Yellow Stripes And Dead Armadillos

Jim Hightower, the Democratic former Texas Agriculture Commissioner and genuine American Populist, wrote a book with an oft-quoted title that accurately described his party's centrist ideological timidity, and which hits home particularly hard now as we make our way into the next presidential election cycle. To wit: "There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos." An entertaining bit of homespun Texas talk, but also a still-accurate description of the Democratic Party establishment even today.

I have written in previous columns that since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, most of the Democratic Party's leadership has been so afraid of supporting the type of corporate and wealth reform and worker-organizing advocacy that were the hallmarks of the New Deal that they have taken what they think is a middle-of-the-road approach: describing themselves as fiscally conservative but socially liberal.