Washington
The Democrats may win the November election. They might even take back the White House in 2008.
But unless Democratic office-holders shuck their reliance on corporate cash and return to fighting for working families, says David Sirota, his party will be better off losing.
The nation’s capital is steeped in corruption, the progressive polemist says, and replacing corrupted Republicans with corrupted Democrats is no solution at all.
“There is always going to be a big-business party in this country. There always has been,” says Sirota. “But we have had equilibrium in the past because there has always been a party of the little guy.”
Then, “big business realized the way to really maximize its agenda was to water down and weaken the counterweight,” Sirota says. Now, he adds, “about a third to a half of the Democratic Party is complicit” in Republican policies on taxes, energy, job losses, trade and the war in Iraq.
“What we have now is a government working on behalf of the big- moneyed interests who finance political campaigns,” he says.
“I don’t care which party is in the majority if you don’t have a mandate to fix things,” Sirota says. “You won’t actually get change; all you’ll get is a change of power.”
Though he has written a new book about political corruption – “Hostile Takeover” – the bite of Sirota’s message and the regard with which he is held by many progressives is a testament to the political reach of the Internet.
From Helena, Mont., via the Net, the 30-year-old Sirota has used liberal blogs, his own website and e-mail to emerge as one of the Democratic Party’s most caustic internal critics. His targets have included Bill and Sen. Hillary Clinton; many of the Clintons’ economic policies and advisers; Rep. Rahm Emmanuel of Illinois, the congressional campaign chairman; and House minority whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland.
Last week, Sirota lit into Sen. Clinton for her romancing of Rupert Murdoch, the conservative owner of Fox News.
“Rupert Murdoch is a guy who has tried to quite literally destroy the Democratic Party,” says Sirota. “I don’t think going to them and pandering to them and legitimating them sends a message of strength. It projects weakness. It projects fear.”
Political corruption comes in two varieties. There are brazen payoffs. And then there is a kind of gooey rot that Sirota is especially good at spotting: the venal abandonment of principles, spurred by the favors of corporate lobbyists and the need for campaign cash.
Inexorably, all but the toughest pols and pundits get seduced. And over time, the party establishment starts to stipulate: globalization is a blessing, free trade is sacred, billionaires need tax breaks, job loss is inevitable, workers are expendable, wages will decline, the war in Iraq is necessary.
Ultimately, what’s left distinguishing Democrats from Republicans is not a commitment to the little guy, but positions on abortion, gun control, gay rights and other social issues.
“There is a very rational decision by many people to prioritize cultural issues when they go to the ballot box because they think both parties fail to represent them on economic issues,” says Sirota. “And so they vote for the person who more culturally fits what they believe.”
Sirota doesn’t think Democrats should abandon their historic commitment to social causes, but he wants them to raise economic issues back to an equal plane. Pro-lifers will get hissed and shunned at party meetings and conventions, he points out, while big-business Democrats shipping jobs overseas get welcomed.
“It is a matter of emphasis. What do you emphasize with your orthodoxy?” he says. “It doesn’t make sense for it to be OK to sell out people economically – as long as you are pro-choice.”
Sirota grew up in Philadelphia, went to college in Chicago and worked in Washington as a sharp- tongued spinmeister for liberal House members before moving to Montana two years ago. There, he contributed to the state’s Democratic renaissance, and the election of Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a gun-toting economic populist. His distance from Washington, and Schweitzer’s success, gives Sirota added freedom and credibility.
Many Democrats don’t like what they hear. Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a party think tank that once employed Sirota, says his message is simplistic, with too much “backward-looking alarm” and not enough “forward-looking optimism” to appeal to middle-class Americans.
“As a strategic framework it is sadly lacking,” says Teixeira. Many of the ills that American workers suffer are brought on by an historic transformation of the global economy. “It’s not just the result of corruption,” he says. “It’s the result of change.”
But others welcome Helena’s young Torquemada.
“At some point the progressive movement lost a little of its intellectual energy. There is something about this town,” says Tom Matzzie, Washington director for MoveOn.org, the Net-based political group. “We definitely need to hold our Democrats more accountable. We need people like Sirota.”
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective.
