He feels his critics on the left are silly and naive when they argue that the key to victory is simply for the party to turn out more of its base.
"There is no base!" he once exclaimed famously during one of his familiar flare of temper.
Lucidity or self-fulfilling prophecy? I do not know, sir.
He, you may have surmised, is outgoing White House Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
As I said before, I don't know much about politics. If you ask me, sir, my uninformed guess would be that telling the base it is irrelevant---the Small-Donor fallacy, sir---does not look much like the kind of change the people who voted for Obama had been led to hope for.
Cicero (106–43 bc) said it first, "the sinews of war are infinite money." And Rahm Emanuel knows how to raise money for the party---that's what he does, sir---and there aren't many better places to find it than Wall Street. Fund-raising was the gentleman's job for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. And again in 2006---the gentleman was then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee---he helped Democrats collect record amount of cash in their bid to retake the House of Representatives.
There are political realities...sir...or so "sensible liberals" keep informing me.
But that has always been the problem, hasn't it? I mean, the money, sir...the price of power. How can Democrats raise the kind of corporate money the party so desperately needs to survive as a major party without selling their base out to special interests?
I miss the old days when grass roots workers were important. The only reward I get now is pissing off republicans. The reality is that I could stuff envelopes, make phone calls and knock on doors 24/7 till election day and not have contact with as many people as one $600 ad on the local evening news.
ReplyDeleteLet me buy George Soros a drink Bartender. Beautifully ironic how billionaires have to save the party of the working American from the slave to the rich republicans.