John Edwards and Dominant Media's Selective Skewering of Populist Hypocrisy

 

 "THE ESSENCE OF AMERICAN POLITICS"

 

 

The essence of American politics," the formerly Left Christopher Hitchens noted in his 1999 study of the Clintons, "consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful," Hitchens explained, "which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as 'in touch' with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently elitist" (Hitchens 2000, pp. 17-18).

 

The Clinton administration was a perfect case study in the actualization of this ugly maxim.  As George Bush the First was showing himself to be hopelessly out of touch with popular concerns, Bill Clinton pitched his successful White House bid around the notion of "putting people first. " Clinton then proceeded to construct a neoliberal presidency based on serving the rich and powerful and punishing the poor.  That performance was richly consistent with the Reagan presidency, which demonstrated an especially perverse capacity for selling militantly regressive, corporate-plutocratic policy as the politics of the "little guy."

 

Hitchens' caustic and accurate description of the U.S. political game is just as relevant today as it was when Reagan or Clinton held power.  A big part of the reason of this is structural. Candidates cannot succeed in the big money winner-take-all U.S. electoral process without managing to balance popular support with backing from the stupendous concentrations of economic privilege that fund expensive, consultant- and media-driven campaigns and control "public" (corporate) communications and culture. 

 

It's an endless, viciously circular Catch-22.  You can't win without with without a good chunk of the populace willing to vote for you, but you can't get your message out to the populace without support from the wealthy few and the corporate elite that controls so much of the nation's economic, cultural and political activity.  And you can't attain ruling-class sponsorship if you appear to be too close (whatever your own personal class position) to the nation's working-class majority.

 

The populism-elitism conundrum is across the electoral board.  It's written into the institutional DNA of U.S. politics. It touches every current presidential candidacy, either by shaping viable campaigns (Guliani, Romney, Thompson, McCain, Clinton II, Obama and Edwards) in conservative ways of by making openly Left campaigns (Kucinich, for example)inherently unviable. 

 

"THE POPULIST LABEL DOESN'T FIT"

 

Curiously, however, dominant (corporate and "mainstream") U.S. media seems to want the citizenry to believe that Hitchens' dreadful "essence of American politics" is a relevant problem only or at least above all for John Edwards. When it isn't ignoring Edwards' campaign to portray the Democratic primaries as a two-way contest between the two big-money candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (1), that media seems especially focused on the affluent Edwards' personal life and the conflict between his individual fortune and his strongly voiced opinions against poverty and economic inequality.    Again and again we hear from news broadcasters, political commentators and comedians (especially Jay Leno) about Edwards' ritzy haircut, his opulent new mansion (recently described in the New York Times Sunday Magazine as "the largest home in the county, a 28,000-square-foot mansion with its own indoor basketball and squash courts"), his exorbitant lecture fees (actually quite modest compared to those of, say, Rudolph Giuliani) and his presence on the board of a Wall Street hedge fund that invested in "exactly the kind of subprime-mortgage dealers that Edwards has repeatedly castigated for preying on the poor" (Bai 2007)

 

New York Times Magazine writer and Barack Obama enthusiast Matt Bai recently skewered Edwards for identifying "mill supervisor" as his ideal non-politician job and concluded that "the more you talk to Edwards, the more apparent it is that the populist label doesn't quite fit." Bai supports this judgment with a quote from former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich: "Rhetorically, if you're calling Edwards an economic populist, it's true he cares a lot about the poor.  He evinces a lot of concern for the middle class and middle-class anxieties.  But he's not in any way attacking the rich or corporations.  He's not explaining one fundamental fact of modern economic life, which is that the very rich have all the money" (Bai 2007) [2].

 

 

HILLARY INC.

 

Are these problems for Edwards' claim to represent the working-class majority in its struggle with the economic elite?  Of course they are.   As the millionaire comedian Jay Leno suggest over and over again, there should be little doubt that Edwards lives on the privileged side of the "two [rich and the non-rich] Americas" that the former North Carolina Senator talks about so much in his presidential campaign (3). Point taken.

 

But Edwards is hardly the only leading presidential candidate to belie populist-sounding rhetoric with elite connections, allegiances and formulations.   All of the leading Republican candidates follow in Reagan's footsteps by trying to disguise their party's militantly regressive and plutocratic agenda as the politics of ordinary middle- and working-class Americans (4)

 

Hillary Clinton likes to sound like a grassroots union or civil rights organizer when talking to labor, minority and community activist audiences about how "everything has been skewed to help the privileged and powerful at the expense of everybody else."  But her progressive claims are badly compromised by the fact that she is heavily reliant on large-scale corporate contributions and has surrounded herself with advisers "who represent some of the weightiest interests in corporate America. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, not only polls for the America's biggest companies but runs one of the world's premier PR agencies."  As Ari Berman has noted in a Nation article bearing the title "Hillary Inc.":

 

"A bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying firm - the Glover Park Group - that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton's campaign. Her husband, since leaving the presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons' closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose DC brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton's economic team in waiting...' She's got a deeper bench of big money and corporate supporters than her competitors,' says Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with union-busters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists."

 

"It's not exactly an advertisement for the working-class hero or a picture her campaign freely displays. Her lengthy support for the Iraq War is Clinton's biggest liability in Democratic primary circles. But her ties to corporate America say as much, if not more, about what she values and cast doubt on her ability and willingness to fight for the progressive policies she claims to champion.... Courting elements of the Democratic base while signaling to the corporate right that she won't shake up the system is a tricky juggling act. Even the First Lady of triangulation may not be able to pull it off" (Berman 2007, pp. 11, 18).

 

Hillary savages the insurance industry (especially when talking to labor and minority audiences) for denying services and over-charging providers and patients but then makes it clear that she intends to leave the insurance companies "in control of the health care system" (Peterson 2007).  It's not for nothing that she received nearly five times as much political money from the insurance industry as Edwards ($226,450 v. $46,500) during the first quarter of 2007 (Center for Responsive Politics 2007c).

 

 

OBAMA INC.

 

Hillary's fellow "new Democrat" Barack Obama is engaged in the exact same "juggling act" as Clinton. He likes to call himself a "progressive" and to identify himself with "the principles of equality," the "Golden Rule" and the cause of "social justice," citing as evidence his youthful experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. Still, Obama is a freshly minted millionaire who recently purchased an opulent Georgian Revival Mansion below price at $1.65 million thanks to some help from the felony-indicted political fundraiser and longtime Obama friend and campaign finance pivot man Tony Rezko (Main 2006).

 

Obama's power-worshipping campaign book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006) - the book to which Obama refers reporters asking him for policy specifics behind his often vague statements - refers to the United States' rapacious, savagely unequal and fundamentally "materialist" capitalist economy as the nation's "greatest asset." The Audacity of Hope absurdly praises the "American system of social organization" and "business culture" on the grounds that U.S. capitalism "has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources."  It commends "the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections" for "prevent[ing] Democrats...from straying too far from the center" and for marginalizing "those within the Democratic Party who tend toward zealotry" and "radical ideas" (like peace and justice).  It praises fellow centrist Senator and presidential rival Hillary Clinton for embracing "the virtues of capitalism" and applauds her "recognizably progressive" husband Bill Clinton for showing that "markets and fiscal discipline" and "personal responsibility [are] needed to combat poverty"  - an interesting reflection on the militantly corporate-neoliberal Clinton administration's efforts to increase poverty by eliminating poor families' entitlement to public cash assistance and privileging deficit reduction over social spending (Obama 2006, pp. 34-35, 38, 149-150; Pollin 2003).  

 

Obama's badly titled book audaciously lectures poor people on their "duty" to feel "empathy" for wealthy oppressors - including Bush and Cheney, who are "pretty much like everyone else"  - and on their need to understood how well off and "free" they are compared to their more truly miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America . It deletes less favorable contrasts with Western Europe and Japan, the most relevant comparisons, where dominant norms and institutional arrangements produce significantly slighter levels of poverty and inequality than what is found in the hierarchical U.S. (Obama 2006, pp. 48, 54, 68, 150; Street 2007a; Street 2007b). 

 

The junior Senator from Illinois denounces the corrosive influence of private political cash on U.S. democracy while cozying up to Chicago's notoriously corrupt Big Money Mayor Richard M. Daley (with whom he shares the same high-priced campaign consultant [David Axlerod]) and raking in campaign largesse from wealthy interests, including Goldman Sachs, Exelon (leading Midwestern utility and the world's leading nuclear plant operator), Soros Fund Management, J.P Morgan Chase & Co., leading corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps,  Sidley Austin LLP),  top Chicago investment interests (including Henry Crown & Co and Aerial Capital Management) and the like (Center for Responsive Politics 2007a).

 

Obama's reliance on such deep-pockets supporters helps explain why he voted for a business-driven "tort reform" bill that rolled back working peoples' ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations (Sirota 2006; Silverstein 2006). It is certainly part of why he opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent (Sirota 2006). It is undoubtedly related to his vote against a bill that would have killed an amendment to the 2005 energy bill that Taxpayers for Common Sense and Citizens Against Government Waste called "one of the worst provisions in this massive piece of legislation."  Under the amendment, which passed with Obama's help, U.S. taxpayers are providing millions of dollars in loan guarantees to power plant operators.  They "risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default" (Silverstein 2006).

 

Special interest influence is certainly behind Obama's constant plugging of federally subsidized ethanol ("E-85") as an environmentally friendly "alternative fuel." The supposed "green" fuel E-85 has become "the classic pork barrel cause of every Midwestern politician" (Silverstein 2006), enticed as such politicians are by the reality or promise of campaign contributions from the legendary Illinois-based political finance player and ethanol producer Archer Daniels Midland (Lewis 1996, pp. 10, 116, 118, 121-127). Whether it really contributes to positive environmental change and reduced U.S. "dependence on foreign oil" is questionable, however.  "Since arriving on Capitol Hill," Ken Silverstein noted in a Harper's article titled "Obama Inc.," "Obama has been as assiduous as any member of Congress in promoting ethanol. ADM has apparently not contributed money to Obama, but during his first year in office he traveled on the company's private jets at least twice" (Silverstein 2006).

 

Reliance on corporate cash and power is likely related to Obama's opposition to the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the curious grounds that such a welcome social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry and that "voluntary" solutions are "more consonant" with "the American character" than "government mandates." ( Klein 2006; Sirota 2006).

 

The last comment is fascinating.  As Noam Chomsky noted last year (Chomsky 2006, p.225):

 

"A large majority of the [U.S.] population supports extensive government intervention [in the health care market], it appears, an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that 'over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee "everyone the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply"'; a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as 'more important than holding down taxes'; polls reported in Business Week found that '67 % of Americans think it is a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 5 dissenting; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the 'U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes' (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans 'thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,' while 40 percent 'thought it already was'" (5).

       

Obama has "played up populist themes of [campaign finance] reform," trumpeting his "large number of small donations" and claiming (in the Senator's words) to be "launch[ing]a fundraising drive that isn't about dollars" (Morain 2007). But his astonishing first-quarter campaign finance haul of $25.7 million included $17.5 million from "big donors" ($1000 and up) - a sum higher than John Edwards' (Curry 2007) total take ($14 million) from all donors together (Campaign Finance Institute 2007). Obama got a combined $530,000 from leading global finance and investment firms UBS-Americas ($162,200), Goldman Sachs ($146,100), Citigroup ($56,000), Credit Suisse Securities ($47,500), Morgan Stanley ($41,850), Lehman Bros. ( $38,400) and ($37,900) Aerial Capital (Center for Responsive Politics 2007c; Morain 2007).  He received more than two-thirds (68 percent) of his first quarter 2007 fundraising total "from donations of $1000 or more" (Street 2007c).  

 

 

THE NARROW NEOLIBERAL SPECTRUM

 

Why is the media's scorn for the populist/progressive hypocrisy of top tier candidates - a hypocrisy that is written into the structural nature of the United States' heavily media-focused and corporate-plutocratic "dollar democracy" - so disproportionately focused on Edwards?  It's simple. He's not a full-blown populist progressive; no such individual could run a credible campaign under the current corporate-dominated U.S. electoral regime.  But after the openly Left and officially unelectable Kucinich (who threw his Iowa caucus delegates to Edwards in 2004 and will probably do so again in 2008), Edwards is the closest thing to such a candidate in the Democratic primaries. Having attained his "wealth as a trial lawyer suing hospitals and corporations" (Cohen 2007), Edwards is deeply concerned (however hypocritical he might sound) about poverty and inequality.  After heading a liberal poverty research center in Chapel Hill for the last three years, he announced his campaign in an impoverished section New Orleans - the nation's leading symbol of concentrated and racialiized poverty and government neglect - and speaks insistently and repeatedly about and against the growing chasm between rich and poor within the United States. He has the most progressive and detailed health care proposal - the only truly universal plan - among the top-tier Democratic candidates. He advocates rolling back Bush's tax cuts for people who receive more than $200,000 a year to fund truly universal coverage (6).  

 

Edwards is the only top tier Democrat to back up Dennis Kucinich's claim that single-payer government health insurance is good policy.  His universal health care plan is to the left of the cheaper and milder copy-cat version proposed by Barack Obama in that it is more adequately funded (thanks to the proposed tax-cut rollback), truly universal and would compel private insurance companies to compete with government plans and could evolve into single payer. 

 

Unlike Obama, he doesn't voice support for the vicious Clinton-Gingrich "welfare reform" (a direct neoliberal assault on the poor) or mouth transparent and unsubstantiated nonsense about the United States being a land of special upward social mobility (Street 2004; Street 2005).

 

Calling himself a "a real Democrat, not a 'new [corporate-neoliberal]  Democrat,'" he describes the labor movement as "the greatest anti-poverty program in American history" and refuses to privilege deficit reduction over poverty reduction. 

 

He criticizes Congressional Democrats for agreeing to fund the continued U.S. war in Iraq without timetables for withdrawal.  He says that "its time for Americans to be patriotic about something other than war" and that "the way to support the troops is to end the war."  He "thrills liberal partisans" by "calling for an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq" (Bai 2007, pp. 74-75) and calls for addressing the threat of terrorism by acting to increase social and economic opportunity in other parts of the world instead of relying on a military approach. 

 

Employing former Detroit-area labor-backed Congressman and onetime labor studies professor David Bonier as his campaign director, he is running as what the New York Times calls "a candidate of the left...filling a vacancy created  as Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have campaigned from the center" (Nagoureny 2007).

 

As Jeff Cohen notes:

 

"Edwards is alone in convincingly criticizing corporate-drafted trade treaties and talking about workers' rights and the poor and higher taxes on the rich.  He's the candidate who set up a university research center on poverty.  Of the front-runners in presidential polls, he's pushing the hardest to withdraw from Iraq, and pushing the hardest on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to follow suit. Given a national media elite that worships 'free trade' and disparages Democrats for catering to 'extremists' like MoveOn.org on Iraq withdrawal, the media's rather obsessive focus on Edwards' alleged hypocrisy should not surprise us. Nor should it surprise us that we've been shown aerial pictures of Edwards' mansion in North Carolina, but not of the mansions of the other well-off candidates. You see, those other pols aren't hypocrites: They don't lecture about poverty" (Cohen 2007).

 

It's not for nothing that Edwards is losing to Hillary-Obama in both the big donor dollar race and in the race for name recognition and favorable attention in dominant media. He's speaking the languages of labor, the New Deal and the (stillborn) War on Poverty to a noteworthy extent in a time when the labor movement and the notion of positive government action for egalitarian and anti-poverty ends have been officially proclaimed dead and over (drowned in the icy individualist waters of neoliberal calculation) and in a period when the issues of inequality and economic insecurity resonate with a considerable and growing section of the ever more class-fractured citizenry.

 

The other thing is that Edwards is a threat to win.  Though you would hardly know it from dominant media coverage, he currently leads the polls in pivotal Iowa, where grassroots organization, the caucus system, a historically independent electorate and his earlier positive history there - he finished a strong second to Kerry in Iowa in 2004, picking up steam at the end with his powerful "two Americas" theme - are working to his benefit. Even with his comparative media and campaign finance challenges, he's a real threat to post early victories in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.  Triumphs in these states would boost his national profile and raise the possibility that his dangerous (to corporate ideological gate-keepers) "class warfare" (the FOX News take on his "two Americas" theme) theme would catch hold with an in fact remarkably and increasingly class-polarized electorate. At the same time, since he enjoys lower negative poll ratings than the other two top-tier Democrats, Edwards fares better than Hillary Clinton and Obama when matched up against likely 2008 Republican presidential opponents in opinion surveys (Rasmussen Reports 2007).    

 

The owners and coordinators of the United States' corporate media empire have good reasons to want to marginalize serious discussion of economic inequality in the U.S. after thirty five years in which the share of U.S. "earnings" appropriated by the richest 1 percent of American has tripled while incomes have stagnated and fallen for the nation's working class majority.  The most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world by far, the U.S. is now at pre-New Deal levels of economic disparity. Reflecting three plus decades of  richly media-enabled class warfare of the unmentionable sort - from the top down - the top 1 percent now owns more than a third of the nation's wealth. This is something the "mainstream" U.S. media oligopoly would very much like to keep off the telescreens of sustained and serious public attention.

       

Edwards, for all his social and ideological limitations (from a Left perspective), is working to place this problem and the intimately related issue of poverty in the foreground.  He appears to sincerely care - and is willing to pay a campaign-finance and related public relations cost for his concern - about these issues. For this and other reasons, dominant U.S. media tend to alternately mock and ignore his campaign. This is supposed to be a militantly regressive corporate-neoliberal age - no questions asked - as far as the nation's economic and ideological power elite is concerned.  The spectrum of acceptable debate set by that elite has shifted to far to the right that even an Edwards - not just a Kucinich (the most truly Left candidate in the race) - gets vicious treatment from dominant communications and cultural authorities.

 

This says more about how right-wing that media has become than how left Edwards is but Edwards deserves credit for refusing to follow the standard chilling big-money path to corporate-neoliberal centrism. He's different and better than and actually to the left of dominant media darlings Hillary and Obama, whose susceptibility to the charge of false populism is reduced by the fact that they possess less real populist concern and commitment than Edwards.           

 

Paul Street (paulstreet99@ yahoo.com) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005). Street's next book Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007) will be published in July.      

 

       

NOTES

 

1. Thus the New York Times reported yesterday (June 27, 2007) that "substantially more Americans ages 17 to 29 than four years ago are paying attention to the presidential race.  But they appeared to be really familiar with only two of the candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, both Democrats" (Nagourney and Thee 2007). 

 

2. According to Bai, Edwards added insult to injury by claiming to have "joined the hedge fund partly because he wanted to learn more about the way markets affected inequality. This," Bai notes, "is rather like saying you hired a stripper in order to better understand the exploitation of women" (Bai 2007).   Bai further criticized Edwards' populist credentials by reporting that Edwards "might consider pressuring the Fed to lower interest raters in order to tighten labor markets, but he wasn't sure. Similarly, he said he was wary of raising the tax rate on capital, fearing that it would cause capital to flee the country.  He sounded equally unenthused," Baid adds, "about returning to the days of steeper levies on the superrich (beyond the tax cut rollback he has proposed on those making more than $200,000), even though his official position is that he would consider them."  

 

3. The biggest tip-off of the rather obvious fact that that Edwards is less than a full-blown left populist is his repeated claim that his great aim is to "help people have a chance to be as successful as I have been." This is Edwards' way of saying that he buys into the standard bourgeois American claim that the only acceptable form of equality to be pursue is equality of opportunity, not equality of condition (Jencks 1992).  That is not the position of the historical Left, which is opposed to social inequality as such. The massive socioeconomic disparities that scar American and global life, leftists think, would be offensive and supremely damaging to democracy and the common good even if everyone at the top of the pyramid had risen to their positions from an equally modest position on a "level playing field." There is no such field in really existing U.S. society, of course,  but the creation of such an equal beginning would not make it any less toxic and authoritarian for 1 percent of the U.S. population to own 40 percent of the nation's wealth (along with a probably higher percentage of America's politicians and policymakers). Serious Left (populist, Marxist, anarchist and/or whatever) vision is about all-around class leveling before, during, and after the policy process.  It's not about giving everyone an identical chance to become fabulously rich or miserably poor in accord with their particular combination of talent or hard work or lack thereof.

 

4.  They also follow the Gipper by relentlessly citing foreign dangers to encourage mass cowering under the protective umbrella of the national security state.  The Reagan administration was especially expert at pushing the foreign policy panic button to divert attention from uncomfortable plutocratic realities in the homeland. 

 

5. Does Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate mass incarceration on the grounds that it provides work for tens of thousands of prison guards? Should the U.S. maintain the illegal occupation of Iraq and pour half of its federal budget into "defense" because of all the soldiers and other workers who find employment in imperial wars and the military-industrial complex? Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006 (Center for Responsive Politics 2007b). His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, was a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006. For what it's worth, she also received $51,200 for attending a few board meetings of TreeHouse Foods, a giant firm strongly linked to the notorious low-wage retail giant Wal-Mart, where she was made a director after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate (Sweet 2007a) 

 

6. Kip Peterson notes a critical problem with Edwards' plan: Edwards unfortunately so far opposes opening "the existing Medicare program, which now insures 43 millions senior and disabled people, to anyone who prefers to be insured by Medicare rather than Blue Cross Blue Shield or Aetna.  He is instead proposing that smaller programs that resemble Medicare, but which are separate from it, operate in numerous 'health markets' across the country (which he does not define) in competition with insurance companies. Would these Medicare-like programs start out with a sizable enrollment, say half a million to a million people, or would they go through a growth phase in which they are quite small? If they start out small, or never get to be very big, will they have to advertise heavily to attract enrollees (something Medicare does not do now) and, if so, won't that drive up administrative costs and premiums? If they start out or remain small, won't they be vulnerable to adverse selection, especially if private insurers deny health care to their sicker enrollees and encourage them to switch to the Medicare-like programs?  These and other problems caused by small size relative to the real Medicare, and by the need to compete with private insurers, could cause programs that bear the name 'Medicare' to lose to the bloated insurance industry even though the real Medicare program is far more efficient than any insurance company. In that event, the single-payer movement will have suffered two setbacks. It will not only have failed to build a single-payer system via market forces, but a central premise of the single-payer movement—that Medicare is more efficient than the insurance industry—will have been falsely undermined" (Peterson 2007).

 

 

       

SOURCES

 

Matt Bai 2007.  "The Poverty Platform," New York Times Magazine, June 19, 2007, p. 76).

 

Ari Berman 2007.  "Hillary Inc.," The Nation (June 4, 2007), pp. 11-18.

 

Campaign Finance Institute 2007. "Big Donations Dominate Early Presidential Fundraising" (2007), available online at www. cfinst.org/pr/pr Release.aspx? ReleaseID=136.

 

Center for Responsive Politics (2007a). "Obama's Leading Contributors, 2001-2006," available online at www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.asp?CID =N00009638&cycle =2006.

 

Center for Responsive Politics (2007b).  "Obama's Leading ding Contributors by Industry," available online at www.opensecrets.org/politicians/allindus.asp?CID=N00009638.

 

Center for Reponsive Politics (2007c). "Race for the White House," available online t http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/index.asp?cycle=2008.

 

Chicago Indymedia (2007).  "General Dynamics, Crown Dynasty and Obama, February 24, 2007, available online at  http://chicago.indymedia.org/ newswire/ display/ 76429/ index.php.

 

Noam Chomsky (2006). Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan, 2006).

 

Jeff Cohen (2007). "Are Media Out to Get Edwards?" ZNet (June 3 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=12981. 

 

Tom Curry (2007). "What Kind of Battle for Democrats in 2008?" MSNBC, April 25, 2007, available online at www.msnbc.com/id/18298064/print/1/displaymore/1098/.

 

Christopher Hitchens 2000. No One Left to Lie to: the Values of the Worst Family (New York: Verso, 2000, pp. 17 -18.)

 

Christopher Jencks (1992). Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

 

Joe Klein (2006). "The Fresh Face," Time (October 17, 2006).

 

Charles Lewis (1996).  The Buying of the President (New York, NY: Avon, 1996)

 

Frank Main 2006.  "Obama's Rezko Ties Deeper Than Land Deal," Chicago Sun Times, 23 December 2006, available online at http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/184540,122306obama.article.

 

Dan Morain (2007). "An Asterisk to Obama's Policy on Donations," Los Angeles Times, 22 April 2007. 

 

Adam Nagrourney 2007.  "Staking His Claims on Iowa, Edwards Makes a Populist Pitch to the Left," New York Times, 18 June 2007, p. A15.

 

Adam Nagoureny and Megan C. Thee 2007.  "Young Americans Are Leaning Left, New Poll Finds," New York Times, 27 June 2007, A1.

 

Barack Obama (2006), The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts Toward Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, 2006).

 

Kip Peterson 2007.  "Democrats Debate Universal Coverage," Z Magazine (May 2007), available online at http://zmagsite.zmag.org/May2007/sullivan0507.html. 

 

Robert Pollin 2003.  Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity [New York, NY: Verso, 2003)

 

Rasmussen Reports 2007. "Election 2008: Democratic Presidential Matchups," available online at www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/match_ups/election_2008_democratic_presidential_matchups.

 

Ken Silverstein (2006).  "Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine," Harpers's Magazine (November 2006):31-40.

 

David Sirota (2006).  "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington," The Nation, June 26.

 

Paul Street (2004). "Keynote Reflections," (Featured Article), ZNet Magazine (July 29th, 2004), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/ showarticle.cfm? SectionID= 41&ItemID=5951

 

Paul Street 2005.  "Rags to Rags, Riches to Riches: the American Dream is More Livable in the Old World," ZNet Magazine (May 28 2005), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=7954.

 

Paul Street (2007a). "The Obama Illusion," Z Magazine (February 2007): 29-33.

 

Paul Street (2007b). "Obama's Audacious Deference to Power: A Critical Review of Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope;" Black Agenda Report (January 31, 2007), available online at  www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task =view&id=61 and at ZNet Magazine (January 24, 2007), www.zmag.org/ content/ showarticle.cfm?Section ID=72&ItemID=11936

 

Paul Street (2007c). "Obama's Wonderful Wealth Primary," ZNet Magazine (April 11, 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12551.

 

Lynn Sweet (2007a) "Barack and Michelle Obama Earned $991,296 in 2006," Chicago Sun Times, 16 April 2007, available online at http://blogs.suntimes. com/sweet/2007/04/sweet_blog_extra_barack_and_mi.html#more.  

 

Lynn Sweet (2007b)."Obama Touts Small Donor Networks But Also Relies on High End 'Bundlers' for Millions," Chicago Sun Times, 16 April, 2007, available online at http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/04/sweet_column_obama_ touts_ small.html. 

 

Lynn Sweet (2007c). "Obama's Donor Courtship," Chicago Sun Times, 18 April 2007.

 

Jeff Zeleny and Patrick Healy (2007). "Obama Shows His Strength in Fund-Raising Feat on Par with Clinton," New York Times, 5 April 2007, A12.