Democratic Party leaders "are dissociated from the mood of the nation, and they do not care"
Published on
Wednesday, May 04, 2016
by The Guardian
Why Must the Trump Alternative be Self-Satisfied, Complacent Democrats?
Convinced that the country’s ongoing demographic shifts will bring victory for years to come, the party establishment acts like its candidates need do nothing differently
by Thomas Frank
The year of our discontent rolls on, and now it is Indiana that hands victory to the insurgent Senator Bernie Sanders and the protectionist demagogue Donald Trump.
Seven years have passed now since the last recession officially ended and yet the country’s fury has scarcely cooled. To this day we remain angry at Wall Street; we rage against career politicians; and we are incandescent that the economic system seems to have been permanently “rigged” against working people. Median household income has still not recovered the levels of 2007. Wages are going nowhere. Elite bankers are probably never going to be held accountable for what they did. America is burning.
Listening to the leading figures of the Democratic Party establishment, however, you’d never know it. Cool contentment is the governing emotion in these circles. What they have in mind for 2016 is what we might call a campaign of militant complacency. They are dissociated from the mood of the nation, and they do not care.
I mean this in ways both great and small. The party’s leadership is largely drawn from a satisfied cohort that has done quite well in the aftermath of the Great Recession. They’ve got a good thing going. Convinced that the country’s ongoing demographic shifts will bring Democratic victory for years to come, they seem to believe the party’s candidates need do nothing differently to harvest future electoral bumper crops. The seeds are already planted. All that is required is patience.
Hillary Clinton is more or less openly offering herself as the complacency candidate. The least inspiring frontrunner in many years, she is a dynastic heir who stands to receive the Democratic nomination largely because it’s her turn – the logic that made Bob Dole the GOP leader in 1996. Clinton has scolded her rival for wanting to break up Wall Street banks since such a policy, by itself, would not also end racism and sexism. (In point of fact, the black middle class was disproportionately damaged by the detonation of the housing bubble.) Clinton’s unofficial slogan, “America never stopped being great” — supposedly a searing riposte to Trump’s “make America great again” – sounds like the kind of thing you’d see inscribed in a country club logo. In her words we can hear the call of contentment, a would-be catchphrase for a generation of satisfied people.
Full article at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/04/why-must-trump-alternative-be-self-satisfied-complacent-democrats
= new reply since forum marked as read
Response to Metric System (Reply #1)
Response to Agschmid (Reply #41)
She does horribly in all the others. . .
Among Democrats she's 55 to Bernie's 45. Not that big a difference. But in the Independent voters, Bernie usually gets near 70% and that is the LARGEST voting group. Whereas Hillary's NEGATIVES are around 70% among independents. .
I think you guys don't realize that the GE has OTHER people who can vote in it and THEY are the ones you need to win. Bernie does, Hillary does NOT.
Be as smug as you want, but those are facts. And so is this.
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Response to iandhr (Reply #15)
"...The least inspiring frontrunner in many years, she is a dynastic heir who stands to receive the Democratic nomination largely because it’s her turn – the logic that made Bob Dole the GOP leader in 1996." 
The best reason I know to be elected to the highest office
The Establishment Campaign (Hillary) has nothing to gain by attacking the Left, the Working Class, and the 99% who haven't "shared in The Recovery",
but does it anyway.
Force of habit?
Arrogance?
I added this excerpt from the linked article as an example of how this works:
"That then feeds, both on the left and the right, a temptation to say, ‘If we could just go back to an era in which our borders were closed,’ or ‘If we could just go back to a time when everybody had a defined-benefit plan,’ or ‘We could just go back to a time when there wasn’t any immigrant that was taking my job, things would be OK.’
--Obama
"Perhaps you noticed something peculiar about that statement, reader: that President Obama has here lumped together two complaints that sound absurd and vaguely racist with a third impulse – a longing for defined-benefit pension plans – that is legitimate and quite real. As it happens, we know who wants to get everybody into a defined-benefit pension plan: organized labor, a big Democratic constituency for whom such plans, in which benefits do not fluctuate like stocks, are a common demand. Social Security is another example of such a plan."
See how that works?
