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Thursday, January 04, 2007

The unseemliness of wealthy Democrats
Posted by Jill | 6:51 AM
If there's one thing that the conservative punditocracy hates, it's people who fly in the face of the old chestnut that liberals are people with no money and that if you have a few shekels in your pocket, you must by definition then be a Republican. The idea that someone can be wealthy and still believe that public policy should help everyone, not just those with the ability to pay, is not just totally alien to them, but actively threatens their perception of reality.

The fact that George W. Bush comes from a wealthy family with a vacation compound in Kennebunkport never figures into the equation, because when not at the White House, he surrounds himself with ersatz blue collar props. But when John Edwards sets up an antipoverty foundation and announces plans to run for President as a Democrat, the moronic Norah O'Donnell appears on MSNBC to call him a "multi-millionaire candidate."

Today in the New York Times, the equally idiotic David Brooks gets his snark on by sniping at Nancy Pelosi's wealth while pretending to be something other than an overpaid pundit who probably parties with people in the very same income range as Pelosi:

I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the opposing party.

Furthermore, I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich — between Randian hedge fund managers on the right and helipad environmentalists on the left. I dream that the big-money people who seem to dominate our politics will put aside their partisan fury and discover the class solidarity that Karl Marx always said they shared, and their newfound civility will trickle down to the rest of us. I dream that Berkeley will make peace with Buckhead, Streisand with DeVos, Huffington with O’Reilly.

I have my dreams, but of course, I am realistic too, for I am aware that at present there is no peace among the secluded island villas. I look out across the second homes of America and its surrounding tropical regions and I see polarization among the Kate Spade devotees and bitterness among the Rolexes. And I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife.

Some people believe that Pelosi is an airhead, but that is wrong. Some people believe she is a radical San Francisco liberal, but that, too, is wrong. The main fact to know about Pelosi is that she is a creature of the modern fund-raising system. Some politicians rise because they run political machines. Some rise because they are great communicators. Pelosi has risen because she is a master of the thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraising circuit.

Living amid a web of investors, venture capitalists and West Coast technology tycoons, she raised heroic amounts of money for the Democratic Party before she ever thought of running for anything herself. In 1984, she was the state party chairwoman. In 1986, she was the national fund-raising chairwoman for the Senate Democrats.

Since coming to the House, she has discovered what many a savvy pol has discovered — that the fastest way to ascend in Congress is to raise a lot of money and give it to your peers.

She paid her dues selecting party favors, arranging seating charts (after that, legislation is easy), and laying thick dollops of obsequiousness on cranky old moguls and their helmet hair spa-spouses. She has done what all political fund-raisers do: tell rich people things they already believe, demonize the other side, motivate the giving with Manichaean tales of good versus evil.

It is no wonder The Los Angeles Times calls her a “rabid Democrat” or that Time magazine calls her “hyperpartisan.” It is not a surprise, as The Washington Post reported this week, that despite campaign promises about changing the tone in Washington, Pelosi has decided to exclude Republicans from the first burst of legislation — to forbid them to offer amendments or alternatives.

She is part of the clash of the rival elites, with the dollars from Brookline battling dollars from Dallas, causing upper-class strife that even diminutive dogs, vibrant velvets and petite salades can’t fully soothe.


Brooks' message is absolutely clear: It is unseemly for Democrats to have money. While the Republicans' ability to raise campaign money is admirable, when Democrats do it, it's wrong. Unspoken, but simmering under the surface is the notion that Pelosi's toughness is unseemly in a woman.

I fully expect Brooks to become more hysterical and shrill as the next two years go on, as the Democrats, if they're smart, treat the Republicans to a taste of their own medicine. Like most of the crybabies on the right, Brooks enjoys it very much when it's HIS side and HIS gender running roughshod over the others, but he is not at all happy when they have to accept the consequences of what they have done for the last six years. As Marty Kaplan wrote yesterday at Huffington Post:

The civility lobby -- which now urges Democrats to bring pea-shooters to a gunfight -- has strong support among Washington's wise men, especially its media lions. Today's Washington Post warns in its news pages of the "mounting pressure from liberal activists to chart a more confrontational course "; on its editorial page, it scolds Speaker Pelosi's 100-hour agenda for setting "an unfortunate precedent that fairness will be offered on sufferance, when the majority finds it convenient, and not as a matter of principle. "

Yes, matters of principle -- the selfsame lofty principles that doubtless will guide John Boehner and Roy Blunt in days to come. The same devotion to fairness that will now be the north star for Mitch McConnell and Trent Lott. Right. And George W. Bush is Gerald R. Ford, Dick Cheney is Edmund Burke, Karl Rove is the Marquess of Queensbury, and love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Rumania.


Let us not forget: It was not Pat Leahy who told Dick Cheney to go fuck himself on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Republicans set this tone as far back as 1994. They chose to live by the sword, let them fucking die by the sword.
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