Sharp piece by Russ “Mugger” Smith at
SpliceToday. He takes aim at the heartfelt belief among
progressives and liberals that there is some sort of groundswell
for left-wing populism as personified by Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(D-Mass.). Smith trains his sites on Daily Beast columnist, former
American Prospect editor, and Hillary Clinton biographer
Michael Tomasky, who recently wrote a weak-in-the-knees mash note
to Warren in
The New York Review of Books.
Where does Tomasky think all the foot soldiers for The Cause are
going to come from, aside from liberal media outlets? A neutral
observer (which I’m not) will, after shaking the cobwebs, recall
the short-lived Occupy Wall Street movement from a few years ago
that was, if you believed the rhapsodic press accounts, the new
force that would bring Wall Street, the Tea Party, the “1 percent,”
mega-banks, Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, insurance companies
and corporations like Walmart to their knees. (It goes without
saying that Hollywood millionaires and Silicon Valley tech
billionaires are exempt from scorn.) It didn’t happen, of course,
as the rudderless throngs that gathered at Zuccotti Park and
countless other urban locations either got bored or frustrated with
their protests. OWS, which for several months really did look like
a potential political player—far more significant than blue-state
scold Elizabeth Warren—squandered its potency and, at least right
now, is a footnote.
In fact, writes Smith,
if there were a significant populist wave that captures the
imagination of Americans, I’d say it’s likely to come from the
Republican Party, with the likes of Sen. Rand Paul (sculpting a
more “electable” image every day), Govs. Scott Walker and John
Kasich and maybe Sen. Marco Rubio. The Other Side. It’s messy: the
GOP would need to dispatch the polarizing and narcissistic Sen. Ted
Cruz, insufferable moralists Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee,
forget the names Mitt Romney and Chris Christie and dispel any idea
that Jeb Bush might be the palooka to combat Mrs. Clinton.
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