"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Abraham Lincoln
As always, the GOP does the same thing in the service of Big Money, and much worse and most of the time, unabashedly. I don't spend a lot of time on them because they don't seem to be a potential vehicle for the kinds of economic change that we need the most. Their service is to the monied interests and every cockamamie think tank ideology that supports the one percent and then some.
But the Democrats, who are the traditional party of the working class and the New Deal, keep trying to ride this 'lesser of two evils' gimmick and avoid doing more than talking about badly needed genuine reform. They want to have their cake and eat it too. The cake is public office, frosted with huge Big Money political contributions, speaking fees, and post-office payoffs.
Don't blame Bernie or Jill Stein for Hillary's loss. And don't blame the voters, or write off half the country, the blue collar working class and the working poor, in the arrogant, elitist manner of Mitt Romney. But the Clinton campaign did, and it is clear that Hillary has learned nothing from her loss.
Her high disapproval ratings across a broad portion of the electorate were well known. And the reasons for this disapproval showed up clearly in her campaign, which epitomized all the self-referential policies that the out of touch Beltway Democrats have been pursuing since before 1990. The 'best qualified candidate' of all time lost to a reality show host and a fast-talking NY real estate developer.
And they lost the Congress, most of the governors' offices, and broad support in the middle and lower working classes in their pursuit a credentialed elite supported by the one percent, hidden beneath the figleaf of identity politics.
Their attitude is that the working class has 'no where else to go.' And when working people do occasionally go someplace else in their desperation for change, they are condemned, vilified, thwarted, and further alienated.
There was a groundswell of popular support for Bernie Sanders. His broad appeal and ability to raise non-corporate money was an undeniable phenomenon, an indication of where the Democratic base was heading. And it was determinedly and at times brazenly ignored, ridiculed and then suppressed by the Democratic insiders and their consultant/media enablers who feed on their money machine.
The Democrats have abandoned their New Deal principles and constituency, and do as little as they can for the public. Meanwhile they have been pursuing the same kind of razzle dazzle elitism that has been their brand since the Clintons showed them how easy it was to have big personal paydays.
And they are not likely to change until there is a rebellion within their own party that tosses them out, or a third party rises up to replace them.
That is what the people who live off the donation/consultants money flows fear the most— that someone will disturb their own 'good thing.' And they become the very things that they pretend to despise while maintaining a hypocritical rationale that grows thinner by the day.
