DCCC Up To Their Old, Failed Tricks In IL-08

The other day, a Member of Congress asked me if there's ever been a good DCCC chairman. My memory doesn't stretch all the way back to 1868, although the first chairman, James Rood Doolittle (WI), was a Democrat and then a Republican and then a Democrat again. He was a fanatic opponent of the 15th Amendment, which granted citizenship-- and the right to vote-- to the freed slaves after the Civil War. He did such a terrible job as DCCC chair that they operated without one for the next decade.

The congressman who turned the DCCC into an arm of Wall Street and Big Business was Tony Coelho (D-CA). He ran the committee from 1981 to 1987, after which he was elected House Majority Whip, a position he held until he resigned in a financial corruption scandal with a crooked bankster.

The DCCC gained a great deal of influence in 2004 when campaign finance reform gave party committees immense power over campaign cash. Since then, they have never had a good chairman. Rahm Emanuel set the authoritarian tone but stuck closely to Coelho's posture of scraping and bowing before Wall Street. Emanuel helped elect a lot of corporate whores from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party in 2006, as did Chris Van Hollen in 2008, almost all of whom were defeated in 2010. Democratic voters, having caught on to the bait-and-switch tactics, have been refusing to come out to vote for these conservative incumbents calling themselves Democrats. Steve Israel was the culmination of that policy, the worst DCCC chairman since Doolittle. He's training the latest disaster, Ben Ray Luján, basically an Israeli sock puppet who is setting the DCCC up for another cycle in loserville.

The congressmemeber who asked me about the chairmen also told me that the DCCC had been pressuring him-- or twisting his arm-- to endorse wealthy corporate Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi over progressive state Senator Mike Noland in IL-08. Progressives who are asked by the DCCC to endorse Krishnamoorthi need to be aware that, despite his willingness to say what anyone wants to hear, he is not, has never been and never will be a progressive. A DINO, Krishnamoorthi is a job outsourcer who was one of the authors of a white paper, The Pros and Cons of Privatization, for Government Finance Review (June 2011) in which it's literally impossible to recognize the voice of a Democrat at all. 

First off, he praised privatization under Ronald Reagan. The paper states:

The present wave of privatizations can also be viewed in the context of the broader liberalization programs ushered in with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and to a lesser degree by Ronald Reagan in the United States... Poorly run private businesses must fix themselves or perish; state-run enterprises face no such constraint... Reagan similarly made privatization a theme of his presidency, describing the 1987 divestment of Conrail, a large freight railroad, for $1,575 billion as "the flagship of privatization and the first of what we hope will be many government functions returned to their rightful place in the private sector."... Today, much empirical evidence supports the claim that private companies are generally more efficient operators than government entities. The reasons for this are various and include management incentives tied to performance, a better capacity to fund capital investments, greater operating leverage, the introduction of proprietary technology, and the de-politicization of pricing and other operational decisions (e.g., raising tolls or cutting money-losing routes).

Yeah, that's the candidate the DCCC is boosting. I wonder if Luján read the paper, which says:

Private operators can do things that politicians are unwilling or unable to do, such as raise tolls or parking fees. This can actually work to the public's advantage because the price of a privatization deal reflects these additional revenues that will be recovered by the private operators." That's a perfectly Republican perspective and Raja continued that "The less obvious reality is that in the absence of those revenues-- if a privatization deal is not done-- a government must implicitly choose a different course... If the goal is to finance some level of spending, then whatever revenue does not come from privatization must come from somewhere else. One likely source of 'somewhere else' is higher taxes, which is both politically unpopular and can have adverse economic consequences in the long run... At bottom, [privatization] is just math.

Yeah, math that Grover Norquist would just love.

If you'd like to prevent the DCCC from bum's-rushing Raja Krishnamoorthi into the nomination over Mike Noland, please consider giving Mike's grassroots campaign a hand here on our Blue America ActBlue page.