IMPress Polly
11-08-2013, 08:13 AM
Since the pundits generally are talking about the recent state and municipal elections in terms of the candidates' respective tactics, I thought it would be appropriate to offer my own commentary on the actual ideological/class significance of the results.
What we see in the Virginia governor's race is particularly interesting, as it concentrates much of what I've been saying about the divides in the Republican Party between the libertarians (controlled overall by the oil industry), the social conservatives (controlled by the Protestant churches), and the so-called party moderates/establishment (controlled mainly by the financial sector). In the Virginia governor's race, each of those factions was represented by a different party: the libertarians by the Libertarian Party candidate Robert Sarvis, the social conservatives by Republican Ken Cuccinelli, and Wall Street has endorsed the Democratic Party's candidate Terry McAuliffe, who emerged victorious. Progressives (actual leftists) went unrepresented by any major institution in that election; a fact which goes to show how weak the left yet remains in Virginia: a state wherein, exit polls revealed, fully the majority of voters oppose the Affordable Care Act and believe that the government "is doing too much". Corresponding to those facts, combining the votes of the Cuccinelli and Sarvis reveals that rightists were the majority of the electorate. Hence why the Democrats strategically opted to endorse a Clinton-aligned centrist in that election. McAuliffe's campaign hence ran a defensive campaign that carefully avoided stating a lot of fundamental ideological disagreements with Cuccinelli, instead opting to criticize only Cuccinelli's degree of ideological extremity. Criticizing degrees and tactics more than ideas is the mark of a true centrist. If I sounded terribly negative on McAuliffe just there though, don't let that lead you to believe that he wouldn't have been my preference, given the aforementioned options. As a direct result of McAuliffe's victory, among other things, Virginia's working class will gain access to Medicaid subsidies that will enable them to purchase health insurance for the first time, discrimination against gay people seeking government employment will no longer be permitted, and you can bet that any further anti-abortion measures the reactionary legislature may pass will meet with a gubernatorial veto. Compared to the alternative that Mr. Cuccinelli offered, that's mana from heaven as far as I'm concerned! However, let there be no illusions about McAuliffe: he's the kind of guy who will support budgetary austerity and privatization in general (including school privatization). For that reason, I would warn progressives against any uncritical defense of him and against any support for letting him represent the Democratic Party overall in any major national speeches, etc. He is an enemy of our enemy, not our friend.
The Wall Street-backed candidate also won New Jersey's gubernatorial (i.e. governorship) election, but there financial aristocracy backed the Republican candidate, Chris Christie, leaving the Democrats to run a more left wing candidate; they decided on Barbara Buono. Buono, for those who don't know, was an Elizabeth Warren-like genuine progressive, known for her background as a trial lawyer and her corresponding consumer advocacy as a politician. Perhaps of greatest concern to Wall Street was the fact that she was the prime sponsor of the state's law against predatory lending, for example. Another worrying sign that doubtless concerned corporate America vis-a-vis Buono lay in her choice of running mate: Milly Silva, executive vice president of a chapter of the United Healthcare Workers East; a section of the Service Employees International Union. As you might expect of New Jersey's overwhelmingly middle class population though, the centrist candidate was broadly preferred to such an alternative. Like his approximate ideological analogy in Virginia, McAuliffe, Christie ran a largely substance-devoid campaign that focused on questions of personal style and tactics. Ignored was the fact that the state's rate of unemployment remains far higher than the national average and that the state's poverty level is the highest it's been in 50 years. Politically speaking, when you live in a state consisting mostly of property owners whose plight overall has perhaps marginally improved since you took office, you needn't worry about such things. Don't be fooled by the polls though: much to the contrast of how he's portrayed it, Christie is NOT popular with the victims of Hurricane Sandy for his recovery program. In a recent poll conducted shortly before the election, 75% of Jersey-ites hit by Sandy said they didn't think the governor cared about them at all. Christie didn't win re-election based on their support. And though many of the headlines suggest that Christie "won all income groups", there was one he still lost: voters making under $30,000. (Evidently the poor needn't even be counted as an income group -- as existing at all -- in the eyes of the commercial media.) In fact, his easy victory had much to do with the fact that big money intervened in his favor, the fact that New Jersey's population consists overwhelmingly of property owners (who are naturally amendable to such messaging rather than largely immune to it like the poorest people). The fact that almost one-third of Democrats themselves voted for Christie goes to show the ideological divides within the party; that a very real Wall Street faction is alive and thriving. In terms of the 2016 presidential race, this outcome does indeed show Christie to be a real, electable prospect, as many have remarked. (Christie is not a "centrist", by the way. Whether it be on economic or cultural issues, Christie is a rightist: he takes conservative-leaning social positions alongside neoliberal economic positions. The only reason he gets called a "moderate" is because he opposes the extreme tactics of the Tea Party movement (thus cementing the favor of the financial sector).)
There was, however, one notable instance wherein Wall Street suffered a political defeat of epic proportions: New York City's mayoral race. Finance had favored centrist Christine Quinn to win the Democratic Party's nomination and provided her accordingly with sizable donations. The most progressive candidate, Bill de Blasio, by contrast, was famously denounced by the city mayor and Wall Street billionaire Micheal Bloomberg on the grounds that his campaign placed wood in the fires of "class warfare". Class warfare is something Mr. Bloomberg would know a lot about, having been personally responsible for the suppression of the Occupy movement's main and founding group, Occupy Wall Street, two years ago. While Quinn had run essentially as the next Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio ran as the anti-Bloomberg populist, calling for a tax hike on the rich in order to increase funding for public schools and construct more public housing to service the needs of the city's growing number of poor people. (Poor and low-income people collectively compose 46% of NYC's population, according to a recent study.) De Blasio also distinguished himself as the only candidate who consistently opposed the city's racist "stop and frisk" policing policy wherein minorities (and yes it's almost always minorities) are randomly grabbed by the cops, thrown to the pavement to get their private parts fondled for a while, and then abandoned, all without a word of explanation. Whereas recent rightist mayors (Giuliani and Bloomberg) have managed to pull off electoral victories by running as law and order candidates focused on reducing the crime rate, that didn't work this time, now that the crime rate is well under control, much unlike in the early '90s. Winning the Democratic nomination for mayor was de Blasio's main challenge, for, as it turned out, the Democrats managed to maintain their broad center-left coalition (which composes a sizable majority of New Yorkers) in the election itself, but just under different leadership than usual; under the leadership of the left rather than of the center. As a result, de Blasio's victory was the biggest landslide in the city's entire history: 73% for de Blasio to just 24% for his Republican opponent. It was quite rewarding to yours truly to watch his victory speech, for which he stood behind a symbolically red sign bearing the word PROGRESS in bold lettering to let everyone know that political allegiances were left-of-center (albeit hardly far to the left). It goes to show that the city has now been sufficiently re-proletarianized for the left to win outright victories again for the first time since the 1940s. That's not to say he'll have an easy road ahead. The city council includes a lot of more centrist figures who will surely seek to block most all of the new mayor's initiatives. Nevertheless, this signifies major, real ideological progress.
What we see in the Virginia governor's race is particularly interesting, as it concentrates much of what I've been saying about the divides in the Republican Party between the libertarians (controlled overall by the oil industry), the social conservatives (controlled by the Protestant churches), and the so-called party moderates/establishment (controlled mainly by the financial sector). In the Virginia governor's race, each of those factions was represented by a different party: the libertarians by the Libertarian Party candidate Robert Sarvis, the social conservatives by Republican Ken Cuccinelli, and Wall Street has endorsed the Democratic Party's candidate Terry McAuliffe, who emerged victorious. Progressives (actual leftists) went unrepresented by any major institution in that election; a fact which goes to show how weak the left yet remains in Virginia: a state wherein, exit polls revealed, fully the majority of voters oppose the Affordable Care Act and believe that the government "is doing too much". Corresponding to those facts, combining the votes of the Cuccinelli and Sarvis reveals that rightists were the majority of the electorate. Hence why the Democrats strategically opted to endorse a Clinton-aligned centrist in that election. McAuliffe's campaign hence ran a defensive campaign that carefully avoided stating a lot of fundamental ideological disagreements with Cuccinelli, instead opting to criticize only Cuccinelli's degree of ideological extremity. Criticizing degrees and tactics more than ideas is the mark of a true centrist. If I sounded terribly negative on McAuliffe just there though, don't let that lead you to believe that he wouldn't have been my preference, given the aforementioned options. As a direct result of McAuliffe's victory, among other things, Virginia's working class will gain access to Medicaid subsidies that will enable them to purchase health insurance for the first time, discrimination against gay people seeking government employment will no longer be permitted, and you can bet that any further anti-abortion measures the reactionary legislature may pass will meet with a gubernatorial veto. Compared to the alternative that Mr. Cuccinelli offered, that's mana from heaven as far as I'm concerned! However, let there be no illusions about McAuliffe: he's the kind of guy who will support budgetary austerity and privatization in general (including school privatization). For that reason, I would warn progressives against any uncritical defense of him and against any support for letting him represent the Democratic Party overall in any major national speeches, etc. He is an enemy of our enemy, not our friend.
The Wall Street-backed candidate also won New Jersey's gubernatorial (i.e. governorship) election, but there financial aristocracy backed the Republican candidate, Chris Christie, leaving the Democrats to run a more left wing candidate; they decided on Barbara Buono. Buono, for those who don't know, was an Elizabeth Warren-like genuine progressive, known for her background as a trial lawyer and her corresponding consumer advocacy as a politician. Perhaps of greatest concern to Wall Street was the fact that she was the prime sponsor of the state's law against predatory lending, for example. Another worrying sign that doubtless concerned corporate America vis-a-vis Buono lay in her choice of running mate: Milly Silva, executive vice president of a chapter of the United Healthcare Workers East; a section of the Service Employees International Union. As you might expect of New Jersey's overwhelmingly middle class population though, the centrist candidate was broadly preferred to such an alternative. Like his approximate ideological analogy in Virginia, McAuliffe, Christie ran a largely substance-devoid campaign that focused on questions of personal style and tactics. Ignored was the fact that the state's rate of unemployment remains far higher than the national average and that the state's poverty level is the highest it's been in 50 years. Politically speaking, when you live in a state consisting mostly of property owners whose plight overall has perhaps marginally improved since you took office, you needn't worry about such things. Don't be fooled by the polls though: much to the contrast of how he's portrayed it, Christie is NOT popular with the victims of Hurricane Sandy for his recovery program. In a recent poll conducted shortly before the election, 75% of Jersey-ites hit by Sandy said they didn't think the governor cared about them at all. Christie didn't win re-election based on their support. And though many of the headlines suggest that Christie "won all income groups", there was one he still lost: voters making under $30,000. (Evidently the poor needn't even be counted as an income group -- as existing at all -- in the eyes of the commercial media.) In fact, his easy victory had much to do with the fact that big money intervened in his favor, the fact that New Jersey's population consists overwhelmingly of property owners (who are naturally amendable to such messaging rather than largely immune to it like the poorest people). The fact that almost one-third of Democrats themselves voted for Christie goes to show the ideological divides within the party; that a very real Wall Street faction is alive and thriving. In terms of the 2016 presidential race, this outcome does indeed show Christie to be a real, electable prospect, as many have remarked. (Christie is not a "centrist", by the way. Whether it be on economic or cultural issues, Christie is a rightist: he takes conservative-leaning social positions alongside neoliberal economic positions. The only reason he gets called a "moderate" is because he opposes the extreme tactics of the Tea Party movement (thus cementing the favor of the financial sector).)
There was, however, one notable instance wherein Wall Street suffered a political defeat of epic proportions: New York City's mayoral race. Finance had favored centrist Christine Quinn to win the Democratic Party's nomination and provided her accordingly with sizable donations. The most progressive candidate, Bill de Blasio, by contrast, was famously denounced by the city mayor and Wall Street billionaire Micheal Bloomberg on the grounds that his campaign placed wood in the fires of "class warfare". Class warfare is something Mr. Bloomberg would know a lot about, having been personally responsible for the suppression of the Occupy movement's main and founding group, Occupy Wall Street, two years ago. While Quinn had run essentially as the next Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio ran as the anti-Bloomberg populist, calling for a tax hike on the rich in order to increase funding for public schools and construct more public housing to service the needs of the city's growing number of poor people. (Poor and low-income people collectively compose 46% of NYC's population, according to a recent study.) De Blasio also distinguished himself as the only candidate who consistently opposed the city's racist "stop and frisk" policing policy wherein minorities (and yes it's almost always minorities) are randomly grabbed by the cops, thrown to the pavement to get their private parts fondled for a while, and then abandoned, all without a word of explanation. Whereas recent rightist mayors (Giuliani and Bloomberg) have managed to pull off electoral victories by running as law and order candidates focused on reducing the crime rate, that didn't work this time, now that the crime rate is well under control, much unlike in the early '90s. Winning the Democratic nomination for mayor was de Blasio's main challenge, for, as it turned out, the Democrats managed to maintain their broad center-left coalition (which composes a sizable majority of New Yorkers) in the election itself, but just under different leadership than usual; under the leadership of the left rather than of the center. As a result, de Blasio's victory was the biggest landslide in the city's entire history: 73% for de Blasio to just 24% for his Republican opponent. It was quite rewarding to yours truly to watch his victory speech, for which he stood behind a symbolically red sign bearing the word PROGRESS in bold lettering to let everyone know that political allegiances were left-of-center (albeit hardly far to the left). It goes to show that the city has now been sufficiently re-proletarianized for the left to win outright victories again for the first time since the 1940s. That's not to say he'll have an easy road ahead. The city council includes a lot of more centrist figures who will surely seek to block most all of the new mayor's initiatives. Nevertheless, this signifies major, real ideological progress.