Robert Borosage nails it pretty well here…

Rubinomics is also bad politics. It favors the Wall Street wing of the party at the expense of the main street voters. Democrats were propelled to victory in this election in part because of growing public dismay over an economy that doesn’t work for them. Democrats ran the most populist elections in memory - railing against the drug and oil lobbies, indicting failed trade policies that are shipping jobs abroad and undermining wages at home. Voters - including independent voters of the supposed “center” - are overwhelmingly in favor of aggressive trade policies, and are looking for help on wages, health care, pensions, and holding Wall Street moguls and corporate CEOs accountable.

With Bush in the White House, Democrats won’t be deciding national economic policy in the next two years. But they will be laying the groundwork for a Democratic economic strategy. They will be offering their indictment of Bush’s course. They should be holding hearings and developing policies to start meeting some of the pressing demands of the voters who put them in office. To do that, they would be well advised to reach out to a far broader range of advisors than the leading strategist for Citibank.

His suggestion of bringing in someone like Paul Krugman is a good one. Until the grassroots of the Democratic party say enough to the Corporatistas (who own the GOP and rent the Dems when needed), they will simply continue to be a mere shadow of their needed potential, an ersatz and diversionary representation of anything resembling democratic political action. Thanks to politicos such as the Clintons and their global capital wonderboy Rubin, the Democrats have become simply a watered down doppelganger of the GOP, effectively serving as part of Republicrat, Inc., the governing arm of the corporate state that the USA is.

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