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Exclusive: The national Democrats saw Russia-gate and the drive
to impeach President Trump as their golden ticket back to power,
but so far the ticket seems to be made of fool’s gold, writes
Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The national Democratic Party and many liberals have bet heavily
on the Russia-gate investigation as a way to oust President
Trump from office and to catapult Democrats to victories this
year and in 2018, but the gamble appears not to be paying off.
The Democrats’ disappointing loss in a special election to fill
a congressional seat in an affluent Atlanta suburb is just the
latest indication that the strategy of demonizing Trump and
blaming Russia for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat may not be the
golden ticket that some Democrats had hoped.
Though it’s still early to draw conclusive lessons from Karen
Handel’s victory over Jon Ossoff – despite his raising $25
million – one lesson may be that a Middle America backlash is
forming against the over-the-top quality of the Trump-
accusations and the Russia-bashing, with Republicans rallying
against the image of Official Washington’s “deep state”
collaborating with Democrats and the mainstream news media to
reverse a presidential election.
Indeed, the Democrats may be digging a deeper hole for
themselves in terms of reaching out to white working-class
voters who abandoned the party in Pennsylvania, Michigan and
Wisconsin to put Trump over the top in the Electoral College
even though Clinton’s landslide win in California gave her
almost three million more votes nationwide.
Clinton’s popular-vote plurality and the #Resistance, which
manifested itself in massive protests against Trump’s
presidency, gave hope to the Democrats that they didn’t need to
undertake a serious self-examination into why the party is in
decline across the nation’s heartland. Instead, they decided to
stoke the hysteria over alleged Russian “meddling” in the
election as the short-cut to bring down Trump and his populist
movement.
A Party of Snobs?
From conversations that I’ve had with some Trump voters in
recent weeks, I was struck by how they viewed the Democratic
Party as snobbish, elitist and looking down its nose at “average
Americans.” And in conversations with some Clinton voters, I
found confirmation for that view in the open disdain that the
Clinton backers expressed toward the stupidity of anyone who
voted for Trump. In other words, the Trump voters were not wrong
to feel “dissed.”
It seems the Republicans – and Trump in particular – have done a
better job in presenting themselves to these Middle Americans as
respecting their opinions and representing their fears, even
though the policies being pushed by Trump and the GOP still
favor the rich and will do little good – and significant harm –
to the middle and working classes.
By contrast, many of Hillary Clinton’s domestic proposals might
well have benefited average Americans but she alienated many of
them by telling a group of her supporters that half of Trump’s
backers belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” Although she
later reduced the percentage, she had committed a cardinal
political sin: she had put the liberal disdain for millions of
Americans into words – and easily remembered words at that.
By insisting that Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee –
after leftist populist Bernie Sanders was pushed aside – the
party also ignored the fact that many Americans, including many
Democrats, viewed Clinton as the perfectly imperfect candidate
for an anti-Establishment year with many Americans still fuming
over the Wall Street bailouts and amid the growing sense that
the system was rigged for the well-connected and against the
average guy or gal.
In the face of those sentiments, the Democrats nominated a
candidate who personified how a relatively small number of lucky
Americans can play the system and make tons of money while the
masses have seen their dreams crushed and their bank accounts
drained. And Clinton apparently still hasn’t learned that lesson.
Citing Women’s Rights
Last month, when asked why she accepted hundreds of thousands of
dollars for speaking to Goldman Sachs, Clinton rationalized her
greed as a women’s rights issue, saying: “you know, men got paid
for the speeches they made. I got paid for the speeches I made.”
Her excuse captured much of what has gone wrong with the
Democratic Party as it moved from its working-class roots and
New Deal traditions to becoming a party that places “identity
politics” ahead of a duty to fight for the common men and women
of America.
Demonstrating her political cluelessness, Clinton used the
serious issue of women not getting fair treatment in the
workplace to justify taking her turn at the Wall Street money
trough, gobbling up in one half-hour speech what it would take
many American families a decade to earn.
While it’s a bit unfair to personalize the Democratic Party’s
problems, Hillary and Bill Clinton have come to represent how
the party is viewed by many Americans. Instead of the FDR
Democrats, we have the Davos Democrats, the Wall Street
Democrats, the Hollywood Democrats, the Silicon Valley
Democrats, and now increasingly the Military-Industrial Complex
Democrats.
To many Americans struggling to make ends meet, the national
Democrats seem committed to the interests of the worldwide
elites: global trade, financialization of the economy,
robotization of the workplace, and endless war against endless
enemies.
Now, the national Democrats are clambering onto the bandwagon
for a costly and dangerous New Cold War with nuclear-armed
Russia. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish their foreign policy
from that of neoconservatives, although these Democrats view
themselves as liberal interventionists citing humanitarian
impulses to justify the endless slaughter.
Earlier this year, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found only 28
percent of Americans saying that the Democrats were “in touch
with the concerns of most people” – an astounding result given
the Democrats’ long tradition as the party of the American
working class and the party’s post-Vietnam War reputation as
favoring butter over guns.
Yet rather than rethink the recent policies, the Democrats
prefer to fantasize about impeaching President Trump and
continuing a blame-game about who – other than Hillary Clinton,
her campaign and the Democratic National Committee – is
responsible for Trump’s election. Of course, it’s the Russians,
Russians, Russians!
A Problem’s Deep Roots
Without doubt, some of the party’s problems have deep roots that
correspond to the shrinking of the labor movement since the
1970s and the growing reliance on big-money donors to finance
expensive television-ad-driven campaigns. Over the years, the
Democrats also got pounded for being “weak” on national security.
Further, faced with Republican “weaponization” of attack ads in
the 1980s, many old-time Democrats lost out to the Reagan
Revolution, clearing the way for a new breed of Democrats who
realized that they could compete for a slice of the big money by
cultivating the emerging coastal elites: Wall Street, Silicon
Valley, Hollywood and even elements of the National Security
State.
By the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and the Democratic
Leadership Council defined this New Democrat, politicians who
reflected the interests of well-heeled coastal elites,
especially on free trade; streamlined financial regulations;
commitment to technology; and an activist foreign policy built
around spreading “liberal values” across the globe.
Mixed in was a commitment to the rights of various identity
groups, a worthy goal although this tolerance paradoxically
contributed to a new form of prejudice among some liberals who
came to view many white working-class people as fat, stupid and
bigoted, society’s “losers.”
So, while President Clinton hobnobbed with the modern economy’s
“winners” – with sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom and parties
in the Hamptons – much of Middle America felt neglected if not
disdained. The “losers” were left to rot in “flyover America”
with towns and cities that had lost their manufacturing base
and, with it, their vitality and even their purpose for existing.
Republican Fraud
It wasn’t as if the Republicans were offering anything better.
True, they were more comfortable talking to these “forgotten
Americans” – advocating “gun rights” and “traditional values”
and playing on white resentments over racial integration and
civil rights – but, in office, the Republicans aggressively
favored the interests of the rich, cutting their taxes and
slashing regulations even more than the Democrats.
The Republicans paid lip service to the struggling blue-collar
workers but control of GOP policies was left in the hands of
corporations and their lobbyists.
Though the election of Barack Obama, the first African-American
president, raised hopes that the nation might finally bind its
deep racial wounds, it turned out to have a nearly opposite
effect. Tea Party Republicans rallied many white working-class
Americans to resist Obama and the hip urban future that he
represented. They found an unlikely champion in real-estate
mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump, who sensed how to tap
into their fears and anger with his demagogic appeals and false
populism.
Meanwhile, the national Democrats were falling in love with data
predicting that demographics would magically turn Republican red
states blue. So the party blithely ignored the warning signs of
a cataclysmic break with the Democrats’ old-time base.
Despite all the data on opioid addiction and declining life
expectancy among the white working class, Hillary Clinton was
politically tone-deaf to the rumbles of discontent echoing
across the Rust Belt. She assumed the traditionally Democratic
white working-class precincts would stick with her and she tried
to appeal to the “security moms” in typically Republican suburbs
by touting her neoconservative foreign policy thinking. And she
ran a relentlessly negative campaign against Trump while
offering voters few positive reasons to vote for her.
Ignoring Reality
When her stunning loss became clear on Election Night – as the
crude and unqualified Trump pocketed the electoral votes of
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – the Democrats refused to
recognize what the elections results were telling them, that
they had lost touch with a still important voting bloc, working-
class whites.
Rather than face these facts, the national Democrats – led by
President Obama and his intelligence chiefs – decided on a
different approach, to seek to reverse the election by blaming
the result on the Russians. Obama, his intelligence chiefs and a
collaborative mainstream media insisted without presenting any
real evidence that the Russians had hacked into Democratic
emails and released them to the devastating advantage of Trump,
as if the minor controversies from leaked emails of the
Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman
John Podesta explained Trump’s surprising victory.
As part of this strategy, any Trump link to Russia – no matter
how inconsequential, whether from his businesses or through his
advisers – became the focus of Woodward-and-Bernstein/Watergate-
style investigations. The obvious goal was to impeach Trump and
ride the wave of Trump-hating enthusiasm to a Democratic
political revival.
In other words, there was no reason to look in the mirror and
rethink how the Democratic Party might begin rebuilding its
relationships with the white working-class, just hold hearings
featuring Obama’s intelligence chieftains and leak damaging
Russia-gate stuff to the media.
But the result of this strategy has been to deepen the
Democratic Party’s reliance on the elites, particularly the self-
reverential mavens of the mainstream media and the denizens of
the so-called “deep state.” From my conversations with Trump
voters, they “get” what’s going on, how the powers-that-be are
trying to negate the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump by
reversing a presidential election carried out under the U.S.
constitutional process.
A Letter from ‘Deplorable’ Land
Some Trump supporters are even making this point publicly.
Earlier this month, a “proud deplorable” named Kenton Woodhead
from Brunswick, Ohio, wrote to The New York Times informing the
“newspaper of record” that he and other “deplorables” were onto
the scheme.
“I wanted to provide you with an unsophisticated synopsis of The
New York Times and the media’s quest for the implosion of Donald
Trump’s presidency from out here in the real world, in
‘deplorable’ country. … Every time you and your brethren at
other news organizations dream up a new scheme to get Mr. Trump,
we out here in deplorable land increase our support for him. …
“Regardless of what you dream up every day, we refuse to be
sucked into your narrative. And even more humorously, there
isn’t anything you can do about it! And I love it that you are
having the exact opposite effect on those of us you are trying
to persuade to think otherwise.
“I mean it is seriously an enjoyable part of my day knowing you
are failing. And badly! I haven’t had this much fun watching the
media stumble, bumble and fumble in years. I wonder what will
happen on the day you wake up and realize how disconnected
you’ve become.”
So, despite Trump’s narcissism and incompetence – and despite
how his policies will surely hurt many of his working-class
supporters – the national Democrats are further driving a wedge
between themselves and this crucial voting bloc. By whipping up
a New Cold War with Russia and hurling McCarthistic slurs at
people who won’t join in the Russia-bashing, the Democratic
Party’s tactics also are alienating many peace voters who view
both the Republicans and Democrats as warmongers of almost equal
measures of guilt.
While it’s certainly not my job to give advice to the Democrats
– or any other political group – I can’t help but thinking that
this Russia-gate “scandal” is not only lacking in logic and
evidence, but it doesn’t even make any long-term political sense.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/21/russia-gate-flops-as- democrats-golden-ticket/
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