Salon: The issue Jeb Bush and Donald Trump understand, which may keep Clinton from the White House
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In office Obama forgot all about ethics reforms. It was the biggest mistake of his presidency. Republicans didn’t stop him. It is a hallmark of many ethics reforms, including most of his, that they may be implemented by executive order. Obama didn’t pursue them because he didn’t want to. Consultants who make rich livings off corporate clients may have told him no one cares about ‘process issues,’ as he took to calling reform. His top hires, most of whom had worked either on Wall Street or as lobbyists or ‘consultants’ to big corporations—the lobbyist pledge was the first campaign promise Obama broke—may have told him reform was impractical. It hurts to say it, but he may never have meant any of it to start with. All we know is he didn’t do it, and not having done it, couldn’t even talk about it.
In his stupefyingly clueless opinion in Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy distinguished between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ corruption. The former is mostly bribery and happens when any public official accepts any sort of personal payment for any official act. The latter occurs when the same guy deposits the money in a campaign account rather than his wallet and never admits the transaction’s true nature even to himself, or simply acts in the unspoken hope of future, unspecified reward. While citing no proof—there’s none to be found in the pleadings or anywhere else–Kennedy said soft corruption does no harm — and anyway no one cares about it. In real life it does the most harm of any form of corruption, and almost everyone cares deeply about it.
Think what our energy policy might be like if the Koch brothers made solar panels. Imagine Dodd-Frank if elite Dems didn’t raise money on Wall Street, or what Obamacare would be like if Obama hadn’t cut preemptive deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. If Obama had less concern for his relations with big banks, might he have offered real relief to homeowners swindled in the mortgage crisis? If he hadn’t been wooing big business, surely he’d have pushed for a hike in the minimum wage in 2009 when he had the votes, and ever after reaped the fiscal, economic and political rewards.
As to how much we care, there’s proof aplenty. In the 2000s the long simmering public anger at corruption began boiling over. In a 2006 CBS poll 77 percent of voters said lobbyists bribing members is “just the way things work in Congress.” In a Fox News poll, 91 percent said they were concerned about Washington corruption, up from 81 percent the year before. In a January 2006 Gallup poll, 96 percent of voters said corruption would be an important factor in their vote for Congress that year. In November Democrats took back the House and Senate.
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Greenberg addresses those who believe the white working class is out of reach for Democrats and who may impute all white hostility to government to racial motive: “White working class and downscale voters in our surveys do support major parts of a progressive, activist agenda particularly when a Democratic candidate boldly attacks the role of money and special interests dominating government and… promotes reforms to ensure that average citizens get both their say and their money’s worth.”
As I’ve written here before, the country agrees with Democrats on nearly every issue now under debate — and by margins often exceeding 60/40. The list includes not just progressive economic policies like a minimum wage and paid family leave, but climate change, gun safety, gay marriage, the lifting of the Cuban embargo, all of the president’s immigration reforms, every tax proposal and nearly every budget priority. We say we’re polarized, but on these big issues we’re as near to consensus as we ever get. Voters who agree with Democrats vote Republican because of their fury at the condition of their government. Democrats are the party of government. If the Democrats won’t fix the government, voters won’t let them near it.
It is America’s hidden consensus: a populist economics and a frugal, efficient and, above all, honest government. Can either party embrace it? Republicans will never embrace economic populism. But their base loves ‘frugal, efficient and honest’ and their elites are great at faking all three. Democrats face a tougher road. Their base loves populism and reform, but their elites love neoliberal economics and pay-to-play politics. Republicans think they have an edge on national security. If they can gin up enough fear they may be proved right. Right now you can watch them lay the groundwork for a campaign based on xenophobia and faux reform. It’s what Trump was up to this week at the Mexican border and on CNN.
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http://www.salon.com/2015/07/26/this_is_why_hillarys_losing_the_issue_jeb_bush_and_donald_trump_understand_which_may_keep_clinton_from_the_white_house/
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