WaPost: Dems WalMart-bashing Stupid Politics

Sebastian Mallaby has an intelligent OpEd on just how herd-like Wal-Mart bashing may backfire on Dems eager to curry favor with unions.

It turns out that a Grocery Workers' Union is very powerful in Iowa. Hmmm.....

Senators Dumb and Dumber are caught entangled in their own contradictory statements:

Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Kerry have attacked Wal-Mart for offering health coverage to too few workers. But Kerry's former economic adviser, Jason Furman of New York University, concluded in a paper last year that Wal-Mart's health benefits are about as generous as those of comparable employers. Moreover, Clinton and Kerry know perfectly well that market pressures limit the health coverage that companies can provide. After all, both senators have proposed expansions in government health provision precisely on the premise that the private sector can't pay for all of it.

Mallaby nails the problem the Democrat Party seems to be unable to avoid.

The truth is that none of these Democrats can resist dumb economic populism. Even though we are not in a recession, and even though the presidential primaries are more than a year away, the DLC crowd is pandering shamelessly to the left of the party -- perhaps in the knowledge that the grocery workers union, which launched the anti-Wal-Mart campaign, is strong in the key state of Iowa.

For a party that needs the votes of Wal-Mart's customers, this is a questionable strategy. But there is more than politics at stake. According to a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, neither of whom received funding from Wal-Mart, big-box stores led by Wal-Mart reduce families' food bills by one-fourth. Because Wal-Mart's price-cutting also has a big impact on the non-food stuff it peddles, it saves U.S. consumers upward of $200 billion a year, making it a larger booster of family welfare than the federal government's $33 billion food-stamp program.

How can centrist Democrats respond to that? By beating up Wal-Mart and forcing it to focus on public relations rather than opening new stores, Democrats are harming the poor Americans they claim to speak for.

The Democrats are against capitalist efficiency. And Wal-Mart pays at the same rates as Sen. Mark Dayton's [Dem. MN] Target pays. Yet Target, with big Dem names like James A. Johnson and Richard Holbrooke on its board, gets off unscathed. Where are those so-called investigative journalists at the MSM?
Bullwinkle says the Dems are starting to get their class war fixes early, to slake their addiction to old-timey socialist mantras. They clothe their divide-and-conquer agenda with populist sloganeering.
Blue Crab Boulevard has links to previous posts on Wal-Mart bashing and Dem relapses into old bad habits.

Last week, even the Los Angeles Times had an editorial scolding the Dems for bashing WalMart.

But even though the WaPost and LAT have joined the reality-based community, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the NYT to kick its addictions.