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Democrats To Brown People: ‘Drop Dead’
By Daniel Koffler / April 8, 2008
Most bad things anyone might care to say about Mark Penn are probably true. A Dick Morris v. 2.0 (now with fewer hookers!), Penn has been Hillary and Bill Clinton's guru and good luck charm since the 1996 election, to which his only memorable contribution was inflicting the term "soccer mom" on our language. On the strength of his thirteen straight electoral defeats and who knows how many increasingly idiotic iterations of the "soccer mom" idea, Hillary Clinton made Penn her chief campaign strategist, in which capacity he flawlessly executed the strategy dictated by the findings of her chief pollster, Mark Penn. Not only was Hillary Clinton confident enough in Penn to pay him a seven-figure salary to act as his own check and balance, she didn't bother asking him to curtail his work as "worldwide CEO" (one rank above CEO but one rank below ultra-super-mega-kingshit-of-fuck-mountain CEO) of the noxious PR firm Burson-Marsteller, recently heard from flacking for the murderous Christian mercenary outfit Blackwater.
Still, just as there was something not quite fitting about Al Capone getting busted for tax evasion, it's not encouraging to see Penn finally get his comeuppance for lobbying on behalf of a free trade deal with Colombia that Hillary Clinton claims she opposes. Granted, Clinton is a politician trying to win an election, and to win she'll have to win over some portion of the voters who are firmly convinced that NAFTA is the cause of the 30-40 year decline of the manufacturing sector. That doesn't mean she had to adopt ignorant nativism as a core value. After all, she didn't see fit to fire or even reprimand Penn when he clumsily tried to insinuate that Barack Obama was a crack dealer on live TV. She didn't cut him loose when he decided the winning fall play for Democrats was to proclaim that only coastal states and Illinois count for anything. She isn't embarrassed that her pollster couldn't pass an introductory statistics course, or that her strategist ran perhaps the worst primary campaign in recent history. But when Penn maneuvered to help swarthy Latins steal American jobs, that was a bridge too far for Clinton and for a sizeable chunk of the "progressive" blogosphere as well.
On reflection, though, it makes a certain amount of sense that a campaign premised on ludicrous, "woe is me" self-pity would find common purpose with the economic delusions of a base of voters that finds anti-NAFTA rhetoric compelling in the first place. As Alan Vanneman points out (link via Nick Gillespie):
Yes, poor Pennsylvania, staggering under a 4.9% unemployment rate (February 2008). Poor Pennsylvania, with a per capita income of a mere $36,680 (2006 data), ranking only 18th in the U.S. A free-trade pact with mighty Colombia (2006 income per capita, a whopping $2,740) would surely blow a huge hole in the Keystone State’s economy.
Hillary Clinton, Josh Marshall, and a lot of other “liberals” should hang their heads in shame at this disgraceful “Fuck the Latinos” campaign strategy.
Barack Obama doesn't have clean hands either. His campaign has been milking the Penn story for all it's worth, today taking the escalating step of calling upon, of all people, Jimmy Hoffa Jr. as a moral authority. Excuse me, but tighter control of unions by corrupt, mobbed-up dynasties is not change you can believe in. Sure, there's an election to win in Pennsylvania, and Obama almost certainly doesn't believe any of his recent anti-trade posturing, but it would be nice if a campaign premised in large part on restoring America's good name in the world and rejoining the international community would take a break from scapegoating foreigners for all the country's economic malaise.
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But Daniel's not commenting on that, or McPeak. Or Rezko. Or…well my goodness the list is getting long, isn't it?
These Obama people are off the charts.
http://www.thetartan.org/2008/4/7/news/obama
"While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event
questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who
handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan’s
correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me
more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting
in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s
going to look so pretty, though.”
“I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’?” said
attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the
crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of
diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it
would be so outright.”"
Are we talking about temporary labor or are we talking about OPEC? OPEC deserves quite a bit of blame for the economic malaise–and the US should have seen this coming in 1974. In fact, everyone outside of Washington did see it coming.
If you are talking about temporary workers, when food is not just expensive but hard to get because farms can't get folks to pick crops, that blame will go away very quickly.
And if you are talking about outsourcing–this isn't a bad thing because it's important for other countries to become technologically advanced enough to buy our high tech products. If you have an ox and a plough, computers are the last thing you think about.
David, the issue with corporations is so complex because so many Americans own stock. So many of our folks are paying the assisted living rent with dividends–social security just isn't enough. In a way, perhaps even the way that Adam Smith intended, corporations are helping others–but as a side effect. And at this point in my life, I like unintended good consequences.
"It would be nice if a campaign premised in large part on restoring
America's good name in the world and rejoining the international
community would take a break from scapegoating foreigners for all the country's economic malaise."
Damned straight, Koffler, we need to give as many U.S. jobs to China and India as we can. Corporations are very big humanitarians!
Um, want to read the last paragraph?
Obama has not shied away from trashing free trade and denigrates NAFTA at every turn (when he actually ventures away from platitudes). The truth is that the Democrat voter likes protectionism. The labor movement likes protectionism and for a Democrat candidate to survive, they must be protectionist. Yet, the electorate as a whole likes free trade so this will be an issue in the coming general election.
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