In their haste to anoint a replacement for Donald Trump, Democrats in exile are unintentionally acting a lot more transparent than their corporate donors might like.
Take, for example, Obama State Department and White House alumna Jen Psaki, who now does P.R. for the oligarchic Carnegie Endowment for International Peace along with a regular gig as a CNN contributor. Lest you think that these jobs are not inextricably related, think again. Both entities are heavily subsidized by Big Polluting Oil, which produces those "I'm an energy voter!" ads showcasing regular people in love with pollution and whose representative also sits on the Board of Trustees at Carnegie. And why not? Despite the liberal outcry over Trump's rejection of the Paris Climate Accord, the US military has always been carefully exempt from even the feeble anti-pollution rules which still exist. This is pretty amazing, given that the US Military is the biggest consumer of polluting fossil fuels on the entire planet.
So anyway, in her revolving-door capacity as peace spokesperson for the more polite faction of the planet-endangering War Party, Jen Psaki is also acting as a spokesperson for the oligarchs who are currently vetting the presidential candidates whom we will ultimately be allowed to vote for.
Her CNN editorial gives the game away right in the lede:
The Democratic Party has a lot going for it right now. An energized base of supporters in cities and suburbs, a more diverse freshman class in Congress to mix up the agenda, interesting likely candidates for President, and a shared focus in defeating Donald Trump.Rural areas? Forget about wooing the Deplorables. Concentrate instead on well-heeled gender and race diversity as new congress-critters mix it up and party hearty while staying laser-focused on Trump, the whole Trump, and nothing but the Trump. Such petty concerns as universal health care insurance and debt-free college education must fade away. They are so divisive.
Nonetheless, Psaki hastens to add, choosing a presidential contender should not be based on gender or race. Identity politics are on the way out. Instead, the oligarchic vetters should examine the qualities they want in their ideal president.
And it's complicated, because these qualities are just so darned intangible.
But first and foremost, the ideal candidate to serve the interests of the wealthy should be honest. She writes:
Not the "aww-shucks" kind, but the kind where our President is not afraid to tell the American people what is happening in our economy and in our global engagements, not afraid to share views that aren't politically popular, and not afraid to admit mistakes.If Jen Psaki were honest, she wouldn't be so obfuscatory. Since Medicare For All (with a 70% and rising favorable rating) is one of the most politically popular ideas in the country, her ideal candidate must not be afraid to tell people that they won't be enjoying universal guaranteed health care any time soon. The candidate also must not hesitate to sell the public on such "global engagements" as war for oil and job-destroying trade agreements, which enrich transnational corporations while keeping American workers poor and desperate. The ideal candidate must be unabashedly pro-capitalist and not threaten the bottomless pocketbooks of the rich with any new taxes.
And that leads Psaki directly to Beto O'Rourke, a man so honest that he just lost the Texas Senate race to the loathsome Ted Cruz. O'Rourke is so painfully honest that he's refused to sign on to either the Green New Deal or Medicare For All. But most important, she writes, is that he was once honest enough to support football players "taking the knee" to protest racial injustice and police brutality while at the same time politely respecting the racism of the town hall attendee who'd questioned him about it.
His honesty is one reason he has quickly emerged as a Democratic frontrunner, although he narrowly lost his Senate race in Texas. He is authentic and inspiring and says what he thinks. And more than anything, that is what inspires people to follow a leader.He has emerged as a frontrunner because CNN says he has emerged as a frontrunner. (For a scathing treatment of how the corporate media advances the fortunes of corporate candidates and dismisses more independent people, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, be sure to read this piece by Matt Taibbi.)
According to Psaki, people getting told that they can't have nice things while learning to embrace the wisdom of the plutocrats is what will inspire people. More than health, housing and living wages, the rich need to believe that ordinary folk simply want to "follow a leader" -- rather than think independently or, heaven forbid, take to the streets. At most they'll have to learn to be satisfied with watching sports teams take to the knee on national television.
O'Rourke has been described as "the white Obama." Indeed, he is adept at projecting a glib and handsome image along with the fine art of doublespeak. Best of all, he has three whole O's in his name.... Beto O'Rourke.... so he might even be triple the fun that Obama was. Skilled as the former president was, he only ever could master talking out of two sides of his mouth.
Did I mention that O'Rourke got the second-highest (after Cruz) amount of money from the oil and gas industry, which also fronts Psaki's "peace" think tank and CNN? I'm sure it's just an honest coincidence.
So Beto should be the corporate Dems' first current choice. Coming in second in their playbook is former Vice President Joe Biden, whose alleged quality of empathy is also a must-have intangible. It is absolutely essential for a liberal politician to feign feeling people's pain, and Biden certainly has this quality in excess. He is even shamelessly willing to milk the deaths of his family members for everything they're worth, especially in book sales.
After experiencing unimaginable tragedy, with the loss of his wife and infant daughter and later his son, he turned his grief into an incredible capacity to comfort others -- a quality that is called upon often for Presidents after a school shooting, a hurricane or any unpredictable moment when the country looks to the Commander in Chief.Biden incredibly and effectively killed gun control legislation in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Rather than seize the moment in the immediate aftermath, he preferred to wait until everybody forgot about the dead children before making his mild suggestions to curb violence. Psaki unwittingly calls attention to the ingrained violence - both state-sanctioned and freelance - of this country when she refers to the president as Commander in Chief. He is not the people's ruling general. That term is only applicable to his leadership of the uniformed armed forces, not the civilian population. Psaki is being unwittingly, transparently honest about her bellicose, authoritarian mindset.
The liberal plutocracy's third and fourth choices for president, writes Psaki, should be Corey Booker of New Jersey and Sherrod Brown of Ohio respectively. She incredibly and honestly admits that Booker might be a little on the self-centered side. She might want to revisit his third place status, now that he has signed on to the Green New Deal, albeit in a self-serving manner to boost his populist cred.
Brown makes the cut because Ohio is an important swing state, and he just got re-elected in what the Dems view as deplorable Trump country. He is very empathetic in towns whose factories went to Mexico, thanks to NAFTA, and whose residents have never forgiven the Clintons for signing their jobs and livelihoods away.
Now comes the inevitable part of the op-ed where Jen Psaki clumsily kills two progressive birds with one stone:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a serious fumble over the release of her DNA. But years ago, she also had the bold idea for addressing consumer woes long before Bernie Sanders ever ran for president.Translation: Warren is toast, but Bernie is stale crusty old toast made with the heels. Not so appealing to the well-heeled. And those ordinary people were pitifully woebegone (not angry as hell!) when the too-big-to-fail banks cheated them out of their homes and their pensions.
Now that she got that distasteful anti-populism chore out of the way, Psaki sets her sights on gender, which she had claimed to dismiss as a presidential quality at the start of her essay. Therefore, she redefines female gender as the intangible quality of tenacity:
There are a number of potential candidates, mostly women, who have shown they have the guts. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Kavanaugh would not have been as pointed and tough without the dogged questioning of Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar. Neither gave an inch beneath the stares of the all-male and all-white Republican side. They asked smart, incisive questions and in Klobuchar's case, and stood firm in the face of aggressive personal questioning from the nominee.They doggedly asked the same repetitive question ("will you request an independent FBI investigation?") over and over and over again. They did not cry out or faint when the truly scary Lindsey Graham shrieked like a banshee, and doddering old Chuck Grassley peered peevishly in their general direction. Try as she might to make it not seem so, Jen Psaki is unashamedly playing the gender card. She could have saved herself a lot of time by simply crowing You go, girls!
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York brings up the gender rear, because she is still something a long shot in the horse-race, thanks to her lead role in ousting fellow senator Al Franken from that august body just as the #MeToo movement was gathering steam.
(She) got her start in electoral office by running for the US House of Representatives against a popular longtime incumbent in a district in New York that had not gone for a Democrat in decades. She pushed her way to the top of the pack without the initial help of the national party and not only won the seat but quickly emerged as a rising star. After being named to the Senate to fill Hillary Clinton's seat when Clinton became Secretary of State, she later won the seat in a special election -- and soon took on the military to hold them accountable for dealing with rampant cases of sexual assault. And that displays another essential quality for a President -- courage.Gillibrand comes from a well-entrenched conservative, or Blue Dog, upstate political family machine. Before becoming a "progressive" she was a staunch NRA adherent and courageous anti-immigration idealogue. She won her Senate seat by raking in more Wall Street money of any other Senate candidate, including Mr. Wall Street himself, Chuck Schumer.
Finally, Jen Psaki seems to become as honestly tired of writing her puff piece as you have become from reading it. She concludes:
While a long primary process is exhausting to everyone involved, it allows for candidates to rise and fall. And the prism through which we should judge each candidate in the 2020 presidential race is how they exhibit these core human qualities: honesty, empathy, curiosity, tenacity and courage.Did I skip the curiosity intangible? My bad.
Of course, Psaki herself doesn't have the curiosity to wonder why this primary process is so long. If she were truly, brutally honest with herself and with us, she'd have to admit that it all boils down to money, and lots of it, for herself and her party and her think tank and her cable TV employer.
