MATTHEW GRIMM GETS A LETTER FROM JAMES CARVILLE

Little more than a week after showing himself the most scurrilous, divisive prick in the Institutional Democratic Party, James Carville just sent me a letter asking for money. He wants my increasingly meager discretionary income on behalf of at least one of the party's runners-up on the scurrilous prick scale, Chuck Schumer.

Apparently blind to the welter of Democrats and even independents who consider Carville a raving crazy-uncle-ish fossil and tiresome vestige of a misguided experiment in party corporatization, Schumer's Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has trotted out the Clinton strategist in a mailer that has him het up on gittin us galvanized. Funny thing, I agree with almost every one of the party rallying points Carville, or Schumer's people with Carville's imprimatur, makes in the letter. And yet I find myself reading it with nose wrinkled, more eager to throw it in the shitter than actually appraise it, eager to symbolically, or in my mind, kicking Carville square in the nuts as I do. I'm not sure this qualifies as effective marketing communications.

Sure, it could be that he's fresh off playing Clinton-machine goon, calling Bill Richardson "Judas" and all on Easter weekend, but American attention spans are short. Surely, this quirky self-impressed Cajun huckster could effect some common ground in this all-important election cycle. But then, in the eleventh paragraph, I get a more sublte reminder of why Carville and Schumer should go fuck themselves. There, Carville urges me to "get behind the only arm of the Democratic Party focused solely on kicking the Republicans out of the Senate-- and it's NOT the DNC."

Sure, technically he's right, but making a hard point of stating as much seems a barely disguised swipe at the Democratic National Committee. The DSCC is the only Dem org exclusively raising money for Senate races, but Carville, and Schumer, could have easily stopped right there, couldn't they? But no, they're in competition for your money with the DNC, and desperate to hook more towards their agenda, a patently diluted, deballed right-wing Democratic party, versus a party of the rest of us.

A quick primer: the DNC would be the Democratic National Committee run by Howard Dean, the who pressed the party's discourse back leftward in the last election presidential cycle, and who then succeeded Carville and Schumer's fellow corporation-fellating Clintonista douchebag Terry McAuliffe at the committee's helm. Dean re-ruddered the Democratic Party on the so-called "50-state strategy," meaning it would set out support candidates and actually compete for votes even in "Red" states, all stereotypes be damned-- to build the party organization community by community, "retail" platforms from which to address the gross failures of the GOP to address up-and-down-the-street issues top-of-mind to voters of all stripes. [Dean's successful strategy, infuriating the Democratic conflict of interest Insiders brigade, like McCAuliffe, Mark Penn, and Carville invests Democrats' money into building up state-level party infrastructure insteda of into consultants fees and billable television advertising.]

That strategy as well as Dean's populistic bent-- both then and now dismissed and spat upon by the Clintons, Carville and their Senate and House campaign committee henchmen, Schumer and Rahm Emanuel (D-Wall Street)-- netted the party's electoral resurgence of Nov. 7, 2006. This occurred arguably in spite of the work of Schumer, who had attempted to run right-wing Democrats against economic populist winners like Montana John Tester, and to the chagrin of Carville. The latter, the day after the sweeping party victory, actually called for the ouster of Dean.

Now Schumer wants my money to bankroll, ummmm, curiously, for Red states. "Even in so-called 'red states,'" Carville writes me, "voters have seen through the bankrupt political philosophy of the Far Right."

Not enough, apparently, according to Schumer and Carville's own actions, for them to attempt to field something other than even thinly-veiled, corporate-blessed right-wing hacks. See Kentucky and North Carolina, where they are trying to foist DINOs like Bruce Lunsford and Kay Hagan, respectively, upon the beleaguered Democrats they presume to rescue. This conspicuously in spite of the fact that democratic Dems Greg Fischer and Jim Neal are running for those same seats. At a recent event in NC, Carville, in fact, talked up Hagan's heroic run against Liddy Dole, curiously omitting how Hagan is ready to roll over with other Vichy Dems and hand big telecoms immunity for their Bush-collaborative crimes. Carville gave the papal (Schumerian) blessing to Hagan with Neal in the very room, forcing the latter to remind Schumer's agent that he, like Hagan, was still in the running for the state's May 5 primary.

Schumers and Carvilles remain, they would say, are just focused on "electibility," codespeak for the odious Clintonista MO of triangulation, by which one attempts to be all things to all people, at the expense of being anything of substance to any. They can say generally agreeable things, as does Carville's letter to me, and still do as little possible to forward the ideas and ideals behind them, grasping white-knuckled to a delusion of "mainstream." If they bothered to look at any substantive research, they would find that mainstream has become unmistakably progressive. But, like the assholes in the White House, they're more interested in stovepiping the data of jagoffs like Mark Penn that tells them they can go on mainlining corporate dollars and canoodling with investment bankers.

These assholes want my money. These assholes diluted the Democratic Party to where it meant nothing. These assholes bent the party over backwards to where it could no longer even stake itself to virtue in the face of fucking evil. These assholes, in fact, decided virtue a commodity, tradable for corporate money, the great unequalizer of American politics, and thereby ceded the party's great raison d'etre since the days of FDR, championing all the people.

These assholes are everything of which the party, and the nation, needs to shed itself. They represent what we are trying to save the party from.

These assholes won't get cent one from me. We've got tools like ActBlue and the real progressive arbiters like the Blue America communities now, to circumvent their asses and get the pittance I can afford to the people who actually fucking deserve it. But more than anything else, this stupid, stupid letter, as much as I agree with its ostensible intentions, evinces the same kind of disconnect with reality that running corporate-embedded right-wingers as vitally needed agents of change for a system fucked by corporate embedded right-wingers. That is, Carville's spokesmanship for the DSCC represents just an absolute misfire from a basic Marketing 101 perspective.

Oh, look, a letter from James Carville! To me! For real? Awesome. Maybe Amnesty International could get Kissinger to MC their next fundraiser.

-by Matthew Grimm