Winning with losers

The White House’s anonymous sniping at the Arkansas labor movement for daring to get uppity and oppose the corporate-shill Democrat Blanche Lincoln was a revealing moment. Some Rahm Emanuel clone hiding behind journalistic anonymity said the $10 million the state’s unions spent unsuccessfully trying to defeat her was money ‘down the toilet’, prompting local AFL-CIO and SEIU leaders to remind the Obama team that unions represent workers and are not a tail to be wagged upon command by Democratic Party hacks in fancy suits.

What a contrast to the usual bemoaning of all long-shot candidacies with the ‘can’t-win’ meme (why we had to dump Jesse Jackson for the triumphant Michael Dukakis, for example). Lincoln was always a miserable candidate and is now given a 3% chance of surviving her Republican opponent in the fall. But while the union-backed challenger stirred up real interest among grassroots activists—the kinds of people who put Barack Obama in office—the White House and the reliably anti-union Bill Clinton pulled out all the stops to support a Blue Dog turncoat, despite her vote against health insurance reform.

So actually winning office turns out to be not so important after all, but locking arms with the powerful is. No one should be surprised at Clinton’s loyalties—after all, he loves palling around with George Bush, Sr. The question now is, Does Barack Obama’s instinct lead him in the same direction? Evidence accumulates that the answer is yes.

In any case, the scorn heaped on the netroots and labor from the White House is a curious posture from a party that needs both to win elections, especially now that the Republican Supreme Court is furiously opening the electoral floodgates to corporate cash. While the GOP struggles to tame its wacko wing and reassert its corporate base, the Democrats are acting as though its own corporate base is more than enough, that it doesn’t need actual troops. With displays like this week’s, they will get their wish.