Reactionary Blue Dogs And Wall Street-Owned Corporate Dems Want You To Know They're Not Socialists

Blue Dog Max Rose and progressive Democrat Ilhan Omar

It should be no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention that the Republicans are going to run against Democrats next year by asserting they're all "socialists" who want to turn the U.S. into Venezuela. I asked Alan Grayson about the problem that Democratic candidates will be facing as they endeavor to combat these pernicious tactics. He told me he sees it as "part of a conscious propaganda strategy in demonizing Democrats, formerly known as McCarthyism. One side of the coin is decrying real news as 'fake news,' and the other side of the coin is slinging fake metaphors as real metaphors. Republican shills have weaponized analogies, trying to play upon a cognitive bias called 'illusory correlation.' Similes aren’t always similar. Not everything is like everything else. Likes can be deceiving."

The other, day Dave Weigel's Washington Post column mentioned that conservative Democrats want their constituents to know that they're not socialists. Blue Dog Max Rose has accrued a ProgressivePunch "F" since coming to Congress. Only 12 freshman Dems have worse voting records so far. And none of them want anyone to think they're socialists. No one will. These are all corporate Dems with natural affinities to Wall Street, not to working families.

At Rose's first town hall a Republican lawyer accused the Democratic Party of becoming "a forum for anti-Semitism" and left-wing extremism, causing Rose to pivot into throwing Ilhan Omar under the bus: "I have to make a confession: I’m not a socialist. I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m the person who you all elected, and there are members of the Democratic Party who have said things I vehemently oppose. I was the first member of the Democratic Party to come out and criticize someone who, I believed, had made an anti-Semitic comment."

There was a brief and loud round of applause; Rose did not need to mention that he was talking about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). The congressman, who ran nine points ahead of Hillary Clinton to win the swingy 11th Congressional District, did so as a moderate [the Post and its writes purposefully term even the most conservative, right-wing Democrats "moderates'] with a military record who would not take orders from his party. Rose, who is Jewish, told the audience that he had joined Democrats in condemning "acts of hate, acts of divisiveness, no matter where they came from" but that he would criticize his peers when they deserved it.

“The Democratic Party is a big tent, isn’t it?” he asked, rhetorically. “They’ve kept it interesting for me.”

It was a nice way to describe a problem that dozens of House Democrats are confronting every time they head home. Rose, one of the 41 Democrats who flipped Republican-held seats last year, is near the top of the GOP’s list of 2020 targets. The president’s party has signaled that it will run against the Democrats’ left, represented less by its White House hopefuls than by stars like Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). This week, the first real congressional recess of the year, is seeing the first test of that strategy, as new Democrats with strong local images get asked about those other Democrats-- the ones constantly on their TV screens.

At this stage in any congressional cycle, the party committees like to dream big. The Republicans’ target list includes not just the 31 Democrats whose districts backed the president in 2016, but also Democrats whose districts voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. After watching dozens of competent Republicans fail to separate themselves from Trump, they are betting that vulnerable Democrats will not be able to distance themselves from the party’s energized left.

The essential epithet, borrowed from the president, is “socialist”-- a press memo from the National Republican Congressional Committee last week used the phrase “socialist Democrats” no less than 21 times. And Republicans have gotten unexpected air cover from former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, who has roamed the country threatening to run a centrist campaign for president because of the "mainstreaming of socialism" inside the Democratic Party.

The evidence from some of the new Democrats’ town hall meetings is that the message has broken through, with a caveat-- new members from swing districts are happy to separate themselves from the party’s left. At a Sunday town hall meeting in Virginia’s 10th District, Rep. Jennifer Wexton, one of the Democrats who flipped a seat in 2018, got questions on “anti-Semitism,” why more Democrats did not applaud the president during his State of the Union address, why Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) had not resigned over revelations that he wore blackface and had a picture of a Klansman outfit in his medical school yearbook, and even why she hung a transgender flag outside of her office instead of a flag raising awareness of American prisoners of war.

“I chose to hang the transgender flag because that’s a community that’s been under attack,” Wexton said. The man who asked the question and had been recording her answer, packed up and left in a huff.

The hot-button questions did not dominate Wexton’s town hall; the only obviously organized groups that attended represented the health-care and disability rights group Little Lobbyists and the gun-safety group Moms Demand Action, both of which she had supported in the past. The diverse and highly educated 10th District has trended strongly Democratic since it was drawn, and Wexton is not seen as one of the most vulnerable new Democrats.

Even so, the Republican plan of attack against Wexton has been to blur any differences between her and the high-profile left-wing members who dominated the last month of news about the House. An NRCC digital ad running in the district asks if Wexton would impeach the president-- not because he is popular in Northern Virginia, but because Republicans see a chance to define the low-key congresswoman before she can define herself.

“I represent the interests of my constituents,” Wexton said after the town hall. “I know that we hear a lot in the press about certain other people in our class, but each of us has our own agenda and our own constituents that we’re out here representing.”

Rose, whose constituents have voted Republican in recent elections, is in a trickier spot. He was one of the first new Democrats to draw a credible Republican opponent-- Nicole Malliotakis, a member of the state assembly who lopsidedly lost a 2017 run for New York  mayor but carried Staten Island.

In an interview, Malliotakis repeatedly called Rose a “Park Slope liberal” who had won only because a nasty 2018 primary weakened the Republican incumbent. (Rose was raised in that part of Brooklyn, but when his 2018 opponent brought it up, the Democrat said he would have moved to Staten Island sooner, had he not been serving in Afghanistan.) Sure, he criticized Omar, said Malliotakis-- but he voted with her more often than not, and he didn’t call for her to be bounced from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“I’m running against Max and the entire crop of new progressives who have come into the Congress who are trying to move the country toward socialism,” she said. “I thought it was great when he denounced Ilhan Omar, but I was disappointed later that day when he called her a friend with whom he shares values. I think the people of this district deserve to know what values he's referring to.”

Over 90 minutes in a Staten Island church, Rose didn’t distance himself from the Democratic Party. He excoriated the president for leaving the Paris climate accords; he pledged to protect the Affordable Care Act; he stood his ground against a constituent angry that he had opposed a Republican amendment to the Democrats’ omnibus voting rights bill, which would have prevented undocumented immigrants from voting in any election, federal or local. (They already are banned.)

“A lot of people are afraid to actually vote to drain the swamp, so they decided to play games,” Rose said.

But Rose also jumped at the chance to distance himself from the party’s far left. He defended his vote for a different Republican amendment, to the Democrats’ popular background checks bill, which required gun sellers to notify ICE, the immigraiton enforcement agency, if undocumented immigrants tried to make a purchase, by saying that "if someone is buying a weapon who shouldn’t be, authorities should be notified." That did not change his opposition to some of ICE's tactics, he said.

And Rose-- like Wexton-- was dismissive toward the Green New Deal, a climate-change measure proposed by Ocasio-Cortez. Wexton called it an “aspirational” document that didn’t have enough details for her; Rose, just miles from Ocasio-Cortez’s district, said that he wanted to “transition responsibly to a carbon-free economy" and that the major left-wing project of 2019 did not work for him.

“The Green New Deal in so many ways takes a socialist economic agenda, and puts it under the veil of environmentalism,” he said. “That’s not who I am. That’s never who I was. That’s why I’m not a signatory to the Green New Deal-- but, give me a plan to tackle climate change, and I’ll be the first one to sign on.”

I hope Rose understands that it doesn't matter to the Republicans if he supports the ultra-popular Green New Deal or not; they'll blanket the airwaves implying he's a socialist-- and worse-- anyway. No mention in his town hall about the accomplishments of the last president the GOP continuously attacked as a socialist: FDR.

Weigel wrote that "To get to Congress, Rose had dispatched a number of more left-wing challengers" but didn't bother mentioning that the DCCC and Democratic establishment backed Rose and did everything they could to bury the other candidates.

Mike Siegel is a candidate running in a red Texas district, TX-10, that Obama lost both times and where Trump beat Hillary by about 9 points. Last year only 4 points separated Mike and the entrenched GOP incumbent, Michael McCaul. Rose may be afraid of his R+3 district but Siegel is in love with his R+9 district and feel confident he can flip it in 2020 with a strong populist message tailored very much for Texas voters. And he has no fear of the GOP's strategy of calling every Democrat-- the conservatives and the progressives-- "socialists."

At a campaign event with Ted Lieu last night, Mike told the crowd that "according to the GOP, Social Security is a 'socialist' program. Medicare and Medicaid, too. Basically, any program that cares for the poor, for the elderly, for those needing a little extra help to have a fair shot at success. When Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple, and gave alms to the poor and sick, I guess that was 'socialist' too. But it's not 'socialist' when megacorporations, whether Big Tech or Big Oil, get hundreds of millions in subsidies from the American taxpayers. The good thing about this Republican fear-mongering is that at a certain point voters tune it out, and it loses its effect. My plan is to run on a strong progressive platform that serves the needs of the people of the Texas 10th Congressional District. The Republicans refused Medicaid expansion in Texas, and as a result we have rural hospitals closing and sky-high maternal mortality rates. The alternative I support is a commitment to universal healthcare, in the form of Medicare For All. The Republican budget would cut just about every essential social program to pay for tax cuts for the rich. We will campaign on a program of caring for people, not corporations."

Anyone who would like to help Mike bring this message to central Texas, please consider contributing by clicking on the Turning Texas Blue thermometer on the right.