When the fire that burns in the predator's eyes takes another disguise with a different face*

If we continue to tell ourselves that there really is such a thing as a "non-politician" candidate, then we're going to continue to be burned when the supposed outsiders start to suddenly act all insidery... as though nobody could have predicted it.... except some people did.

At Rising Tide this year, John Slade got a big round of applause when he told us the lesson he had learned from the Ray Nagin experience was the folly of electing a "businessman" rather than a politician. I think the lesson is that all politicians are politicians. Although some of them like to sell themselves as something else. Rest assured at least one candidate in 2010 will run as an "outsider" based on his/her business credentials or extra-NOLA nativity or enthusiasm for Twitter or some such thing. Rest assured that candidate will be full of shit.

(*)

This must mean that Arnie's in, then?

Mitch Landrieu Says He Won't Run For Mayor

Be the populist anger you want to see

Taibbi:

Apparently it is not enough that the credit card companies have spent $15.5 million on lobbying fees in the first quarter of 2009 alone (this according to CREW, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), while employees of credit card companies spent an additional $14.5 million last year, and credit PACs spent $8.6 million more. It’s not enough that when the President even considered making a change to the credit laws, 14 top-ranking credit card company officials got to meet with Obama to plead their case in person; conveniently, none of the 14 was a registered lobbyist, which made them exempt from laws banning lobbyists from influencing officials with responsibility for distribution of stimulus/recovery funds. Apparently despite all that the credit card companies are voiceless yet, and still need Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times to champion their cause. (link added by me for clarity)

Of all the truly revolting political developments of the financial crisis age — and there have been a lot of them — probably nothing is more disgusting than the weirdly intense media backlash against “populist anger,” anger that is inevitably described by media sages like Hiltzik as irrational, unfounded, and pointedly unhelpful. The public is depicted as a great dumb beast lashing out wildly at shadows and hallucinations, with the poor diligent hardworking members of the financial class (slaving away to pump much-needed capital into the bloodstream of international commerce) suffering the collateral damage.

One thing I've been trying to figure out is the degree to which persistent public anger at the mismanaged economy will be an aid or a hindrance to Democrats in 2010. I think that Obama's basic continuance of the Bush policy of giving away all of our money to the bankers bodes ill. It muddles the political message in such a way that it makes even the most insane ramblings of his opponents seem at least just as reasonable as he.

For instance, it should be quite simple to rebuff the recent Teabagging phenomenon, not only because it was a load of corporate lobbyist produced astroturf, but also because it just doesn't make sense for "the people" to get up in arms against a tax policy and stimulus package that clearly favors the interests of "the people" over those of the money power. But once Obama aligns himself with continued giveaways to Wall Street, it becomes far more difficult to keep people convinced he's on their side. It becomes easier for your opponents to purposely conflate "bailouts" which are government giveaways to wealthy criminals with "stimulus" which is government investment in services and infrastructure from which we all benefit.

People have a right to be angry. And angry people express their anger in sometimes incoherent ways. It should fall upon our political leadership to respect that anger as legitimate and channel it toward meaningful resolution. Instead, we have a political leadership and media establishment that serves an elite criminal class on the one hand and showers the rest of us with disdainful lectures on the unseemliness and incivility of populism on the other.

Someone is going to be blamed, and the Republicans have figured out who: Clinton and Obama. But the Democrats are staying above the battle and refuse to “play the blame game”. This responsible, patrician, professional approach hasn’t worked for the Democrats for thirty or forty years, not even during normal times, and it’s certainly not going to work now. But the Democrats don’t realize this, and they’re so committed to their cool, professionalism that are unlikely to be able to deal with the politics of the impending disaster at all.

This is precisely why I'm not so keen as the professional political observers are to write off the GOP at this point. It seems to me that while the right is sticking to its ideological guns and doubling down on the crazy, the left (or what passes for the left) is engaging in a hubristic elitist rhetoric of condescension which combines the tone of upper-class intellectual paranoia with a shockingly unempathetic sectional bias. This looks like a long-term losing strategy to me.

No one is taking this seriously yet (and for good reason... at least until the polling trends start to change) but I really do see a populist backlash coming somewhere in the next few electoral cycles. I still think the Democrats have the option of swimming with rather than being wiped out by the tide, but as long as they continue to cater to the bankers and rain insults on the masses they're swimming in the wrong direction.

Specter's Gambit

Might not survive the 2010 backlash after all.

Update:

A lot of this can still get ironed out before election time. Maybe it's Specter's arrogance (or "cockiness") which has put him in a hole... but it also represents an opportunity for labor to get back in the game.

There's another angle here too. Labor is really licking its wounds over what appears to be the very steep climb EFCA faces in this Congress. And the Democratic establishment in Washington moved very quickly to crown Specter as the Democratic nominee. It would not surprise me if labor and affiliated organizations might not mind engaging in a amicable Specter-Sestak proxy battle with President Obama and the lords of the senate to make the point that as much as everything's great and everyone's pals, they've got their own independent bases of power and political muscle.

In the political script yet to be written, Obama and the Dems are due to lose political momentum in 2010 precisely because they have been too kind to the banks and too dismissive of labor. 2010 is going to be a populist backlash election. The Dems still have the option of capturing some of the anger for their own party's cause. This requires primarily two things in my opinion. 1) Breaking free of the death grip of the finance lobby. (Not likely to happen) and/or 2) Passing EFCA... which wasn't likely to happen before this opportunity arose. Exploiting a pressure point like Specter is a good way for labor to try to get back on the President's agenda... and offer him an opportunity to rescue himself.

Specter

On the one hand, I'm tempted to say that this means he's pretty much toast politically.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. What has happened here is Arlen Specter has been forced out by a calcifying, radicalizing GOP. He was about to become a sacrifice to that radicalization and clearly didn't have anywhere else to go. Conventional wisdom at this point in time will claim this as a portent of Republican weakness in 2010. I have other ideas but it's still a bit too early to tell. Either way, I'll be very interested to see what a Toomey vs Specter general election looks like.

Update: Josh Marshall has some preliminary thoughts:

Democratic registrations swelled in Pennsylvania last year at the expense of Republicans. A lot of that was moderate Republicans who wanted to vote for Obama in the primary or the general. Or for that matter, moderate Republicans who wanted to vote for Hillary. Whatever your interpretation of why they were switching, that left the Republican primary electorate much more conservative than it was in the past, certainly much more than it was when he ran against Toomey the first time in 2004.

The question is just how "moderate" will those "moderate Republicans" who crossed over in 2008 remain?