Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Robert Parry — Russia-gate Flops as Democrats’ Golden Ticket

The national Democratic Party and many liberals have bet heavily on the Russia-gate investigation as a way to oust President Trump from office and to catapult Democrats to victories this year and in 2018, but the gamble appears not to be paying off.

The Democrats’ disappointing loss in a special election to fill a congressional seat in an affluent Atlanta suburb is just the latest indication that the strategy of demonizing Trump and blaming Russia for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat may not be the golden ticket that some Democrats had hoped.
Though it’s still early to draw conclusive lessons from Karen Handel’s victory over Jon Ossoff – despite his raising $25 million – one lesson may be that a Middle America backlash is forming against the over-the-top quality of the Trump-accusations and the Russia-bashing, with Republicans rallying against the image of Official Washington’s “deep state” collaborating with Democrats and the mainstream news media to reverse a presidential election.
Indeed, the Democrats may be digging a deeper hole for themselves in terms of reaching out to white working-class voters who abandoned the party in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to put Trump over the top in the Electoral College even though Clinton’s landslide win in California gave her almost three million more votes nationwide....
That is not a strategy. It's a tactic and not a very good one. It's only a step above waiting for the opponent to stumble.

A strategy requires goals set by policy that determine strategic objectives. Strategy is about how to achieve objectives. Politically, this generally involves distinguishing oneself from one's opponents and showing one's position to be more in the voters interest while discrediting opponents for failing to meet voters' interests.

The Democrats are without a vision and therefore lack a clear policy. This is indicated by the push to unite a deeply divided party. Focusing on the opponent is not going to do that and the Democrats are just wasting time doing it.
Clinton’s popular-vote plurality and the #Resistance, which manifested itself in massive protests against Trump’s presidency, gave hope to the Democrats that they didn’t need to undertake a serious self-examination into why the party is in decline across the nation’s heartland. Instead, they decided to stoke the hysteria over alleged Russian “meddling” in the election as the short-cut to bring down Trump and his populist movement.
Losers.
While it’s a bit unfair to personalize the Democratic Party’s problems, Hillary and Bill Clinton have come to represent how the party is viewed by many Americans. Instead of the FDR Democrats, we have the Davos Democrats, the Wall Street Democrats, the Hollywood Democrats, the Silicon Valley Democrats, and now increasingly the Military-Industrial Complex Democrats.
To many Americans struggling to make ends meet, the national Democrats seem committed to the interests of the worldwide elites: global trade, financialization of the economy, robotization of the workplace, and endless war against endless enemies.
Now, the national Democrats are clambering onto the bandwagon for a costly and dangerous New Cold War with nuclear-armed Russia. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish their foreign policy from that of neoconservatives, although these Democrats view themselves as liberal interventionists citing humanitarian impulses to justify the endless slaughter.
Earlier this year, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found only 28 percent of Americans saying that the Democrats were “in touch with the concerns of most people” – an astounding result given the Democrats’ long tradition as the party of the American working class and the party’s post-Vietnam War reputation as favoring butter over guns.…
Consortium News
Russia-gate Flops as Democrats’ Golden Ticket
Robert Parry

5 comments:

Kaivey said...

I've been watching the Putin interviews on YouTube and it is surprising how many people like Putin. They think the world of him and deeply distrust Washington.

Kaivey said...

These are the warmongering liberals the Guardian supports. In fact, most of the Tory party hate Trump as well as well as the right wing media. They are all war mongering liberals. But they are not really liberals, that just don't hold old fashioned conservative social values. They are still hard right when its comes to business, imperialism, and war.

Russians hold old fashioned conservative values but they are not authoritarians. They look at our decadent society with its drugs and other 'immoral behaviour' and shudder.

GLH said...

The difference between the democrats and the republicans is just an illusion created by the media. As Ralph Nader said many years ago they are just two sides of the same coin.

Kaivey said...

Dead right. The Corporate Democrats and the Corporate Republicans.

Schofield said...

I like Newt Gingrich's latest move to point to Trump's 12th May Twitter:-

Follow
Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!
8:26 AM - 12 May 2017

25,514 25,514 Retweets
77,449 77,449 likes