The Best TV Show of the Season Dies Premature Death

With almost no fanfare, ABC's summer thriller "Traveler" ended its all-too-brief eight-episode run last night. As expected, the series ended with a cliffhanger, as nobody knew back in November when the series was being produced that it would not be returning. As it stands though, it seems almost inevitable that this intelligently crafted action-drama is finished.

The saddest part of the "Traveler" story is that ABC essentially set it up to fail. Originally scheduled as a midseason replacement and given a 13-episode order, ABC informed the network when it was in the midst of filming episode eight last November that it would be the last show. The writers did get a chance to amend that particular episode's script to given some semblance of closure, but it was pretty clear ABC had every intention of sabotaging the series before it aired. The expectation of the show premiering early in 2007 as most midseason replacements do never came to pass, and although the series was a given a solid post-Grey's Anatomy timeslot for its mid-May sneak preview, it was quickly moved to Wednesday night and given next to no promotion for its low-profile summertime run.

Hard to understand what could have been going through the minds of ABC programmers investing in a high-budget show with an impressive cast (Steven Culp, Neal McDonough), only to send it to slaughter in June and July, when virtually nobody is watching network TV anymore. The only explanation I can come up with fits right into my conspiracy theory about the networks trying to unload higher-priced programming in the hopes of completely saturating the airwaves with lowest-denominator reality show drivel as quickly as possible. If only "Traveler" could have come out a year or two earlier, it would have at least had a chance.

A Bizarre Interpretation of "Economic Populism"

The Democratic Party has correctly identified that a large measure of its success in the 2006 midterms is the result of a populist economic mood among the nation's nervous working class. One would think that the majority's response to such a mandate would be the enactment of policy measures designed to ease the burden on the sweating classes, but apparently that would make too much sense. Just last week, a United States Senate committee voted in favor of a 61-cent-per-pack tax increase on tobacco. A simple analysis of the demographic of Americans who smoke make it abundantly clear that there is no tax in existence that is as despicably regressive as the tobacco tax, so how is it that levying a tax of hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year exclusively to this low-income demographic can be a priority of a Senate that got elected on a message of economic "fairness"?

There is literally an unlimited number of reasons why tapping into the "soak the poor" cigarette tax is foolish, predatory, and dangerous, but let's just focus on the "economic populism angle. Long-suffering blue-collar voters (the demographic most likely to smoke) put their faith in the Democratic Party last fall to make government work better for them. Not a word was mentioned during that campaign that the new Congress' pending effort to "help" them included raising their tax burden by at least $500 per year while holding the cakes on the other side of the tracks harmless to new taxation. With that in mind, this is incredibly stupid politics, kicking one's own political base in the groin simply because they are the path of least resistance to accrue additional revenue for government.

Yes, I realize this is a bipartisan proposal and will undoubtedly get plenty of support from "moderate" Republicans also interested in path-of-least-resistance soak-the-poor taxation. I also realize that Bush is likely to veto this bill if it gets to his desk, likely negating its political impact heading into 2008. But its the multiple levels of disgusting precedent this measure presents that makes me physically ill. The "Democratic Congress" will be on record supporting a tobacco tax hike against working-class Americans, and the GOP will have a convincing case to be made that allowing Democrats to control government ensures the same working people who trusted them to enact "economic fairness" will be clobbered over the head with the most regressive tax of all.

Furthermore, the nanny-state precedent this tax proposal evokes ensures similar puritanical tax policy ahead even for those us (including myself) who are nonsmokers, with future "sin taxes" required to save the peasantry from the evils of Big Fast Food, Big Soda Pop, and Big Ice Cream, among others. We can basically expect that Democratic governance ensures a tax policy that is massively, massively MORE regressive than was tax policy under Republicans.

My association with the Democratic Party is a product of economic populism. I could never vote for any Republican based on their economic worldview, but why would I still vote for Democrats if expanding tax code regressivity is their endgame? By conservative estimates, figure smokers represent 15% of the electorate, and the Democratic Party is effectively handing them over to the other side by forcing them to almost single-handedly finance the cost of government. If this really is the Democratic Party's idea of economic populism, they will be forfeiting my previously guaranteed vote as well.