From The Z Blog:
Fake Indian Update
I’ve been arguing for a while now that Fake Indian will run and win the Democrat nomination in 2016. I’m not even sure Cankles runs again. She is old, fat and sick. Democrats generally hate old people, which is why they are always dreaming up ways to kill them. The only way they back Cankles is if they think the Stupid Party candidate is going to win. Given the state of the GOP, they will not be nominating a sure thing in 2016. Instead it will be some establishment man who does not scare the horses.
Anyway, it looks like Jonah Goldberg has joined my side on this one.
In 2007, Democrats were delirious with rage about the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, the “inevitable” presidential front-runner, had voted for the war and refused to apologize for it. Other leading candidates, including Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd, voted for it too. This left a huge opening for a credible antiwar candidate. Barack Obama, inexperienced and underqualified, nonetheless jumped into the vacuum. The rest, as they say, is history.
Today, the issue that obsesses the base of the Democratic party is income inequality. I think that’s foolish. The underlying causes of inequality — miserable economic growth, stagnating wages, poverty, etc. — are vastly more worthy challenges. Though, in fairness, many people actually have those problems in mind when they talk about inequality.
There’s another, more important reason. In the 1990′s, the Left radicalized and, like Africanized honey bees, became very aggressive. They were convinced Clinton was too timid and let the Gingrich led extreme right-wing extremists push him around. Loyalty to the cult kept them from revolting against the Clintons, but the resentment turned into rage by 2000. Just as fundamentalist Muslims went violently crazy after the end of the Cold War, the American Left went bonkers when the Clintons left town.
In 2008, the most anti-Bush candidate was Obama. In 2016, the Left will embrace the most aggressively liberal candidate in the field. The Left largely feels Obama has not been aggressive enough, particularly with the Wall Street crowd. That’s what makes Fake Indian’s faux populism so appealing.
There’s another component to the inequality obsession: populism. People increasingly feel that economic and political elites are enriching themselves, not by making great products or selling valuable services, but by cutting backroom deals and selling influence. This rage is remarkably bipartisan. It is the one theme that loosely unites tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers alike.
Goldberg, like most of the Conventional Right, instinctively rejects anything that smacks of populism. That’s why they tend to get it wrong as we see here. Fake Indian’s faux populism is the sort you see in the faculty lounge or the coffee shop at Whole Foods. It’s overly credentialed bobos bitching about the rich guys who sign their paycheck. They may have it good, but someone with fewer diplomas has it better and that’s just unfair.
It’s why Fake Indian sounds so weird to working class types. If you are a part-time teacher at your kid’s Montessori school, hearing a rich white woman complain about inequality sounds inspiring. If you’re working two jobs so your kid can go to the local state college one day, hearing an old rich woman talk like that sounds phony. But, the Democrat party is the party of Montessori school parents, not plumbers with two jobs.
Talk about being a Manchurian candidate...
