My Budding Romance With The DCCC, The Blue Dogs, The New Dems And EMILY's List

For too many people "but better than Trump" just wasn't enough motivation

Until just now, I have avoided going to the Blue America endorsement page and counting how many woman are on it, how many people of color, how many from the LGBT community. I just think of the list is one that includes many of the best candidates running for Congress-- regardless of any kinds of identity other than political identity. Butter reading Branko Marcetic's new piece, Only When It Suits Them, at Jacobin I decided to count. There are 8 women, 7 who identify as people of color, and, as far as I know, one openly gay person. There are 5 who served in the military. Any other categories and boxes you want to know about? I suspect we have an even 2 dozen with IQs at least 20 points higher than Trump's.

Branko was, more or less, making the case for Chelsea Manning (MD) and Paula Swearengin (WV) for the U.S. Senate, Keith Ellison as head of the DNC, Elizabeth Warren as a VP nominee and Lucy Flores as a House nominee. I'm not going to deal with any of that and just go to his sensible abstract.

Since at least the 2016 election, centrist Democrats have had a ready tool to fend off left-wing challenges.

Make an honest criticism of Hillary Clinton’s record-- whether on war, criminal justice reform, trade agreements, or campaign finance-- and they’d decry it as sexist or conflate it with online misogyny. Express distrust in Clinton, and they’d chalk it up to latent sexism-- even if the critics were avowed feminists.

During the primaries, Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright appeared to admonish young women for favoring Bernie Sanders over Clinton. Numerous liberal feminist writers insisted on the importance of getting Clinton into the White House, regardless of how centrist she may be. “Not electing a woman, again,” warned Rebecca Traister, would be “much more than symbolic.” In a now-deleted post on David Brock’s Blue Nation Review, Clinton loyalist Peter Daou explained that, “[Sanders’] views notwithstanding,” he was “a white male who has been in Congress for over a quarter century,” making him the “definition of establishment,” while Clinton, solely by being “a woman attempting to break the ultimate gender barrier” was “the definition of anti-establishment.”

This line of attack continued into 2017, when similar claims were used to deflect substantive criticisms of potential presidential candidates. Skeptics of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick-- three establishment Democrats floated as 2020 contenders who also happen to be black-- were told they were simply motivated by bigotry, to the point where some critics were blithely misidentified as white men. In the words of Briahna Joy Gray, liberal discourse became “a world in which personal identity [is] shorthand for ‘progress’… and ‘white man’ [is] an epithet.”

So what, then, to make of the less-than-enthusiastic reaction in establishment circles to a number of recent diverse, progressive challengers to establishment Democratic picks?

I like his line of thinking but he wastes it on Manning and Swearengin, one step up from vanity candidates. I was for Ellison and Flores and they both lost but they both lost in fair, unrigged balloting. That happens some time. More important, though, he mentions, Kara Eastman in Omaha, a serious primary still to take place:

Kara Eastman, a forty-five-year-old woman, is running on a platform calling for a higher minimum wage, Medicare for All, increased taxes on the rich, and a halt to the Keystone XL pipeline. Her Democratic primary opponent is Brad Ashford, a sixty-eight-year old white, male, former Republican who supported the TPP, wants to cut taxes and regulations, and, unlike Eastman, supports some abortion restrictions. Ashford has not only received the vocal backing of one Michigan congresswoman, he’s already receiving institutional support from the Democratic Party.

These are the candidates the DCCC admits trying to rig primaries for. There may be one progressive-- Abby Finkenauer, although friends of mine in the Iowa legislature are mixed about just how progressive she is. The rest of them-- 17-- are trash from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, basically a bunch of Blue Dogs and New Dems. Don't vote for them. One, Jason Crow in suburban Denver, made his fortune defending PayDay lender predators from the people whose lives they ruined. Perfect DCCC fodder. Steny Hoyer tried to bully his progressive opponent into quitting the race. But the whole list is basically dreck. And yet the DCCC is out pushing them, helping them raise money, bad-mouthing their opponents, doing whatever they can to get these really horrible Republican-lite candidates into Congress where they will be voting with the Republicans, just like Brad Ashford did before Omaha Democrats boycotted him in 2016 and ended his political career-- until the brain surgeons at the DCCC dug him up again. NRA poster-child Ann Kirkpatrick is another absolutely awful candidate running as a Republican with a "D" next to her name and hoping the voters in Tuscon-- she's a carpetbagger and voters there don't know what she is-- don't find out how horrible she is.

The tragedy of all those walking garbage candidates the DCCC--along with the Blue Dogs, New Dems and EMILY's List-- try to pass off as real Democrats is that most of them have-- or had before the DCCC chased them away-- fine progressive candidates. Don't be fooled. At the minimum don't support or vote for any DCCC-endorsed candidates in the primaries.