Takedown

The New Republic's Jon Chait loved him some Sensible Centrists in 2006, calling progressives behind the efforts to primary Joe Lieberman out of office in 2006 "fanatics". This week, Chait has changed his tune, suddenly seeing the light that corporate drones like Lieberman are killing Obama's agenda.

Needless to say, this hypocrisy has earned him the deadly eye beams of one Double G Glenn Greenwald.

My, what a rapid and total reversal -- one effectuated without the slightest acknowledgment that it even occurred. But that's just the accountability-free nature of Beltway punditry. There's a more important point highlighted here: namely, it is a sign of how dysfunctional the Democratic Party is -- and how meaningless is their glorious super-majority -- that even The New Republic, which long prided itself on safeguarding the Party from nefarious left-wing influences, is now calling for "centrist" Democratic Senators (even including Joe Lieberman) to be thrown out of office by means of primary challenges (I believe that was once called a "purity purge"), even if doing so results in a loss of Democratic seats. Chait's rationale is that allowing "centrist" dominance within the party means that the same corporate interests (rather than the interests of constituents) and the same political agenda end up being served regardless of which party is in control, meaning that -- as he put it -- even "a filibuster-proof Democratic majority isn't worth having" because nothing meaningful changes. You don't say.

That, of course, was exactly the motivating premise of those who sought to remove Joe Lieberman from the Senate in 2006 -- the people Chait demonized back then as "left-wing fanatics" who "refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent." That was also the animating principle behind the founding last year of Accountability Now, largely designed to recruit and enable meaningful primary challenges against corrupt, unaccountable, and worthless corporate-serving incumbents.

Ahh, Double G in Righteous Indignation Mode is a glorious thing to watch, folks. The real problem is that the corporate whoring doesn't stop at Capitol Hill, but heads all the way across to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

While it's lovely that The New Republic has now joined that movement and decided that corporate-owned "centrists" need to be purged from the Party, Chait is laboring under complete blindness about the reasons these problems have arisen. Chait accuses me, Dan Froomkin and "liberals" generally of "confusion" because we believe that the Obama White House bears some of the blame in the dominance of corporate interests generally and in the health care battle specifically. Chait echoes the facially absurd excuse of the most hardened Obama loyalists everywhere: namely, that Obama, Rahm Emanuel and friends are just helpless, impotent observers who wield no influence over the health care debate and can do nothing but sit back and hope and pray that the Senate will pass a good, progressive health care reform bill free of excessive servitude to the health care and drug industries. If the Congress refuses to, well that's obviously not Obama's fault -- a President isn't in the Congress and can't really influence what it does, so this excuse-making goes.

For the moment, leave aside all the evidence to the contrary: that, as Chait's colleague Jonathan Cohn detailed, the Obama White House secretly entered into a deal with the drug industry not to negotiate for lower prices; that Obama has repeatedly sought to empower the Baucus-dominated Senate Finance Committee at the expense of more progressive committees; that the White House aggressively threatens, berates, and cajoles House progressives who impede the President's agenda but hasn't done anything against Blue Dogs; that the strategy of the White House from the start has been to ensure that the health care and drug industries are pleased so that they continue to use their ample largesse to fund the Democrats rather than get behind a GOP takeover in 2010; and that Emanuel built his career and power base by controlling the Congress through the expansion of the Blue Dogs and other "centrist" and "conservative" members and by pleasing corporate donors, thus rendering the image of him as a helpless, passive bystander in the health care debate transparent fiction. Even Dick Durbin -- the Senate's number two Democrat -- acknowledges that, even with a huge Democratic majority, the banking industry "frankly owns" the Congress.

And if you're wondering why we don't have a health care bill signed into law yet, remember that we need a health care bill to be created first, and Obama's done squat in that department, insisting that he leave the process to centrists like Max Baucus. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that both sides are trying to drag the fight out looking for the best way to shift all the blame to the other side, and neither side has any intention of passing a bill.

After all, both sides have been bought and paid for.