Political economies

It’s fascinating how much attention is given to Vice Presidential candidates before an election. Afterwards, or course, they largely disappear -- unless they’re puppet-masters like Dick “Fuck Democracy” Cheney.

Barack Obama, fresh from pledging his fealty to toeing the disastrous Israeli-right line – guaranteeing continued colonialism, land theft, balkanization, and, not surprisingly, Palestinian reaction to these continued efforts to obliterate them as a people – is now hunting for a Veep. Needless to say, it must not be Hilary Clinton.

It’s yet another numbing irony of our politics that Clinton enjoys greater (white) working class support than Obama, since her DLC-wing of the Party has done so much to destroy the last vestiges of the (white) working class (cf. NAFTA) in the name of the neoliberal order. As Jesse Jackson showed, the white populist revolt, usually ignored by the Democrats, is a rich source of votes when not abandoned to the “god, guns, and gays” (and race) confidence game of the Right. This is why I think someone like Jim Webb or John Edwards should be Obama’s Veep; a populist firebrand who can shore up this flank, and then spend the next four years pushing hard for the long hard struggles ahead (global warming, health care, the war).

More than 3/4ths of adult American don’t have 4-year college degrees. What’s the matter with Kansas? What’s the matter with Manhattan, more likely: a liberal upper middle class and some enlightened rich folk don’t make much of a majority. But it’s this thin spectrum of the ruling class which funds the Democrats, making it a bourgeois party par excellence, beholden to the money. The Democrats, of course, are held up by African American voters, who aren’t much participants in the bourgeois pie. Meanwhile, the Republicans, equally bourgeois, are held up by poor whites, who also don’t get much more than ideological crumbs.