I'm not sure Arianna Huffington understands the Centrist Dem world-view

[Leopolds Ghost]

She seems to regard Clinton's platform as contradictory when it is not.

1. Obama is too liberal. HuffPost's Tom Edsall reports: "Hillary's aides point to Obama's extremely progressive record as a community organizer, state senator and candidate for Congress, his alliances with 'left-wing' intellectuals in Chicago's Hyde Park community, and his liberal voting record on criminal defendants' rights as subjects for examination."

Dear God, not "left-wing intellectuals"! Aren't you grateful Hillary warned us in time? The last thing voters in a Democratic primary want is someone with a "liberal voting record." Apparently, Mark Penn is still advising the campaign.

2. Obama is too conservative. In a sleazy direct mail letter sent to New Hampshire voters, Clinton tried to twist Obama's record on abortion, saying he has been "unwilling to take a stand on choice."

Really? Tell that to Planned Parenthood and NARAL, both of which have given Obama 100 percent ratings for his support of abortion rights. I asked NARAL about this mailing. "We are fortunate to have such strong pro-choice candidates like Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as former Sen. John Edwards and Gov. Bill Richardson, running for president," Elizabeth Shipp, NARAL's political director emailed me. "We are confident that any one of these candidates would protect and defend a woman's right to choose, if elected president." *

3. Obama is soft on crime. Hillary's staffers, trying to play up the "too liberal" meme, pointed out that Obama had spoken out against mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes, saying: "Mandatory minimums take too much discretion away from judges."

How dare he! Imagine a Democrat -- an African American Democrat, at that -- expressing dissatisfaction with the injustice of a system that disproportionately impacts young people of color.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/portrait-in-cynicism-hil_b_80289.html

What Arianna and other bloggers fail to understand is that this policy mix reflects completely a consistent
neoliberal worldview which appeals to the secular upper class who believe in abortion and women's rights,
but not the right to housing or "left-wing" attitudes toward social justice and what they deem the "thankfully discredited extremists" of the civil rights movement.

Indeed, they cling to their pro-choice record and their hatred of Bush Evangelicals and cherish it, as proof that despite their increasing wealth, the increasing exclusivity of their "blue" real estate enclaves, their increasing equanimity about the loss of American jobs, the increasing conservatism of their "blue" city halls that have adopted Clinton-style privatization and downsizing of public facilities across the board that Reagan never dreamed of, their increasing conservatism on every pocketbook issue that goes hand in hand with a solid class identification as part of a besieged Anglo-American Global Citizen of a Superior Enlightenment-created Capitalist Class, one that is superior to the teeming masses whether they are ignorant Huckabee voters or ignorant third-world Muslims that are sitting atop our oil which we bought from their governments fair and square.

If they were not pro-choice they would be indistinguishable from Rockefeller Republicans (no, wait a minute ... the Clinton wing of the Democratic party, which is substantial and includes many ex-union types and suburban professionals, all of whom teach their children that they will not end up like those god-awful trailer trash who are still working at the factory on the other side of the tracks, basically ARE Rockefeller Republicans and have driven the party off the rails into territory somewhere between Rockefeller and early Reagan.)

The Beltway Establishment Dems are anti-populist and so they will latch onto any "superior reasoning" that identifies them with that educated portion of the upper class that cares about the poor in the abstract (and so views itself as superior to the gangster-capitalist Republicans) but ultimately wants to create a society where the only standard of success is to join the ranks of the upper middle class. Pro-choice is popular among the highly-educated management classes and so that and a few other cultural markers is their big ticket to create a pro-business party that is distinct from that of the Republicans. If wealthy-urbanites were socially conservative then the same party consultants who encourage their clients to support women's rights would be downplaying abortion and identifying pro-choice movement as yet another "relic of the radical 60s" that the Democratic Party must, in their eyes, move away from.

[Skidmore]

1. Oh, I think she understands it just fine.

[Armstead]

2. Great Post...K&R

Social liberalism is not automatically associated with populism or progressive policies on the real issues of wealth and power.

[cali]

3. lol.

you may well be the wordiest- and least astute political forecaster here. NOTHING in Obama's record is remotely reflective of neoliberalism.

Absurd.

[Leopolds Ghost]

4. I'm referring to Clinton here -- she's attacking Obama for being

a) Insufficiently pro-choice
b) Insufficiently tough on crime
c) Too much of a dreamer
d) Insufficiently respectful of the "doers" who actually hold authority in the present system
e) Dangerously left-wing on other unspecified issues ("will Obama destroy the goose that laid
the golden egg by listening to economic populists?" Is the unstated meme.)

These fit into a coherent neoliberal philosophy which is, if anything, a retreat
BEYOND modern day conservatism into the secular, economically conservative "liberalism"
of William of Orange and the Puritans back in the days when the only organized alternative
to "liberal" politics was blood aristocracy or peasant rebellion, and the only organized
opposition to establishment committed offenses was the business elite, most of whom
were either secular or part of a religious minority (which is why they were so passionately
"liberal" in the first place, because they were excluded from the feudal aristocratic
system.) Since the Republicans seem to be pushing us into some kind of corporate debt-fueled
feudalism, I guess it's only fitting that center-right Dems would want to return to the days
when elegantly suited land-owners drinking mint juleps on the verandah of a McLean mansion
were considered to be more socially conscious and more economically aware than their
uneducated constituents, when vast disparities of wealth were considered to be a mark of
intellectual accomplishment on the part of the most prestigious university graduates.

It's probably true that Arianna Huffington understands that the Clinton platform is
consistent (and consistently anti-populist, using womens issues as a wedge not just
against lefty progressives but against black supporters of Obama -- to quote Howard
Fineman, For many Baby Boomer women it is infuriating to watch Hillary, who would be
the first female president, be outflanked by Obama on the “making history” theme.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22539570/