The Values-Free Schumercrat Candidates Oppose Obama On Guantánamo

This is probably a bad year for a candidate to be counting on establishment endorsers. But the DC Democratic establishment hasn't figured that out yet. The wretched pro-Wall Street Schumercrats the establishment is running against progressives are all bragging about endorsements they've gotten from pathetic figures who are despised by the Americans who have heard of them. A candidate telling someone they have the endorsement of someone like a Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer (or on the other side of the aisle, Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan) is a net loser and possibly, all things being equal, toxic.

Schumer's crappy candidates are proving themselves as gutless as anyone has to be to be in bed with Schumer to begin with. The cowardly Schumercrats are all refusing to back President Obama's efforts to close the Guantánamo gulag before he leaves office. Worst of all are Pennsylvania's Katie McGinty (Schumer's silliest candidate of 2016), Tammy Duckworth (IL), who has always backed the policy but now that the heat is on refuses to comment, New Hampshire's Maggie Hassan and Ohio's Ted Strickland, both Democratic establishment favorites in key Senate races, who are refusing to support the plan, saying it doesn't do enough to keep their constituents safe.

Patrick Murphy, the overall worst Democrat running for the Senate in 2016 is studiously avoiding the topic but he generally sides with Republicans on controversial bills and opposes Obama and most House Democrats. He supported the Keystone XL pipeline; voted to condemn Obama for the exchange of American prisoner Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban leaders held at Guantánamo; voted for a resolution seeking to rein in Obama's use of executive orders on issues like health care and immigration; consistently votes to gut financial sector consumer protections while collecting ungodly sums from Wall Street banksters; voted with the GOP to create the anti-Hillary witch-hunt Benghazi Committee; and supported a resolution seeking an investigation on whether the IRS targeted conservative groups.

Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Joe Sestak (D-PA) are both loudly supporting Obama's bid to shut down the Guantánamo gulag but Reid and Schumer are both in overdrive to sabotage both their campaigns, even calling big donors and telling them to cut the two Obama allies off from funds. The two anti-democratic party bosses are having a terrible time propping up weak candidates like Strickland, Murphy and, especially McGinty, who is widely viewed as a joke with no backing outside of the most corrupt elements of the establishment.

Katie McGinty joined the Democratic Party's primary race in Pennsylvania for U.S. Senate with the support of influential recruiters, and her fortunes in the wide-open race may ultimately be about more than her ability or her future as a candidate.

It could be a test of whether the Democratic Party's top-level donors, fundraisers, elected officials and like-minded groups can propel a candidate into the good graces of the rank-and-file.

...McGinty's chief rival in the four-way race for the Democratic nomination is Joe Sestak, whose icy relationship with some party leaders is shaping this race-- just as it shaped the 2010 race he lost by 2 percentage points to Republican Pat Toomey.

"I've never seen that lineup against one candidate in a primary not based on issue positions," said David Landau, chairman of the Delaware County Democratic Party. "I've certainly never seen anything like this based on personality and not issues."

The primary election is April 26. The fall campaign in Pennsylvania promises to be expensive and closely watched, and Republicans say Democrats cannot retake control of the U.S. Senate without beating Toomey, a potentially formidable candidate who is seeking a second term in November.

Sestak's loss to Toomey is viewed through various lenses: He deserves another chance after barely losing to Toomey during a historic year for Republicans. His feuding with party elders during the 2010 campaign-- including defeating the late Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary-- was a strong enough signal that he is not a team player. ["Team player" means fellating Chuck Schumer.]

As early as 2013, Sestak, 64, a former Navy vice admiral and two-term congressman, said he was seriously considering running again and Landau and other Sestak supporters around Pennsylvania note that he has spent the intervening years as a regular on the local party event circuit around Pennsylvania, attending hundreds of fundraisers, county dinners and other gatherings.

But doubts about Sestak propelled a search for an alternative by party leaders in Washington. After a few prospective candidates said "no," McGinty, 52, said "yes" and got into the race in August, 15 months after the long-time state and federal government official finished fourth in the 2014 gubernatorial primary.

The problem for the party's heavy hitters is that their one-sided involvement hasn't necessarily gone well for them in top-tier races in recent Pennsylvania history.

Sestak beat Specter, largely thanks to Democratic primary voters who had opposed the Republican-turned-Democrat for decades and weren't about to change.

...The list of McGinty supporters is a virtual who's who of power players in Pennsylvania Democratic Party politics, plus an assortment of U.S. senators and the Washington, D.C.-based Emily's List.

In theory, endorsements can plug candidates into fundraising networks and networks of volunteers who will hand out leaflets, knock on doors and staff phone banks. But in interviews, Rendell and other McGinty supporters tended to downplay the significance of McGinty's super-structure of support, or what a McGinty loss would say about its influence.

"We're in a different time and I would say in the past that (high-powered endorsements) would be a guarantee (of victory)," said Nancy Mills, a McGinty supporter who is the Allegheny County Democratic Party chairwoman. "I think that now people are so well informed and they do their own research and don't necessarily depend on an endorsement."

Sestak, meanwhile, embraces his differences with party leaders, while acknowledging the downside of going against party leaders who can discourage help from major campaign donors. For her part, McGinty has doubled Sestak's fundraising since she entered the race, but she remains behind in available cash and polling.

Rendell, McGinty's campaign chairman, acknowledged that endorsements are not fate-- "If they were determinative, then Donald Trump wouldn't exist," Rendell said-- and said it still remains to be seen whether McGinty and her backers can raise the millions necessary to air weeks of TV ads.

"If the answer is 'yes,'" Rendell said, "then she's in business."

Which, of course, is what politics is all about to self-serving corporate whores like Rendell. A creature of the establishment like Rendell could care less about the jaw-dropping, unqualified nature of McGinty, especially compared to Joe Sestak and Braddock Mayor John Fetterman.