Enough already!

It is not hard to find evidence of just how limited and bankrupt the American "progressive" tradition is these days. However, the Democratic Party is pretty much the only alternative to plutocracy that there is in the Great Republic right now. It is now pretty clear how the race for the Democratic nomination is going to end, unless somehow Miss Hillary can involve the Supreme Court or an assassin in the process. You'd have thought that getting rid of Mark Penn and rejigging her campaign's messaging might have brought her back to the reality-based universe.  However, at week's end we find her sniping at Obama's elitism and celebrating bowling and duckhunting. Good grief! Maybe she'll she start passing out pork rinds. I could go on. There's that Wal-Mart video : how long did she spend on that board? Maybe she was just trying to make sure that the hard-working folks of America had somewhere to go to find work after the trade deals brought down the final curtain on the rust belt. Could someone tell her, "It's over!" In times gone by the Clintons used to think of themselves as heirs to the Roosevelt spousal-presidency tradition. That was a time when the White House spouse was a loose-cannon force for good. April 9th was the 69th anniversary of Marian Anderson's concert at the Lincoln Memorial.  You can find the historical background here. It's worth remembering that FDR had not quite finished saving plutocracy from itself at the time (1939). He was in the process of running for a third term and would need cracker votes from Dixie to win the 1940 election. At the time blacks were anything but a Democratic bloc; they couldn't vote in the south and in the north lots of them voted Republican for historical reasons. Eleanor didn't spend much time thinking about narrow partisan advantage when she resigned from the DAR or when she arranged for the concert to take place at the Lincoln Memorial. The concert was broadcast across the country. Marian Anderson went on to sing at other important events in the years ahead. She would return to the Lincoln memorial to sing the national anthem at the march on Washington in 1963. Hillary is no Eleanor. Not by a long shot.