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by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

“Leading national Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are in deep, longstanding and fundamental disagreement with Democratic voters.”

The Democratic party won the midterm elections of 2006. But did Democratic voters?

A sneaky and unscientific ABC News poll in late October lifted the lid on the dirty secret shared by Democratic party leaders and the nation’s corporate media. The poll showed a wide majority of respondents in favor of impeaching the president. Of course the poll was unscientific because it was taken online, and dishonest because ABC News jiggered the questions in a vain attempt to lower the pro-impeachment numbers. But both ABC’s naked duplicity in trying to rig the survey against impeachment, and the survey’s result despite their efforts are congruent with the very small number of scientific polls on the subject. Polling organizations in the Bush era have been extremely reluctant to take scientific polls asking direct questions on impeachment, support for the Iraq war, or similar matters, lest they reveal the true extent of popular opposition to the president, his policies and his war, and highlight the vast gulf between Democratic party leaders and Democratic voters.

Why did Nancy Pelosi declare impeachment “off the table”?

How is this possible? It’s possible because U.S. political campaigns are conducted with private instead of public dollars. It’s possible because broadcast and print media often devote fewer resources to news coverage during campaign season than at other times, forcing candidates to spend huge sums donated from private sources in order to get any message out to the public at all. It’s possible because America’s political processes are so fundamentally corrupt that the only way you get to be Speaker, minority or majority leader or senate president in a state legislature, in the US Senate or the House of Representatives is not because of your persuasive powers, your lofty and encompassing vision or your mastery of the details of governance.

Legislative leaders in every state house, the US Senate and the Congress are in those slots because they attracted more campaign donations from wealthy individuals and corporations than their fellow lawmakers. Legislative leaders in Congress and state houses are chosen to zealously guard the interests of the already wealthy, by passing the bucks on to their colleagues in the same party who play the game, and recruiting new candidates for office who understand and play by the crooked rules. Hence Democratic voters - again, black ones most of all - overwhelmingly oppose the war in Iraq. But in preparation for this election, leading House Democrats devoted a river of cash from many of the same sources that bankrolled Republicans to knocking anti-war congressional candidates out of Democratic primary elections. As a result, according to John Walsh in Counterpunch, in 20 of the closest 22 congressional districts, the Democratic candidate was pro-war. The gap between these pro-war corporate Democrats and Democratic base voters was so wide that some, like Tammy Duckworth in Illinois managed to lose to real Republicans. This was the doing of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC.

On the Senate side, New York Senator Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC) played the same role, ensuring that Senate candidates who threatened to represent Democratic voters much too well in states like Ohio and Tennessee were eliminated long before the November election. If Tennessee’s Harold Ford had been someone else entirely — an honest and genuine black candidate with the integrity to represent his people and other Tennessee Democrats, rather than a pro-privatization, pro-torture, pro-war Bush sycophant craven enough to claim his own black grandmother was actually white to get a few more white votes, he might well have won the open Senate seat in that state, and become the first black US Senator from the South since Reconstruction.

But for the Democratic party elite, representing the wealthy and privileged has always been more important than representing Democratic voters.

Democratic voters, when anyone bothers to ask them, lopsidedly favor a more even-handed policy toward the aspirations of Palestinians. But among old and new faces in Democratic party leadership, from wannabe presidential nominees like Clinton, Obama and Biden to shot callers in the House and Senate, not a one opposed Israel’s merciless bombing of Lebanon earlier this year, the construction of its apartheid wall, or its current shelling and slow starvation of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza.

In the few instances they have been polled, Democratic voters also favor universal single payer health care. But you’ll search a long time before you find a leading national Democrat to speak up for single payer. Barack Obama used to, when he represented the South Side of Chicago in the Illinois State Senate. But that was before he was anointed by the corporate media as possible presidential material, before billionaires Warren Buffett and Oprah became his best friends. In fact, Democratic party honchos seem to be little more than foreign objects, grafted onto supposed “leadership” of millions of Democratic voters whose interests they do as little as possible to represent, while the do pay constant and careful attention to the whims of corporate campaign cash, and to corporate media. Nowhere has this disconnect between Democratic leaders and Democratic voters been more apparent than in Black America.

“Democratic party honchos seem to be little more than foreign objects, grafted onto supposed ‘leadership’ of millions of Democratic voters whose interests they do as little as possible to represent.”

The man-made disasters attendant to Hurricane Katrina cost uncounted thousands of lives and depopulated and dispersed a black city of more than half a million. Leading white Democrats, afraid to be identified in the eyes of whites as too close to the interests of African Americans, made no attempt to stop the dispersal. They even forbade black members of Congress from bringing Gulf Coast residents to the nation’s capital to speak on their own behalf. Among them, only Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney had the integrity to defy this order. In an aftermath nearly as shameful as Katrina itself, what passes for “black leadership” showed its impotence and disconnection from black masses by being unable or unwilling to conduct any sort of mass-based mobilization to protest the dispossession and dispersal of black New Orleans, or to insist on their right to return, to rebuild and remain.

This does not bode well for the ability of the Democratic base to make Democratic leadership represent them in the new Congress. In contrast to the Latino community, which proved able to take hundreds of thousands of people out of school and off the job and put them in the streets for a few weekends in protest of unjust immigration laws, black America’s leaders, and the leaders of the Democratic party seem to serve other masters. Is there any hope that Democratic party leaders somehow be made to serve actual Democrats?
“What passes for ‘black leadership’ showed its impotence and disconnection from black masses.”

If the last few elections are any guide, credible reports will surface in the wake of this week’s election of massive purges of minority voters, widespread tampering with results and ingenious methods of selective disenfranchisement of Democratic voters, who everybody knows are disproportionately black. In 2000, in ‘02 and ‘04 national Democratic leaders were quick to throw away the votes of black constituents, conceding elections before the ballots were even counted.

If a change is gonna come, it will not be from leaders like these. A good start would be for antiwar Democrats, for impeachment Democrats, for count-every-vote Democrats and post.Katrina Democrats, if there are any, to refuse to sit down, to refuse to shut up. It’s time to refuse to accept the statesmanlike demurrals and reaching “across the aisle” nonsense of the Clintons and Obamas and others.

It’s time to get and to stay in the faces of Democratic party leaders and aggressively fight for peace, for justice, for the right of New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents to return, rebuild and remain, for the double impeachment Cheney AND Bush, for an end to the war, for a “small d” democratic media and for the right to be heard.

The Democratic party may have won the election this week. But Democratic voters now must confront their supposed leaders, and get ready for the real fight.

[Bruce Dixon can be reached at Bruce.Dixon (at) BlackAgendaReport.com. When sending email do remember to substitute the “@” character for (at).]

Article originally published online at the Black Agenda Report