Quant-model politics

Is it naïve to expect politicians to stand for something? Anything?

Already the usual suspects are chiming in unison that the new hand-picked senator from our state, Kirsten Gillebrand, can start shaping her unpopular pro-gun positions to fit her new, more urban constituency. Snake-oil salesman Chuck Schumer, her mentor-to-be and apparently a big reason why she got the nod, promptly announced that she would be touring Brooklyn, an area she cared nothing about until last night, so that she can start feeding those residents the proper lines and get herself positioned for a statewide race next year.

Gillebrand enjoys a perfect 100 rating from the National Rifle Association, but her ‘views’ on that topic are now going to get a thorough laundering by Schumer and others whose idea of politics is to develop pandering into a fine art. You calculate who wants what down to the last fraction of a voter, shape your message scientifically to pretend to care about those topics with the most electoral weight, then sally forth onto TV relentlessly repeating the stock phrases that your focus groups have indicated will garner you votes.

Schumer’s success at this model is pretty terrifying, and he has built up a phalanx of former aides as his junior imitators in the state legislature and Congress, like weasely Representative Anthony Wiener and the fresh-faced Daniel Squadron just arrived to Albany. They swarm into our consciousness by following the tested model of non-stop exposure and fanatical pursuit of the lowest-common-denominator commonplaces. (Wiener was on the tube this week praising the re-opening of the Statue of Liberty.)

The result is that these guys get ahead, but the vague sense that they believe in the same things we do is an illusion. Schumer cultivates the image of a standard liberal, but when his accumulation of personal power is at stake, all bets are off. He personally shepherded nasty Michael Mukasey through the confirmation process as Attorney General despite that reptile’s support of the Bush torture program. Not many New Yorkers would agree to that, but 90 percent of them remain ignorant of it since no local Democrats dared to bring it up, and Republicans were delighted.

Schumer apparently got the increasingly pathetic Governor Paterson to choose a Blue Dog upstate Democrat to strengthen the Democrats’ lock on statewide offices. But joy at the precipitous demise of the corrupt Republicans should not automatically generate a hero’s welcome for a passel of corrupt Democrats.

Schumer is also as guilty as anyone in the country for the Wall Street debacle as he shilled for their interests in exchange for contributions just like any Carolina cracker would do for the local cigarette companies. If he were an Alaskan, he’d be competing with Sarah Palin to boost oil drilling in the wildlife refuges. He’s not even embarrassed about it—on the contrary, Schumer likes to brag about how quickly he delivers to the interest group du jour because that’s how he understands his job.

That doesn’t mean we have to accept his philosophy, that politics is nothing but a crude clash of interests in which the relative strengths of each group translate directly into an equivalent portion of society’s goods—an entirely static and conservative formula that can only reinforce the status quo. Schumer is loyal to nothing but himself and his influence game, and under a dictatorship or a fascist state he’d be a cabinet minister with communications channels open to the opposition just in case they some day succeeded in overthrowing his boss.

Governor Paterson shot himself in both feet with his coy guessing-game bullshit, his encouragement of the foolish Caroline K boomlet and now his crass opportunism in putting in Gillabrand to help his own chances for re-election. He’s run through his entire stock of good will in less than a year.

For her part, Senator Gillabrand is the daughter of a Republican lobbyist with business ties to the just-indicted Joe Bruno, who ran the Republican-majority state senate for decades. She seems to fit the Schumer mold of tireless self-promotion and infinite policy flexibility. This the best we could do in one of the most liberal states in the nation? Although the end of the Kennedy-Paterson circus is welcome, it’s a pity that the Obama presidency has not brought to our unfortunate state politics any sense of public service as a noble, rather than a purely expedient, endeavor.