[NYTr] Democrats in Future Shock: They Could Lose It All in 2008!

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Nov 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff11192007.html


Democrats in Future Shock

They Could Lose It All in 2008!

By DAVE LINDORFF

For Congressional Democrats, the train has already left the
station--and they're not on board.

A year after the election that gave them control of both houses of
Congress, they are exposed as a feckless bunch of frauds posing as an
opposition.

As long ago as last January, when the US death toll in Iraq was almost
1000 lower, and the civilian death toll in Iraq was over a hundred
thousand lower, they could have brought an end to the conflict by
simply refusing to approve any more money for the war.

Instead, they approved administration requests for several hundred
billion dollars for expanding the number of troops from 140,000 to a
current level of nearly 173,000-a post- invasion record.

They could have brought administration assaults on the Constitution to
a screeching halt by initiating impeachment hearings against the
president, the vice president, or against both of these criminal
usurpers. Instead, the House leadership threatened anyone who might
file impeachment bills with various punishments, reportedly ranging
from loss of committee chairmanships to loss of access to Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee funding.

In the perverse "logic" of Democratic Party leaders, this do-nothing
strategy was designed to bring Democrats a historic victory in 2008,
when American voters, angry about the quagmire in Iraq, and disgusted
with eight years of Republican misrule, would supposedly hand Democrats
the presidency and health majorities in both houses of Congress.

But the American public is not that stupid. With Bush and Cheney
leaving, they won't buy a campaign based on running against those two
disasters.

Polls are showing that the majority of Americans are at least as
disgusted at Democrats in Congress as they are with the
Republicans-maybe more so. Since last November, public approval of the
new Democratic-led Congress has fallen from a post- election high of 65
percent to a current level of about 20 percent, depending on the poll.
That's lower than President Bush's record low approval rating of 24
percent.

The only political entity with a lower approval rating than the
Democrats in Congress at this point is Vice President Dick Cheney,
currently at 11 percent, but being more popular than a blood-thirsty,
power-crazed lunatic with a nuclear fetish is a pretty sorry claim to
fame.

The dire situation facing Democrats is masked currently by the fake
"excitement" being generated by all the corporate media coverage of the
so-called "race" for the Democratic presidential nomination-coverage
that is artificially skewed towards just two or perhaps three of the
candidates, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. This
coverage creates the illusion of some kind of groundswell of public
excitement about the Democratic candidates. In fact none of them fares
particularly well against Republican candidates, At this point, given
the disastrous history of seven years of Republican rule in Washington,
with the economy staggering, the dollar in freefall, oil prices at
record levels, the country $8 trillion in debt, mortgage defaults at
depression levels and the war in Iraq still without an end in sight,
any Democrat should be trouncing any Republican candidate in the polls.
Instead, the so-called "leading" Democrats are all neck-and-neck with
their potential Republican opponents. (Evidence of how out-of-whack the
corporate media coverage of the Democratic campaign is was provided at
the CNN debate in Nevada last Sunday, when even in an auditorium packed
with supporters of Clinton and Obama, the biggest applause came when
Dennis Kucinich, a candidate almost ignored by the moderator Wolf
Blitzer, when he called for impeachment, and for ending the war
immediately.)

The reason for this disconnect from reality is that while Democratic
voters, as always, can be expected to go dutifully to the polls next
November and cast their votes for whatever compromised and weak
candidate their party puts up to run, the independent vote which put
Democrats over the top in the 2006 off-year congressional elections is
gone.

Those voters, many of whom have long harbored a powerful antipathy
towards both parties, towards the government, and towards the
corporations that dominate the political process, came out in record
numbers and voted Democratic in November, '06 because, sick of the
Bush/Cheney administration, sick of five years of a phony "war" on
terror, and sick of three years of the Iraq War, they turned to the
Democrats, even in traditional "red" states and congressional
districts, in hopes that the Democrats would do what they were
promising to do: end the war and defend the Constitution.

Now they have seen that this hope was misplaced.
The Democrats had no intention of doing either thing, and indeed seem
to be happy to see the war and the Bush administration continue through
the next election.

But 2008 will not be 2006. In 2006, those independents had reason to at
least hope that the Democrats would really be different, that they
would really act like an empowered opposition, that they would really
do something to turn the country around.

In 2008, independents and even many Democratic voters know that the
Democrats will not be different from Republicans in any meaningful way
on the two key issues-ending the war and restoring the Constitution.
Not only will the likely Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary
Clinton, not end the war in Iraq. Because she is a woman, and has made
it clear she wants to be perceived as being as tough as any guy, she is
as likely as Bush to expand the war to Iraq or some other country
during her first term of office-maybe even more likely, if Bush doesn't
do it first.

As for Congress, Democrats may be in for a big shock in 2008. Expecting
major gains in both houses, they may find themselves surprised if the
independent voters who came out for them in 2006 stay home, and leave
the field to Republicans and nativist independents who base their votes
on issues like immigration and an unreasoned fear of terror-both issues
that the Republican candidate plan to stoke.

There is still time for the Democrats to recover, but they won't do it
on their own. The leadership of the party has lost its connection to
the American people and to reality, and is living in a world of image
management, corporate pandering and inside-the-Beltway machinations.

With an overwhelming majority of Americans clearly in favor of an
immediate end to the Iraq war, and a similar majority in favor of
impeachment hearings against both Bush and especially Cheney, it is
clear that the entire electoral situation would change overnight if
Democrats in Congress announced that there would be no more funding
bills for the Iraq War-only for withdrawal-and that impeachment
hearings were beginning.

This is not going to happen, though, without an even more forceful mass
movement by the American people.

What we need is a tsunami of mail and phone calls to Democrats in
Congress demanding both things. We need marches on the local offices of
Democratic members of Congress. And finally we need mass resignations
from the Democratic Party, with voters making the point directly and
unambiguously that people are leaving the party until it acts
decisively to end the war and to begin impeachment proceedings.

No more symbolic votes. No more posturing.

Only action.

[Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by
Barbara Olshansky. He can be reached at: dlindorff at mindspring.com ]