Quote of the Day (Kevin Baker, on the Plight of the Demographically Deluded Dems)

“Today’s Democratic Party, with its finely calibrated, top-down fixes, does not offer anything so transformative [as the rural electrification provided with the New Deal, the G.I. Bill, and the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s]. It seems scared of its own shadow, which is probably why it keeps reassuring itself that its triumph is inevitable. It needs instead to fully acknowledge just how devastating the recession was for working people everywhere in America, and what a generation of largely flat wages did to their aspirations even before that. It needs to take on hard fights, even against powerful forces, like pharmaceutical and insurance companies that presume to tell us the limits of what our health care can be or energy companies that would tell us what the world’s climate can endure. It means carving out a place of respect for working men and women in our globalized, finance-driven world.”— Kevin Baker, “Delusions of the Democrats,” The New York Times, November 16, 2014