by JEFFERY ST. CLAIR
PHOTO/Jeanne Menjoulet | CC BY 2.0
This year the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to grow larger than ever. Oceanologists predict the lifeless expanse of water below the Mississippi River Delta will swell to an area bigger than the state of Vermont, an aquatic ecosystem despoiled by industrial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, oil leaks and the lethal effects of a warming climate. But the desolate waters of the Gulf pale next to the electoral dead zone now confronting the Democratic Party, which seems to occupy about two-thirds of the geographical area of the Republic—a political landscape deadened by the Party’s remorseless commitment to neoliberal economics, imperial wars and open hostility toward the working class base which once served as its backbone.
The latest political zombie offered up as a vessel to freight the electoral asperations of the Democrats was a pious former congressional staffer called Jon Ossoff, whose name sounds like one of those creepy Svengali-like characters from a Tod Browning horror film of the 1930s. But the candidate wasn’t as scary as all that. In fact, Ossoff scared no one, which was both his campaign theme and his problem. One of his problems, anyway. Ossoff presented himself as an anodyne candidate, a nowhere man, a quiescent emissary for a return to civility in politics. He was the white Rodney King, who plaintively asked why we couldn’t all just get along. Of course, who really wants civility in politics, when you’re working two jobs, can’t pay the power bill, have a kid with asthma and just had your Ford Focus repossessed.
Ossoff proved much more popular outside the sixth congressional district of Georgia, than within it, which is only fitting for a candidate who didn’t even bother to reside in the district he was running to represent. Ossoff was an interloper, a carpetbagger, who refused to promote even the trickle-down benefits of a second Reconstruction for a South that has been ravaged by a 30-year-long exodus of good-paying jobs.
In an age crying out for a new kind of politics, Ossoff campaigned directly from the Clinton playbook (Hillary version), apparently hoodwinked into believing that absent Russian interventionism this stale platform was a winning strategy. His main opponent was Trump, not even Trumpism, which might offend some of the Republican voters he was targeting. In what became a kind of daily ritual on the campaign trail, Ossoff repeatedly scrubbed himself clean of any taint of populism or progressive inclinations. Ossoff denounced single-payer health care, kept himself at arm’s length from Bernie Sanders and never uttered even a minor critique of American imperialism. Think of him as a prettified Tim Kaine.
Ossoff dutifully punched one item after another on the checklist of neoliberalism. He wanted to end waste in government. He wanted to trim burdensome regulations stifling the old entrepreneurial spirit. He wanted to reduce the deficit and hectored struggling black families to demonstrate “personal responsibility” if they wanted to get their federal benefits. He pledged his loyalty to Israel, decried nasty dictators from Putin to Assad and vowed to eradicate the scourge of Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth. He sedulously avoided any mention of radioactive subjects such as hunger, homelessness, drone warfare, the death penalty or police shootings. The fate of entitlement programs from Social Security to Medicaid was much too thorny for Ossoff to deal with on the campaign trail. Prosecuting Wall Street criminals somehow escaped his attention. He remained opaque on the subject of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Bernie Sanders himself questioned whether Ossoff could be considered a “progressive,” but that warning sign didn’t stop progressives across the country from flooding his campaign coffers with cash. By the end of the campaign, Ossoff had raised more than $24 million, six times the amount raised by his Republican opponent Karen Handel.
After Ossoff’s ignoble defeat, Margaret Kimberly, the fiery columnist for Black Agenda Report, quipped, “What did they expect? It was a reactionary district in Georgia.” Good point. But these are precisely the kinds of districts that the Clinton Democrats (who have yet to melt into a steaming pile of ectoplasm like most vanquished zombies) see as fertile terrain. The Georgia Sixth occupies the northern suburbs of Atlanta. It’s been solidly in Republican hands since the late 1970s, when Georgia’s segregationist Democrats had largely completed their migration into the Republican Party. For many years, the Georgia Sixth was the domain of the white-haired gnome Newt Gingrich. Later it passed into the hands of Dr. Tom Price, the errand boy of Big Pharma who views his obligations under the Hippocratic Oath with the same animosity that his ancestors once reserved for the Emancipation Proclamation. Price was reelected last November by a 23 percent margin over his Democratic challenger.
Demographically, the Georgia Sixth is populated by voters who are predominately white, suburban, middle-class and educated. In other words, it qualifies as the Democrats’ new field of dreams: cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac of houses which once proudly sprouted Romney signs from their immaculately manicured lawns. And living inside those pastel-colored split-levels and golf course condo units are thousands of housewives, quietly bristling at the misogyny of Donald Trump and his Republican enablers. These are Chuck Schumer’s women, the soft-Republican matrons he predicted would flock to non-threatening, well-groomed Democrats in the age of Trump. These were the thoughtful, silent female majority who would have yielded Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania to Hillary had not Putin monkey-wrenched the vote. In order to seal the deal, the DNC orchestrated conveys of UberBlack towncars to shuttle Hollywood celebrities around Dekalb and Fulton Counties proclaiming the virtues of Ossoff.
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