Bring It On, Bipartisan Fetishists

David Sirota basically wrote the post I was about to write, but I'll summarize it in shorter form. This Mike Bloomberg "Old White Men For Bipartisanship As Defined By Agreeing With Us" boomlet is nothing more than a desire to save the country from the evils of a progressive agenda. The High Broderists of the world who scream for centrist bipartisan solutions don't know what they're talking about, nor do they understand how American democracy works, nor do they really want American democracy. Bloomberg is a neoconservative narcissist who wants to buy the White House for him and the Big Money boys. He has steadfastly supported the war in Iraq and some of the dregs of Washington like Paul Wolfowitz and Joe Lieberman. As Greenwald notes:

A Bloomberg candidacy would have no purpose other than satisfy his bottomless personal lust for attention and bestow the wise old men threatening the country with his candidacy with some fleeting sense of rejuvenated relevance and wisdom. His political views are conventional in every way and he's little more than an establishment-enabling figurehead. The whole attraction to his candidacy has nothing to do with any issues or substance and everything to do with an empty addiction to vapid notions of Establishment harmony and a desire to exert control, whereby our Seriousness guardians devote themselves to a candidate for reasons largely unrelated to his policies or political views, thus proving themselves, as usual, to be the exact antithesis of actual seriousness.

Digby's worried about this and thinks that Bloomberg is the kind of guy that could bamboozle a lot of so-called "independent Democrats" and swing the election to the Republicans, but I would relish shutting this guy up. Could you imagine a scenario where John Edwards faces Mitt Romney, with Michael Bloomberg as an independent? Would that not be just the perfect embodiment of Edwards' candidacy, going against two corporate suits and their billions? And I don't think that having the clueless Villagers against you would be an impediment. Worried about an Edwards nomination, you're starting to see shills like Stu Rothenberg and Joe Klein attack him for having the temerity to line up on the side of the working man. Klein's is particularly stupid because he has to lie ("NAFTA has been a wash, creating as many jobs as have been lost.") in order to get his point across, as well as magically find ordinary citizens who just so happen to parrot back his own arguments.

My sense is that the country is fed up with these gasbags who think they can do what's best for the country without interference from the rabble. I think that Sirota is right:

In my reporting over the last year I learned that things are - finally - starting to change. The Joe Kleins, Stu Rothenbergs and Mike Bloombergs still have influence, because they have lots of money behind them. But an uprising is on - one that has already impacted the 2008 presidential race, and one that will continue to seethe well past the upcoming caucuses and primaries. It is that simple fact that truly frightens the defenders of the status quo who have gotten used to the good life inside the palace walls.

Edwards' message resonates to those who've been kicked around by an economy that values the super-rich for the last three decades. He's not running against George Bush, but a system in Washington that is rigged for moneyed interests. He understands that a politics of confrontation is the only way to get a decent outcome, that only through epic fights and, yes, partisanship, have we ever made progress in this country. These bipartisan fetishists don't want anything that would disrupt a status quo that keeps real power for themselves. What's ironic is that, in the name of changing the country, they want to keep it the same.