Gina Raimondo Is Not A Moderate But Frank Bruni Sure Hates Progressives

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is a mainstream Democrat who was reelected in November with 231,477 votes (61.5%) against Republican Robert Flanders, who took 6 of Rhode Island's 39 municipalities. Frank Bruni's distorted puff piece on Rhode Island's right-of-center crooked governor, Gina Raimondo-- The Loneliness Of The Moderate Democrat didn't mention Whitehouse, only that Raimondo had been "reelected by a margin of more than 15 percentage points." She took 196,977 votes, significantly fewer than the normal Democrat won with. But that didn't fit Bruni's dishonest narrative. So why mention it? Bruni's whole twisted piece was deceptive, an attempt to paint the Republican wing of the Democratic Party heroic. Worst of all, he was happy to confuse "corrupt" and "right-of-center" with "moderate, saddened she isn't running for president." He bales that she "won her primary against a progressive rival by more than 20 points, then trounced her Republican opponent in the general election, 52.8% to 37.3%. No mention by Bruni that Obama won it both times he ran with over 62%-- just a little better Gore (61%) and Kerry (59.4%)-- and that even Hillary did better than her with 54.4%. 52.8% for a Democrat in Rhode island is pretty bad. Senator John Reed won his seat last time he was reelected with over 70%.

Also no mention that she spent over $7 million, to Republican Allan Fung's $2.3 million. Independent outside spending for her was at least $5.5 million more, compared to just $1.8 million for Fung. Her primary challenger, Matt Brown, was also swamped by her flood of corporate money. Last year The Intercept's Aída Chávez did a much better job of reporting truthfully than Bruni did for The Times.

Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo is working to fend off a progressive, albeit underfunded, primary challenge from the left. Matt Brown, a former Rhode Island secretary of state, is running a grassroots campaign against Raimondo, who he describes as “the most extreme corporatist Democrat in the country.”

The Democratic Governors Association has pumped in $1 million to support Raimondo, money that won’t be available for Georgia, Florida, or Maryland. EMILY’s List, which helps elect pro-choice women, jumped in as well, spending $345,000 on pre-primary mailers for the incumbent. Although Raimondo presents herself as pro-choice, she was criticized by reproductive rights advocates for passing what amounted to restrictions on abortion access during her first term in office and is listed as “mixed-choice” by NARAL Pro-Choice America.

A July survey found Raimondo with a 40 percent job approval rating among the general public and 58 percent among Democrats. That dropped to 29 percent among independents, who are legally allowed to vote in Wednesday’s primary.

Raimondo, a former venture capitalist, has raised nearly $7.8 million for her re-election, raking in much of her fundraising from the same corporate players responsible for the state’s fiscal problems. The claim of “most extreme corporatist” may sound like hyperbole, but as state treasurer, Raimondo touched off a scandal by pushing through pension reform legislation that handed a billion dollars of state worker money over to hedge funds with links to the conservative movement, which harvested eye-popping fees.

...Raimondo’s head-to-head polling calls into question the conventional argument that centrist or pro-corporate candidates deserve support because they are more electable. “She’s taken millions in campaign contributions from Wall Street, fossil fuel industry, tobacco industry, lobbyists, corporations, tax breaks, and benefits from the state,” Brown said in an interview. “And she has, I think, raised a total of $7 million dollars now for this race and yet, as you point out, still a large majority of Rhode Islanders are looking for a different candidate with a different vision.”

Throughout her political career, Raimondo has also received thousands of dollars from the family that owns Purdue Pharma, a company widely blamed for fueling the opioid epidemic.

Brown’s campaign has sworn off corporate political action committee money, relying instead on individual contributions. The campaign boasts hundreds of volunteers that knock on doors and hold phone-banking sessions. In the first two months of the campaign, he said, they held over 70 events all across the state, “in people’s living rooms, talking to their friends and neighbors.” As for his policies, he’s running on “Medicare for All,” the creation of a public bank, tuition-free college, undoing Raimondo’s cuts to Medicaid, and a “Green New Deal.”

...Raimondo has refused to participate in even a single debate with her primary opponent. “She has funded her campaign with millions of dollars from Wall Street and corporations in an attempt to buy the election, while doing no debates with me about our records and our visions for the state,” Brown said. “So, it’s really-- the kind of campaign she’s running is not democracy.” Raimondo told the Providence Journal she skipped out on debating because Brown is “not operating in good faith,” accusing him of telling lies.

The only conclusion one can come to when a candidate avoids debate, Brown said, is that the candidate has an indefensible record. “And in her case, it’s a record of always working for Wall Street and corporations at the expense of the people. It’s a record of cutting Medicaid and giving out corporate giveaways, handouts, out to handpicked corporations that are often her campaign donors,” he continued.

“It’s a record of taking money from the executives of a gas company and then turning around and announcing that we’re going to do ‘whatever we have to to make sure we’re successful here at building a fracked gas and diesel oil burning plant in Rhode Island,’ which would be bad for everyone in the state, bad for our future, bad for our children. The only one it’s good for is the corporation. The fracked gas corporation, they’d make a bundle off Rhode Islanders, and Gov. Raimondo gets campaign contributions from them in return.”

Frank Bruni looked at that pile of congealed puke and calls it "moderate" and just could not wait to bash Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his shameless and misleading propaganda column. "She can't tweet worth a damn," he wrote, "and the same goes for Instagram. She winces at talk of a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent and cringes at the growing use of 'corporatist' as a slur against Democratic politicians deemed too cozy with business interests. She thinks that big companies often need to be prodded forcefully to do right by their employees, but that it’s bad policy and bad politics to paint them as the enemy." No one will ever confuse Gina Raimondo with an enemy of Big Business; no need to worry about that. She's an old style conservative who even hates the idea of a minimum wage for workers.

She recalled an exchange with college students not long ago. One of them said: “I get who you are. You’re one of those spineless centrists.”

“And I was like, ‘Excuse me?’,” she said. “It takes a lot of spine to be a centrist in America today. You get whacked from the left and whacked from the right. That’s my life. I get whacked.”

Moderate Democrats have certainly had their day and their sway. In fact the passions of the left arise in part from how much compromise there has been-- and here we are stuck with Donald Trump. The rage of less moderate Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is earned and righteous. And Raimondo said precisely that to me.

But Ocasio-Cortez is by no means the whole of the Democratic Party. And is the leftward lurch that she personifies the best and safest bet for 2020? I worry, because there’s no political priority higher than limiting Trump to one term. Raimondo also worries-- a lot.

“So many Democrats just assume we’re going to win,” she said. “They underestimate how hard it’s going to be.” And it might be a serious tactical mistake, she added, to nominate any candidate who seems to be at war with capitalism itself or entertains the idea of a guaranteed minimum income.

“We have become the party that is anti-business,” she told me. “We need to be the party of work.”

She acknowledged that “the system we have today is totally broken.” She cited grotesque income inequality. She noted that too many Americans have no economic security and no prospects for achieving it.

“But I fall in the camp of: Let’s fix it,” she said. “Let’s embrace business to come to the table. Someone needs to make the case that it’s in the best interest of businesses and wealthy people to be better corporate citizens. Pay for health care. Help people get their college degree. Pay for job training.”

Along those lines, she recently proposed that companies doing business in Rhode Island be taxed up to $1,500 annually for every employee who is enrolled in Medicaid because he or she can’t get health insurance through a company-sponsored plan. “I hope that they’re embarrassed,” she said.

But, she added, “Where I think we are at risk is if all we do is beat up and crap on businesses.”

Sound like a Republican to you? Even Bruni admits her right-wing bullshit is "an exaggeration of where the party is." But he forgives her instantly for it; "I take her point." He sure does. He goes on the moan that "The media attention to full-throttle progressives among newly elected House Democrats is disproportionate to their numbers, and it sometimes obscures a sizable, practical middle. Besides, their more moderate peers are the ones who wrested seats from Republicans in districts that, like America, aren’t deep red or emphatically blue. 'I don’t think the lefties can win a general election,' Raimondo said. But, she conceded, 'Who knows? I’m not running in 2020. I could have missed the boat.'"

David Segal, a former Green Party city councilman who later joined the Democrats, represented East Providence in the state House and founded Rhode Island's Progressive Caucus, told us that "Decades of neoliberal policies that assume we should outsource political decisions to 'the market' have ruined untold millions of lives and left our democracy strained. Just as a consensus is emerging that we must act to systematically reform our political economy by instituting a new, progressive social contract, implementing state programs that provide for the general welfare, and undermining the power of this generation's robber barons, my governor gains praise in the paper of record by asserting that we should solve of nation's vast problems by begging our corporate overlords for more crumbs. It's appalling, but in the context of Raimondo's record of subservience to Wall Street and the donor class, it is anything but surprising."