Ann replied:

And I don’t know about LA County, but out here in the Big Orange the folks with the fake Calvin’s defiling something, isn’t limited to “The redneck truck-driving, Kid Rock-listening, reality-TV-watching guy.”
And that Ashcroft guy who’s all bashful about the partially nude statutes? Yeah, I’m sure his party is rather attractive to “The redneck truck-driving, Kid Rock-listening, reality-TV-watching guy.”
And, I could be wrong here, but the Labor folks, they pretty much uniformly vote Democratic and I think quite a few of them are “The redneck truck-driving, Kid Rock-listening, reality-TV-watching guy [or gal],” and we’ve reached them rather well. (Although we had to suffer a big spanking awhile back to get the picture.)
And don’t talk to me about military or veterans. No one in my party called multiple amputee Sen. Max Cleland unpatriotic.

Ann, let’s take a look at the numbers.
The Times had a great graphic yesterday (not available on the web, dammit) showing the counties in CA and how they broke out for Davis/Simon.
In Southern CA, it was LA and Imperial for Davis. That was it.
All the commuter ring counties, all the places where the blue and pink collar workers who are getting screwed by GOP tax and labor policies?? They went for Simon.
Ask yourself why.
Nixon’s political masterstroke was to have split the rank-and-file union members off from the union leadership, using race and culture as a lever. A lot has been done to try and bridge that split, but it’s still wide and deep.
Now on the face of it, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for the union folks to go GOP. They are facing huge structural economic problems, and it may not look that way from where you and I live…but I’ll tell you that the crisis of the middle manager forced to ‘downsize’ his lifestyle isn’t anything compared to the crisis of the help-desk worker whose job is going to Ireland or the machinist who can’t afford to send his kid to U.C.
So while the culture clash is there…think ice sculptures and SkyBoxes…there are real issues there too.
And I’m staying the hell out of the Burton/Acidman fight. But you can’t paper over the ‘clash of cultures’ we have within our country with that one.
You saw this email, right?:

From: Peter Kirstein
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 1:46 PM
To: Kurpiel Robert C4C CS26
Subject: Re: Academy Assembly
You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage. Help you recruit. Who, top guns to reign death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world? Are you serious sir? Resign your commission and serve your country with honour.
No war, no air force cowards who bomb countries with AAA, without possibility of retaliation. You are worse than the snipers. You are imperialists who are turning the whole damn world against us. September 11 can be blamed in part for what you and your cohorts have done to Palestinians, the VC, the Serbs, a retreating army at Basra.
You are unworthy of my support.
Peter N. Kirstein
Professor of History
Saint Xavier University.

Ann, if you don’t think there is a cultural chasm in this country, (and this email shows is loud and clear) and that the core constituencies of the Democratic party aren’t sitting on one side of it, you’re just not looking.
And while I think the Dems core issues … for justice, for the little guy, for the powerless … should be objectively in the interests of and dammit, they ought to buy us some respect in RedNeck Town, the cultural baggage we’re carrying…and what was expressed by Jef Malett and echoed by you … shuts us Right Out.
And as part of creating the New Model Democrats that I want to join up with, and that I think can win, we are going to have to find a way across that cultural chasm.

Regular visitors will know that I’m a huuuge fan of Ann Salisbury’s. She’s smart, committed, cute (and AFAIK, all you Orange County guys, single!), and a rabid, serious Democrat who in a better world ought to running for office.
But even the best of us sometimes step in it.
Ann points out this strip from Frazz (a personal favorite comic BTW):

There is a bunch wrong with this, sadly. My comment to her points out one side of it:
and you know, I have to wave a hand here. The redneck truck-driving, Kid Rock-listening, reality-TV-watching guy you’re happy to see off the polls is the same guy or girl who’s sitting on a ship headed to the Gulf right now, and their redneck, know-nothing grandparents won WWII as well.
Until the Democratic Party figures out how to trust and reach them, we’ll be the party of the coastal elites.
I don’t want to pile onto Ann, but those two points need a bit of elaboration.
If I’m a Hispanic minimum-wage worker at a resort hotel in Santa Monica, the Dems might have something to say to me. But if I’m a furniture factory worker in North Carolina…white or black…the Democratic contempt for my gun-toting, pickup-truck-driving, country-music-listening ways is as loud as the Eminem song I’m playing in the CD player as I drive by the local latte shop.
The Democrats will never win unless they find a way to reconnect with that voter, and they will never reconnect with that voter until they find a way to treat him or her with respect.
And, bluntly, they may not deserve to win unless they find that reconnection.
For all the sympathy that the liberal core constituency exudes for the working class, they always seem awfully uncomfortable when they have to deal with real, breathing examples.
[Update: A Shot In The Dark shows it in another light:

Garrison Keillor illustrates in this Salon piece why the DFL not only got clobbered last Tuesday, but probably hasn’t learned its lesson.
Contempt? He’s got it!

To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.

That’s right – going to a steakhouse and ordering tuna, to escape a friggin’ Lutheran church basement lutefisk social.

Yeah, because the lumpenproles just don’t get it That’s why the Dems lost this cycle…]

Yesterday, I talked about ‘investors’ in the political process.
Today, in the L.A. Times (registration required, or use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’), there’s a good analytical article: ‘Drug Industry Poised to Real Political Dividends’.

WASHINGTON — Few industries campaigned harder than pharmaceutical manufacturers to elect Republicans to the new Congress, and few industries are better positioned to reap the rewards of the election returns, analysts said Thursday.
“The pharmaceutical industry may be at the front of the line of groups looking at the next two years as an opportunity to make a lot of progress on their issues,” said Larry Makinson, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.

Read the whole article, but do it before lunch.
They have a neat table of individual and PAC contributions to congressional campaigns broken out by industry and party. Check this out:
Lawyers and Law Firms
$59.3 million 72% D 28% R
Retired Persons
$50.2 million 36% D 64% R
Securities
$39.4 million 46% D 54% R
Real Estate
$38.5 million 47% D 53% R
TV/Movies/Music
$29.4 million 77% D 23% R
Insurance
$26.2 million 31% D 68% R
Health Professionals
$24.7 million 37% D 62% R
Computer Equipment & Services
$18.2 million 49% D 51% R
Pharma
$18.1 million 27% D 73% R
Oil and Gas
$17.6 million 20% D 80% R
It’s interesting to note how the party’s policies (pro-pharma in the case of the Republicans, anti-tort reform in the case of the Dems) neatly line up with 73%/27% and 72%28% splits in funding.
There’s a chicken-and-egg issue here; do the interest groups support the parties because they naturally align with them? Or do the parties shape their positions to accommodate the interest groups? But the result hatches all the same…

Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Biiiirthday, dear Devra…
…returns of the day…

Oz economist John Quiggin (note the corrected spelling) has a blog, where he is hosting a discussion on judging the work of philosophers in the context of their lives (inspired by Nazi-functionary philosopher Heidegger).
First, I’m a believer that philosophy influences politics.
But I’m not convinced that an author’s work cannot be greater than they are.
I need to think about this…

Kevin Drum, the alarmingly clean-cut author of CalPundit, has a damn smart post up about, of all things, tax policy. OK, where is the party leadership on this?
Oh…on the phone to their brokers…

So in my obsessive search through my referrer logs, I discover The Bitch Girls, a multiauthor blog from a secret location at a haughty northeastern university…and they’re bright. interesting, and funny as hell.
…so do any of you guys ever make it down to VA where the Biggest Guy is in school?…
…and what does it mean that I’m trolling for my son rather than myself?? It’s some weird sign of aging or something…
…during the post-divorce Dating Flurry(tm), I happened to go out with a few of the young dot-commies that I’d met on projects.
That ended when I was at a bar with one who, when asked, explained that she was almost twenty-five. I started thinking, “Hmmm, she and Biggest Guy would get along…she’s a little old for him, but…” and immediately started feeling like a very creepy old guy…you know, the ones you see in ‘decent’ restaurants with young overdressed women who are obviously not their daughters.
Sigh. Now I’m not sure if I should feel highly moral or depressed.

TAPPED thinks Terry McAuliffe is doing just fine:

DUMP TERRY MCAULIFFE? That’s what Arianna Huffington, along with lots of other people, has begun to say. We’re not so sure. Look, McAuliffe is the Democrats’ party chairman. His main jobs are to raise money, support candidates, repair the party’s grassroots machinery and rebuild the Dems’ small-donor program. He’s done a pretty fair job on all counts; in fact, by those measures, he’s a pretty good chairman. Yes, his job is also to help win elections. But Terry McAuliffe is not the Democrats’ problem. The Democrats are the Democrats problem. They’re timid, disorganized and bereft of energy and ideas. Tapped is not sure how to fix the Democratic Party, but firing Terry McAullife is surely a band-aid at best

No, dipshits, Terry “Eighteen Million from pre-IPO Global Crossing Friends and Family Shares” McAuliffe is exactly the problem the Democrats face. How seriously can he speak out in opposition to corporate interests when it’s clear as hell where his interests are aligned.

Commenter Michael Ladd pointed me at this article … “From Citizens To Customers, Losing Our Collective Voice” … in the Washington Post.

Now our government no longer needs us. The citizen-soldiers have given way to the professional all-volunteer military and its armada of smart bombs and drone aircraft. The citizen-administrators have disappeared, too, replaced long ago by professional bureaucrats. Americans may still regard each other as fellow citizens with common causes and commitments. But the candidates seeking votes on Tuesday see us as something less: not a coherent public with a collective identity but a swarm of disconnected individuals out to satisfy our personal needs in the political marketplace. We see them, in turn, as boring commercials to be tuned out.
It would be a mistake to conclude, as many commentators do, that Americans are apathetic citizens gone AWOL. But there’s no question that the fundamental relationship between citizen and government has changed. Increasingly, public officials regard us as “customers” rather than as citizens, and there are crucial differences between the two. Citizens own the government. Customers just receive services from it. Citizens belong to a political community with a collective existence and public purposes. Customers are individual purchasers seeking the best deal. Customers may receive courteous service, but they do not own the store.

Michael chastised me for using the term ‘customers’ instead of citizens, and he was exactly right.
The problem is that the politicians and investors in politics think of us as customers, and we’re buying that presumption.

Great stuff today:
Here:

The new “International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification” for 2003 (or ICD-9-CM, for short), the federally mandated bible of medical diagnosis and treatment codes, includes a rather regrettable new category: Section E979, which describes deaths from terrorist acts, including nuclear attacks.

and here

Those who put together the APHA Guiding Principles, which were, in part, meant to help spark interest in increased funding for public health interventions, saw these as the top 3 public health priorities (at least, that’s how they numbered them in the report):

1) Address poverty, social injustice and health disparities that may contribute to the development of terrorism.
2) Provide humanitarian assistance to, and protect the human rights of, the civilian populations of all nations that are directly or indirectly affected by terrorism.
3) Advocate the speedy end of the armed conflict in Afghanistan and promote non-violent means of conflict resolution.

#4 was strengthening the public health infrastructure, workforce, and other components of the public health system.
Do I think the public health community can serve as a voice for issues 1 through 3? Sure. But I would argue that, when the foundation of our own house needs to be completely refurbished, that describing those three priorities as our top 3 priorities will not only hinder our effectiveness in taking care of what needs to be done in case of a bioterror attack, but also may hamper our efforts to advocate for, acquire and maintain funding for other non-terror-related core functions of public health.

All the soccer moms and dads who thankfully voted “yes” on B and took a step toward saving the trauma system didn’t vote to support airy generalizations about social justice and conflict resolution.
Those issues are certainly damn important, but in a world where institutions are failing to deliver on their basic goals, and more importantly where their legitimacy is compromised by their failure to deliver, this is a awfully stupid thing to do.