OMG! Ben Ray Luján Hasn't Resigned As DCCC Chair Yet!

Many progressives are sickened by DCCC chairman Ben Ray Lujan's (and the increasingly senile Pelosi's) decision to recruit and fund Blue Dogs and other anti-Choice candidates and pass them off to unsuspecting voters as real Democrats. One top Democratic candidate in one of the country's swingiest districts told me, on condition of anonymity and in fear of DCCC retribution, that he is "seeing the results of their active support of Blue Dog candidates right here in [his state]. People want authentic candidates who actually know the voters and care about their communities. National party interference in primaries is not welcomed by the people based on what I am hearing from voters here in [his district]. And I believe it could seriously backfire on all of us-- like no Dem majority in the House. I would like to avoid discussing the DCCC at all at this point. It just makes them seem more influential than they really are... so please don't include a comment from me on this post.  Always happy to share my thoughts with you private of course!"

Sam Jammal is a candidate for Congress in an Orange County district represented by anti-Choice fanatic and Ryan rubber-stamp Ed Royce. He was happy to speak on the record: "I'm pro-choice and believe we need to stand up for the rights of women, especially given what is going on in Washington. We can't abandon our values. The reality is that most people continue to be concerned with kitchen table economics around their wages, monthly bills and whether they can save a little for retirement. We need to be the party fighting for regular folks-- that is how we win." The DCCC is running a clownish and very wealthy "ex"-Republican lottery winner from another district against him, someone who was unable to even answer a simple question about Medicare-for-All at a candidate's forum in Fullerton last Wednesday.

The new Morning Consult poll for Politico shows 53% of registered voters disapprove of how Trump is doing his job and that if the midterm election were today 44% would vote for a generic Democrat and 37% would vote for a generic Republican. Among independents-- who tend to decide elections in swing districts-- the Democrat leads, 34-25%, with 41% undecided. Among all registered voters, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's job approval is underwater. 44% have an unfavorable opinion of him, 35% have a favorable opinion and 21% say they never heard of him. Pelosi is even less liked-- 48% unfavorable and 28% favorable, with 24% of people saying they've never heard of her.

This-- and other recent polls-- has conventional wisdom inside the Beltway absolutely certain that the House majority is up for grabs in 2018. Now there's the most notoriously trailing indicator you'll ever find about what's headed in the GOP's direction.

"There are a lot of reasons to think that the House will be in play next year," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an election handicapper at the University of Virginia.

Kondik said the single best gauge for predicting 2018 results may be the House generic ballot, which has the Democrats up between 6 and 14 points, according to recent surveys from various outlets.

[Because of gerrymandering and turn-out patterns] "Democrats likely will need something around a double-digit lead to win control," he said.

"Right now, I’d say the House generic indicates the Democrats would make gains but not win the majority-- but of course the election isn’t today."

...Democrats still face unique challenges, including legislative district lines that favor Republicans and the danger that Democratic voters simply will not go to the polls in a non-presidential election year.

They also face divisions over how to attract working-class voters who flocked to Trump, while maintaining progressive values.

Conservative-leaning Blue Dog Democrats have hailed the party’s "Better Deal" campaign message for its focus on the economy. But some are airing concerns that Democratic leaders, in an effort to attract the populist camp embodied by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have overstepped in adopting aggressive proposals to rein in corporate power.

Some liberal members of the Progressive Caucus, meanwhile, fear the Better Deal’s avoidance of social issues-- like reproductive rights, immigration reform, the environment and criminal justice reform-- may deflate certain liberal constituencies.

"This is not rocket science," said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). "The problem that we’ve had in the past is that we just focused on social issues, right? What we’re going to do now is continue our progressive nature when it comes to social issues and go hardcore when it comes to economic issues."

Much of the Democrats’ 2006 success hinged on locating candidates who spoke to conservative-leaning voters, even if they veered from the party’s liberal base on certain social issues.

The Hill always seems to conveniently neglect to mention that virtually all the Blue Dogs, New Dems, "ex"-Republicans and the rest of the garbage candidates who made up the Republican wing of the Democratic Party were defeated in the next midterm when Democratic voters realized they had been tricked into voting for conservatives and just stayed away from the polls, allowing 63 Democrat seats to become Republican seats. That's the Rahm Emanuel strategy that the current imbecilic DCCC is following today with their determination to crush progressives in favor of Blue Dogs and the rest of the crap candidates, while alienating women-- and men who like women-- with their new dogma about recruiting and financing anti-Choice fanatics as candidates.

It would be hard to argue that there's a worse Democrat in Congress than grotesquely corrupt Arizona Blue Dog Kyrsten Sinema, who sits in a safe Phoenix district that Obama won 51.1-46.6% and even Hillary won with 54.7% against Señor Trumpanzee's 38.4%. Sinema, who sells her votes to whomever will bribe her-- Wall Street, for example, gave her $1,003,940 last cycle for her votes against consumer protections on the House Financial Services Committee-- has the worst Progressive Punch crucial vote score of any Democrat in Congress. This cycle she's at 19.44, a number that no Democrat has ever sunk to before. Currently 7 Republicans are voting more progressively than she is-- and in a solid blue district! But this is how that psychopath presents herself to the Beltway media:

Suggesting they’ll revisit that playbook this cycle, Rep. Ben Ray Luján (NM), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), told The Hill last week that there would be no "litmus test" on abortion during the recruitment process. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Blue Dog Democrat, said the group is teaming up with the DCCC to field candidates who "reflect the values of their communities."

"Winning these seats is crucial to the Democrats’ goal to winning back the majority," said Sinema, who heads up the Blue Dog PAC.

Sinema's progressive primary opponent is Talia Fuentes and you can contribute to her campaign here.

Laura Moser is one of the progressive candidates running for the Houston congressional seat currently held by anti-Choice Trumpist John Culberson. Yesterday she penned an OpEd for Vogue based on the disappointment she felt by the DCCC's shocking betrayal. "As a first-time Congressional candidate," she began, "I’ve been warned not to criticize Ben Ray Luján and the powerful Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. I’m running in one of the most competitive House districts in the country, and I’ll need all the support, financial and organizational, that I can get from party leaders and organizations. But I cannot hold my tongue while Luján and the DCCC abandon the commitment to human rights that brought me to the party in the first place. I believe that if Democrats-- not any one Democrat, and certainly not just me-- want to start winning races again, Luján’s statement that the DCCC would fund candidates who oppose abortion rights puts our country in danger, and makes it all the more likely that the Republicans will continue to defeat us in election after election."

This may seem surprising. After all, Luján’s assertion that there will be no “litmus test” for Democratic candidates who oppose abortion seems like the kind of big-tent cliché with which it is hard to disagree. “As we look at candidates across the country,” Luján said yesterday, “you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.” But we Democrats also need to stand firm on some basic principles, for a change. Like: Health care is a human right. And: The right to plan her own family is a cornerstone of a woman’s economic security. So yes, we realize that we live in a huge and diverse country, and that our party is huge and diverse as well. We can acknowledge that there are anti-abortion Democrats, just as there are pro-choice Republicans (including the state rep who represents my Houston district). While Luján’s position seems to embrace that reality, it actually does the opposite. For all the hand-wringing about what we Democrats can do to reach more voters, many Americans still see us as the “anti-Trump party.” That is true, and to our credit. But what they don’t see is Democrats taking firm stands in support of our values, and that’s the crux of the reason why we keep losing so many elections.

We’re still the party that was in favor of gay rights but-- for far too long-- wasn’t quite in favor of marriage equality. We’re the party that promotes racial equality, but helped bring about the mass incarceration of African Americans. We’re the party that denounces income inequality, but still snuggles up to Goldman Sachs at every possible opportunity. The base of the Democratic party has lost its tolerance for these numbing equivocations: We embrace values that might best be summed up as “treating people decently.” We believe in economic fairness; in racial and religious equality; in LGBT rights. We believe that all men-- and women-- are created equal. These aren’t controversial matters that we need to poll-test or focus-group. Wherever we derive these values, from our religious heritage or from our fidelity to the American heritage of freedom and justice for all, we shouldn’t constantly be negotiating them.

And we, women and men both, don’t believe that women’s fundamental rights should be nibbled away around the edges. We believe that abortion is healthcare, a fundamental human right that the majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, support, and that the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed.

When the Democrats unveiled their “Better Deal” last week, they focused on economic policies related to job creation, wages, and income inequality. That’s all well and good, but they left abortion rights off the table, and what is abortion if not an economic issue? Women know this, especially poor ones. And, in the state of Texas, which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world, access to healthcare-- and yes, to abortion-- can be the difference between life and death.

We recognize that different candidates have different beliefs, not just on abortion, but on a huge range of issues. Still, a statement from one of our most powerful party leaders serves as a proxy statement of our values. Wishy-washy equivocations-- and not just on abortion, but on immigration, on civil rights, on income inequality-- weaken all of us. I always think of an old saying: If voters are given the choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they’ll choose the real Republican every time.

I refuse to believe that most Americans (or even most Republicans) can look at today’s GOP and see their own values reflected in its erratic leader. But even though, as we Democrats are fond of repeating, our values are the values of the majority of Americans, Trump won because so many people stayed home. And why did they stay home? Because they didn’t really believe that we believed what we said we believed. And why should they, when we keep compromising and hedging?

Let’s not forget who the most reliable Democratic voters are-- women of color, who are most likely to suffer the consequences of Democrats “compromising” on reproductive rights. Texas Latinas are twice as likely to be uninsured and lack healthcare access as white women in Texas, and nationwide, black women are four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as white women. And one more thing: Who has powered the resistance against Trump, and who will inevitably be the most motivated voters in the next election? Women. I was initially shocked to discover that my own resistance group, Daily Action, was 86 percent female, but it’s consistent with all the other data about the postelection landscape. We are the ones showing up and marching and placing calls and fighting to take back our country while our party heads fiddle.

It’s a truism to say that my state, Texas, isn’t a red state: It’s a nonvoting state. We consistently rank in the bottom five states in the country in voter turnout. Perhaps Texans, especially the Democrats among us, stay at home because they don’t have any clear sense of what we stand for. I have one idea of how to get more Democratic women to polling stations: Stand up for them. Let’s cut out the whimpering and stop reducing us to an “interest group.”

We are the base of the Democratic party, so let’s start talking about what happens in states like mine where reproductive rights have been attacked and eroded over and over and over again, and let’s start defending women’s rights to make their own decisions about their health and families. And let’s extend the principle of treating people decently-- regardless of their sex, religion, race, or sexuality-- and start talking to them like adults. It’s about time we had some of those in Washington.

Pelosi and Luján are now entirely divisive forces inside the Democratic Party-- and at a time when the whole party should be coming together to beat Trump and the Republicans in 2018. It's not going to be done by throwing women under the bus-- or throwing anyone under the bus. For the good of the party Luján should step down as DCCC Chair-- he's terrible at the job anyway-- and Pelosi should retire as well. As few Americans want to see her as the next speaker as they want to see Paul Ryan continue in that job. It really is time to move on. As one DC pundit said recently about the Democratic Party, "We no longer have a party caucus capable of riding this wave. We have 80-year-old leaders and 90-year-old ranking members. This isn't a party. It's a giant assisted living center. Complete with field trips, gym, dining room and attendants." The time to do something about this is NOW-- not when we're crying about "woulda, coulda, shoulda"... on the first Wednesday of November, 2018. And this DCCC affinity for Blue Dogs and "ex"-Republicans is anything but new. Notice who was paying for this. And how did it work out?