Wampum

Voting's begun in France d'Amérique. In June of last year the French Socialist Party celebrated the defeat of economic neo-liberalism in Europe by purging the leadership of everyone who campaigned against economic neo-liberalism in Europe. Laurent Fabius and everyone else who campaigned for the "non" vote was told to go join the Communists. Laurent Fabius didn't, and remained in the party though he was dismissed from the party's National Executive Committee, and contested the PS primary in April.

During the balloting for the '07 presidential race when we lost power and I lost a good post. I was rhetorically crossing my fingers that the best candidate wouldn't be wiped out in the first round. It didn't even occur to me that the worst candidate would get more than 50% of the vote, eliminating a runoff between the partisans of the worst, and the partisans of the best and the second best. It was worse than I anticipated. Over 60% of the PS voted for a break with the left and for triangulating toward the program of the right. That's how Ségolène Royal became the candidate of the largest party on the left, and the presumed, except for the weeks of suspense when François Bayrou broke the 10% threshold and for a few days, was polling at, or above, without a real political party, Ségolène Royal's own numbers, alternative to Nicolas Sarkozy and the imposition of neo-liberalism on a still socialist France.

The problem isn't so much that the Left is going to lose tomorrow, its that the Left lost last November, when this person managed to suppress the campaigns of Lionel Jospin, Jack Lang, and the others who drove Fabius and the other nonists out of the leadership of the PS, and finally beat both Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, obtaining more than 50% of the vote, short-circuiting the 2nd-round and any chance of presenting a candidate with less flash, less bling, and more policy depth, and fundamentally, independent of gender, more credible.

I recommend viewing a fragment of 12 minutes of an interview shot in 1999, with Pierre Bourdieu, talking about which political figures styled as "of the left", are actually "of the right". The 12 minutes were first shown as Gauche/Droite vu par Pierre Bourdieu on Zalea TV, on September 29th, the day that Ségolène Royal announced that she was running for president in the '07 cycle. As a Socialist. The bits are no longer at Zalea, but are still up at Daily Motion.

The student that Pierre Bourdieu chose to discuss, as a professor of sociology, was Ségolène Royal. The "money quote" is here, under a minute, and without the clatter of plates and the rest of the cacophony of a working café.

The bits were posted to DailyMotion, a YouTube like free (for the time being) video stream feed server, and four days later, the dead tree press (Le Monde, Libération, etc.) had copy on the TV-to-feed-to-blogs phenomena.