(No) Class Warriors

Double G argues that the populist middle-class impotent rage that Republicans are cynically manipulating into the Tea Party silliness is the root cause of the anti-incumbent wave against the Democrats this year, and he actually has an excellent point.  The Tea Party itself may be a toxic swamp of racism, hatred, scapegoating and fearmongering...but the seed of frustration that gave birth to it cannot be ignored.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion, at least for me, that, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, much of the discomfort and disgust triggered by these Tea Party candidates has little to do with their ideology.  After all, are most of them radically different than the right-wing extremists Karl Rove has spent his career promoting and exploiting?  Hardly.  Much of the patronizing derision and scorn heaped on people like Christine O'Donnell have very little to do with their substantive views -- since when did right-wing extremism place one beyond the pale? -- and much more to do with the fact they're so . . . unruly and unwashed.  To members of the establishment and the ruling class (like Rove), these are the kinds of people -- who struggle with tuition bills and have their homes foreclosed -- who belong in Walmarts, community colleges, low-paying jobs, and voting booths on command, not in the august United States Senate. 

You want to know why it's so unusual for a U.S. Senate candidate to have what Rove scorned as "the checkered background" of O'Donnell, by which he means a series of financial troubles?  In his interview with me earlier this week, Sen. Russ Feingold said exactly why.  It's not because those financial difficulties are rare among Americans.  This is why:

It's not a new thing; it's been going on for a couple of decades. If you look even in the Senate, I'm one of the very few people in there who doesn't have a net worth over a million dollars; my net worth is under half a million dollars, after all these years.

And as poor as Russ Feingold is relative to his colleagues in the Senate, he's still a Harvard Law School graduate who owns his own home and has earned in excess of $100,000 as a U.S. Senator for the last 18 years.  People with unpaid Farleigh Dickinson tuition bills and home foreclosures just aren't in the U.S. Senate.  And there are a lot of people -- those who see nothing wrong with the U.S. Senate as a millionaire's club and entitlement of dynastic succession -- who want to keep it that way. 

Americans aren't stupid.  They know the middle class is vanishing and has been for 30 years now.  It has become acute in the last ten.  They see politicians who have been in Congress for those 30 years or more, and they see that those in Congress have reigned over the largest transfer of wealth in human history from the American working class to the super-elite.

Greenwald's real argument is that with the deaths of Senators Byrd and Kennedy, the Democrats have surrendered the mantle of the party of the working class.  He has a point.  Many folks are starting to believe it.  They are getting behind Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle simple because they are not CEOs.

But where that breaks down is in Tea Party candidates like Carl Paladino in NY and Rick Scott in Florida, multi-millionaire businessmen who make no effort to hide their complete and utter contempt for the working class.  If it's really "screw it, the economy sucks and we need to throw everyone out" then the Democrats need to start going after folks like Paladino and Scott for their ideology.

Greenwald is right however that picking on Tea Party candidates for being average folks with average jobs is only going to harden the country against the Democrats.