My, my, a whole lot of people seem to have "the burbles" all of a sudden. Here's one of many in Matt Stoller's piece at OpenLeft:
Obama made his bet that the country isn't into ideological combat and wants a politics of unity and hope, and he has won at internally...the Obama campaign is masterful. From top to bottom, they have destroyed their opponents within the party, stolen out from under them their base, and persuaded a whole set of individuals from blog readers to people in the pews to ignore intermediaries and believe in Barack as a pure vessel of change.
That was just for starters. There's more:
Obama has successfully remade the Democratic Party already, and shown that old partisan Washington politics is over if you are a Democrat.
That's total hogwash, of course. Politics has always been "old" and "partisan," and always will be. President Obama will not "transform" the system. His agenda--whatever it is--will be vigorously opposed by all those who don't see it in their interests. They will connect, form alliances, build a base, and sally forth as they always do and always will. Obama will have to rally has political base and join the battle. The system is simply not going to be bowl-ed over by his awesome awesomeness.
So I don't believe that "old partisan Washington politics is over if you are a Democrat"--or a Republican, for that matter. The problem is that if you start to think that way--if you believe your own propaganda, in other words--you're setting yourself up to be rolled.
Chris Bowers thinks along the same lines as Stoller, though possibly stupider. He thinks the Democratic Party needs a "cultural shift" away from the working class and toward the self-described "creative class"--the Kewl Kidz. (Cautionary note: Bowers calls Obama a Unitarian, which he is not. He's a member of the United Church of Christ. What if he were a Unitarian though? That would be even cooler!)
Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades.
This is the path of disaster. Bowers ought to keep in mind that the "working class" is not just white--it is also heavily hispanic, black, and Asian. If the Democratic Party abandons the working class, especially in favor of the hipster crowd, that leaves a whole lot of us out. You can't build a governing majority out of African-Americans and latte-sippers. What's more, it's the wrong thing to do. If the Democratic Party does not represent the poor and the working class, then I can't see any point in continuing to be a Democrat. (Gasp!)
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