So it goes.

Well, the Clintons won Pennsylvania by nearly ten points, so I guess all that slamming, sliming, and race-baiting was well worth it. Or sort of, anyway... since it's still hard to see how Hillary can walk away with this nomination short of spontaneous combustion on Obama's part. No matter - the race continues. In a year when a Democrat should certainly walk to victory in November, the party is inventing a way to lose against a pretty lame candidate on the G.O.P. side. Start with two parts ambition - the kind the Clintons pursue at the cost of all they claim to believe in. Certainly, I've never been a fan of theirs, but I would dislike them a whole lot less if they simply stuck to articulating their positions, outlining policy differences with their opponent in a civil fashion, and refrain from all the exaggerated accusations about sixties radicals, anti-American (Marine veteran) preachers, and out of context remarks worthy of Sean Hannity or Matt Drudge.

Are the Clintons crypto-Republicans? I've always suspected so, but it hardly matters. They're just serving their own interests and those of the corporations they represent. The same may be said, to varying degrees, of the other two major candidates. All this hot air about elitism, Bill Ayers, flag pins, and Black Liberation Theology is just the usual business. It happens every national election cycle - the divide and conquer strategy kicks into high gear. As long as the elites in the political class and corporate America (and they are all true elites in the economic sense) can manage to separate us into fractional and mutually antagonistic groups, the power wielded by the wealthy in this country will never be diminished. Working class people - and by this term I mean office workers, truck drivers, field hands, the unemployed, retired folks... everybody who's not rich - are the supermajority in the United States. That's why the business of elections is to distract and divide us.

This is a principle as old as organized society. The beast must be kept in its cage. That is why the political culture minimizes or excoriates the mass movements of the 1960s and '70s - because people were participating in our democracy and involving themselves in policy matters to a degree elites found distressing, prompting them to fret over a growing "crisis of democracy" - the crisis being that the "d" word had any meaning to it at all. It's the reason why anytime pop culture looks at the civil rights movement, for instance, they focus on Martin King and his "I have a dream" speech, not the thousands and thousands of people who risked their lives alongside him to bring about change. No, the wealthy have no desire to see a return to that level of participatory democracy. Perhaps they understand better than we do how much they rely upon a supine working class to create value in the businesses they own, to purchase the products and services they profit from, to serve their needs in every imaginable way, and so on.

Without workers, riches have no meaning. Think of that next time Charlie Gibson talks about flag pins.

luv u,

jp