More Centrists-- The Arena Has Nothing To Offer

Anti-ideology advocate Jason Kander had a cool video... and lost

I've talked with Andy Kim a few times on the phone. A little straight laced for me but Andy is a former Obama White House national security official who coordinated the fight against ISIS inside the National Security Council. Before that, he worked at the Pentagon, the State Department and in Afghanistan as a strategic adviser to General David Petraeus. Andy was a Rhodes Scholar and received a Doctorate in International Relations from Oxford after going to the University of Chicago. Today he's running for the South Jersey congressional seat (NJ-03, stretching right across the state from the suburbs east of Philly through the Pine Barrens to Toms River) held by one of the devious architects of TrumpCare, reactionary multimillionaire Tom MacArthur. He seems like a very worthwhile candidate who would probably make a good member of Congress.

And I've talk with Lillian Salerno a few times as well. She's running for a north Dallas-metro congressional seat (TX-32) held by cartoon arch-villain Pete Sessions. Before running for office, Obama had appointed her deputy undersecretary of rural development for the Department of Agriculture. She's a widely respected anti-trust expert and her campaign is pure Texas populism. If she wins her race, expect her to be a real player in crucial and much-needed reforms.

A couple nights ago, I had dinner with another candidate, Haley Stevens, the progressive Democrat running for the open MI-11 seat (Oakland and Wayne counties northwest of Detroit and Dearborn). She was the highly regarded chief of staff for the Obama administration’s auto bailout and is a universally  respected expert on industrial policy. Haley is another excellent candidate who, if elected will be a real upgrade in the House of Representatives and a boon for the folks living in Birmingham, Troy and the suburbs and small towns west of Detroit.

All three have a couple things in common-- they are successful Obama Administration alums with real expertise in their fields. All three are likely to be endorsed this cycle by Blue America, not because the worked in the Obama Administration per se, but because they are smart progressive candidates who are offering worthwhile experience, passion, courageousness and integrity to the people of their districts. About a week ago, writing for the New Republic Ben Austen reported on a new group, The Arena, that is pushing Obama Administration officials for Congress, as if they are another-- albeit more exclusive, identity group. The Arena was founded by Ravi Gupta, who worked in the Obama Administration for a short time and then went to work in the charter school industry. Austen defines the group as one in which "the populist surge that elected Trump is not exactly welcoming to the political insiders and coastal elites who founded the Arena. The group, which plans to run candidates in red and blue districts across the country next year, has adopted a deeply pragmatic approach. It avoids specific positions on policies, encouraging each candidate to fashion his or her own message, even on core liberal issues like health care and government oversight... A candidate in Wisconsin might advocate universal health care and a $15 minimum wage; an office-seeker in Georgia, meanwhile, might eschew gun control and abortion rights... [T]he Arena focuses on process, not policy."

The danger of this district-by-district relativism, of course, is that the party offers up a thousand messengers but no message. Democrats don’t have a “vision or story they want to paint of what is wrong with America today,” Matthew Yglesias observed recently in Vox, and no model for “what is the better country they want to build for the future.” Gupta, like many establishment Democrats, believes that the core principles of economic equality and social justice are enough to unite the party, especially at a time when Republicans are intent on slashing health care and aid to working families. The Arena, in essence, embodies the debate at the heart of the widespread resistance to Trump: Can Democrats regain power over the long term without articulating a clear and compelling party agenda? And can a group of young Obama acolytes bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice, as their candidate so often proclaimed, without agreeing on what justice looks like?

...Inside the vote center, Yvonne Cash, a UAW representative, laments the outcome of the election in the Rust Belt, where Trump won a majority of the white electorate. “The Republicans took our message and flipped it,” she says. “They said they were for the working class, and that the Democrats are only educated, college elites.” The young lawyers and techies from the Arena listen intently. One of them asks Cash how, as candidates, they can connect with organized labor.

Cash pauses for a few beats. “I’m going to be very real,” she says. “The first question we ask when we screen a candidate is: What kind of car do you drive?”

It’s an awkward if revealing moment. Cash is suggesting that Democratic candidates must adhere to the “buy American” message that the UAW has been promoting ever since Japanese imports invaded the U.S. auto market in the 1980s. If you want to get working-class voters out to the polls, she implies, you have to drive a Ford F-150. But that kind of “old economy” thinking runs the risk of reinforcing the false promises that Trump made about restoring a bygone industrial age. And it has little to do with the “new economy” challenges facing the Arena’s young millennial candidates, many of whom don’t even own a car. They use Lyft and Uber.

...[Arena-think] glosses over the knotty questions that Democrats are wrestling with right now: What specifically do they believe? And what policy positions in their candidates are they willing to forgive to win races next year and beyond? Gupta, for his part, talks excitedly to me about Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in 1992 doing just what Kander extols. “He was Yale Law and a Rhodes scholar,” Gupta says, “and he crushed it on blue-collar issues.” I point out that while Clinton was coming across to working-class voters as a folksy guy who felt their pain, he and the New Democrats were shredding social welfare and putting millions of black Americans behind bars. Gupta agrees-- to an extent. He says there’s nothing worse than the “Ivy-educated elite who wears flannel,” and he has turned away candidates seeking his help who seemed inauthentic. But he also argues that Bill Clinton gets a bad rap. “For people who care who’s on the Supreme Court and about our tax policy,” he says, “Clinton did win back the White House after three terms of Republican rule.” It’s an undisputedly pragmatic position, but one that is unlikely to inspire the millions of disaffected Democrats who rejected Clintonism in favor of Trump and Sanders during last year’s election.

We came across a relatively worthless Arena candidate, Lauren Underwood, in IL-14, where 6 Democrats are running to take on centrist Republican Randy Hultgren. She worked for Obama's Department of Health and Human Services. At her core Underwood probably has more in common with Republican Hultgren than with the energy of the post-2016 Democratic Party. The DCCC absolutely loves her; she's just like they are. Austen: "Underwood is, in many ways, the picture of a candidate running on the virtues of Obama: She’s young, African American, reared in his administration-- and, as she tells me with mock apology, “not the most liberal Democrat.” She is fine with Elizabeth Warren, but does not agree with Sanders and his followers on many issues, including the legalization of marijuana and the aversion to U.S. intervention in world conflicts. She says she has no time for activist groups like Brand New Congress, which wants to mount primary challenges to Democratic incumbents it deems insufficiently progressive." If the DCCC manages to slip her into the nomination, it will take a wave higher than the Sears Tower for her to beat Hultgren in an R+5 district Obama lost to Romney and in which Trump beat Hillary 48.7% to 44.8%. Bernie beat Hillary in IL-14 and on primary day several of the key counties didn't just see Bernie outpolling Clinton, but outpolling Trump as well. Kane is the biggest county I'm the district. Bernie took 31,085 votes to Hillary's 24,063. Trump won 21,605 votes. Same dynamic in Kendall and Lake counties. But Underwood thinks she's in touch with the voters in the district. Maybe she is, but not the Democratic voters.

To Gupta, Underwood and the other political hopefuls at the summit embody the way forward for Democrats: young, experienced candidates able to articulate their passion and connect with voters. “If we’re successful in the 2018 race,” he says, “the Arena-backed candidates will all be the clearest examples of telling an authentic story in the clearest, most compelling way.” But one Democrat’s authenticity is another Democrat’s selling out. Many in the party warn that unless candidates address the needs of working-class voters, Democrats will continue to lose ground to Republicans at every level of government. “We don’t just need more people running for office,” says Becky Bond, who served as a senior adviser in the Sanders campaign. “We need credible candidates who run on a bold platform that will significantly improve people’s lives if elected. We need to give the voters who the Democrats have consistently taken for granted or written off a reason to turn out and vote. Medicare for all, free college tuition, an end to the cash bail system. Resistance groups should encourage and support candidates who step up to run on these ideas.”

Underwood rejects that kind of thinking as out of touch for her district. She is content to shape her own message, even if it diverges from the prevailing upsurge of populist sentiment, tailoring it to what she sees as the concerns of her constituents. She’s eager to start talking to voters at supermarkets and churches in McHenry County, the reddest part of her district, which Trump won by eight points. She won’t be highlighting some traditional Democratic issues, like gun control, which she considers a no-win proposition there. And she doesn’t think it prudent to lead with calls for racial equity. She looks me over, considering how freely she should express her views on the world as it is and the world as it should be. “I am running in reality,” she says.

...It is not until the very last panel that I hear the name Bernie Sanders spoken aloud at the summit. The conference room is packed for “The Millennial Generation and the Future of American Democracy,” and I stand in the back as a former county financial official from Detroit encourages people to do their stint in local government: “The best experience of my life,” he says. A national political consultant talks about the need to rebrand politics so it’s cool for young people. The head of a creative studio that does campaign videos-- most recently for Randy Bryce, the union ironworker challenging Paul Ryan in Wisconsin-- argues that millennials aren’t being given the right incentives to invest in politics. A city councilman from Cincinnati chastises Democrats for ceding the economic argument to Trump, who spoke about trade, jobs, and industry only in fanciful generalities.

Suddenly, an African American web developer from Brooklyn raises his hand to interject. More millennials voted for Sanders, he points out, than for Clinton and Trump combined. What’s more, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom ran a far-left campaign earlier that month and reclaimed seats in Parliament. “They have a platform that is unapologetically progressive,” the man continues. “They say, ‘We’re going to take care of regular people.’ We don’t have that message.”

“We don’t see a platform that goes with our beliefs,” someone else interrupts.

A white woman cuts in, “We want to feel something.”

“The party assumes that most progressives are Democrats,” another woman shouts. “But most millennials don’t see themselves in the party platform. So they don’t feel an obligation to show up for the party. I’ve worked in politics ever since I was a teenager, but I’m not a party loyalist.”

It’s as though a quarter-century of frustration with the Democratic Party has boiled over in the space of a minute. The moderator for the panel is Milia Fisher, a former Hillary Clinton staffer in her twenties who recently launched the Defiant Network, a grassroots group dedicated to creating a “powerful crowdsourced vision to save our democracy.” She asks how many people in the room identify strongly with the Democratic Party. Fewer than half raise a hand.

It’s hardly a rousing vote of confidence. If Democrats aren’t giving their most energized members a clear and inspiring sense of why the party matters, then what hope do they have of winning back the Rust Belt or middle America, or turning red states blue? In July, the party establishment unveiled a modest agenda called “A Better Deal,” calling for a $15 minimum wage and regulations to cut prescription drug costs, but it did little to change minds that the Democrats stood for more than being anti-Trump.

Gupta is a joke-- a very, very bad joke. He actually tells Austen why he's a Democrat-- a slog so sick that even the DCCC-- which came up with it-- eventually rejected it. "I’m a registered Democrat. I mean it’s, like, better than the other guys."

His candidates are mostly centrist garbage who are headed towards defeat. Elissa Slotkin (MI-08) and Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06) were both endorsed by the Wall Street-owned and operated New Dems. Dan McCready (NC-09) is even worse-- a fucking Blue Dog. Josh Harder (CA-10) is running in one of the most winnable GOP-hed seats in the country. The PVI went from R+1 in 2015 to even this year. Obama won the district twice and Hillary beat Trump 48.5% to 45.5%. It's a minority majority district but the DCCC is determined to run Harder, a wealthy venture capitalist from San Francisco running a centrist platform.