NYT Grants Anonymity to Basher of "Crazy Left"

Since becoming a national referendum on Wall Street Democrats, Chicago's contest between neoliberal incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanual and local county commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia has been heavily featured this week on the Paper of Record's homepage.

The coverage has been heavy on the rehabbing of Rahm's well-deserved corrupt image and equally heavy on dissing Garcia's alleged "vagueness." (shades of Occupy-dissing.) "In his first one-on-one debate with Mr. Emanuel," the Gray Lady sniffed, "Garcia appeared shaky when pressed for his plans to fix the city’s finances. His first campaign ad appeared only last week."

Oh no! Because as we should all know by now, political success and credibility and legitimacy can only be measured by the money and the marketing. You shall be judged not by the content of your character, but by the garish display of your cash.

In a debate last week, Mr. Garcia repeatedly attacked Mr. Emanuel as a tool of the “rich and powerful” in Chicago. He said Mr. Emanuel was interested only in the priorities of “millionaires and billionaires.”

Still, Mr. Emanuel has been moving up in the polls since he was forced into a runoff, and his advisers say the left will find it difficult to defeat him.

Mr. Garcia, 58 and known as Chuy, has been vastly outspent by Mr. Emanuel, but he flew to Los Angeles last week to try to drum up last-minute cash from donors. Whether he can raise enough to hurt Mr. Emanuel is an open question.

Mr. Garcia is starting to draw more attention on liberal email lists, but he has yet to draw a total of even $100,000 from small donors using the liberal fund-raising hub ActBlue. (A week of network television advertising in Chicago costs over $600,000.)

“Unless they get the crazy lefty money machine going nationally, it’s not going to matter that there’s a resurgent left,” said an adviser to Mr. Emanuel who did not want to speak publicly about strategy. “The liberals at Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park can think great thoughts and read poetry for Chuy, but nothing else will happen.”

We'll just have to wait and see whether poetry has more power than cash.

Meanwhile, shame on the Times for granting a cowardly apparatchik anonymity for purposes of impugning the mental health of anybody not in bed with the Big Money Boys. According to Rahm and his cronies, if you're not rich then you have to be nuts. Impugning the mental health ("gaslighting") of one's political opponents is the last refuge of neoliberal scoundrels like Rahm, who earlier this month crazily screamed at mental health activists for "not respecting" him.

It brings back fond memories of Rahm calling progressives "fucking retarded" in 2009 for not getting down with Obama's abandonment of a public option in his health care plan.

And if calling their mental health into question doesn't work, there's always the racial guilt approach. Because where would impugning the left be without the helpful input of Obamabots playing the corporate race card?  Millionaire TV host and professional pseudo-activist Al Sharpton does the honors in the same Times article:

Others on the left are showing ambivalence about campaigning against a candidate who has the full-throated support of the president of the United States.

“It would energize the progressive side of the party that many of us are part of,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said of a possible win by Mr. Garcia. “The apprehension is that the right-wing media would take it as some people abandoning the president’s endorsement. That’s why it gives some of us pause. We don’t want to feed into some of the hysteria against the president.”

Mr. Sharpton, the longtime civil rights activist, said that as he considered whom to endorse, he was faced with “a dicey choice.”

“I’m attracted to Chuy’s populism and his consistent progressive base. He goes all the way back to Harold Washington,” Mr. Sharpton said, referring to a 1980s mayor of Chicago. “But Rahm is good with the black business community, and he’s been good on some of the stuff when he was with the president as chief of staff.”

Got that? A vote for Garcia and a vote for your own economic interests would be a punch in the face to the president. According to Sharpton's convoluted logic, a crazy left wing vote for Garcia would also be a vote for the right wing crazies and their anti-Obama attack machine. This is just the latest example of the scourge of the Third Way: the ideological crusade of the plutocrats who use wedge issue divide and conquer techniques to keep the masses confused, the politicians bought, and the wealth flowing in an endless geyser to those at the very top.