Getting Ready For A Biden Presidency-- It Can't Be As Bad As Trump's Presidency

In an off-the-record talk with a top Florida elected official, I was informed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz no longer has any power inside the Florida Democratic Party. "She has zero influence. The consultants who make money loosing elections have all the influence... The current chair's career experience (Terrie Rizzo) is that she’s a yoga instructor. And the executive director (Juan Peñalosa) was comms director for Joe García's failed reelection campaign and then worked at Mercury, the [sleazy] Republican lobbying firm" (Mar 2015 – Feb 2018). Last week the Biden campaign announced it had taken on Peñalosa as a senior advisor for Florida. Currently Rizzo and Peñalosa are involved in a high octane dispute with dozens of Florida candidates, which comes right on top of a scandal that forced the shabby state party to return at least $780,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) small-business loans after Democratic lawmakers and candidates flipped out over the party's unethical and probably illegal money grab.

As I've said for years, the Florida Democratic Party is saved from being the worst state party in the country by only one thing: the Ohio DemocraticParty, the model of how to destroy a political party from within. Funny that right in the middle of the fight between Peñalosa and the party's grassroots candidates over the way the party squeezes hard-pressed campaigns for VAN access, making it close to impossible for working-class candidates to run in Florida and the shady PPP scam, the Biden camp decides to hire Peñalosa.

"This," a prominent Florida Democratic elected official told me, "is what happens when you hire a novice and a shady lobbyist to run your party... Ethics? What ethics? Congresswoman Donna Shalala pretty much ordered Rizzo and Peñalosa to return the money.-- which they reluctantly did. State Senator Jason Pizzo (D-Miami): "Forget the legality for just a second and consider what should have been a huge ethical dilemma. They are taking financial resources from someone who might have food or housing insecurity in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know who possibly thought that was a good idea. " Pizzo knew exactly ho thought it was a good idea and said he alerted Biden’s daughter Ashley, to the problem-- at which point the Biden campaign rewarded Peñalosa with the senior advisor job while he stays on as party executive director.

At the same time, Aída Chávez reported for The Intercept that "More than 50 candidates signed onto a letter on Thursday demanding that the Florida Democratic Party share access to its voter files and resources. For access to VAN, the widely used Democratic voter file technology firm, the party is charging about $3,500 for a congressional campaign, $1,500 for state Senate, and $750 for House-- fees that many candidates can’t afford before their campaigns get off the ground. State Democratic parties in New Jersey, Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska... do not charge candidates to access their voter data." Other crummy state parties like Florida charge as well. Congressional candidate Adam Christensen noted that "If these candidates had the voter files, the data, the information on where to canvass, who to canvass, not only would it increase the amount of Democrats in Florida, it would in turn increase donations, it would increase the amount of races that are won in Florida. But right now the Democratic Party is more concerned with making money off candidates, who they essentially see as suckers, and they will not call them back, they will not give them any actual backing... They have gone out and hired a bunch of field organizers and they give them access to VAN, they give [Democratic Executive Committees] access to VAN, they give everyone access to VAN except for the candidates. And at the end of the day the candidates are the ones who not only use the data, but update the data. They fix most of the data rolls to begin with because they’re the ones that actually make contact with voters and find people who are persuadable enough."

Biden's guy-- not Christensen-- Peñalosa.

On Monday morning, The Week published an OpEd by Ryan Cooper: Democrats can't afford to let former Republicans co-opt the party. And by "Republicans," he also means sleazy lobbyists and corporate shills, who already have far too much influence inside the Democratic Party. It isn't news that everyone loves the hard-hitting and vicious ads that conservative Republican #NeverTrump groups are running against Trump. Democratic groups-- which have no balls and no spines-- are afraid to run ads like that, so now everyone is excited about how the ethics-free Republicans are doing their dirty work against Trump. This is the newest from the Lincoln Project:





And this is a recent one from Republicans for the Rule of Law:





I'm not seeing ads like this from the DNC, the DCCC, the DSCC or the Biden campaign. But what Cooper and others-- myself included-- worry about is the cost of these ads. "The faction of so-called Never Trump Republicans," he wrote, "has scented opportunity. Some such conservative exiles have formed a group called the Lincoln Project, which is running rude ads mocking Trump for his disastrous presidency. Many Democrats are celebrating the ads for contributing to Trump's downturn in the polls and welcoming these apostates into the party fold. Yet should Biden win, it would be a great mistake to grant these conservatives much credit, and a greater mistake still to allow them to influence a Biden presidency. America needs better than former Republican operatives who learned about anti-racism last week." But that is exactly what Democrats-- and America-- will get when Biden is elected.

[I]t is primarily Trump's own failures that are dragging down his poll numbers. He is presiding over a pandemic that has killed over 136,000 Americans at time of writing, and a resulting economic collapse that is worse than any since the Great Depression. Other rich countries are cautiously emerging from the pandemic, while the U.S. outbreak is only accelerating. Trump is utterly incapable of doing his job, and the result is a humiliating, world-historical catastrophe. A couple viral ads are not making much difference against this background.

Meanwhile, it seems Trump has completely misjudged the political valence of the George Floyd protests. By some counts this has been the largest protest movement in American history, but Trump has reacted as usual by digging in even further with inflammatory racist screeching. The result is a further backlash against racism and police brutality-- support for Black Lives Matter has skyrocketed probably in part because Trump can't stop running his mouth.

...[I]t will be critically important for a Biden administration-- if it cares to keep the Democratic Party in power-- to both address the growing concerns about bigotry and restore economic security. Attacking racism is plainly popular and necessary, and what's more, as Bouie rightly argues in another article, egalitarian economic policy is vital for fixing the problem of police brutality and mass incarceration. On the other hand, failing to fix the coronavirus depression (as President Obama failed to fix the Great Recession) leaves open the future possibility of a more skilled and competent demagogue following in Trump's footsteps. If unemployment and production are still in the toilet in November 2022, Biden and the Democrats will be blamed for it.

Figures in the Lincoln Project are suitable for neither of these tasks. Before their dislike of Trump got them crosswise with the conservative mainstream, they were committed Republicans who generally disliked if not hated Barack Obama, and pushed austerity and deregulation-- precisely the opposite of what is needed to fix the economy. Indeed, Steve Schmidt, one of the groups co-founders, was John McCain's senior strategist for the 2008 campaign, and convinced him to pick Sarah Palin as a running mate-- the most important forerunner for Trump's brand of emboldened stupidity. Stuart Stevens, an adviser for the organization, was similarly a senior strategist for Mitt Romney on the 2012 campaign, which eagerly sought and received Trump's endorsement. Others have done worse-- Ben Howe, reportedly the project's video whiz, once boasted on Twitter that he would have shot Michael Brown of Ferguson himself if given the chance.

Howe now says he regrets those comments, as does Stevens, but these are still not particularly credible messengers for either economic populism or racial justice. It would be hard to produce a stronger impression of a bunch of conservative opportunists who expected Trump to lose and got routed out of their own party when he didn't, and are now rooting around for a place in the other party. If they simply want to help defeat Trump, that's fine, but if they want anything more than that, it should be earned with considerably more self-searching than has so far been in evidence.

The only way Biden can win-- hatred for Trump

In terms of electoral politics, Joe Biden has had the tremendous stroke of luck of his opponent turning in just about the worst presidential performance in American history. That will give him unusually wide latitude to pick who we wants aboard his political bandwagon. But if he takes power, he will have to clean up the worst mess since 1933. We have seen the horror of pre-Trump conservatism-- and few more closely than Biden, because in 2009 he and Obama inherited the mess from the previous Republican disaster. A bunch of conservative washouts are far more likely to hinder than help Biden's attempts to put the country back on two legs.