Holy Shit !!! - I'll Just Lay This Here...

[WillyT]

The Race to Lose the White House
Michael Brenner _ HuffPo
02/15/2016 11:42 am ET | Updated 6 hours ago


Ethan Miller via Getty Images

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The Clinton juggernaut is losing traction. Powered by the full weight of the Democratic Establishment, it was designed to smoothly carry its idol across America and into the White House. It still may get there. But now it must traverse a far more treacherous and uncertain route than Hillary and her entourage ever imagined. The course is lined with the pundits, operatives and analysts who will cover the spectacle with their usual attention to trivia and a faith in their own perspicacity matching that of the heroine herself.

This was all predictable. For it conforms to the parochialism and inbreeding that for so long has infirmed the Democratic Party's leadership as well as the punditocracy. Fortunes could be made betting against the "Washington consensus" whose singular talent for getting it wrong extends from the country's endless skein of foreign misadventures to electoral politics. They give the impression of all sipping out of each other's double-lattes at Starbucks in Dupont Circle. The resulting damage done to the party's traditional constituents, to the integrity of national discourse and to America's interests in the world is incalculable -- and may well be irreparable.

Still, it is worth recording the pathologies that this latest bruising encounter with reality reveal. Most obvious is the disconnect between political elites and the country they presume to know or aspire to govern. The success of Bernie Sanders makes that transparently clear. His greatest asset is simply that he ran as a "Democrat" -- that is, as representative of the party as forged in the mid-20th century and whose precepts conform to the socio-economic interests and philosophical truths typically held by most Americans today. He is the first Presidential candidate to do so since Walter Mondale in 1984. Mondale's defeat convinced many pols that the future lay with the Reagan smorgasbord of discredited nostrums and myths repackaged by skillful political craftsmen as the new Revelation. Market fundamentalist economic models, a cartoonish version of American individualism a la Ayn Rand, financial libertinism, muscle-flexing abroad in the mantle of democratic proselytizing, and anti-government demagoguery were fashioned into an intoxicating cocktail. It worked to the extent that the cheap high thereby produced tapped latent racism, jingoism, evangelical Christian passions, and a new-found greedy selfishness which was the mutant offspring of 1960s liberation.

Disoriented Democrats badly miscalculated the danger, and in the process lost sight of who they were. Most damaging, many found a comfortable niche in this new world of hallucination. Among them are the careerists, the trendy intellectuals, and the ambitious politicians who thought that they had discovered the one route to recouping power and glory. Together, they reshaped the Democratic Party into a me-too auxiliary to a waxing conservative movement. Today, it is radical reactionary Republicans who sweep elections at state and local levels, who hold an iron grip on the Congress, who have used their power to ruthlessly transform the judiciary into an active ally.

True, Democrats have won the White House twice. Bill Clinton did thanks to Ross Perot and then retained it against feeble opposition. In the process, he moved progressively to the Right in policy and philosophy ("the era of Big Government is over&quot . Republican ascendancy followed. Only the Bush era collapse into disaster abroad and at home made possible Barack Obama - who presented himself not as the embodiment of Democratic values but as a transcendent bipartisan healer- with just a few vermilion strokes. A prophet without message or mission. Whatever liberal ideas he had sounded were swiftly abandoned in what is surely the most shameless bait-and-switch in American political history.

This was predictable. After all, he thrice cited Ronald Reagan as the man who most influenced his view of the Presidency...

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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/the-race-to-lose-the-whit_b_9237006.html?utm_hp_ref=politics