Two-Faced: The Democratic Party's Divergent Future

[mota bhai 2,675]

More divides Booker from de Blasio than their diverging electoral fortunes ... Each personifies a distinct future for the Democratic Party—futures that ultimately are mutually exclusive. As Washington marvels at the degree of Democratic unity and Republican disarray at the national level, it’s easy to overlook the intra-party differences that still split the Democrats, particularly at the municipal level. A look at Booker and de Blasio can illuminate some of the Democrats’ emerging fault lines.

...

It’s ... on certain economic issues that the Democrats are divided. Just some issues: Almost all party leaders support making taxes more progressive, raising the minimum wage, investing more in infrastructure, extending health coverage through Obamacare, and making education more affordable. But at the state and, even more, the municipal level, there are serious differences over the role of unions, the future of public education, and the corporate-backed privatization of services. De Blasio and Booker diverge on issues of substance here, and have come to symbolize even more disparate paths.

...

Not to put too fine a point on it, Booker is a corporate Democrat and de Blasio an anti-corporate Democrat. Booker sees the corporate and financial sectors as allies in helping America’s poor, while de Blasio sees the corporate and financial sectors as the groups that have used their power to rig the economy in their favor and at everyone else’s expense.

In his defense, Booker can, and does, claim that governing an impoverished inner-city like Newark—he’s been mayor for the past seven-plus years—has presented him with few viable options. No Democrat can take issue with many of the ways he’s highlighted the plight of the poor, such as his living for a week on a food-stamp budget, or his patrolling the city alongside Newark’s cops. But Booker has journeyed to the outer extremes of education reform—not only redirecting city funds to charter schools, as a number of Democratic mayors have done, but also disparaging teacher tenure and endorsing vouchers for private schools. Neither charter schools nor private schools have been shown to be more successful in educating inner-city children than their public school counterparts, but that hasn’t kept Booker from attacking teachers unions or raising $100 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for Newark schools reconfigured to fit Booker’s pedagogical preferences.

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Booker’s vision of the forces for progressive social change apparently includes the very poor and the very rich—the former as beneficiaries, the latter as dispensaries, of private wealth. Any mayor of a city like Newark is surely entitled to periodically adhere to the adage that beggars can’t be choosers, but at a time when the financial sector has brought the broader economy to ruin, when profits have soared due in large part to the suppression of wages, and when the continual upward redistribution of income has battered the middle class, Booker’s comments—and the sensibility they betrayed—could not have been more at odds with that of his party. Particularly with that part of the party that de Blasio has come to personify.

After running fourth for many months among the candidates in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary, de Blasio surged to the top by campaigning, essentially, against the very economic trends on which Booker seemed to rely. New York, de Blasio said repeatedly, had become a tale of two cities—a Bloombergian, more benevolent version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, where nearly half the residents lived in or near poverty while the super-rich swanned about as never before. Long identified with the Working Families Party, de Blasio championed the city’s union workers and excoriated Bloomberg and the mayoral candidate closest to him, City Council President Christine Quinn, for blocking passage for three years of a paid-sick-leave ordinance he supported. He campaigned as well against the stop-and-frisk-minority-young-men policy of the New York police, which Bloomberg fervently backed, and made clear that the city’s current policy of letting charter schools set up shop rent free in city-owned facilities may well be discontinued. He’s called repeatedly for higher taxes on the rich, though that’s a change that would have to be enacted not in council chambers but by the legislature in Albany—and then pass muster with Governor Andrew Cuomo. And to date, Cuomo has been more a Bookeresque friend of the rich than a de Blasian populist.

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A handful of Democrats are managing to work on both sides of the party’s dividing line. California Governor Jerry Brown steered to passage a ballot measure that raised taxes on the rich to balance the state’s budget and successfully backed a legislative hike in the state’s minimum wage to $10-an-hour. He also signed into law a number of bills that the state’s business organizations had been backing—though none so fundamental as the hike in the minimum wage—and discouraged the Democratic-dominated legislature from enacting more tax hikes atop those that the voters authorized.

Perhaps the largest question for Democrats is how the party’s presumptive presidential nominee will respond to this rift. If Hillary Clinton continues to take counsel from her family’s retinue of economic retainers—Robert Rubin and his many protégés—that would signal a continuation of Bill-Clintonomics, with its bias towards finance and pro-corporate free trade, and, as inadequate counterweights to the unegalitarian consequences of that bias, support for a more generous earned income tax credit and a more progressive tax code. To connect with that new generation of Democratic activists, however, Hillary Clinton would need a new generation of advisers who’d recommend policies that would more forcefully take on America’s plutocratic order. More de Blasio, less Booker. Therein lies the Democratic future—if that future is to last.

http://prospect.org/article/two-faced-democratic-partys-divergent-future

[Danno 1,228]

<<<Neither charter schools nor private schools have been shown to be more successful in educating inner-city children than their public school counterparts,>>>

Thats not good news.

[mota bhai 2,675]

<<<Neither charter schools nor private schools have been shown to be more successful in educating inner-city children than their public school counterparts,>>>

Thats not good news.

It should have been obvious, though. Strong families with income security are the foundation on which a child's educational success lies. Not educational gimmicks.

[Danno 1,228]

It should have been obvious, though. Strong families with income security are the foundation on which a child's educational success lies. Not educational gimmicks.

Well I have placed "some" of the problem (actually a lot) on disorder in the classroom.

One would assume some education models would do better in this regard and some improvement would be realized.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Two-Faced: The Democratic Party's Divergent Future

At least the Democratic Party has a future.

[Danno 1,228]

At least the Democratic Party has a future.

Everything has a beginning and end, in some cases the end is delayed much too long, but often that ending is spectacular.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Everything has a beginning and end, in some cases the end is delayed much too long, but often that ending is spectacular.

Yes, I anticipate the ending of the Tea Party - long overdue - to be quite spectacular. It's in the works. And they themselves are fueling it which makes it even more fun to watch.

[Pooky 3,838]

Yes, I anticipate the ending of the Tea Party - long overdue - to be quite spectacular. It's in the works. And they themselves are fueling it which makes it even more fun to watch.

Try and stay on subject.

Or is that just something you tell other people to do?

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Try and stay on subject.

Or is that just something you tell other people to do?

Nobody ever stays on subject. Why should I?

[Harpa Timsah 13,258]

I disagree with this analysis. It seems like a bored journalist is making up a "special story" just to fill content. I say no to this taxonomy.

[Pooky 3,838]

I disagree with this analysis. It seems like a bored journalist is making up a "special story" just to fill content. I say no to this taxonomy.

Say yes to taxidermy, instead. Tell all politicians to get stuffed.

[Harpa Timsah 13,258]

Say yes to taxidermy, instead. Tell all politicians to get stuffed.

When I was little a friend's dad had all sorts of stuffed animals in their house; it was like a dead zoo. Slumber parties at her house were always creepy.

Edited October 14, 2013 by Harpa Timsah