OPINION:
Revolutions are notorious for eating their own, punishing any true believer who isn’t a true believer 100 percent of the time. Ronald Reagan once said he considered anyone who agreed with him 80 percent of the time a true friend, but the Gipper was a kind and reasonable man, and 80 percent is not always enough for a true believer.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a six-term Democratic congresswoman from Florida, and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is learning what is expected of a partisan’s partisan. She bent the party’s rules to help Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, earning the enmity, even if usually unstated, of every Democrat who isn’t on board the Clinton express. She’s learning that that’s not enough.
Republicans are often accused of feasting on their own, intolerant and abusive of those in the party who disagree with the party line. Bigoted and narrow-minded, Republicans organize their firing squads in circles and eagerly shoot their wounded. Choose your cliche. Democrats, on the other hand, are determined to let many flowers bloom, have no litmus tests, and encourage diversity of opinion whether on abortion or gun control. Choose your brand of moonshine. Or you could ask Mzz Wasserman Schultz.
The Florida congressional delegation, including both Republicans and Democrats, supports state reforms of the “payday lending” companies to see if they can bring them to heel before reform should be turned over to the federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Mzz Wasserman Schultz has joined them. This enrages the liberal extremists in the party, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who mistrust reformers in the states and want reform only as decreed by federal bureaucrats.
Tim Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University who has worked with Bernie Sanders on attempted reforms of Wall Street, is running against Mzz Wasserman Schultz in the Democratic primary because, he says, she wants to eviscerate authentic payday lending reforms by supporting watered-down state reforms. “She has been taking millions of dollars from the same corporate interests that profit from payday loans,” he says. “She reversed President Obama’s long-standing ban on corporate lobbyist donations to the Democratic National Committee, opening the door to influence peddling by the payday loan industry.”
She has been described by one Canova supporter as “the living, breathing embodiment of everything rotted and corrupt … a corporatist who relies on corporate money to keep her job.” If this sounds like language Donald Trump might use to describe an opponent, it’s a sample of what a Democratic deviationist can expect if he challenges the party line, proof that 80 percent is not enough. True believers everywhere demand 99.9 percent, or else.
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