Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Few faces at the shoulder of our leading donk statesmen cause me more instant ire than bond king Robert 'bobtail' Rubin (shown above with a pet pitbull). Why, the bastard effectively ran dumbocrat macro policy and budget policy singlehandely for the full 8 years of Clinton's magic kingdom -- ran it and ran it his way, and by running it his way, kept the nation's jobbled masses' nose firmly on the grindstone, and our industrial platform crumbling like newlyweds' first piecrust.

Throughout it all he conducted himself with a gusto and a sweatless elan worthy of that other hard-nosed runt named Bobby -- you know the supercilious half-pint with a heart of cold cream, the one that was about to save America from Amerika, till he got himself assassinated by a very early one-man anti-Zionist commando unit named Sirhan Sirhan for offering Tel Aviv all the jets they could eat....

But I stray, don't I? Back to the as yet unassassinated Bobby. Unassassinated, but nevertheless over. His ticket is punched. Not only is the guy in trouble, he's the mother Clinton of party political economics.

Don't believe me? Then read between the lines of this "think it all the way through" piece by my mentor, Robert Pendragon Kuttner:

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=12573

A blind spot in the usual story of the Democratic party's capture by "interest groups" is the failure to notice Wall Street as an interest group. In the usual media account, the obstacles to the party's modernization are such groups as abortion-rights advocates, blacks, gays, and unions. Candidates can score points with pundits for showing independence by taking on, say, the unions on school vouchers, or African Americans over inflammatory rhetoric (Sister Souljah), or civil libertarians over the death penalty (then-Governor Clinton's refusal to spare Ricky Ray Rector).

Such actions are said to show political courage by resisting "politically correct" politics and entrenched interest groups. But taking on the most powerful Democratic Party interest group of them all -- Wall Street -- is viewed as a sign of recklessness, unsoundness, demagoguery, and political suicide. A mark of Wall Street's ubiquitous power in defining the limits of the politically thinkable is that its power is hardly noticed. The personification of this power is Robert Rubin.

A portrait that odious can only come out after the corpse is so rotten it's starting to smell like a flower bed.