| Within the past few days, democracy with a small d made important, even historic, gains in New York, New Jersey, and Alaska.
An important part of the New York State story covered by Chris Bowers is that the Senate Majority Leader is, in effect, an unelected position. In the nearly 50 years since the Republicans grabbed control of the chamber, governors have come and gone and the Republicans clearly lost much of their popular support. But the position was seen as politically untouchable, certainly by any Democrat or any mere voters. After Elliott Spitzer amassed an incredible 69% of the vote for governor, Bruno basically stuc his thumb out and said so what. And with the backing of the city's tabloids, the Post and the Daily News, derailed the will of the voters and seemed to put Spitzer's career into deep jeopardy by abusing the investigative power of the state senate. It was old Albany saying to Spitzer what entrenched DC said to Bill Clinton in 1993: we don't care who elected you, we run this place and you are a temporary outsider and parvenu.
Spitzer, unlike the previous governors, refused to play the game as Albany dictated it. He realized that concentrating on the Senate one seat at a time coukld change the game and put the voters instead of the bosses in charge. And he did more. By appointing a Republican to a state post he opened up a Democratic leaning district on Long Island and took one huge bite out of the apple. Last night, he surprisingly found another. And all of a sudden the corrupt and corrupting tone that elections don't matter and can be easily overturned by a boss like Bruno suddenly vanishes. (Bruno's swipe at stae driver's licenses was a huge dent in Hillary Clinton's campaign, the swift boat of 2008, so far; he's a national level time bomb). |
| Well, all of that is interesting but it is happening elsewhere. Blue Jersey, and only Blue Jersey is reporting that Chris Christie the federal prosecutor for New Jersey is far more corrupt than the Democratic politicians he has pirsued. Christie, of course, used to prosecute a lot of Republican crooks untill Karl Rove put him on the list of US Attorneys to be fired. Since then, Christie goes only after Democrats and in election season he stretches things to the ridiculous to weaken the chances of people like Bob Menendez. He's gone after former Newark Mayor Sharpe James with all the passion of Inspector Javert going after Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. Finally indicted him after seven long years.
Well, Christie, a former one-term Morris County freeholder who couldn't play with the others in a group setting and current bundler, er bag man, for Bush, is more corrupt than the crooks he prosecutes. Blue Jersey found that he diverted $3 million plus in federal contracts to his political and business associates. Now Christie has made the writer of the piece a target of an investigation. Wonder why Jersey pols score so low, all of them. The answer is Christie. Every pol in the state is widely viewed as a crook, either convicted, indicted, or not yet found. The evidence be damned. He is corrupting democracy big time. (And he's also a darling of the state's most influential paper, the Newark Star Ledger).
If Christie and Bruno are weakened, so is Don Young, part of the gang of Republican crooks and suspected crooks in Alaska that have run the state for much of the past 20 or 30 years (Young, Ted Stevens, his lobbyist son Ben, Frank Murkowski). Young has spent nearly half of his once huge war chest paying legal bills and won't discusss it with the media, particularly the state's biggest paper, the Anchorage daily News.
Young called a press conference in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the most rapidly growing part of the state and kind of an exurb of Anchorage in a spread out Alaka way. The largest paper by circulation in Mat-Su is the Anchorage Daily News. Young saw two reporters from his nemesis at the press conference so he skeedaddled.
Whether it plays out electorally or not, the state is changing population wise. The old fishing villages and Eskimo/Aleut population centers like Kodiak Island, North Slope, and Ketchikan Gateway are losing people, not just proportionately but even in hard numbers. Alaska has four big population centers for its 670,000 people now: Anchorage (278,900), Fairbanks North Star (86,754) Matanuska-Susitna (80,480) and Kenai Peninsula (52,304). In the six years since the Census (Census Bureau's 2006 estimates), the state had grown by 6.9%; Mat-Su had grown by 35.7%.
Win Mat-Su and you win the state. Looks like Young is trying to piss away support in Mat-Su. Way to go Don.
Overall, arrogance and top down non-elected style government is having a bad week and populism, not old-style progressivism, is having a good week. Will anyone in the press notice? Nope, the MSM is too vested in the establishment. Maybe they will write an obit for the fall of Joe Bruno that makes him look like Pericles. Who cares. What matters is clearing out the varmints. |
