The Democrats' Big Bang

2/13/08

While pretty much everyone now knows what the big bang is, not everyone knows that the term began as a joke; at the time, no one believed anything so absurd could be possibly be true.

So too with a different kind of big bang, namely the big bang which explodes the Democratic Party.

For a long time there has been a growing consensus among progressives that, as one website puts it,

"The American Left may not be much, but it won't be anything at all until it ditches the Democrats."

The idea has been dismissed as a joke by most leftists who take for granted that the party is too big to fail-too monolithic, too bloated with cash, too woven into the fabric of the political system to be dislodged.

And it might seem that, with the huge primary turnout, the evangelic enthusiasm around the Obama campaign, and the likelihood that the Democrats will take both houses of Congress, the party is now stronger than ever.  

But the unleashing of populist energies by the Obama campaign has a real danger associated with it, the danger of raised expectations.  When the inevitable occurs, namely, when the party insiders and big money donors call in their chips-whether in a Clinton or Obama presidency or before-the disillusionment among party activists will be proportionally greater than in the past.  The party could survive its torpedoing of the Rainbow Coalition in 1988, the clean for Gene supporters of 1968, and the Kucinich anti-war voters of 2004.   Selling the Obamaites down the river-a demonstrable majority of the party rank and file- has the potential to be the match which leaves the DP a charred hulk along the side of the electoral freeway.

If a train wreck is in the offing, how it will materialize has been widely discussed. While Clinton is certainly down, she is by no means out.  In particular, if she takes Texas and Ohio the media narrative will shift to anointing her as the comeback kid.  But more importantly any subsequent Clinton victories will provide a rationalization for superdelegates  to return favors to those to whom many owe their careers.  A Clintonite theft of the nomination from the Obamaites has the real potential to precipitate the big bang which we have all been waiting for.

For those of us on who view the Obama campaign as yet another in a series of dead ends and who still see a true alternative party as the sine qua non of leftist organizing, this will be the best possible news.  

So what we need to do now is clear:  

The Clinton campaign needs our support.  We need to provide the superdelegates the fig leaf leaf of legitimacy to embolden them to do what comes naturally and steal the election from what one has called those "unfortunate and dangerous insurgent candidates" which endanger party unity. 

And then the superdelegates can work their magic from within, accomplishing what those of us on the outside have been unable to achieve from without.

I, for one, will be sending Hillary a few dollars and will be encouraging friends and family in the remaining primary states to actively and enthusiastically support her candidacy.

In any case, no other candidate is more deserving of our support.