condor_0000
Tampa, FL
60, joined Feb. 2013
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Democrats in the Dead Zone
by Jeffrey St. Clair
June 23, 2017
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/23/democrats-in-the-dead-zone/
Excerpts:
This year the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to grow larger than ever. Oceanologists predict the lifeless expanse of water below the Mississippi River Delta will swell to an area bigger than the state of Vermont, an aquatic ecosystem despoiled by industrial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, oil leaks and the lethal effects of a warming climate. But the desolate waters of the Gulf pale next to the electoral dead zone now confronting the Democratic Party, which seems to occupy about two-thirds of the geographical area of the Republic—a political landscape deadened by the Party’s remorseless commitment to neoliberal economics, imperial wars and open hostility toward the working class base which once served as its backbone.
The latest political zombie offered up as a vessel to freight the electoral asperations of the Democrats was a pious former congressional staffer called Jon Ossoff, whose name sounds like one of those creepy Svengali-like characters from a Tod Browning horror film of the 1930s. But the candidate wasn’t as scary as all that. In fact, Ossoff scared no one, which was both his campaign theme and his problem. One of his problems, anyway. Ossoff presented himself as an anodyne candidate, a nowhere man, a quiescent emissary for a return to civility in politics. He was the white Rodney King, who plaintively asked why we couldn’t all just get along. Of course, who really wants civility in politics, when you’re working two jobs, can’t pay the power bill, have a kid with asthma and just had your Ford Focus repossessed.
Ossoff proved much more popular outside the sixth congressional district of Georgia, than within it, which is only fitting for a candidate who didn’t even bother to reside in the district he was running to represent. Ossoff was an interloper, a carpetbagger, who refused to promote even the trickle-down benefits of a second Reconstruction for a South that has been ravaged by a 30-year-long exodus of good-paying jobs.
In an age crying out for a new kind of politics, Ossoff campaigned directly from the Clinton playbook (Hillary version), apparently hoodwinked into believing that absent Russian interventionism this stale platform was a winning strategy. His main opponent was Trump, not even Trumpism, which might offend some of the Republican voters he was targeting. In what became a kind of daily ritual on the campaign trail, Ossoff repeatedly scrubbed himself clean of any taint of populism or progressive inclinations. Ossoff denounced single-payer health care, kept himself at arm’s length from Bernie Sanders and never uttered even a minor critique of American imperialism. Think of him as a prettified Tim Kaine.
Ossoff dutifully punched one item after another on the checklist of neoliberalism. He wanted to end waste in government. He wanted to trim burdensome regulations stifling the old entrepreneurial spirit. He wanted to reduce the deficit and hectored struggling black families to demonstrate “personal responsibility” if they wanted to get their federal benefits. He pledged his loyalty to Israel, decried nasty dictators from Putin to Assad and vowed to eradicate the scourge of Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth. He sedulously avoided any mention of radioactive subjects such as hunger, homelessness, drone warfare, the death penalty or police shootings. The fate of entitlement programs from Social Security to Medicaid was much too thorny for Ossoff to deal with on the campaign trail. Prosecuting Wall Street criminals somehow escaped his attention. He remained opaque on the subject of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
How did the new wonder boy of Democratic politics crash-and-burn, when he had the looks, the money and the analytics all working in his favor? The answer is pretty simple. Most of the voters in the Georgia Sixth saw Ossoff as a manufactured candidate, a fraud, in a time when people are craving at least a hint of authenticity. Ossoff may have come by his timid neoliberalism honestly, but he struck many as a political cross-dresser. If you’re going to vote for a conservative, why not vote for the real thing?
The attack ad that really doomed Ossoff wasn’t the grotesque smear that ludicrously tried to link him to the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise, but a relatively routine spot that predicted he’d become the political automaton of Nancy Pelosi. In a region that understands the relationship between master and slave, this ad rang true. Throughout the entire campaign, Ossoff had shown not the slightest impulse toward independence of thought or character. He was a creature of a party establishment which had long since auctioned off its soul to the same Wall Street predators that had looted the garment factories, fields and ports of the Southland as ruthlessly as General Sherman during his incendiary march to the sea.
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cupocheer
Assumption, IL
68, joined May. 2010
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