Finally, Elite Democrats Are Feeling the Heat

By Ruth Conniff, The Progressive. Posted October 7, 2006.

David Broder recently wrote a column in the Washington Post warning of a battle between sensible centrists and "vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left" and their heroes.

He singled out Ned Lamont in Connecticut and, in Ohio, Sherrod Brown, whom Broder called "a loud advocate of protectionist policies that offer a false hope of solving our trade and job problems."

Broder's ire shows how media establishment types and defenders of the status quo are "freaking out" because a majority of Americans are not forming their opinions according to the opinion-makers' predictions, according to one leftwing blogger -- political activist David Sirota.

Change is in the air, and the people who have been holding onto power in Washington are worried.

It is the Republicans' betrayal of middle-class voters that got them into the hot water they're in this year, Brown says. "People look at whose side are you on?" he says. "The Republican leaders in the state see government as a piggy bank.[Ohio's Republican Senator Mike] DeWine and that crowd are giving away tax breaks to drug companies and the oil industry. People reject that."

As for Broder's critique, Brown shrugs it off. "Reporters and editors in Washington have always hated my position on trade," he says. "Out here they don't feel that way."

The controversy over Brown -- whom the National Journal compares to John Edwards, saying he's turned his "liberal" record in Congress into a popular pitch for "economic populism" -- captures a basic struggle within the country.

Brown has always been for establishing fair trade, raising the minimum wage, and breaking the oil and drug companies' stranglehold on public policy. He has also opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. These positions turn out to be particularly popular with voters this year, both in the Rust Belt and around the country, as polls show the public definitively opposed to the Administration's war in Iraq and in favor of progressive wage and health care policies.

But, as David Sirota put it in his furious blog following Broder's column, the ragged people who work at manufacturing jobs in Ohio -- those Brown represents -- aren't the people Washington insiders care about.

"In David Broder's world, those hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers who have been thrown out onto the street thanks to NAFTA and China PNTR are the filth of the earth that high and mighty elite Washington journalists like him cannot be bothered with," Sirota ranted in vituperative-blogger fashion. "In David Broder's world, any request for our trade pacts to include restrictions on child slavery, environmental degradation, and pharmaceutical industry profiteering off desperately poor people, positively un-American. Why? Because David Broder lives in a place where all of these critical issues are merely just more fodder and gossip for a newspaper column -- not real challenges in his life, nor in the life of the people he spends his time with in the Washington Beltway."

In the Democratic Party, the economic populists are fighting an uphill battle against the Washington in crowd. The outcome of that struggle is one of the interesting issues up for grabs in this fall's midterm elections.

Across the country, the Democrats are all over the map on Iraq and other fundamental issues. "I understand there's not going to be a national Democratic policy on Iraq," Brown says, "because Harold Ford doesn't want to say what I'm saying. Everybody runs their own race the way they run it -- that's endemic in the party and maybe in politics generally."

But for Brown, being a straight shooter seems to be winning politics.

"He is a person who says what he thinks," says Progressive Democrats of America chapter member John Cross. "Despite fourteen years in Congress he's pretty straight-forward. I think people appreciate that."

But, as Sirota laments, it's not a quality that's necessarily prized in Washington. Take Rahm Emanuel, head of the DCCC, who is another Sirota nemesis.

A rather breathless Newsweek story on Emanuel and his brother Ari -- who happens to be the model for the smarmy Hollywood agent on the hit HBO series "Entourage" -- gushes over the two men's similar roles as gatekeepers and kingmakers in their intersecting Hollywood and political worlds. One big question in this fall's midterms is what chance does the rabble who care about "kitchen table" issues have against this glamorous "in crowd" of the Washington and Hollywood elite?

Sirota calls the coming election a "tidal wave" heading for Washington's "hall of mirrors," conjuring up a massive populist uprising against the smug establishment types that will smash their arrogant worldview to smithereens. It's a gratifying image. But the positions of individual candidates around the country don't necessarily sustain it. Along with the Sherrod Browns and Ned Lamonts, there are the Maria Cantwells and James Webbs, who don't take such a strong position on getting out of Iraq, and who supported CAFTA and other free-trade bills. Around the country, a majority of Democratic Congressional candidates are not calling for withdrawal from Iraq.

Ruth Conniff covers national politics for The Progressive and is a voice of The Progressive on many TV and radio programs.

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