Looks like New York isn't the only place with a problem among its Democratic donors class.
Remember Steven Rattner?
"I can't think of a single active Democrat in New York who's supporting Freddy Ferrer. And when I say active Democrats, I mean the people in our world, who help raise money for Presidential candidates and things like that."
Now,
via diarist neutron, we have Diane Feinstein's co-chair, Angela Bradstreet:
"Quite frankly, I'm also sick and tired of paying taxes," she said. "And that's Angelides' solution -- raising taxes."(...)
"A number of my Democratic friends, who have raised lots of money for Democrats, have said they cannot support Phil," said Angela Bradstreet, a well known San Francisco attorney and co-chair of Sen. Dianne Feinstein's re-election campaign. "This is the first time I can remember it being so pronounced."
Bradstreet, a Democrat who said she is voting for Schwarzenegger, argued that the governor has re-established himself as a moderate who has shown strong leadership on economic issues.
This is the sort of thing that has damaged Democratic chances to win elections for at least two decades now.
Look at Bradstreet's bio (emphasis mine):
Angela M. Bradstreet is the firm wide Managing Partner of Carroll, Burdick & McDonough LLP and was selected as one of the top 75 female litigators in California in 2005. She defends employers in sexual discrimination, harassment, disability, wrongful termination, and racial discrimination claims. She also conducts sensitive investigations. Angela is a former president of the San Francisco Bar Association, California Women Lawyers and the Queen's Bench Bar Association and is the creator of the No Glass Ceiling Initiative that has been endorsed by over 80 law firms and corporate legal departments. She is a recipient of the California State Bar's Annual Diversity Award and the Anti Defamation League's Jurisprudence Award. She can be reached at abradstreet .(...)
Representative clients include Citibank; National Surgical Hospitals; Northrop Grumman; Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Inc.; Pacific Union; Pebble Beach Company; San Francisco 49ers; USI Insurance Services; VeriSign, Inc.; and Wells Fargo Bank.
Some good things in there, but mostly it appears to be a career built on defending huge companies from discrimination claims. Matt has written extensively about the rich donor class of machine Democrats,
most recently yesterday:
Ok, the more serious point is what
Atrios points out, which is the deeply elitist and authoritarian streak of the rich and liberalish. Many of them are starfuckers who want to be around big shot Democrats like Hillary Clinton, regardless of policy or ideology (which explains her $40 million warchest). Many of them are just arrogant elitists who might have been activists in their college days, but send their kids to competitive nursery schools on the upper East side while pretending to know what sells 'in the heartland'. David Brooks unwittingly supplies them with talking points, and their wealth insulates them from George Bush's America except on a sort of abstract aesthetic level and on a social level since most of their friends aren't in the White House anymore, though the Hamptons is still really nice so it's not that big a deal. Rattner's wife, for instance, is Maureen White, who used to be DNC finance chair under Terry McAuliffe.
Actually it's interesting how much of this social world revolves around Terry McAuliffe and the Clinton/Gore WH. Gore is partners with Lieberman Steven Rattner in
Current TV. And the whole culture of insider Democrats, which overlaps lobbyists like
Mike McCurry and
Richard Goodstein along with single issue group leaders, is part of it. They think nothing of spitting on Democratic activists, holding them in utter contempt. This machine was created in the early 1980s by Tony Coehlo, who I'll write more about in the next few weeks. The rules for this machine are simple - don't rock the boat, and don't point fingers at anyone but liberals, activists, and politicians like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Maxine Waters who for some strange reason just, you know, make people uncomfortable. Feel free to loot, steal, insult, take money from lobbyist friends, become a lobbyist friend, and/or support the right-wing. Just don't point fingers and don't rock the boat/
Matt was talking about Rattner in that passage, but I could hardly imagine a more apt description of what we are seeing from Bradstreet (except that it is a West Coast version). No matter the coast, to have this person so high up in Diane Feinstein's organization is completely destructive to our chances to win anything in California this year. Her presence undercuts not just Angelides, but the entire Democratic ticket in California.
Please call Diane Feinstein's campaign office about this. The number is (310) 556-8683.
