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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 Iran 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.
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