Winning

by digby

Matt Yglesias subbing for Marshall at TPM makes the point that despite the fact that Democrat William Jefferson is obviously a crook, he’s just a run of the mill free lance criminal rather than being part of a criminal syndicate like Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham. This is true and Democrats have a right to make this distinction and should.

But I think the most important thing about all this culture of corruption stuff isn’t who benefits from it as a rhetorical device in upcoming political campaigns. What’s important is that the GOP machine be broken up into little pieces.

I like the “culture of corruption” as a rhetorical frame, and frankly I think it’s probably working quite well. I wrote about this some time back: images are far easier to stick on political opponents if they fit in with preconceived notions of how their side tends to work. Democrats tend to be concerned with issues that affect the weaker members of society and are therefore more easily tarred as “soft.” It’s why the Republicans have always found it easy to win in times of perceived danger — and if we aren’t in times of perceived danger, they’ll create danger out of whole cloth. (Sex is a threat to civilization!)

Republicans tend to look after those with wealth and power and are therefore more easily tarred as greedy and crooked. I’m glad the Republicans gave us such an easy frame for our congressional elections. But I’m even happier that they were so transparently corrupt that even a Republican justice department couldn’t ignore it.

That K Street Project was going to kill us. If the Republicans had played it cool they could have fashioned an impermeable national political machine that could have locked us out for decades. Fortunately, they are greedy and stupid and couldn’t keep themselves from stealing while still in office.

The long term health of our democracy and the long term health of our party required that this machine be shut down. Whether they can effectively frame this as a bipartisan problem or not the truth is, regardless of their hype, this was the GOP’s baby all the way and it has been irreparably damaged. No matter what happens in the fall, in a larger respect we have already won.

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