Big business just loves Democrats: good news or bad news?
Corporate America today has this to say to the GOP (quoting from the Godfather): “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.” So, goodbye.
It’s hard to believe that just a couple of years ago the K Street Project was going strong. You know, back in the bad old days when Grover Norquist ruled the Beltway and it wasn’t good enough for industry groups to contribute far more to Republicans than Democrats. No, Grover and Tom DeLay demanded that they give virtually every last dime to the GOP and things were getting close to that becoming a reality.
But it’s amazing how the deadly cocktail of corruption, incompetence, mendacity and extremism leading to an election defeat can screw up a perfectly good megalomaniacal plan.
And how the mighty (money grubbers) have fallen.
(Politico) Business PACs jilt Republicans
Lag, lag, lag. That’s all you hear these days regarding Republican fundraising compared with the Democrats’.
Now we can add a new word: abandoned.
The business community that celebrated the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 by spending millions to prop it up for more than a decade is in full retreat.
All 10 of the top-giving industries tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan money and politics watchdog group, are now donating more cash to Democrats than Republicans. A year ago, Republicans had the edge in six of the 10 sectors.
Kind of brings a tear to your eye doesn’t it? Those poor Repbublicans, abandoned in their hour of need by their old friends. But industry’s willingness to toss the GOP overboard and embrace the Democratic ascendancy, while deeply satisfying on one level, poses obvious threats to the progressive agenda. Will a Democratic Party awash in corporate cash really be ready to fight for working people, let alone take on the all important issue of economic inequality in a comprehensive fashion?
If you’re pessimistic, I can’t blame you. To a significant degree, so am I. But two things do give me some measure of comfort. The first is remembering that even when Democrats are “a little pregnant” with corporate money they’re still a hundred times better than their Republican counterparts — and in ways that matter in the lives of ordinary Americans, such as bankruptcy “reform” (and, yes, a lot of Democrats voted for it, but remember it was only after the GOP took control of both the executive and legislative branches of government that it actually passed).
Second, and more importantly, rank and file liberals are far from powerless these days. The netroots aren’t going away: and while job one is to elect more progressive Democrats, job two has to be to keep them honest once they’re in office. No, we won’t win every battle with the modern day robber barons even if the Democrats take the White House and hold Congress in 2008, but if we stay in the fight we can win a lot of them. And when was the last time that was true?
This entry was posted by Steve on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. |
