The Democratic Industrial Complex

by digby

Chris Hayes has written a must read piece about the evolution of the K Street culture to adapt to the Democrats in power. Here's an excerpt:

While the Republican Party shrinks, corporate interests are deftly molting their old K Street Project skin and crawling en masse inside the big tent being pitched by the Democratic Party. These same corporate interests have always had a purchase on Democrats, of course. But for much of the last decade, business interests had the luxury of spending most of their resources aiding their allies in the GOP.

No more. Writing on The Atlantic's website, Scott Bland and Ronald Brownstein identify the emergence of what they dub "The Democratic Industrial Complex." Energy and healthcare companies, automakers and banks all understand that the Democrats control much of their fate, so they've cast their lot with the majority party in a big way: John Kerry got less than 20 percent of the donations from electric utilities; Barack Obama got almost 60 percent. So far in this cycle, Democrats have captured two-thirds of the donations from the healthcare industry.

If big business's old legislative strategy was centered on relentless opposition to progressive initiatives--an approach that continues in areas like EFCA--the new strategy is to subvert legislation through co-optation, as in healthcare and cap and trade. By converting themselves, ostensibly, from opponents to "partners," corporate lobbies are trying to have it both ways: to block reforms while changing overt power struggles over the future of the economy into seemingly cooperative negotiations. At these negotiations, to use the president's favorite phrase, "everyone has a seat at the table"--except, the lobbyists get by far the best seats. (Alinsky didn't have much patience for this approach. "This liberal cliché about reconciliation of opposing forces is a load of crap," he once said. "When one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it.")

These efforts at co-optation are aided by our natural inclination toward narrative and fable. It is pretty irresistible to view politics through the lens of heroes and villains. Palin is a character; the ABA is just an acronym.

But Goehl says the challenge for his organization and others (indeed, for members of the progressive media such as myself) is to make Ed Yingling and those of his ilk into household names. "We're interested in, how do we lift up a few of these key actors and turn them into public names for what they've done to lead us down this road. I don't think it's going to be easy. But it's happened a bit with the Bank of America guy."

"Ken Lewis?" I say.

"Yeah," Goehl replies, laughing. "I totally lost his name, and here I'm supposed to have a different orientation."

This is hard for liberal activists to adjust to. We're oriented to the democratic process which we see as a counter balance to the influence of wealth. But there has never been a time when it was more obvious than now that our two party political process mostly serves as a front for wealthy elites no matter who's in power. This situation does require a reorientation, and a big one.

In that regard I was somewhat surprised, and pleased, to hear a great deal of discussion among activists about this issue at the recently concluded AFN conference. Despite Dana Milbank's typically snotty take (see Jane Hamsher's excellent response) there actually was a realistic acknowledgment that the left's influence is marginal and that the plutocracy has things well in command. I don't think there's much delusion about that.

The question is what to do about it. Theoretically, there should be power in numbers and the democratic process should at least water down the influence of the malefactors of wealth. But the power of the corporate media combined with the huge cost of campaigning (because of the corporate media) leaves little room for real grassroots influence. Despite all the hype about the Obama campaign's tremendous online fundraising, the fact is that it also collected unprecedented massive amounts of corporate cash, as did all the campaigns. And that corporate cash is represented by lobbyists who are so much a part of the fabric of the political system that they function as staff members in the congress and kitchen cabinet in the administration. (Indeed, one of the most interesting tidbits of information I heard was that despite the fact that there are many progressive committee chairmen, they are almost all pretty conservative on the issues their committees oversee. Now why would that be do you suppose?)

We persist in believing that the system can be influenced by the democratic process and perhaps it can. Primary challenges are one way to do that. But in the final analysis, government sausage making is done by inside players who represent interests and the elected officials rather than being the people's representatives are actually just vessels to be manipulated by various interests. Therefore, "the people" are seen as just another special interest group and not a very powerful or influential one at that. As a very smart and savvy friend pointed out to me, the simple problem is that the progressive movement doesn't have a lobby.