What's More Important To You-- Being A Generic Democrat Or Being A Progressive?

Instead of interfering in primaries, Israel should be allowing local Democrats to pick their own candidates and have the DCCC concentrate on going on the offense against the Republican excesses that have brought so much pain to the country. This morning Dan Balz and Scott Clement reported in the Washington Post how the GOP is looking like winners in the midterms, despite that fact that the American people trust Democrats more than Republicans on most of the key issues of the day. This is because Beltway political hacks like Israel have spent their energy on pointless political infighting and posturing instead of effectively making the case about Republican shortcomings by going after the men who set their agenda and write their policies. Israel's DCCC is not taking on a single Republican leader or not even vulnerable committee chairmen in districts Obama won! No one is making the case against the architects of hated GOP policies like Boehner, Cantor, Ryan, Upton, Issa, Rogers, McCarthy, Royce, etc. Israel, his corrupt staff and his lame handpicked candidates haven't been able to thread the needle that show, for example, the minimum wage leads Obamacare as a motivator of voting by double digits. Israel and his weak, sad excuse for an army is failing to take advantage of that point.

In the 34 states with Senate races, 50 percent of voters say they favor Republicans and 42 percent favor Democrats.

That is the case despite the Republican Party’s poor image nationally and its deficit on some important issues. About two in three Americans say the GOP is out of touch “with the concerns of most people in the United States today.”

Fewer than six in 10 Republicans say their party is in touch with the public, while four in 10 say the party is out of touch. But that is significantly better than last year, in the wake of Republicans’ 2012 presidential election defeat. Then, just four in 10 said they were in touch, while almost half said they were not.

…Despite the problems with the health-care law’s implementation, Democrats maintain an edge over Republicans on which party Americans trust to deal with the issue, by a margin of 44 percent to 36 percent. Democrats hold advantages of the same size on energy and immigration. On helping the middle class, the Democrats have a 13-point advantage over the Republicans.

The public rates the two parties about evenly on handling the economy, dealing with taxes and managing the federal budget deficit. Earlier this year, Republicans had a 10-point edge on the deficit, but that has narrowed to two points.

Attitudes about the economy remain overwhelmingly negative, with 72 percent rating the economy as “not so good” or “poor.”

At least the DSCC is vigorously taking on McConnell. The DCCC is less than worthless

Israel and his pathetic mystery meat candidates continue to fail making an effective case against Republican governance. Last week one of his absurd candidates, Guantánamo ex-comandante Jerry Cannon, called for the repeal of the Affordable Career Act. Another one of his horrific candidates, Jennifer Garrison, attacked the EPA on behalf of his Big Coal donors. Several DCCC candidates-- like Pete Aguilar (CA-31)-- have slipped up and admitted publicly that they, like Republicans, want to reduce Social Security benefits for seniors through Chained CPI. No wonder voters are confused! Thanks to Israel's gross incompetence, they don't even know what a Democrat is any longer! And when you try to talk with Democratic leaders about these failures they deflect responsibility by chanting nonsense about how the Democratic Party is a "Big Tent" party.

Amy Dean, writing yesterday for Al Jazeera, helped explain why this strategy is a failure for Democrats-- and an alternative to it for progressives mature enough to not be bound to the corrupt insider party that the Beltway-centric Democrats have turned into. Key" Democratic politicians need to be led, not followed-- a lesson the teabaggers have been teaching the Republican Establishment.

Since 2010 the tea party has made considerable strides in completing an ideological purification of the Republican Party. By running challengers in party primaries against candidates they perceive as too moderate, far-right activists have helped shape the Republicans into a relatively coherent force. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is full of underrepresented constituencies who can’t agree on key progressive causes, including workers’ rights, campaign finance reform, environmental protection and the regulation of Wall Street. If anything, the party’s tendency over the past two decades has been to drift rightward.

After years of soul searching, several dissatisfied progressive groups are coming up with more creative approaches that allow them to avoid getting caught up in perpetual debates of “let’s vote for a third party” vs. “we must choose the lesser of two evils.” And they’re taking cues not from third parties, which end up being ineffective, but the tea party, which has managed to engage Republicans and disrupt the way they do business by functioning as a party within the party.

Traditional community organizing groups, using the model pioneered by left-wing grass-roots activism guru Saul Alinsky, made avoidance of electoral politics a point of pride and opted to push for policy changes and community improvements from the outside. National People’s Action (NPA) has long followed this model, engaging in direct action campaigns around issues such as financial reform and housing rights. They have bused their members out to the homes of financial lobbyists and occupied bank branches. In the past the NPA tried to push policy changes by pressuring elected officials from the outside. But now the group wants to participate in electoral politics not as a substitute for its direct action tactics but to supplement them, and it’s throwing its hat into the ring with a newly minted sister organization, the NPA Action Fund. “The Democratic Party isn’t very responsive to social movements,” says Daniel Espinosa-Krehbiel, director of strategic initiatives for the NPA. “The Democratic Party is a field of struggle (where) we want to contest for power. If we do that more often, we are more likely to be in power at least some of the time.”

The NPA’s membership is concentrated a scattershot array of states: Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio. The group’s organizers hope to start changing the political conversation in these states before influencing the federal level. They aren’t opposed to running primary challenges against conservative or moderate Democrats, but they operate “mostly in purple and red states, (so) the party lines are where the front lines are,” says Espinosa-Krehbiel. Presumably, this means that the NPA Action Fund will be mostly working against Republicans (except in Illinois and other blue-tilting states, where Democratic primaries will be greater priorities).

The NPA doesn’t want to wait for local or state Democratic Party chapters to announce their candidates or positions before deciding to back them or not. Instead, it wants to recruit its own candidates and give them the support they need to run successful campaigns. With an army of thousands of volunteers, the group can provide a huge boost to candidates’ campaigns, which is appealing to people who are considering a run but may not have the backing of establishment Democrats.

“Instead of just falling behind the party message, we are trying to set the terms of the debate ahead of time,” says Espinosa-Krehbiel. “If they agree to run on it, we’ll help them get them elected by delivering a big portion of their field program through our organizing. We’ve got thousands of highly active members in most states who want to volunteer for our campaigns, and voters are way more responsive to a message that’s delivered to them from one of their neighbors than someone to who has been paid to come in from some other state.”

…In the past, constituencies that have aligned themselves with the NPA and Working Families-- organized labor, people of color and others who routinely vote Democratic-- failed to resist a rightward drift in the party because the only other choice was a more conservative Republican. However, the new electoral drives from the left aim to challenge the idea that these groups are what political scientists call captive voters. Members of the tea party, too, were once considered captives with nowhere else to turn: According to an in-depth 2012 study, “almost all are Republicans or conservatives to the right of the GOP.” Yet, galvanized by political trends (and supported by right-wing think tanks and well-heeled funders), they were able to redefine the political options available to them.

There’s no reason frustrated progressive captives of the Democratic Party can’t do the same. While it’s true that they must run on lean budgets and that they lack the media infrastructure provided by Fox News, they have the vision and members to make a difference in places where progressives have seethed but not yet organized.

  This is especially true with regard to state and local politics, where both the NPA and Working Families will focus for the foreseeable future. “It’s impossible to get anything meaningful done” at the federal level, says Green. “The action is at the state level because that’s where we have political power to make a difference. The state level is going to be a laboratory for progressive policy.”

A big test for national Democratic Establishment this cycle is in blue-blue CA-33, where Obama beat Romney 61-37% and where Henry Waxman is retiring. The Democrats don't have to worry about Republicans but they do have a problem with an independent progressive with an enormous non-political following, author and spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson. Political metrics predict that liberal state Senator Ted Lieu and corrupt conservative careerist Wendy Greuel will be the frontrunners. But those metrics can't pick up the kind of support Williamson is engendering on a strictly grassroots level. Her race reminds us of how the Democratic Party used to fight against Bernie Sanders when he was running and seeking reelection in the House. Williamson talks about her affinity on a policy level, with Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alan Grayson and Keith Ellison. Last weekend she was endorsed by Dennis Kucinich and by Jennifer Granholm, both still very much Democrats.

The very first thing you find on Williamson's website is a cogent and compelling explanation of why she's running, especially cogent and compelling for voters in a high-info progressive district like CA-33:

I am running for Congress because I believe America has gone off the democratic rails. A toxic brew of shrinking civil liberties, expanded corporate influence and domestic surveillance is poisoning our democracy.

We are currently in the process of dismantling the most basic social contract between the American people and our government, as "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people" has transitioned before our eyes into " a government of a few of the people, by a few of the people, and for a few of the people." A purpose of American progress is to expand the democratic franchise, not constrict it. Yet today, that franchise is being narrowed for everyone.

That's the bad news, of course, but there is good news as well: we can change this!

We must act quickly, however, for the trajectory of corporatism is already wreaking havoc on our environment, our economy and even our food supply. When banks, oil companies, chemical companies, health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, food companies, military manufacturers and prison builders are able to influence our lawmakers so disproportionately to the influence wielded by average citizens, we have a problem. Let us not be the first generation to wimp out on the work necessary to protect and foster our democracy.