By Samuel Bell in Rhode Island’s Future - See more at: http://www.rifuture.org/taibbi-is-still-missing-the-real-story.html#sthash.uvAAYxMt.dpuf
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| "DINOs" (Democrats in Name Only) can be worse than Republicans |
I
want to thank Matt Taibbi. Unlike many national
journalists, he admits when he goes far too easy on Rhode Island
Democrats. On Friday, he published a new article acknowledging Raimondo’s party
affiliation and tying her to the national trend of conservative Democrats in
the Wall St. camp. If you ignore a glaring and egregious spelling error,
it’s a great piece. Taibbi ends with my favorite line, “Readers, if I’m
missing something, please let me know.”
That’s
an invitation I can’t turn down.
There
is still much that bothers me about Taibbi’s approach of going soft on Rhode
Island Democrats. I wish, for instance, that he wouldn’t use the deceptive right-wing
phrasing “pension reform” to describe the pension cuts.
But I have a much more foundational critique. He is missing the
bigger story–what has happened to the General Assembly.
Raimondo,
as Taibbi rightly notes, is very similar to a number of conservative Democrats
around the country with strong ties to the finance industry. But this
sort of pro-finance attitude is a fairly common feature of the modern
Democratic party. Sadly, the conservatism of General Assembly Democrats
takes on an entirely different character.
Most
out of state pundits forget this, but the legislature that so gleefully passed
the pension cuts is the same legislature that passed a voter ID law.
These are the people who gave us a D+ rating from NARAL
Pro-Choice America–the worst of any solid blue state. It was
these so-called Democrats who pushed through the steep 2006 tax cuts for the
rich that blew up the
budget in the first place.
Down
the line, the policies the General Assembly’s leadership has enacted have not
been the policies of ordinary Wall St. conservative Democrats. They have
been the policies of Republicans.
As
Ann Clanton famously put it when she was Executive Director if the
Rhode Island Republican Party, “We have a lot of Democrats who we know are
Republican but run as a Democrat–basically so they can win.”
Raimondo
is not as extreme. When leadership wanted to skip a pension payment
during the recent budget battle, Raimondo and some of the more moderate
conservatives in the
House balked. I don’t know how true this is, but she does claim that she
opposed one of the more odious components of the pension cuts.
On
social issues, Raimondo makes a cleaner break from the extremists in the
General Assembly. She is pro-choice. Unlike the leaders of the
General Assembly, she is not an NRA Democrat. Although she never issued a
full divestment statement, she did pressure a distributor to stop distributing
assault weapons, and she did send out a press release saying she would look into divestment.
(Full disclosure: I led an unsuccessful calling campaign to try to get
her to issue a formal divestment statement.)
Let
me be clear. I am no fan of Raimondo. I plan on voting against her
in the primary. But I understand that she is not as conservative as the
nominally Democratic leadership in the General Assembly.
I
trust Rhode Islanders to stand firm against the money tsunami and vote Raimondo
out of politics this September. In a gubernatorial race, there is enough
press scrutiny that it is very hard for this sort of conservative to win.
But in tiny, low-turnout Democratic primaries for General Assembly seats,
where politics has more to do with personal connections and money than issues,
candidates far more conservative than Raimondo routinely win easily.
That’s the core problem Rhode Island faces. And that’s the story I
wish Matt Taibbi would cover.