Posts by David Sirota

David Sirota was the top spokesman for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee. He is currently writing a book on the middle class economic squeeze for Crown Publishers. You can contact him at Davidsirota.com.

The Framing of the Political "Center"
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on July 18, 2008 at 8:56 AM.

I'm filing this column dispatch at a rest stop outside of Waco, Texas on my way to the Netroots Nation conference. On the drive from Dallas, I've been listening to talk radio and obsessing over the concept of "the center."

I'll admit it -- I'm more than a bit obsessed with the ongoing attempts by today's propagandists (read: politicians and Washington pundits) to distort where the mythic "center" is. Whoever controls the definition of the center, controls a huge amount of political power because they control the very parameters of what policies are -- and are not -- acceptable for serious consideration.

Back in 2005, I wrote this article for the Nation on how forces inside the Democratic Party exist almost exclusively to make Democratic politicians believe the "center" is far to the right of the American public.

Now this week, I wrote this new column looking at the debate surrounding Barack Obama's recent policy shifts.

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GOP Brags That McCain Will Continue Bush's Economic Legacy
Posted by David Sirota, Brave New Films on July 16, 2008 at 8:17 AM.

Last week, I appeared on Fox News to discuss the inflammatory comments by Phil Gramm (John McCain's top economic advisor) and how those comments really epitomize the Republican Party's country clubbish, let-them-eat-cake outlook on the economy. Notice about half-way through as the Republican strategist I'm debating actually acknowledges that McCain's major idea for fixing the economy is continuing George W. Bush's tax policies - and that when she's called out for saying that, she tries to deny what she just said.

The interchange is instructive for two reasons.

First and foremost is the admission: namely, that Republicans still want America to believe that the way to steady the economy is to follow Bush's efforts to slash taxes for millionaires. As I show in the very first chapter of my book, this is a prescription being rejected even in some of the most conservative parts of the country.

Second, there is the denial: When called onto the carpet for wanting to continue the policies of the most unpopular president in history, Republicans start running for cover to the point of claiming they never said what they just said. The denial is a tacit acknowledgment of the power of the populist uprising now boiling throughout the country. The GOP knows the country is very angry at conservatives' free market fundamentalism - and so will deny and obfuscate to pretend they aren't championing such fundamentalism.

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Progressives Discover That Obama's no Messiah
Posted by David Sirota, Huffington Post on July 15, 2008 at 5:00 AM.

The New York Times write two days ago on Barack Obama's recent policy shifts. The headline (not surprisingly) distorts the frame of debate, calling the Illinois senator's critics the "far left." I'll be writing on why that is such a distortion in my upcoming newspaper column this week. But beyond that distortion, let's consider the substance of what's going on. Here's my take, as quoted in the article:

"I'm not saying we're there yet, but that's the danger," said David Sirota, a liberal political analyst and author. "I don't think there's disillusion. I think there's an education process that takes place, and that's a good thing. He is a transformative politician, but he is still a politician."

This follows a lot of the underlying message of my book, THE UPRISING: namely, that politicians -- whether Obama or others -- are not messiahs, but mere vehicles for the change we do -- or do not -- force them to embrace. If Obama's moves force more people to learn that truism, then I think that's a positive silver lining to his disappointing shifts.

Jeralyn Merritt over at TalkLeft says I'm wrong -- that Obama isn't a transformative politician. What do you think? Do you think what I told the Times was right, and that Obama is transformative, but that his moves potentially undermine his brand? Or do you think I'm wrong, that Obama isn't really transformative, and that his moves prove that?

Pelosi Plays Hardball on Trade: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on April 9, 2008 at 4:28 PM.

This just off the Reuters wire:

The House of Representatives will decide on Thursday whether to put off indefinitely a vote on the Colombia free-trade agreement that President George W. Bush submitted to Congress this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. Pelosi, announcing the move to reporters on Wednesday, would not give a time frame for when the trade pact might be debated and put up for a vote on passage in the House. The vote on Thursday would change rules for considering the deal by eliminating a 90-day deadline for Congress to approve the Colombia trade deal.

This is good news, bad news and potentially ugly news.

The good news: Finally, a Democratic leader is trying to use some modicum of legislative power to halt our economically destructive and wildly unpopular trade policies. It's a start.

The bad news: Pelosi has yet to say she will work to kill the pact outright. In fact, she issued a press release earlier this week merely worrying that Bush's tactics jeopardize the final passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Meanwhile, other top Democrats like Jim Clyburn have gone on record saying they want this deal to pass (Clyburn has since amended his statement - but sometimes the truth is in the first reaction).

The potentially ugly news:

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The Issue That Could Decide the Democratic Nomination and the General Election
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on February 23, 2008 at 9:49 AM.

None of us likes being lied to by politicians, and not just because being lied to is insulting, but because when a lie comes from a politician, it suggests that none of their promises should be believed. As my new nationally syndicated newspaper column shows, this is precisely what is going on in the presidential race when it comes to trade and globalization policy - key policies as the race heads into the working-class bastions of Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

It would be one thing if Hillary Clinton was admitting that yes, she vigorously supported NAFTA, but that support was misguided. But no, as the column shows, Clinton is now trying to convince voters she never supported the North American Free Trade Agreement - the trade model whose lack of labor, human rights and environmental standards made it a tool for Big Business to ship jobs abroad. Not only is she claiming to be a longtime opponent of the deal, but she's actually trotting out former Clinton administration officials-turned-corporate-lawyers like Mickey Kantor - the very architects of the deal - to tell us that behind closed doors she really wasn't for NAFTA. Shocker - these are the same hacks who have lashed their careers to Clinton's campaign in hopes of getting back their White House jobs.

The strategy assumes that the media will simply report this revisionist history as fact, and worse, that Americans who have been crushed by this unfair trade policy are a bunch of idiots. We are simply supposed to ignore the speeches she made telling us what a great success NAFTA was, including the one where she traveled to Davos, Switzerland to give a speech in which she thanked corporate interests for mounting "a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA" (that's a direct quote from her mouth). And the lying is about the best indicator that all her rhetoric promising a new trade policy under a Hillary Clinton presidency would be tossed out the window when she got to the White House - much like Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign promises to oppose NAFTA and China PNTR were tossed out the window when he was inaugurated president.

But now, Barack Obama is picking up where John Edwards left off and is reminding folks of the real history, promising to get serious on trade, and consequently the polls in Ohio appear to be closing.

Though Obama is certainly not as aggressive on the issue as some of us would like, the rhetoric is encouraging in that he sees his political opportunity in standing with progressives. That means if he manages to win on this message, he will have begun the process of building a real public mandate to reform our broken trade policy - a mandate that he will be under enormous pressure to respect and fulfill as president.

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Hillary Clinton's Superdelegates Coordinate "Screw Democracy" Message
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on February 14, 2008 at 1:09 PM.

Looks like Hillary Clinton's campaign machine is getting its superdelegates (aka. party insiders) to start softening up the public for a potential trampling of democracy that may mark the Democratic National Convention. This morning we have two superdelegates from different parts of the country landing headlines in their local papers saying they are fully prepared to ignore voters and trample democracy - as long as that lets them help Clinton potentially steal the Democratic nomination. In my upcoming book, The Uprising, I trace the ugly history of superdelegates - and how they were set up precisely to stop popoular uprisings like we are seeing in the Democratic nomination contest.

Here in Colorado, we get this dispatch from Mannie Rodriguez in the Rocky Mountain News:

Because regular delegates are allocated proportionally, some calculations show that even if Obama were to roll through the rest of the primary season, he would not be able to secure the nomination with pledged delegates alone. That could result in a floor fight during the convention - with superdelegates key to the outcome.

"I'm going to stick to her 100 percent," Rodriguez said. "I hope it doesn't go to superdelgates deciding, but if it does, I'm with her all the way."

Forget that Colorado voters overwhelmingly supported Obama, forget that Obama may win the total, democratically awarded regular delegates...

Then in a suburban Philadelphia newspaper, we get this from Clinton-backing superdelegate Marcel Groen:

"It's worked for the past 40 years, for the most part, and largely it's an honorary position," he said. "But if it's going to be real close, then I think it's wise to let the leaders of the party do the right thing."

This follows Clinton hack Lanny Davis's missive on Huffington Post saying almost exactly the same thing (after embarrassing himself by claiming Adlai Stevenson was elected president). It also comes as the Boston Globe today reports that Clinton is determined to "take the Democratic nomination even if she does not win the popular vote" with a plan to "persuade enough superdelegates to vote for her at the convention." Clinton "will not concede the race to Obama if he wins a greater number of pledged delegates by the end of the primary season, and will count on the 796 elected officials and party bigwigs to put her over the top, if necessary, said Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson."

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Economic Class Is Finally a Presidential Campaign Issue
Posted by David Sirota, Open Left on January 11, 2008 at 12:12 PM.

Economic class is the taboo subject in American politics, to the point where the word "class" itself has been made into something of an epithet by politicians deriding opponents for supposedly waging "class warfare." Of course, most often, those deriding "class warfare" are the corporate elite, Washington insiders and their Punditburo spokespeople within the major media institutions - that is, the six and seven-figure-salaried upper class that is waging a vicious class war on the rest of us. At a time of increasing economic inequality and decreasing social-class mobility in America, these people will do anything to avoid class taking center stage in American politics. But as I show in my new nationally syndicated newspaper column today, class is forcing its way into the 2008 presidential contest - and that's a good thing.

Democrat John Edwards and Republican Mike Huckabee are the messengers of class politics in this election - the Huey Longs as I called them a while back. As Reuters today reports:

"Ask corporate lobbyists which presidential contender is most feared by their clients and the answer is almost always the same -- Democrat John Edwards...Edwards' tone and language on the campaign trail have increased business antipathy toward him. His stump speeches are peppered with attacks on "corporate greed" and warnings of "the destruction of the middle class.'...But this year Edwards is not alone. Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, sometimes also rails against corporate power and influence, tapping a populist current that lies just below the surface of U.S. politics."

On the Democratic side, Edwards class-based campaign has pushed candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to lately vent more populist themes (though Obama's underlying message remains class-averse). That stands in contrast to the Republican side, where the rest of the field against Huckabee is digging in promoting more Bush-style upper-class warfare.

Reuters notes just how courageous and groundbreaking class-based politics really is. "Open attacks on the business elite are seldom heard from mainstream White House candidates in America," the news service reports, "despite skyrocketing CEO pay, rising income inequality, and a torrent of scandals in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street."

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Why Is Rep. Al Wynn Being Primaried? He's The New Joe Lieberman
Posted by David Sirota, WorkingForChange.com on November 1, 2007 at 3:00 PM.

This post, written by David Sirota, originally appeared on Working For Change

Why is Maryland Rep. Al Wynn (D) facing a strong primary challenge from Donna Edwards? Well, lots of reasons. For one thing, he voted for the Iraq War. But that's really only part of the story. Wynn represents part of the corrupt Washington Establishment - the Money Party that both Republicans and Democrats are a part of. Don't take my word for that - check out his campaign finance reports and his own campaign website.

Here is Wynn's Federal Election Commission report of donations from June of 2007. You'll notice that he pocketed a $2,000 contribution from something called the "Billy Tauzin Congressional Committee." Tauzin is the Republican who was formerly the chairman of the committee that wrote the infamous Bush Medicare bill - the one that gave over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money away to the pharmaceutical industry. Soon after that bill passed, Tauzin retired from Congress to become the chief lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry - and now, it seems, a campaign contributor to one Al Wynn.

Then there is Wynn's campaign website which tries to defend his vote for the credit card industry-written Bankruptcy Bill. As I document in Hostile Takeover and as Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren references here, the bill that makes it much more difficult for families to deal with medical debt, while actually making it more easy for corporations to declare bankruptcy and use bankruptcy status as a way to avoid paying back wages/benefits to their workers. Wynn flails all around trying to pretend the Bankruptcy Bill was passed as a way to actually help workers. Read here and here to see just how absurdly dishonest such a claim really is.

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Democrats Are Afraid of Their Own Shadows
Posted by David Sirota on July 10, 2007 at 2:00 PM.

John Kerry had a bad case of it in 2004. The consultants, operatives and self-described strategists in the Democratic Party's Washington Establishment spreads it as a profession. Now, Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar (D) looks like he just contracted a virulent strain of it, and some of his other colleagues may soon be susceptible to it. No, I'm not talking about a venereal disease, I'm talking about something far more politically toxic: A disease known as Autoshadowphobia, or fear of one's own shadow.

Here in America, we like our politicians to emulate descriptions used in tire ads or SUV commercials: We like our leaders "tough" and "strong" (and maybe even with some "torque") as any number of the aspiring, cliche-peddling pundits who crowd the nation's capital will happily tell you. That's why Autoshadowphobia is so dangerous: Because regardless of the issues where its symptoms most clearly present themselves, the disease lets the public know about a deeper sense of insecurity, fear, spinelessness and unprincipled calculation that governs a politician's decision making. It projects the opposite of a Michelin ad or Dodge Ram spot. For voters, Autoshadowphobia elicits at best what a Kleenex ad portrays (softness), and more likely recalls the impulses associated with watching a commercial for Raid (a desire to spray the scurrying varmints down with a blast of industrial strength repellent).

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A Conservative Collapse in the Rocky Mountain West
Posted by David Sirota on July 6, 2007 at 7:36 PM.

In 2005, I wrote a national op-ed for Knight Ridder newspapers that showed how when right-wing congressional politicians return home as governors from the fantasy land known as Washington, D.C., they often drop their conservative economic elitism in the face of reality. Last week, I wrote that the conservative movement in the Rocky Mountain West is seeing this same economic elitism decline as an effective political cudgel, and not surprisingly, many Rocky Mountain states are watching their Republican parties descend into disrepair (here in Colorado, for instance, the GOP has resorted to hiring as party chairman the same supposed "guru" who most recently helped commandeer his boss George Allen from leading presidential candidate to historical cautionary tale). Now, up in Idaho, we see the convergence of both of these phenomena, as Gov. Butch Otter (R) has become yet another conservative Washington-insider-turned-home-state-economic-realist and yet another Rocky Mountain Republican fleeing his own party's elite consensus.

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Why Progressives Should Look Westward
Posted by David Sirota on July 6, 2007 at 1:00 PM.

Tired and worn out from a difficult slog of a populist campaign in a red state, I penned three articles (in the Washington Monthly, the American Prospect and In These Times) in December of 2004 showing how the politics of property rights, hunter/angler access and energy development - let's call it Land Politics - has the potential to scramble the traditional Republican coalition in places like the Great American West, if progressives plot a course to advantage of the changing political topography. These articles were met with typically blank looks in Washington, until about 2005 when the New York Times essentially reprinted the articles in a "new" piece by Tim Egan. Now, three years later, we see the fissures that were mere tiny cracks in 2004 are becoming potentially wide chasms, replete with serious political opportunities. Considering the fact that many of the 97 out of 100 fastest growing counties in America that Bush won in 2004 are out here and face these issues, Land Politics could be the key to progressives fundamentally changing the national electoral map.

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Why Washington's Pundits Are Scared of You
Posted by David Sirota on July 5, 2007 at 1:00 PM.

There is a story that warms the heart of every Washington-based pundit, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, a story that hearkens back to the heady Boys on the Bus days - the days when the Towering Pundits of Washington supposedly led America to a blissful political utopia. This tale was trumpeted like a clarion call from the sleek websites of Beltway chronicles like The New Republic. It was the story of how one courageous pundit, Time Magazine's Joe Klein, so honed his skills at self-congratulation and promotion that he managed to bill himself as a de facto adviser and strategist to the 2004 Democratic nominee for President. This story has reached legend status inside the Beltway, as it gives all D.C. pundits both the strength to press on with their courageous work propping up the Establishment and the motivation to continue worshiping power. Because of this tale, they too can hope to one day be so self-important as to use their proximity to officialdom to transcend mere writing and pontificating, and move into the actual wielding and execution of elite power.

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Are Progressives Jealous of Michael Moore?
Posted by David Sirota on July 3, 2007 at 1:00 PM.

Employing a tone that implies reporting on a fast-breaking scandal, the Los Angeles Times breathlessly tells us today that filmmaker Michael Moore will - gasp! - make a lot of money on his movie Sicko if it is successful.

Here's the excerpt:

"Moore himself stands to make a mint on the film. Thanks to a lucrative contract negotiated with the Weinstein Co. by his talent agent, Endeavor's Ari Emanuel, Moore is in line to receive 50% of "Sicko's" gross profits — arguably one of the most lucrative deals on Hollywood's books, richer even than those enjoyed by the likes of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts and director Peter Jackson. After theater owners have taken their cut, in other words, "Sicko's" profits will be split in half between Moore and Harvey and Bob Weinstein, whose Weinstein Co. is releasing the film nationally today. And that's not the only place Moore's deal eclipses almost all other movie deals. While most actors and directors get a cut calculated on 20% of a film's DVD revenue, Moore's cut of those earnings is calculated based on all of the DVD proceeds."

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Barack Raises Millions … Now What Does it Mean for the Future?
Posted by David Sirota on July 2, 2007 at 2:00 PM.

It's pretty damn exciting that Barack Obama has gotten more than 250,000 people to contribute to his campaign. As I've written before, his efforts to raise small dollar donations is looked upon by those in the Beltway as some sort of scandal, when in fact it's totally admirable in an election system that unfortunately is not publicly financed.

The news, covered by Beltway reporters with typically vapid platitudes and caricatures, made me think about a few important questions that few are asking.

The first set of questions are horse-race-ish: Does being an Obama donor mean you are an Obama voter or volunteer? I think that's a harder question to answer than it seems in light of the fact that we know his campaign (admirably) asks lots of people for fairly small amounts of money. Someone may be willing to pay $5 or $10 just to go see Obama speak, but that doesn't necessarily mean they support him. Hell, I might consider paying $5 or $10 to go see one of the Republicans speak just to hear them and evaluate their skills - but that sure as hell doesn't mean I'd vote for them or work to get them elected. So how much of the 350,000 represents die hard support, and how much represents interest in a media spectacle?

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Rocky Mountain Right Reels As Public Rejects GOP's Outdated & Elitist Rhetoric
Posted by David Sirota on July 1, 2007 at 1:10 PM.

Is the much-touted conservative economic revolt over in the Intermountain West? That's a question that undoubtedly has people like Republican presidential operatives and national anti-tax activist Grover Norquist worried - especially with a spate of evidence that suggests a whole new politics is emerging out here, and I'm not just talking about the region being dominated by Democratic governors (that is at least as much a symptom of the underlying phenomenon as it is the phenomenon itself).

Matt Singer over at Left in the West has a telling post up about new public opinion data from Montana, one of the central fronts in the conservative economic revolt for the last two decades. Some history before we get to the numbers: Montana was once a longtime and reliable Democratic state, but became a Republican stronghold thanks to the Reagan-inspired economic revolt which brought to prominence people like governor-turned-RNC-chair-turned-Enron-lobbyist Marc Racicot, since-unelected-and-humiliated Sen. Conrad Burns (R), and Burns' political guru/Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams (known to many of us who have worked against him as simply "Dickwad").

Now, however, a new poll from Lee Newspapers suggests that revolt is over. Wide majorities in Montana approve of Gov. Brian Schweitzer's (D) progressive tax rebate and spending plans, just passed by Democrats in the legislature. Even more tellingly, a plurality of Republicans in the state approve of what happened as well.

Something similar seems to be happening here in Colorado, the home of TABOR, that icon of the right's economic revolt. Voters, as we all know, voted to temporarily suspend TABOR in 2005, and now even one of the state's most conservative voices - the editorial page of the Rocky Mountain News - seems to be grasping that massive budget cuts to state services are destructive. In a strong editorial today that is reprinted in the Sunday Denver Post as well, the paper applauds Gov. Bill Ritter's (D) efforts to better fund the state's motor vehicle division, citing long lines and wait times for the most basic of state services. Meanwhile, when a right-wing city councilor in Aurora announced plans to push the right's tired "right to work" initiative aimed at destroying organized labor, a statewide poll quickly showed that beyond liking the happy sounding misnomer "right to work," Colorado is actually quite hostile to what this conservative ploy actually does. "Opposition to the initiative is strong among Democrats," note the pollsters. "However, even a majority of unaffiliated voters oppose the measure."

Clearly, the public's rejection of the right's economic class warfare on behalf of the wealthy and subsequent waning of the conservative economic revolt as an effective political weapon has had major consequences for both political parties, and has created opportunities for a whole new kind of progressive politics.

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