hidden. Opponents of the Stupak amendment have been accused, albeit in a "subtle" manner, of indifference to poor women of color. Identity politics, conflation of the left and the right...these are telling signatures.
But take a closer look. Who are the administration's allies in this clever game of Kabuki?
In 1981, I left the liberal wing of the Democratic Party because the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had gone off the deep end. I wrote an article in Rolling Stone describing how the Democratic Party, meeting in Denver, had subdivided itself into multifarious caucuses -- women (concerned exclusively with the Equal Rights Amendment, a futile and symbolic gesture and therefore favored ground for Democrats), blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals (a lonely caucus of one), progressive-liberals and ethnics (a caucus for Caucasians?) -- and lost any unified sense of message. I've written versions of that Democrats in Disarray story too many times over the past 25 years; it's amazing how little has changed.
Perhaps you do not recognize this crafty opponent of identity politics. Why, who else, but Joe Klein, the moderate and centrist critic of the Left?
Why the focus on that "multifarious caucus" that is the Democratic base today? Why the balkanization, the appeal to identity?
This diary is brief, and an invitation to some self-reflection: Why is the left blogosphere, so worthy of contempt, even being addressed by Joe Klein today? And what possible reason could an advocate for DLC centrism have for reigniting identity politics that he does not even believe in?