Poverty & “Class Warfare”

The LA Times has a nice piece on John Edwards and the major themes of his campaign:

WASHINGTON — When Elaine Ellis began her rounds as a New York nursing assistant one morning this spring, she had an improbable companion: John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate, who had accepted a union invitation to spend the day with a low-wage worker.

When Ohio steelworkers went on strike last fall to protest a plant closing, who joined their rally? John Edwards.

Next month, low-income survivors of Hurricane Katrina will have another visit from former Sen. Edwards (D-N.C.), who announced his presidential campaign amid the storm rubble of New Orleans.

For more than two years, Edwards has been methodically building his campaign around an issue long shunned by leading Democratic candidates: the plight of the poor and working class. He has backed up his public appearances with unusually detailed proposals to provide universal healthcare, raise taxes on the rich and eliminate poverty over the next 30 years.

“This is a huge moral issue facing the country,” Edwards said in a telephone interview as he headed into a Memorial Day weekend campaign swing through Iowa. “I don’t see in polls that it is a driving issue [for voters], but it is for me.”

Of course, any establishment media article on poverty and politics wouldn’t be complete, er, "balanced," if it didn’t raise the specter of "class warfare":

But Edwards’ 2008 strategy carries risks, in part because it speaks most directly to a slice of the electorate that has notably little political clout. Perhaps the last major presidential candidate to make fighting poverty a central theme was Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) in 1968, before his assassination that June. Some analysts warn that an agenda that might suggest “class warfare” risks alienating middle-class swing voters and moderate Democrats who do not want to revive criticisms that theirs is the party of the poor.

Now, as anyone with sufficient sense knows, there’s "class warfare" going on… just ask Warren E. Buffett:

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Al Gore, “The Assault On Reason”

Some Summer reading to look forward to, from Al Gore — The Assult on Reason:

American democracy is now in danger-not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

TIME has more.

David Sirota: The Rise of Seinfeld Politics & The End of Principles

Here’s just one more example illustrating why David Sirota’s writing is the most lucid embodiment of what I think of as progressive populist:

Berating the entire concept of ideology has become something of a fad in contemporary Washington, D.C. The David Broders lead us to believe that ideology – defined by the dictionary as “a set of beliefs” – is exactly the same thing as rigid, counterproductive dogma that prevents people from compromising. Of course, the chattering class is perhaps the most rigidly dogmatic demographic in America, loyally clinging to a rather strident elitist ideology on everything from trade, to the war and to democracy itself.

Put another way, “ideology” is berated even as an ideological war is being fought by the beraters. And while the conservative movement actually believes in movement politics and rejects the idiotic attack on the concept of having “a set of beliefs,” many Democratic Party elites buy the whole frame hook, line and sinker – for clearly corrupt reasons.

[...]

We are expected to believe that the American people want candidates who stand for nothing but have good “personalities” – that, say, a gameshow host like Alex Trebek or Bob Barker is the ideal Democratic Party candidates. We are expected to believe that you can “sell leadership” without actually SHOWING any leadership. And perhaps most ridiculously of all, we are expected to believe that the way to “reclaim fleeting authenticity” is to eliminate a coherent belief system – the critical ingredient of authenticity itself.

Go read the rest at the HuffingPost.com, and see why Sirota takes Sen Obama’s campaign manager to task for being guilty of exercising "Seinfeld Politics" — that is, the politics of nothing.

Real Family Values

Americans Support Edwards Choice

Americans by 2 to 1 margin support the decision of John Edwards to stay in the Democratic presidential race even though his wife, Elizabeth, has been diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer, according to a new USA Today/Gallup Poll.

Edwards also “got a boost in the horserace of Democratic contenders, chosen as the preference by 14% of the respondents who are Democrats or lean toward the Democratic party. That’s up from 9% in the USA Today poll taken three weeks ago.”

The national poll had Clinton at 35%, with Sen. Barack Obama at 22%, Al Gore at 17% and John Edwards at 14%.

Congress Must Intervene

Via Dailykos.com, this is a great analogy about the Bush administration, and why the Democratic Party led Congress needs to intervene:

Netroots ’06 candidate Gary Trauner (WY-AL) visited D.C. last week, and spoke to the Democratic Caucus on Iraq. He reports back in a diary to us:

I had the opportunity last week to spend some time in DC with the Democratic House Caucus as they debated the Iraq Supplemental bill.  In fact, I was given the opportunity to speak to the Caucus for a few minutes.  Against the advice of several "consultants" who wanted me to just show up, be bland and ask for financial support, I couldn’t let this golden chance slip by without giving them my take on the Iraq situation from a different angle….

I told our Dem Representatives that perhaps we should use the language of the free market so often used by Republicans and their corporate sponsors. The way I see it, Congress is the Board of Directors of the largest, most important enterprise in the history of the world – the United States of America – and the President is the CEO. But he’s a weak CEO surrounded by a bad management team. In these circumstances, there isn’t a company worth it’s salt in America where the Board should not step in to set strategic, and sometimes tactical, parameters. In fact, in these circumstances, any Board has a fiduciary obligation, a responsibility, to its shareholders – in this case, every American citizen – to intervene with purpose, decisiveness and conviction to change the strategic course of the organization. If we’ve learned anything from the recent corporate scandals at Enron, MCI, etc., it should be that while some of the scandals arose from bad people purposefully doing bad things, these corporate frauds were enabled largely because of ineffective Board oversight and unconscionable Board inaction.

In the business world, strong Board action in the face of a ineffective CEO/management team that is pursuing a rigid and ill-planned strategy isn’t micromanaging – its called good governance.  And, in my view, it‘s good politics.

I can tell you that the arguments I heard in the Dem House Caucus were by and large impassioned and heartfelt.  And leadership is working hard to come up with a solution.  But here in the west, after knocking on nearly 20,000 doors across Wyoming last year, I KNOW that people want straight talk and a Representative who will stand up for his/her convictions.

This is Congress’ chance to show the American people that they have the courage to hold others accountable, and that they have the intestinal fortitude to do the right thing regardless of political calculation.

That’s an important message for our Blue Dogs to hear. Gary ran in the reddest of the Red States–Wyoming. If the people in Wyoming think it’s time for the President’s hands to be tied on this war, maybe it is.