Memories of Wankstock

by dday

I’m kicking myself for only catching about 10 minutes of the Wankstock conference on C-SPAN. I was disappointed to see Bob Graham there; I always thought he was better than that. And the deep, thought-provoking discussions I saw consisted mainly of jokes about Oklahoma Sooner football. The only issue anybody brought up was Republican former Congressman Jim Leach’s call essentially for public financing of elections, which was met with a decent round of applause. I guess Bloomberg’s billion dollars doesn’t count.

The more representative quotes were pabulum like this:

“People have stopped working together, government is dysfunctional, there’s no collaborating and congeniality,” Bloomberg said to applause from the crowd.

This is particularly amusing in light of that floated Bloomberg-Hagel ticket. They agree on absolutely nothing. Bloomberg is fairly Democratic domestically and a neocon on foreign policy, while Hagel is a hardline conservative on everything BUT foreign policy, where he rejects neoconservatism forcefully. Those are actual policy differences. The idea that you can “work together” on those doesn’t make any sense.

But apparently, the rise of Barack Obama dampened the spirits of the attendees, kind of like a bad trip.

The event was organized by former Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, with former Senator David L. Boren, Democrat of Oklahoma. In the days leading up the event here, just outside Oklahoma City, Mr. Boren suggested that he would encourage Mr. Bloomberg to run if the major party nominees failed to heed the call for bipartisanship.

But several leading participants took pains to say that they had no intention of abandoning their own parties in the election. Some even cast Mr. Obama’s success as evidence that the nation was yearning for the type of leadership they were offering.

“I believe he is demonstrating, in the support he is getting, that the American people share this concern about excessive partisanship,” said Bob Graham, a Democratic former senator from Florida, who said he would support a Democrat for president.

Gary Hart, a Democrat from Colorado who also served in the Senate, said he intended to endorse one of the Democratic presidential candidates in the next 48 hours, though he declined to identify the candidate.

“I am a Democrat, and I will endorse a Democratic president,” he said. “There are no independent candidates. I won’t endorse a Republican.”

Seems to me like these tools are declaring victory (for now). Obama says a few words on bipartisanship, and the Wise Old Man appear satisfied. They’re claiming that everyone is following their dictates.

Of course, that’s not true. But it’s far easier to influence the debate from the outside, to narrow the options for a progressive agenda. They can go ahead and claim some sort of betrayal the first time Obama offers something that doesn’t fall in the narrow lines of the status quo. They’ll kneecap him as sure as they kneecapped Bill Clinton.

You could hear Sam Nunn, the Jerry Garcia of Wankstock, if you will, just deflated today on an interview with Andrea Mitchell. He kept talking about “the fundamental issues” without really explaining what those issues are (except an allusion to entitlement reform, which means Social Security privatization, of course). Yesterday at Wankstock, he closed it out with an electric guitar version of the Star-Spangled Banner this quote:

“A minister once said to me, if you call yourself a leader, but nobody’s following you, you’re just takin’ a walk.”

Wankstock: just takin’ a walk.

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