Mudcat is elementary to Democratic politics today; in the rural South, in broken Detroit, and here in rural NH. The Democrats are finally coming out of Clinton Denial. Bill Leuchtenberg, the Roosevelt biographer from North Carolina, made the point that Bill Clinton - in reference to the "bridge to the 21st century" which allowed the bonding of banks and loan companies - undid every protection Roosevelt made during the Great Depression. The resulting flood of cash strewn irresponsibly across the world and the Southern piedmont was condemned by the great Old School Democrats like John Kenneth Galbraith in his early '90s book, "The Culture of Contentment." The "contented" he was referring to were not rich Republicans, but Clinton-era "urban professions" hoping to get rich on unfunded DOT.com stocks. And who was doing the real work, Galbraith asked? Undocumented Mexicans. (Writing an article on the tobacco fields in Yadkin County, NC, in 1993, I asked a priest among 100 Mexican workers cutting tobacco how many were illegal. "All of them," he said.) I can only think that the new Wall St. Democrats who went for Clinton and made the Democratic party - of which I have been a life-long member - again and again the defender of the indefensible did so only because they were taken by the euphoria of the times when James Glassman and VP Al Gore promised them that the stock market was going to go up to 35,000 and everyone would be rich. I happened to be working in North Carolina and in Martinsville, VA, during the Clinton boom (which was only Part Two of the Reagan boom). It was the same economic wave that I was born into in Fall River, Massachusetts, in the 1940s when the mills all moved to South Carolina (my father worked in the last of 150 mills to close in 1954: He was the electrician. He shut the lights out.) When I was in Martinsville it was perfectly obvious that what happened in Fall River and Lowell, Massachusetts, would now happen in SC, NC and VA, but this time, the rush to minimal wage was to Mexico and China. And that was the voice I heard of Mudcat yesterday. Capital fled New England long ago and the Prescott Bushes, the Bordens,  and all the wealthy families moved to Texas to dig for oil. They were all Republicans looking for new fun and a new ride in oil, having used up the working class in the New England mills. This time it was the Democrats; or a specific kind of Democrat; Clinton Democrats. Wages had remained flat since 1970 but the voice of the common person and the working class was extinguished. It sparked again only last year in Jim Webb's response to Bush's State of the Union speech when he spoke of "Wall St. robber barons." He has since spoken of "Rubin Democrats" referring to the Clinton Secretary from Goldman Sachs which now directs both parties. This is the rising voice of the Democratic party and it is the traditional voice. Today it is Edwards and it is Obama. Mudcat has always been there. He has always been making these points. His book with Steve Jarding, "Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and What the Democrats Need to Do to Get it Back" fully outlines the failures of Democrats. The Republican took the South but the Democrats gave it up: And if the Democrats want to exist at all as a party they will need to TAKE IT BACK. Mudcat offers a path.