The Future Of The Democratic Party Is... That Way!

Which way? The way Status Quo Joe and Mayo Pete (and Schumer, Pelosi and Hoyer) are pointing? Or the way Bernie, and to a lesser degree, Elizabeth (and AOC, Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal) are pointing? 2020 looks like a real cross roads for the Democratic Party and if the DNC is seen as stealing the nomination from Bernie again will that big tent be able to withstand the violence and depth of the rift? I want to point to two essays this evening-- one by David Freedlander for New York Magazine: One Year in Washington-- Alexandria Ocasio Cortez Reshaped Her Party's Agenda, Resucitated Bernie Sanders' Campaign, And Hardly Has a Friend In Town, and one by Hanna Trudo for the Daily Beast: Obamaworld Hates Bernie—and Has No Idea How to Stop Him. Let's begin with the latter and then end with the former.

"Former President Barack Obama’s top lieutenants," wrote Trudo, "are eager to poke every conceivable hole in Bernie Sanders’ resurgent bid for the Democratic nomination. But ask about a coordinated effort to stop his ascending campaign and you’ll get crickets. Less than a month before voting begins, Obama has declined to offer a preferred pick to take on President Trump in 2020, only occasionally waxing philosophical about the perils of moving too far left and reminding voters to be 'rooted in reality' when exploring nominee options. But as Sanders gained new flashes of traction in recent weeks, the former president’s lack of official guidance to halt his momentum, and the scattering of his inner circle to rival campaigns, have hampered any meaningful NeverBernie movement. Indeed, the most striking aspect of Obamaworld’s response to Sanders on the rise-- flush with cash, an uptick in the polls, and unusually frequent hat tips about the merits of his character from his rivals-- is the lack of a cohesive one."

The RealClearPolitics polling averages today show Bernie in the top spot going into the Iowa caucuses next month:

• Bernie- 22.0%
• Mayo Pete- 21.7%
• Status Quo Joe- 20.3%
• Elizabeth- 15.3%

and Bernie in the top spot in New Hampshire, the country's first primary:

• Bernie- 22.7%
• Status Quo Joe- 18.7%
• Mayo Pete- 17.7%
• Elizabeth- 14.7%

ObamaWorld-- often better described as ClintonWorld to included wretched and despised neo-con figures like Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Neera Tanden-- has some magical thinking going on, namely that Bernie will flame out on his own. People like Emanuel, Wasserman Schultz and Tanden are inherently incapable of ever quite understanding the "us not me" aspect of the Bernie campaign.

Privately, Obama has reportedly acknowledged problems with Sanders’ vision for the country. In November, Politico reported that the former president once said that if it looked like the senator were close to winning the nomination, he would speak up in some capacity to help stop that from happening. A spokesperson later muddied the waters when asked about the comment by the outlet, saying that Obama would support the nominee. Still, Obama’s rare public statements give a glimpse into his thinking about Sanders 2020.

Speaking to Washington donors in in November, Obama cautioned against placing too much stock into “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party.”

“Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality,” he said. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”

Sanders, who built both of his presidential campaigns around the notion of a “political revolution,” is explicit in his intent to restructure major swaths of America’s governing systems. His most fervent legislative push, a universal health-care pitch in the form of Medicare for All, has dominated much of the Democratic primary discourse. And while Sanders’ campaign, which did not respond to a request for comment on this story, views his progressive health-care position as one of the strengths of his candidacy, others see it as one of the biggest points of contention, evoking tense flashbacks.

Heading into the 2012 re-election campaign, one top Obama ally recalled how “the most vocal opposition came from not just Sen. Sanders but the folks that are currently leading his campaign” over health care. “I don’t think anyone has forgotten that,” the source said.

Still, with just 28 days before voting begins in earnest, Sanders has shown more sustained momentum—boosted by a coveted endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), strong showings in several early-state surveys, and hundreds of thousands of new donors. And, as the Daily Beast reported, his competitors have so far failed to lay a glove on him in a meaningful way during the first several Democratic debates. He is one of only five contenders to qualify for the upcoming debate in Des Moines.

The fact that Sanders has enough money and apparent support to compete well beyond the first few early contests and through Super Tuesday, the marquee, delegate-rich event in March, has caused other former Obama hands to take note.

“Bernie Sanders' chances of winning the nomination are being underestimated and under-discussed. He might be the candidate with the best chance to sweep IA, NH, NV before we ever get to South Carolina,” Dan Pfeiffer, one of Obama’s former senior advisers, wrote last month, linking to a Monmouth University national poll that placed Sanders at 21 percent, behind Biden’s 26.

Now, that gap in several early states is even narrower. A pair of new CBS News/YouGov polls released on Sunday show Sanders leading the pack in New Hampshire, earning 27 percent, with nearly half of his voters in the Granite State saying they have definitely made up their minds. In Iowa, the Vermont senator is in a three-way tie with Biden and Buttigeig at 23 percent.

Still, Sanders would have to beat out every other viable contender, several within striking distance of each other in polling averages, for the chance to face off against Trump. And as Iowa’s Feb. 3 caucus approaches, multiple sources speculated there are risks in running an electability-based argument against Trump in the midst of the Democratic primary before voters have cast their first ballots.

“The strongest argument against Bernie will be showing that you can defeat Donald Trump,” one Obamaworld source projected. “And he cannot.”

Trudo mentioned AOC twice. The world Freedlander paints in his essay is AOC-World, not ObamaWorld. "Dear AOC. Continue to scare old white men" reads one paean he mentions in his intro to the woman he notes is "perhaps the most significant political figure in the Democratic Party in the age of Trump. She was recently ranked the fourth-most-tweeted-about politician in the world, beating out every Democrat running for president... As the rest of the world has changed, Congress remains a place of traditions. Even the chaos merchants-- the Ted Cruzes and Rand Pauls and tricornered tea-party Republican congressmen-- still end up playing by the rules as laid out by the leadership. Ocasio-Cortez, at least so far, has not. She is at once a movement politician and a cultural phenomenon, someone equally at home on CSPAN and Desus & Mero. She isn’t especially interested in compromising with those who don’t share her values, and isn’t afraid to be the lone 'no' vote, as she was last January, when she was the only Democrat to vote against funding the government because it meant continuing to fund ICE. Twelve months later, it is clear she isn’t trying very hard to amass power in Congress. Her heroes are Bernie Sanders, who withstood party pressure decade after decade in the Senate, and Howard Thurman, a mentor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s who believed in merging the spiritual and political." When Freedlander first met her during the campaign, he noted that she "saw politics as a rigged system that preserved the careers of those in power at the expense of the poor and working class."

The Democratic congressional majority, she told me, is too acquiescent to the demands of its members in so-called red-to-blue districts — those moderates who flipped Republican seats and gave Pelosi the gavel. “For so long, when I first got in, people were like, ‘Oh, are you going to basically be a tea party of the left?’ And what people don’t realize is that there is a tea party of the left, but it’s on the right edges, the most conservative parts of the Democratic Party. So the Democratic Party has a role to play in this problem, and it’s like we’re not allowed to talk about it. We’re not allowed to talk about anything wrong the Democratic Party does,” she said. “I think I have created more room for dissent, and we’re learning to stretch our wings a little bit on the left.”

Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the first politician to become a cultural sensation, but she may be the first to do so at the very beginning of her career, when she is occupying the lowest rung of political power. Her main project going forward may be this: harnessing her immense star power and the legion of young lefties who see her as their avatar, not just to push the Democratic Party away from an obsession with its most moderate members but also to make the stuff of government, like congressional committee hearings and neighborhood town halls, into must-see TV. She said the Congressional Progressive Caucus should start kicking people out if they stray too far from the party line. Other caucuses within the Democratic Party in Congress require applications, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out. But “they let anybody who the cat dragged in call themselves a progressive. There’s no standard,” she said.

The same goes for the party as a whole: “Democrats can be too big of a tent.”

It is comments like that that kept Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Democratic Party from reaching any kind of meaningful détente. I asked her what she thought her role would be as a member of Congress during, for instance, a Joe Biden presidency. “Oh God,” she said with a groan. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”

...If she was a hero on the streets of New York and online, in Congress, “it was very, very chilly coming in,” she said. Joe Crowley was an old-school Irish pol who slapped backs and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his peers. He was a conventional Democrat and congressman, and his replacement had tarred him as hopelessly compromised (for raising money from corporations and pharmaceutical interests); as a creature of Washington who lacked vision, courage, and a moral core. Would she do the same to her colleagues?

The fears of what Ocasio-Cortez would mean were present even before she was sworn in, when she swung by a sit-in in Speaker Pelosi’s office for the environmentalist group Sunrise Movement; she wanted the soon-to-be Speaker to push for a “Green New Deal.” Other members of “the Squad”-- the group she created with Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib when she posted an Instagram of them together on orientation day-- were supposed to join her but begged off, and even Ocasio-Cortez’s staff were on the phone with allies moments before, wondering if it was a good idea.

“I was terrified,” she told me. She doesn’t regret it-- though it set the stage for a very complicated year with Pelosi. “I learned a lot about how fear shapes the decisions of elected officials: ‘I know this could be bad, and this could make someone mad, and I don’t know exactly how they would drop the hammer on me or what hammers would be dropped.’ It felt like the right thing to do, and when you say that people think it’s a form of naïveté and that it’s childish, but I don’t think it was.”

Ocasio-Cortez backed Pelosi for Speaker, but the two continued to battle publicly. It wasn’t just that they disagreed about policy: Pelosi thinks in terms of votes, of what any member can bring to the table and who they can bring with them. Preserving the Democratic majority means protecting the party’s most vulnerable members, those in places where people still like Donald Trump and the Democrat may have won by just a few hundred votes in the midterm-- exactly the group that Ocasio-Cortez thinks the party doesn’t need.

That the freshman didn’t have a meaningful coalition behind her and had alienated some natural allies didn’t seem to give her pause. The Congressional Black Caucus, in particular, was put off by her association with Justice Democrats, the young campaign operatives-- co-founded by Ocasio-Cortez’s then chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti-- who powered her win and have made it their mission to replace the Democratic Party’s moderates with a younger and more liberal group of lawmakers. Black lawmakers believed (not entirely incorrectly) that this meant the group was coming for some of them. In the press, CBC members accused Justice Democrats of being privileged gentrifiers with little respect for what it had taken them to gain political power.

The conflict came to a head in the summer of 2019, when Chakrabarti accused moderate members of the caucus on Twitter of acting like segregationist Democrats of the civil-rights era. Democratic leadership pounced online, suggesting that Chakrabarti was a racist for singling out lawmakers of color. After Donald Trump jumped into the fray (of course), Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez had a closed-door meeting. Chakrabarti left soon after, as did another top aide, Corbin Trent, who had been with Ocasio-Cortez since the campaign. Pelosi has never spoken in public about what was said at the meeting; Ocasio-Cortez told me that the two staffers had planned to leave anyway. (They did not go far from her orbit, Chakrabarti to the progressive think tank New Consensus and Trent to her 2020 campaign.)

The fracas forced Ocasio-Cortez to ask, What does this movement look like, and what is my role in it?

“What was frustrating was getting singled out over and over again over a series of interviews by the Democratic leadership,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. She said that her colleagues consider her an unseen force in every primary this cycle, when in fact she has made endorsements in just two races. Meanwhile, it is the moderates who have put up more challengers to liberal incumbents than the other way around. “As a consequence of my victory, many people are inspired to run for office, and in a body where 70 percent of the seats are safe red or safe blue, that de facto means a lot more primaries. A lot of members think I’m like a Koch brother.”

House leadership sees the past summer as having been a turning point and believes that Ocasio-Cortez is now sufficiently chastened. She’s showed up for the job she was elected to do-- coming prepared to committee meetings and hearings (like when she cornered Mark Zuckerberg on running misleading ads on Facebook), sponsoring 15 pieces of legislation (most notably the Green New Deal), and missing only two of 701 roll-call votes. I spoke with dozens of House and New York City governmental officials, some of whom disagree with her politics and have reason to dislike her personally, and they all said that she shows up to meetings unusually attentive, taking notes and asking detailed questions and writing personal follow-up emails. That even in House caucus meetings, as members call one another “Congressman this” or “Congresswoman that” but casually call her “Alexandria,” she gets to know her ideological enemies’ home lives and interests.

“There are people here who are never going to like her, never going to trust her, who are always going to be worried that she is going to turn her people against them,” says one House aide. “But you can’t say she isn’t making an effort. I think people are surprised at how not-strident she comes off.”

Still, even Democrats who are supportive of Ocasio-Cortez’s political project wonder how much enthusiasm there will be for it during an election year. It is one thing to reform a party out of power; it is another when the party is trying to unify for the most consequential election year in memory. Dissident factions could prove deadly to Democratic efforts to retake the White House. Should the party succeed, even with (very optimistically) a slight majority in the Senate, the chances of getting anything passed could easily get bogged down in partisan infighting.

“No one gets all of his or her way,” Congressman Gregory Meeks, Crowley’s replacement as head of the Queens Democratic Party, told me recently. “You have to learn quickly; otherwise, you will be in the minority and you will be as relevant as that windowpane. Do you want to be able to just talk a lot or do you want to be able to do something?” If you are a hard “no” in Congress, eventually people will stop asking for your vote. You don’t need to be negotiated with because everyone already knows the answer, and-- most of the time-- this means your voice is marginalized.

Ocasio-Cortez’s opponents in the Democratic Party want this to be her fate. “This is how it works here: You negotiate a concession in exchange for a vote. But you have to have the votes and you have to be willing to negotiate,” says one House aide friendly to Ocasio-Cortez. “She says she is an organizer, but you have to be willing to organize in the caucus as well as outside it.”

Opponents point to the fact that early in her tenure, rather than using her prodigious public influence to push for a climate bill that had 71 co-sponsors and would have kept the country in the Paris climate accords, she unveiled the Green New Deal. A draft of the resolution was mistakenly released early, and critics jumped on vague language in it to accuse the new congresswoman of wanting to ban beef and air travel and to give free money to people who don’t work.

But it is still the biggest achievement of her term, a rebuke to the idea that leverage is the only power in town. The Green New Deal, for all its vagueness-- it was a resolution and a statement of principles and not a piece of legislation-- set up a new tentpole in the debate. More than a hundred Democrats signed on as co-sponsors, including a handful of moderates whom House progressives have been trying to push left for years, as did every major contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, including Joe Biden.

“The most ambitious climate plans were a carbon tax here or a biodiesel thing there. There were no climate bills that were a solution on the scale of the problem. I couldn’t take all of this and say, ‘Let’s get a 10 percent subsidy on electric vehicles,’ ” Ocasio-Cortez said. “These very small incremental plans are a form of denialism.”

...It is clear there is a shift happening in American politics, one that favors Ocasio-Cortez’s long-term prospects. Trump’s demagogic populism is a part of it, and so is the fact that Americans ages 18 to 24 are more favorably inclined toward socialism than capitalism, that 80 percent of young people think the federal government should address climate change, that over 70 percent say the wealthy should pay higher taxes, and that some of the highest percentages ever recorded call their politics far left or liberal. Post-millennials are majority nonwhite in 13 states and in nearly 40 percent of the nation’s largest metro areas; they are close to majority nonwhite nationwide. Sanders leads by large margins among the young, but also fares better than almost any Democrat against Donald Trump-- proof, perhaps, of millennials’ desire for someone liberal and the heartland’s desire for different political ideas.

And Ocasio-Cortez is all of these things: Latina, liberal, “authentic,” fluent in social media and popular culture. Outspoken lefties have come and gone before, but often they were like Bernie or, before him, Ralph Nader: rumpled, grouchy, hectoring. For leftists, politics used to be something to avoid, a corrupting drag on the purity of activism. Ocasio-Cortez has changed that.

...“Everyone in the House is just constantly thinking about self-preservation, and we don’t get nice things because people are constantly thinking in electoral terms. The way we change that is through political education. I had this conversation with Bernie,” she said. “Here’s this guy in a then-Republican state, a quite conservative state, and he wins by a handful of votes to become mayor of Burlington. And by the time he becomes senator, Vermont is crazy-blue. And a lot of that has to do with his time there. And I said, ‘So how’d you do this?’ And he said that he and different grassroots movements in Vermont spent decades doing political education. And they took on the long-term project of turning a red state blue.”

As political analysis goes, this is a bit specious. Vermont turned blue thanks to a number of sociological and demographic factors greater than any single politician. But it’s also the kind of downfield vision more likely to be expressed by people who work in political organizing than inside the government. It explains a lot about how she acts in Congress. By the time Ocasio-Cortez is as old as Bernie is now, the year will be 2067. The Democratic Party may have immediate needs, but she wants the movement to think in longer time frames.

“Republicans have focused on that long-term project for a very long period of time. Democrats don’t. We think if something is red, it stays red. But you know what? I think if a state like Tennessee or West Virginia can go from blue to red in our lifetime, I think it can go back,” she told me. Justice Democrats are taking aim at another dozen or so incumbents this cycle; if a few more get in, she could build a bloc. “That’s a kind of project that a lot of people think is a waste of time, but I don’t think it is,” she said.

“This whole primary,” she went on, referring to the one Biden and Bernie are in, “is going to be about the soul of the Democratic Party. I think it’s a referendum on whether we think everything was fine before Trump. People who live in a lot of privilege, who think of public programs as charity, they often think there was nothing wrong before Trump. They think Hillary was the problem. But it’s much deeper than that.” And so, on the eve of a primary contest that will train everyone’s attention on the project of unseating the president, Ocasio-Cortez is keeping her focus closer, betting that a purer, bolder Democratic Party is the one this country wants, and can afford.

New Yorkers stick together-- AOC and Nate McMurray

I talk to a lot of candidates; it's what I do between writing posts. I've never heard one say "I want to be just like (majority leader) Steny Hoyer" or "I want to be like (minority leader) Kevin McCarthy." I never heard one say I want to go to Congress and work with Nancy Pelosi to make our country better. Yesterday I asked a few dozen candidates to fill in the blank: "I want to go to Congress and work with _____ to make our country better." Would it surprise you to know that AOC had the most mentions and, in fact, the only candidates who got more than one mention. (Besides AOC the members with multiple mentions were Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal.)