David Sirota

As I say in the review, the basic premise of Dobbs’ book (and his television show) is simple:

“Cultural liberalism focusing on social issues that have only varying degrees of support among the general population is far different from full-throated Dobbs-style economic populism. It is undeniable that aside from Dobbs and a few politicians, America’s political debate is almost entirely devoid of economic populists. ‘War on the Middle Class’ confronts this problem head-on — and thanks to Dobbs’s passion and charisma, it succeeds in sounding an alarm that cannot be ignored.”

Dobbs-style populism, along with opposition to the Iraq War, was the overwhelming theme of the 2006 elections. There is no denying it. In the last few days, there have been a barrage of right-wingers and DLCers trying to hide this very simple fact. They have said the election was about Democrats pretending to be Republicans, citing people like Virginia Senator-elect Jim Webb - even as Webb himself has appeared on Dobbs’ show to give voice to the very kind of economic populism many of us have been pushing for years. And, of course, even in the face of the New York Times’ own news page admitting the rise of populism, we are asked by the Establishment revisionists to simply forget about the election of red-region economic populists like Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, Heath Shuler, Nancy Boyda and others.

Writers like Tom Frank, Chris Hayes, Matt Taibbi, Bill Greider and I have for years been pushing this brand of politics, and for our efforts we have all been attacked by Washington insiders and Big Money interests. I remember vividly the DLC attacking me for publishing The Democrats’ Da Vinci Code back in 2004 that proposed a populist national campaign strategy, citing real-world examples of how this strategy works in red regions of the country.

But we have stuck to our guns because polls show populism (aka. challenging economic power) is the “center” position in the public, even though it may not be the “center” position in a K-Street-owned Washington, D.C. On Tuesday, the true “center” won out over Washington’s faux “center” - whether our status quo opponents in Washington’s think tanks, cocktail parties, congressional cloakrooms and lobbying firms like it or not.

Oh, sure, there will continue to be efforts to revise history. We can look no further than the recent New York Times Sunday Magazine piece about populist leader Brian Schweitzer that shows just how desperate those Big Money representatives who have run the Democratic Party into the ground really are:

“’He’s as much a prairie centrist as he is a prairie populist,’ Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council told me. Schweitzer has the ability to reduce a complicated issue to a few sharp lines, reframing it with themes of patriotism and underdog know-how. ‘I was a critic of Nafta, I was a critic of Cafta and I’ll be a critic of Shafta,” he says of free-trade agreements, long the hobgoblin of even the most articulate liberal politicians. “Why is it that America supposedly creates the best businessmen in the world, but when we go to the table with the third world, we come away losers?’”

It’s true - Schweitzer is a “centrist” in that he is at the center of American public opinion in his efforts to take on Big Money interests and give voice to Americans’ justifiable anger at the sellout trade policy pushed by the DLC. But that’s not what Reed is trying to say - he’s trying to claim Schweitzer as one of the DLC’s own, implying that the Montana governor is yet another mushy corporatist - an insult to what Schweitzer and other red-state populists have built. Still, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at this kind of revisionism. Dishonesty knows no bounds when irrelevance and rejection is in the air.

To be sure, I go after Dobbs for his refusal to comprehensively address immigration in a way that actually deals honestly with the problem. He prefers to use the issue as a crude cultural bludgeon, instead of connecting it to all the other economic issues he focuses on. Similarly, I chide him for repeating some of the most tired right-wing stereotypes about the media.

But all in all, there is no denying that if Democrats want to hold a governing majority for the foreseeable future, they cannot continue to deny the populist outrage seething all over the country and highlighted by Dobbs book. They cannot continue to listen only to the former Clintonites now on K Street. They cannot continue to listen only to executives on Wall Street. They cannot continue to openly brag about how close they are to corporate lobbyists. They must see election 2006 for what it was: a mandate for economic populism and a battle cry against the hostile takeover of our government and against the War on the Middle Class.

Sirotablog

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