Is The DCCC Doing Anything Wrong? It Would Be Easier To Ask If They're Doing Anything Right

DCCC executive director, Dan Sena-- he knows what's wrong but is too cowardly to act on it

It was lonely out there when DWT first started covering DCCC perfidy in 2005. It isn't any longer. At the rate things are going, it'll be on TV news soon. TV news should have covered Pelosi's visit to the Austin American-Statesman in February. Maybe if they did, the exposure of Steny Hoyer as a scumbag this week wouldn't have been such a shock to so many people. Back towards the end of February, Pelosi wandered into the newsroom and admitted that if a DCCC corrupt conservative candidate doesn't win the primary, the DCCC abandons the district to the Republicans. Ever since Pelosi took control of the DCCC, that's how it's been run. She started out babbling to reporters that the DCCC doesn't want any "slackers" as candidates. If a candidate says the can't campaign on Sundays because they play golf on Sundays, the DCCC will just move on to someone who will work. She told the reporter that she and DCCC chairman, Ben Ray Luján had to be "very cold-blooded" about how they make decisions about who to support and who to leave by the wayside.

"Texas," she claimed, "is really important to us." I won't accuse her of lying-- but she's out of her mind-- crazy as a loon. The House Democrats elected Jared Polis DCCC Regional Vice Chair for the area that includes Texas, Colorado and New Mexico. He ignored his duties 100% and then decided to run for governor of Colorado. He resigned as regional vice chair. Luján, Pelosi and Hoyer decided to ignore pleas to replace him immediately from people who really did think Texas is key to the 2018 midterms. They refused. It's been over a year and it's the only region without a vice chair. It allows the notoriously corrupt DCCC staff to run wild. And it allowed Luján, Pelosi and Hoyer to handle the area directly. Here's what that means to Hoyer, for example-- the story Lee Fang broke Wednesday.

She babbled on: "We have 5 races [in Texas" [TX-21, TX-07, TX-23, TX-32, TX-31]... How can I say this in a nice way? We have to be cold-blooded in what we do. In other words, if the wrong person wins-- well nobody’s wrong-- but if the person who can’t win, wins, it’s not a priority race for us anymore, because we’ve got 100 races."

The next day, Pelosi's lies were laid bare when a race in Houston (TX-07) exploded when the DCCC did something publicly that it usually only-- and always-- does behind the scenes where no one can watch. It viciously attacked a progressive candidate, Laura Moser, to benefit an establishment corporate shill in the primary. From the DCCC website... ammo for John Culberson, the Republican, if Laura wins:

Democratic voters need to hear that Laura Moser is not going to change Washington. She is a Washington insider, who begrudgingly moved to Houston to run for Congress. In fact, she wrote in the Washingtonian magazine, “I’d rather have my teeth pulled out without anesthesia” than live in Texas. As of January 2018, she claimed Washington, DC to be her primary residence in order to get a tax break. And she has paid her husband’s Washington, DC political consulting firm over $50,000 from campaign contributions; meaning 1 of every 6 dollars raised has gone to her husband’s DC company.

PROOF POINTS

Moser just moved to Texas from Washington, DC.

In a November 2014 article, Moser said she’d rather have her “teeth pulled without anesthesia” than live in Texas.

As of January 2018, Moser was still receiving the DC Homestead Exemption on her property in Washington, DC.

In 2017, Moser paid over $50,000 in campaign money to her husband’s DC consulting firm. More than 1 of every 6 dollars spent by her campaign went straight into her husband’s DC company’s bank account.

A progressive member of Congress told us that what the DCCC had done was "shocking to me. Apart from the unfairness of it, what if she wins anyway? They’ve kneecapped her. Didn’t they notice what happened when McConnell spent $7 million against Roy Moore, and then he became the nominee?"

And, indeed, along came the primary and Laura came out as one of the two winners for the runoff. The DCCC is now in the awkward position of supporting an anti-union conservative against her. And that wasn't all that went wrong for the DCCC that day, when their biggest bet was in TX-23 and on Jay Hulings, a right-of-center dull corporate shill endorsed not just by the DCCC but also by the Blue Dogs, the New Dems, the Castro San Antonio political machine and every corrupt surrogate the DCCC could round up. Again, no one won outright and the nomination to face GOP incumbent Will Hurd in November will go to a May 22 primary runoff. But Hulings won't be in that runoff. He came in 4th with just 15.04% (6,584 votes). Yep, the DCCC failed again-- and spectacularly so. Hulings spent the most money of course-- $554,903. Progressive Berniecrat Rick Treviño spent $20,417, $2.64 per vote, the least of any candidate in the primary, and ignoring the DCCC and the DC Democratic establishment entirely, running a race that was 100% about people in his district, not about lobbyists and consultants, not about Steny Hoyer or Nancy Pelosi or the DCCC or the Blue Dogs and New Dems and not about any of the typical establishment corruption that makes Americans hate the two DC political parties. Treviño is the TX-23 candidate, not a hand-picked Washington DC puppet. [And no, he's not the country singer of the same name, just a fan of his music.]

Matty Yglesias published a post that week in Vox, The DCCC should chill out and do less to try to pick Democrats’ nominees, based on looking at a serially-failed, utterly dysfunctional operation-- the DCCC. The fools at the DCCC don't understand that their ham-fisted interference in the TX-07 race handed a win to Laura Moser and that they "instantly turned a vote for her into a symbolic rejection of the party establishment." The DCCC is loved by corrupt lobbyists and contemptible DC-insiders but Pelosi and Hoyer and their teams don't understand that America hates those people-- and hates them as well. Congress has an astoundingly low approval rating; the DCCC (and NRCC) have even lower approval. And they've earned it. "Moser," wrote Yglesias, "will be the underdog, though she certainly might win. And if she does, it’s likely the DCCC will take its toys and go home. As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters from the Austin American-Statesman in February, 'We have to be cold-blooded in what we do. In other words, if the wrong person wins-- well, nobody’s wrong-- but if the person who can’t win, wins, it’s not a priority race for us anymore, because we’ve got 100 races.' This is a perfect statement of the standard Washington political professional’s view of how to target resources-- some candidates are electable and some aren’t, and it’s a waste of time to back the ones who aren’t. But to walk away from TX-7 or other purplish seats based on the identity of the nominee would be a serious mistake. Targeting resources is reasonable, but so is humility about one’s ability to foresee the future. That attacks on Moser backfired is a reminder that the political judgment of the pros in Washington is flawed, and both narrative history and broad quantitative research shows that their ability to accurately identify which races are winnable and which candidates are worth backing is sharply limited."

Looking for a solution back in February we suggested that Pelosi should no longer have any connection to the DCCC. Nor should Hoyer. The only DCCC regional vice chair who is doing his job properly-- and neutrally-- is Ted Lieu. He should be elected DCCC chairman (if not party leader, our preference).

This week, in light of the Hoyer revelations, Katherine Krueger published a post in Splinter News: Nancy Pelosi Says Democrats Intervening to Prop Up Bad Centrists in Primaries Is Just Fine. "For Nancy Pelosi," she wrote, "the way Democrats do business—which, particularly in the run-up to the 2018 midterms, has meant redoubling its efforts to hobble left wing challengers to establishment candidates-- is A-OK with her."

Pelosi told reporters at her weekly news conference on Thursday that these thing are just “the realities of life” in politics. Her comments came after the Intercept published audio today of Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer urging a progressive candidate in Colorado to drop out of a hotly contested race.

During that meeting, Hoyer told Levi Tillemann-- a green energy entrepreneur running in Colorado’s 6th District who supports policies popular with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party-- in no uncertain terms that he should step aside now. The party, he said, had long ago decided to back Jason Crow, a veteran and more centrist candidate, in the primary.

...If you’re the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, it’s just “not very smart strategy” to sit back and let the voters decide who should be on the ballot. And, as both they and Tillemann know, this is an important race: as a blue-leaning district that elected a Republican to the House while going for Hillary Clinton in 2016, it’s a top target for the Dems to flip come November.

On Thursday, Pelosi said Hoyer had done nothing wrong. “In terms of candidates and campaigns, I don’t see anything inappropriate in what Mr. Hoyer was engaged in-- a conversation about the realities of life in the race as to who can make the general election,” she said.

...The DCCC has been committed for some time to the project of weeding out the “bad” (read: popular with voters, politically progressive) candidates from the bunch in favor of the more centrist, establishment, corporate types they think make voters’ hearts stir. Wrong! There is scant evidence to support the notion that the Democrats are very good at picking candidates at all; in a number of races, the party has actually chosen to back losers who fit their mold instead of backing anyone who might push the party toward the left. This is a travesty, and one that means they’ll only keep losing until they give the power back to voters.

The thermometer just above is about independent-minded progressive candidates, not DCCC corporate shills. Please consider contributing what you can to candidates who will help usher in a new era in Democratic politics, one without Hoyer's and Pelosis.