Kerri Evelyn Harris, An Ocasio Democrat Running For The U.S. Senate In Delaware

How bad is Tom Carper in the Senate? I guess he could be worse. Delaware is a very blue state. All the members of their congressional delegation are Democrats, albeit conservative Democrats. The governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of State are all Democrats. Democrats have a majority in the state Senate and in the state House. The state PVI is D+6 and Delaware voted for Bill Clinton twice, Al Gore, John Kerry, Obama twice and even Hillary. But Delaware's senior senator, Tom Carper, is the only Democrtat-- aside from Dianne Feinstein-- from what ProgressivePunch rates a "strong Democratic state"-- who has an "F" rating. He's always in the bottom 10 of senators when it comes to voting against progressive legislation. The only senators with worse scores when state tilt is factored in are Doug Jones (AL) and Joe Manchin (WV). His lifetime crucial vote score is 71.31, worse than, for example Jon Tester (75.06) who comes from a red state with a PVI of R+11.

So why's Carper such a dick? You'll have to ask him. There are people however challenging him this cycle. The progressive candidate running against Carper in the Democratic primary is Kerri Harris. The primary isn't until September 6 but Carper is way ahead, at least in the money race. A notorious corporate whore, he's raced $2,315,778 so far, to just $17,138 for Kerri. Alexandria Ocasio has dispatched some of her top campaign staffers to work in several states where super-progressives are running against machine hacks. One is on her way to help Kaniela Ing in Hawaii and others are headed down to Delaware to help Kelli. CBS covered the news yesterday.

Ocasio-Cortez this week decided to send at least three paid campaign staffers to Delaware to help Kerri Evelyn Harris, an Air Force veteran and community activist who is challenging three-term Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-DE), in a Sept. 6 primary. Aides to Ocasio-Cortez and Harris shared the details first with CBS News.

Harris, a political novice based in Dover, Delaware, began her campaign in February, seeking to run to the senator's left. She is only the second Democrat to challenge Carper since he joined the U.S. Senate in 2000.

There is no reliable polling to gauge Harris' viability in Delaware, where just a few thousand Democrats voted when Carper faced a primary challenge in 2012. If she wins, Harris would be Delaware's first biracial lesbian woman to serve in Congress-- and the first-ever to serve in the U.S. Senate.

Harris faces daunting odds, given Carper's four decades of political success-- but so did Ocasio-Cortez in her fight against Crowley, a 10-term congressman who many expected would one day succeed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, as the top House Democrat.

At least three of Ocasio-Cortez's paid staffers will move temporarily from New York to Delaware by next week to help Harris ahead of her Sept. 6 primary against Carper, according to Corbin Trent, an Ocasio-Cortez spokesman. Another New York-based staffer will help with Harris's digital outreach, according to Drew Serres, a spokesman for Harris.

The spokesmen acknowledged that the move is partly a thank-you to Harris and five members of her campaign team who traveled to New York to campaign for Ocasio-Cortez in the closing days of her primary against Crowley.

In the weeks since her victory, Ocasio-Cortez has leveraged her newfound star power and influence to endorse like-minded liberal Democrats running for office up and down the ballot. Among others, she has endorsed Brent Welder, a congressional candidate in a Kansas City-area district challenging GOP incumbent Kevin Yoder; Abdul El-Sayed, a Michigan gubernatorial candidate running for an open seat; and Julia Salazar, of Brooklyn, is hoping to unseat incumbent Democratic State Sen. Martin Malavé Dilan.

Like Harris, these candidates are all aligned with Justice Democrats, a group co-founded by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks and other leaders of the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who are seeking to recruit and support liberals willing to run for open seats or challenge incumbents - even if those incumbents are Democrats. The candidates generally seek to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, support "Medicare for All" and want to drastically slash college tuition costs.

Harris was among the nearly 600 people arrested last month during a demonstration in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington to protest the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy that led to the separation of immigrant families that illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.

Aides to Carper didn't immediately respond to inquiries. Next to former Vice President Joe Biden, Carper is Delaware's other Democratic political godfather. The 71-year old previously served as a congressman and governor. He conceded to reporters earlier this year that he had wavered about whether to seek a fourth term, but ultimately decided to do so after encouragement from family members, state Democratic activists and business leaders.

But Harris' camp believes it could prevail by adopting a key part of Ocasio-Cortez's campaign strategy: Hustle.

Serres noted that just 49,940 Democrats cast ballots when Carper faced nominal competition in the 2012 primary.

"The idea is to focus on states with smaller races," he said of Justice Democrats' strategy. If Ocasio-Cortez's support could help encourage "even 200 volunteers" to help, he added, "it might happen."

Forget Democrats vs Republicans-- It's A False Dichotomy-- Think Progressives vs Reactionaries

Monday when the self-proclaimed leader of the Senate ConservaDems-- a small, corporately-sponsored faction that has worked assiduously to thwart President Obama's legislative agenda-- declared that he couldn't stand the gridlock (that he has been so key in creating) and would leave the Senate when his term expires in January, the first note I got was from an Indiana Democratic Party activist entitled "Uncork The Champagne." He mentioned that Indiana progressives within the party had been waging "a stealth campaign... to withhold their active support from him this year [and that that] probably had a lot to do with" his decision to retire from the Senate.

The first comment to our post came from a progressive poster named Carter who accused me of not thinking through the ramifications of Bayh's decision to pull a modified Sarah Palin and leave the Senate behind as he pursues his dream. His missive is typically well-intentioned, if also typically fraught with factual error and strategic miscalculation. You can read it if you like (at the link), but, like most people, he can't get beyond the simpleminded narrative that pits the guys and gals in the blue jerseys against the guys and gals in the red jerseys.

Americans have to go beyond thinking in terms of that narrative and focus on the real struggle between the ordinary working folks who make up 95% of the country and the 5% who own most of it. Classically, this is the struggle between progressives and reactionaries (or progressives on the one side and reactionaries plus morons on the other side). Even on his way out, Bayh is screwing working folks and trying to bolster his big money pals. Yesterday: "Two days after he announced he wouldn't seek reelection, Sen. Evan Bayh is throwing a wrench in the works of a signature administration initiative, expressing reservations about the plan for the government to eliminate private-sector middlemen and make student loans directly... Bayh's stance could be a look toward either of two next moves for the senator: If, like his predecessor, he becomes a lobbyist, warm relations with the financial industry won't hurt. And if he runs for governor, he's standing up for Hoosier jobs."

Is it just that? Maybe-- at least among Republicans, the overtly conservative party that exists to protect the status quo on behalf of the ownership class, as is the case with all right-wing political parties. Right now the GOP is a narrowly based ideological party, very much in contrast to the Democrats' all-things-to-all-people "big tent." But if the Republican Party is the overtly conservative one, the Party of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt has degenerated into a covertly conservative party, almost as thoroughly owned by the same anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-human special interests that own the GOP. Almost. With innumerable corporate hacks beholden to Wall Street and other powerful special interests-- the same special interests that Republicans are beholden to-- what, aside from jersey color, differentiates notoriously corrupt Democrats like Rahm Emanuel, Harold Ford, Blanche Lincoln, Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter and Max Baucus from even the most blatant of the Republican whores-- the likes of John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Dick Shelby and John Cornyn on the Senate side and top House criminals like Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Roy Blunt, Eric Cantor, Spencer Bachus, John Boehner and Pete Sessions?

I remember a friend of mine telling me how he arrived at a job at the DSCC, all fresh and fired up with idealism. After a routine discussion in which he brought up someone's propensity to vote more frequently with the Republicans against working families than with the Democratic Senate caucus, one of the money men looked at him with contempt and said something to the effect of "Oh, don't tell me you're one of those ideological dorks!"

Last night I heard extremely corporate ConservaDem, DLC leader and Senate Democratic assistant whip Tom Carper making a half-hearted and utterly failed attempt to communicate on NPR. Listening to him-- even just his inability to frame a cohesive thought or sound vaguely interested or just his repulsive manner of speaking as though he were also eating at the same time (which he may have been)-- made me physically ill. Could I possibly be in the same party that this doofus in a leader of? He was supposedly on the show to represent the side that wants to reform the Senate by changing the filibuster rules that allow 40 senators to hold up every nomination and every piece of legislation passed by the more representative lower House. (England took care of this throwback from Divine Right and aristocracy in 1911.) And Carper had a solution as well. He said that if we just wait until there's a Republican President and a GOP majority in the Senate, we'll be able to scrap the filibuster. And from the corporate point of view, that makes perfect sense and is certainly worth waiting for.

Yesterday's Washington Post reported on a poll that shows nearly 80% of Americans agree that corporations shouldn't be allowed to buy American democracy. In other words, there is overwhelming public consensus against the single most important conservative initiative, diluting the power of the voters and tilting the balance of power into the hands of the rich and powerful. Will our political class do anything to serve this expression of populist desire? Don't count on it-- especially not on anything definitive.

The results suggest a strong reservoir of bipartisan support on the issue for President Obama and congressional Democrats, who are in the midst of crafting legislation aimed at limiting the impact of the high court's decision. Likely proposals include banning participation in U.S. elections by government contractors, bank bailout recipients or companies with more than 20 percent foreign ownership.

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republican lawmakers have praised the ruling as a victory for free speech and have signaled their intent to oppose any legislation intended to blunt the impact of the court's decision... Republicans and business groups have rallied around the ruling, arguing that the decision merely levels the playing field with free-spending unions and other liberal interest groups. The new poll, however, suggests there may be political risks for the GOP in opposing limits that appear to be favored by the party's base.

The Democrats have overwhelming control of the House and Senate and they occupy the presidency. But because they are nearly as sold out to the powerful special interests as the Republicans, it is unlikely that the handful of progressives within the party caucuses will be able to do anything effective at all.

When it came time for the Establishment to end the virtual state of war with China, the world's biggest market and an economic powerhouse of the (very immediate) future, it was lifelong anti-Communist firebrand Richard Nixon who could do it without damaging his political standing much. Now that the Establishment has determined it's time to ditch Social Security, they've tasked Barack Obama to do the job for them. Yesterday we saw how very ready he was to do the job for them with his selection of two mainstream conservatives to head up his deficit commission, Erskine Bowles (the Democratic Party conservative) and Alan Simpson (the Republican Party conservative), who the White House claims was picked to provide some levity for the gruesome task. He'll also provide the butcher's cleaver. Economist Dean Baker: "Simpson is not just your run of the mill Republican. He is an extreme foe of Social Security... [As a Senator] his agenda was cutting Social Security. And that is who President Obama picked to co-chair his deficit commission."

I don't want to sound like a Naderite-- I actually held my nose and pulled a lever that included the detestable Joe Lieberman on it in the fear that Bush was surging in California-- but I have so little faith in the Democratic Party as it stands that the only efforts I want to undertake are involved with helping it find its roots as the party that sticks up for working families and fights against the entrenched wealth and power that has taken control of it. That, of course, is why Blue America is concentrating on Sending Democrats A Message They Can Understand right now. And that's why, if I were a drinking man, I would have indeed popped the cork of a bottle of champagne when I heard Evan Bayh was going bye-bye.