Kshama Sawant forcing others to prove left-wing credentials

Taken from Monday’s edition of The David Boze Show on AM 770 KTTH.

There was a huge article about Socialist Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant in The Seattle Times over the weekend. Much of the article was considering her influence as a politician.

She is, of course, there to make waves.

“The election of a Socialist to the council of a major city in the heartland of global capitalism has made waves around the world,” Sawant has said.

She continues to make waves, but the question is: Is she really all that influential?

What seemed to be implied in the piece is that she thinks she is more influential than she is, that her fellow members on the Seattle City Council say, look we’re just as liberal, we were going to do all these things. They say the Service Employees International Union was already calling for a $15 an hour minimum wage. In fact, Richard Conlin, whose place she took on the council, said look, I was endorsed by the SEIU, so I would have voted for that.

“If I had been on the council, I would have supported it,” Conlin told The Times. “The results that came out were basically what the folks at SEIU had been working for, and I was endorsed by SEIU. I don’t think she made much of a difference.”

But was her loudness as a Socialist pushing the council to act faster than they otherwise would?

You have some liberals in Seattle saying things like, I’m sure we would have done the same thing, we all want to be in the same place, the thing is, she is the spark that puts the fire into the left and maybe she gets us there a little faster.

As I read this piece, what it really said to me is that the Seattle Democrats just don’t want to identify themselves as Socialists. You look through the story and the only objection to Sawant seems to be they don’t like her general approach, they don’t like her personality, they don’t like the presentation. But in terms of substance, they’re in total agreement.

You look at this and you say to yourself, well she might be the open Socialist, but what does that make the rest of them?

I’ve joked for a long time now that the Seattle City Council members are the closeted Socialists that have been confronted by the open Socialist. Sawant is very proud of her image as a Socialist, her image as a protester. She’s perfectly willing to go out, shout on the streets, and get her job done.

I thought the story was great in that it lays out for you what the differences are between the Democrats of Seattle and the Socialists in Seattle, and it basically boiled down to just rhetoric. It was tone, it was presentation, but there was a fierce desire, it seemed among all the left, to accomplish what Kshama Sawant wants.

So what is the nature of Kshama Sawant’s influence?

It seems the influence of Sawant is that she may be pushing them faster than they would otherwise go, and also it seems she’s emboldening the left in the state who, compared to her, are worried about providing proof of their left-wing credentials.

Taken from Monday’s edition of The David Boze Show on AM 770 KTTH.

JS