EVEN IN THE BLUE STATES, THEY LIKE A BIT OF ROUGH

We have a winner in Rhode Island:

Gina M. Raimondo, the Democratic treasurer of Rhode Island, who risked her political future by overhauling the state's troubled pension system and alienating its powerful labor unions, won a convincing victory on Tuesday to become her party's nominee for governor.

... analysts had predicted she might win about 32 percent of the vote. But she won 42 percent, with voters apparently agreeing with her argument that Rhode Island, which has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country, needed to take serious action to dig itself out of its financial hole.

Her methods apparently did not upset primary voters:

Her opponents have cast her as a tool of Wall Street, and say she trumped up the pension problem to enrich her Wall Street friends, in part through increased state payments in hedge fund fees.

You know what all this means, of course:

Analysts were already predicting that if she won in November, Ms. Raimondo could go on to become a national star in the party, showing fellow Democrats that responsible policy is not necessarily bad politics, although organized labor may choose to differ.

Well, I suppose it was to be expected -- the big victories by Chris Christie in New Jersey, with lots of crossover support, showed us that the workers and retirees in the Democratic voter base are surprisingly eager to take out their economic anger on other workers and retirees who seem to have amassed a few more crumbs, rather than on the one-percenters who continue to make off with everything else on the table.

You can blame the party for this, or the mainstream media, but, by now, too many voters, including non-conservatives, have simply internalized this worldview. They've let themselves be divided and conquered.

We should always be suspicious of the rich. We should be deeply suspicious of any analysis of our economic problems that doesn't blame the rich. They have all the political power. Their recession ended years ago. They're experiencing an economic boom. When do we get some of what they're having? Well, the first step is suspecting them whenever our economy goes off the rails. After all, they're in charge.