The Chris Moeller Archives

"Don't Run"

The Nation is a politically-liberal weekly magazine that dates back to 1865 and calls itself "the flagship of the left." Breaking with almost a century-and-a-half tradition of establishment dissent, it published an open letter in February of 2004 to Ralph Nader entitled "Don't Run" whose title alone should provide a pretty full explanation of what it was about. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that letter is nowhere to be found online these days, not during a time of such great progressive disappointment and regret-- that is, the co-opting of so many reactionary Bush/Cheney foreign and domestic policies by a Democratic administration.

In '04, editors at the magazine were taking third-party progressive candidate Ralph Nader to task for his participation in the 2000 Presidential Campaign. They laid the George Bush electoral victory not at the feet of the U.S. Supreme Court, at corrupt election officials in Florida, at the lame-duck Democratic President that had made everybody in America feel like they needed a shower, or even at the actual Democratic candidate himself for his frustrating inability to articulate a vision for the country. No, they laid the Bush triumph at Nader's door for the public advocate having had the audacity to run for president outside the Washington establishment's sanctified two-party dictatorship.

Well, behold. The Nation may have just planted the seedlings today for the next political round. An article appeared at their website with the heading "How Sarah Palin Could Beat Obama in 2012", and surprise of surprises, the author's hypothesis in laying out a plan of potential White House defeat doesn't have anything to do with President Obama continuing to betray progressive voters at every opportunity. It has to do with another so-called "spoiler" candidate entering the race-- this time, popular Michael Bloomberg, a "moderate," and a high-visibility independent office-holder as the mayor of New York City.

The game is the same:

1) Use fear tactics. Fall in line behind Obama or risk the dangerous radical Sarah Palin, they say. Progressives in 2004 were told they had to back the uninspiring John Kerry or they would be stuck with a Bush second term. Then they were told in 2008 that they had to back Obama or a John McCain presidency would be something akin to a third term for Bush. McCain was soundly defeated, but America got their third Bush term anyway.

2) Attempt to bribe the "spoiler." In '04, then-DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe tried to buy off Nader with an unspecified amount of money to stay off the ballot in 19 battleground states. Now, according to the author of The Nation piece, the wealthy Bloomberg (who could spend billions of his own money in a third-party campaign for the presidency) may have the Treasury Secretary position dangled in front of him as a carrot to stay on the sidelines.

Stay tuned for step 3. If history tells us anything, the bribes will be replaced by blackmail, the way the Democratic establishment starved Nader's consumer and legal protection groups-- many of them to death-- in the wake of his refusal to prostitute himself. It remains to be seen what could be done to punish the lavishly-rich Bloomberg, whose enterprises are far more capitalistic than they are centered on the welfare of the public, which is what makes him, in many ways, much more dangerous.

On its surface, The Nation article may seem rather innocuous-- perhaps it's just a little reader on some noteworthy polling numbers, but when we look closer, we see the strings. Bloomberg is regarded by the author as a "spoiler" (and those are my quotes, not his), rather than as a viably-alternative candidate. The article also reinforces the "horse race-style" narrative so preferred by the duopoly, the one that replaces the debate between ideas with the debate between political conveniences.

The most interesting element about this theoretical three-candidate race between Obama, Palin, and Bloomberg is that it would inevitably have to lead to at least four candidates because there would still be no candidate representing the millions of dissatisfied progressives-- what with the three named campaigners all deemed perfectly-acceptable by the Lords of Wall Street. That's why a Bloomberg candidacy, so potentially-visible and well-funded however, would be such a marvelous thing. It would be a challenge for the duopoly to legitimately keep Bloomberg out of the nationally-televised debates, which are all-important in garnering candidate "viability" with the establishment media, but actually operated by a sham commission made up of Democrat and Republican party hacks. Then the door could conceivably swing open for a fourth candidate, and then a fifth, and then before you know it, we have government accountability and a truly representative democracy.

posted by CM @ 6:34 PM