The Freakout Escalates: DNC, MSDNC & Korporate Democrats Losing Their Minds Over The Appeal Of Bernie Sanders

-by Noah

About 20 years ago, I was looking for something to watch on the telly while I ate my dinner and I happened upon the Chris Matthews Hardball show. It was the first time I had ever seen in it and to this day, I simply turn the sound down or switch the channel whenever his show comes on. Why? Simple. First impressions mean a lot. That night Matthews was interviewing Newt Gingrich and it was anything but hardball. Since that night, I've called the show exactly what it is: Nerfball. Chris Mathews interviewing Newtie was no interview. It was a lovefest of nudge-nudge and wink-wink between two conservative geezers that were old beyond their chronological years; old and in the way. They might as well have been twins rejoicing after being separated for years. The cloying banter on the part of Matthews was a sickening aural plague. Matthews asked the softest questions, all teed up for his buddy Newt to hammer over the fence to the glee of both. MSNBC might as well have been showing us two semi-demented guys talking politics in the lunch room of a nursing home. Neither man had a grip on current day reality, and that was 20 years ago. It was like Hannity and Giuliani are these days, except it was hard to tell which one was Hannity and which one was Giuliani. It was at least that bad. It was, as they say, some really sick shit.

For a long time after that, I saw Matthews rail against progressives on other MSNBC shows, especially whenever election time rolled around. Progressive was a word that he spat out. Even when he feebly tried to hide his contempt, it showed. Even when he tried to cloak himself in his supposed northeastern liberal roots, it showed. He'd long outgrown his so-called "liberalism." Besides, his brand of liberalism was the dated and establishment kind, a co-option kind that was very prevalent in the 1960s when Kennedy Democrats decided to try on the trappings of being more "with it." It was pretty phony then. I saw that first hand. I called it opportunistic liberalism. Anything for a vote. And that was 50+ years ago. Matthews is the embodiment of that. He didn't evolve. He stayed in one place and atrophied while many of us moved on. We progressed. He became a living fossil. Due to his calcification, what Matthews became then, now often appears, in comparison to modern progressives, to be what Barry Goldwater and John Birchers were way back then. The same charge can be directed at politicians like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg and any Republican you care to name. They are all people from another time, another century, and they are not what we need.

Hello! What time is it? We don't need media people or politicians who are so stuck in the past. It doesn't have to do with age but with intellect. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren didn't stop growing 50 wears ago and they are of the same generation. Yours truly is only a few years behind. Some people have moved into the 21st century. Others feel more comfortable in the past, the reality that they know. They fear the future but, damn, we are now 20 years into a century that we shouldn't even call new anymore. Hillary Clinton didn't get it in 2016. Matthews doesn't get it now.

Matthews has made an effort to fake it. A few years ago he at least tried to hide behind a facade of tolerance for progressives. At MSNBC, he had stuck his finger into the air and detected a gentle breeze flowing left and went with it, at least on face value. As they say, follow the money, and he did, but Bernie Sanders is more than that weak facade of Matthews could bear. On Saturday, as the Nevada Caucus results came in, Matthews snapped for good. He came back out of his Consevervadem closet, bowing the door of the hinges practically screaming, comparing Sanders, a Jewish man, to Hitler's Nazis who stormed into France shortly before he was born:

It looks like Bernie Sanders is hard to beat... I think it's a little late to stop him, and that's the problem... I'm reading about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general calls up Churchill and says 'It's over.' And Churchill says, 'How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?' He said, 'It's over.'

Over at CNN, former Obama administration official Van Jones spoke for his fellow bubble dwellers when he said:

Nobody thought six months ago that we would be sitting here with Bernie Sanders on his way to the nomination. He's on his way to the nomination. Something could happen to stop him. Somebody may have some marbles to throw at the stairs or a banana peel. They better find it. Because this guy is off and running.

It's not really over, of course, but to people like Matthews and the equally calcified Democratic National Committee led by Tom Perez (Think of him as this year's Debbie Wasserman Schultz), it is, or at least they fear it is. Bernie isn't one of their proscribed, pre-approved choices. He's not a member of the club. He's only what, in their eyes, too many voters, so far, want. Damn voters! How dare they have opinions! The DNC and their media hacks like Chris Matthews treat Bernie winning as their worst nightmare and, looked at one way, he is. Bernie is such a threat to their gravy train and safe, status quo that they've launched themselves into a state of panic when, in fact, they should be embracing Senator Sanders as a gift. In order to win, you need enthusiastic voters. That's what Trump has and you have to match enthusiasm with enthusiasm or else you don't have a chance. In order to survive as a political party and have a future, you need young people and Latinos coming in your door, and that is what Bernie is rounding up and delivering. He is a gift and the lords of the party gnash their teeth and wail. They are pathetic and they are dangerous, not only to us but the very existence of the party. Their hate for Bernie could deliver not just the nomination to a flaccid Conservadem euphemistically called a "moderate," it could also deliver the election to Trump whether Senator Sanders ends up with the nomination or not. Obviously, that would be fine with korporate America and their shills like Chris Matthews.

The Matthews outburst wasn't just a moment of crankiness and twitching fear, it was also a moment of moral bankruptcy, and, speaking of moral bankruptcy, as I write this on Monday afternoon, MSNBC has not fired Matthews on the spot. They haven't reprimanded him. They haven't even commented. Any silence between the Matthews outburst and the time you read this not shows us the true colors of MSNBC's parent company, COMCAST. Anything they may do now is too little too late.

Matthews isn't exactly alone at MSNBC of course. While the channel is better than the overtly right-leaning Wolf Blitzer led CNN and totally wacko nutjob outlets like FOX "News," and Sinclair, not to mention Drudge, Breitbart, and Trump favorite Alex Jones, there are others at MSNBC who share in Matthews's panic, a panic that has the DNC spinning like the head of that poor little girl in "The Exorcist." Give it another month and they will sound like her too. Since COMCAST took over MSNBC, there has been an obvious move right to the extent that many of us ruefully joke that the channel has become MSDNC, a bland merger of MSNBC and the DNC. Warning #1 to the DNC Establishment Suits and their media minions: You keep saying Bernie isn't a Democrat but you ignore the fact that his voters are and he's more of a real democrat then you've ever been. Warning #2: Bland wallpaper news and commentary doesn't beget any more support or enthusiasm than bland wallpaper politicians. You might as well bring back Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale.

Among the worst of the bubble dwelling offenders at MSNBC are former Conservadem $enator Claire McCaskill of Missouri who all but clutches her pearls every time Bernie's name comes up. There's the execrable Chuck Todd who has been living in a doorless Republican closet his whole pointless career. There's Katy Tur who doesn't seem too happy at all about the way things are going in the Democratic primaries. There's Nicole Wallace who at least openly admits to being a Republican who doesn't like Trump. However, she was George W. Bush's Communications Director so that bears close attention. Then there's Joy Reid. Reid is the most disappointing of all of them other than Matthews himself. Reid not only has a history of homophobia but she has taken to immaturely openly and loudly sighing when her guests speak up in favor of Sen. Sanders. She reminds me of Al Gore in the first Bush-Gore debate when he sighed, smirked, and made faces at everything Bush had to say. At least Bush deserve and earned the disrespect. And let's not forget the guy who runs the whole thing, the perfectly named Andy Lack who has made a career out of being forced out of one Korporate CEO job only to land in a new one. He's perhaps most infamous for his farcical and clueless tenure at Sony Entertainment.

Meanwhile, Howie has tweeted out a poll where followers can voice their choice of who at MSDNC should walk the plank first. Matthews has a commanding lead but why stop with him?

Democratic Party Establishment Interests Do Not Align With The Grassroots Of The Party-- Not Even A Little

Siena is a generally useless poll--except in New York state. For some reason, they tend to be fairly predictive there. Their new poll, released yesterday, shows Bernie winning the primary with Bloomberg in the #2 spot. Among registered Democrats:

• Bernie- 25%
• Bloomberg- 21%
• Status Quo Joe- 13%
• Elizabeth- 11%
• Mayo Pete- 9%
• Klobuchar- 9%

All 6 Democrats beat Trump in head-to-head match-ups, although Bloomberg does best-- beating Trump by 25 points. Although Bernie and Biden have more support from Democrats, Bloomberg manages to garner more support from Republicans than any of the Democratic candidates and also leads with Independents, presumably Republican-leaning Independents.

Biden, Bernie and Elizabeth have very high favorables among Democrats, while NY Dems rate Mayo Pete and Bloomberg significantly lower. And when it comes to unfavorables, Bloomberg is the most disliked by Democrats. Bloomberg has the highest favorables among GOP voters. Bernie has the highest favorables among Independents.

New York's 274 pledged delegates will be up for grabs on April 28 in a northeast Super-Tuesday that also includes Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware-- for a grand total of 663 delegates, the most of any day besides March 3. It's possible that Bernie will have-- despite corporate media anti-working class hysteria-- enough delegates in his pocket to be unstoppable. Reporting after the Nevada blowout, BuzzFeed's Ruby Cramer noted that "David Plouffe, who was Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, said on MSNBC Saturday night that if the primary stays crowded after Super Tuesday, Sanders could have a hold on the nomination."

“If it is more than a two-candidate race, certainly, if it’s a four or five-candidate race, Bernie Sanders can walk to the nomination getting 35, 36, 37 percent of the vote,” he told NBC’s Brian Williams.

He later made that more explicit. “But basically, if we’re-- Brian, if it’s March 3rd and we’re talking about Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Warren, Biden, Bloomberg, and Sanders, and everybody’s in, Bernie’s going to win almost all the delegates he needs to build an impenetrable delegate lead. That’s just math. It’s not my opinion, it’s just simple math."

The final vote in Nevada was released late yesterday-- along with the delegate assignations. Bernie wins, establishment loses

Even as anti-progressive an operative as Hillary's losing campaign manager and the DCCC's all-time worst disaster-maker, Robby Mook-- a walking onomatopoeia-- said that "If he has a three-figure lead, there is no catching up. It’s too late after Super Tuesday. Even if the field drops down to two people, that person still has to be beating him by 10-20 points in the remaining contests. This is the fog everybody is in right now. If you aren’t Sanders you have to deal with this problem before Super Tuesday."

On Sunday, William Rivers Pitt wrote that "Plouffe’s sober assessment of the state of the race, combined with Sanders’s resounding Nevada victory, had a strange and terrible effect on the minds of a number of MSNBC regulars. No longer content to ignore or dismiss Sanders’s status as frontrunner, that network’s top names spent the bulk of Saturday evening in a state of near panic, weaving a tapestry of impending doom out of literal Nazi analogies and Russia scaremongering."

“Right now, it’s about 1:15 Moscow time,” said James Carville, the longtime Democratic establishment strategist and occasional Gollum impersonator. “This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin. I promise you. He’s probably staying up watching this right now. How you doing, Vlad?”

MSNBC Host Joy Reid, for her part, smashed the panic button straight through the table in a breathless aria for the ages regarding the seeming menace of Sanders supporters in the face of puddle-bound Democratic establishment candidates.

“They’re turning the tables over and they don’t care what the potential result is,” said Reid of Sanders voters:

They’re the hungriest. He only had to consolidate them, and the moderates, the sort of mushy moderates, think that they have the luxury of luxuriating on whether they’ll have someone who can speak six languages, you know, maybe today I want this woman who’s from the Midwest and, you know, maybe I’ll go with the vice president…. No one is as hungry, angry, enraged and determined as Sanders voters. Democrats need to sober up and figure out what the hell they are going to do about it.

On Friday, Dr. Jason Johnson, another regular MSNBC contributor, went on SiriusXM’s The Karen Hunter Show earlier this week and referred to Black women who have appeared in the media to support Sanders’s campaign as “the island of misfit black girls.” The group of women to which he was referring includes Barbara Smith-- the respected Black feminist critic who co-founded the Combahee River Collective and coined the term “identity politics”-- and Nina Turner, the Ohio politician who is now national co-chair of the Sanders campaign.

Sanders’s national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, offered this response:

On Saturday, Johnson apologized for the remark.

Meanwhile, Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC host and former press secretary to George W. Bush, went scratching for whatever wildly discredited anti-Sanders rocks she could throw, arguing that Sanders “hasn’t been vetted by either the press or the other candidates.”

Apparently, Wallace is unaware-- or is pretending to be unaware-- of the decades during which Sanders has served in politics, and his presidential primary run against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment in 2016. If that isn’t “vetted,” then nothing is.

But it was MSNBC’s own human weathervane, Chris Matthews, who took home the prize for Most Offensive Anti-Bernie Slander on Saturday night. “I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940,” he lamented, “and the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says ‘How can it be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’ So I had that suppressed feeling.”

Suppressed feeling? Not so much, Chris. By Sunday morning, #FireChrisMatthews” was the top trending topic on Twitter.

The Sanders campaign’s communications director, Mike Casca, responded with somber astonishment that a national news network would liken the campaign of a Jewish presidential candidate to the Third Reich:

I expect Sanders’s opponents to say ridiculous things as they watch him pull away. It’s primary season; if you’re losing and still acting reasonable, you aren’t trying hard enough. But to watch MSNBC, the so-called “liberal” network, sink into this kind of venomous Fox News-worthy nonsense is a bright, blinking warning light for the entire institution of U.S. journalism.

The establishment wing of the Democratic Party and its cohort of faux-progressive media mouthpieces have been confronted by their own senescence after so many decades of poorly managed control, and they are not liking the taste of it. Even if they manage to thwart Sanders’s nomination with brazenly undemocratic power moves at the convention, the party will never be the same after 2016 and this year’s elections. The writing is on the wall, and it is making them scream on live television.

The dinosaurs have seen the meteor, and it’s coming by way of Brooklyn and Vermont.

Shaniyat Chowdhury is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in southeast Queens, for a seat held by one of DC's most corrupt swamp residents. Chowdhury has endorsed Bernie while his opponent has been bought by Bloomberg. "Give the people what they want! I think members members of Congress forget they are in a job as public servants and not to serve themselves. It’s clear the people want Bernie to win because he is speaking to their pain. Denying them the right to healthcare is a big F-you to the American public and those members need to be primaried. My opponent for example, endorsed the racist oligarch Bloomberg who was a democrat for fifteen minutes. Against the interest of the people in NY-05 he is taking Bloomberg’s money to be his campaign for-chair so Democrat’s like Bernie cannot win. We are going door-to-door and not one person is happy about Meeks and Bloomberg. No matter how much power one person may have, the people will always revolt to win back power."


 

Do The Two Political Parties Make You Want To Throw Up?

Feel the love?

In 2006, I started interacting with other progressive bloggers nationally through some e-mail groups. I freely shot off my mouth pretty regularly and often attacked Rahm Emanuel, than head of the DCCC. I assumed the 600 or so people on the list knew what I knew about Emanuel and his record as a neoliberal, self-serving and corrupt shit head. Bad assumption. I was attacked for being a Republican-plant. There were many people on the list who saw Emanuel as a stalwart hero of the Democratic Party... and who the hell was I? Most of the list of progressives saw the DCCC and Rahm Emanuel as our allies and even if they didn't all buy into the assertion that I was working for the GOP, the sentiment was to kick me off the list.

At the time, Matt Stoller was a respected and admired blogger. He told the people attacking to STFU and was the only person to defend my position on the merits. Stoller understood what Emanuel was back then. Of course, now almost everyone does but back in 2005-6 it was definitely a minority position among progressives. Yesterday, Stoller, who has since then worked for Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders in Capitol Hill and now works for the anti-monopoly Open Markets Institute and writes here, created a tweet storm work looking at and considering. This is it in narrative list version-- Matt Stoller:

1. Starting 2006 or so, I've become somewhat disillusioned with the Democratic Party. I'm going to explain why. It has to do with the relationship most Democrats have with corporate power, or really, power. Now first, to explain, I'm a liberal Democrat.

2. What I saw in 2006 was the allegiance Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had to lobbying power. They both backed Joe Lieberman against a Democrat. Obama then lied about NAFTA in 2008, and retroactive immunity for telecoms. He lied about a lot in 2008. Dems didn't notice or care.

3. In 2009, I began working in Congress for a member of the financial services committee. Tim Geithner sought a foreclosure wave and to help the banks. Rahm Emanuel Larry Summers ran around protecting monopolies. My friends at Moveon, etc didn't notice, cheerleading Obamacare.

4. The day Obamacare passed, a friend was sitting on my couch. He was tearing up with joy, and I've never felt so much contempt. We got calls from people with cancer. When do I get my free Obamacare? Try explaining to someone with cancer they get it in four years.

5. People in the Obama White House would scoff and laugh behind the scenes at who they perceived as deadbeats in foreclosure. Meanwhile we took calls from people desperately trying to show they paid the bank what they owed but were losing their home anyway.

6. I was reminded of the stupidity and venality of the Obama administration day after day by their actions, big and small. They were mean, petty, dumb, greedy, and dishonest. And Democratic voters refused to believe their own leaders were doing what they were doing.

7. Obama snuck in a provision to the stimulus mandating that AIG execs would get their bonuses. Obama then blamed that provision on Chris Dodd and held a press conference on how he would do everything he could to get those bonuses back, after they had already gone out.

8. Obama's first FCC Chairman, Julius Janikowski, was a buddy from law school. He refused to actually do net neutrality. He's now at the Carlyle Group in private equity. Tim Geithner is also in private equity. Obama takes massive speaking fees from powerful financiers. Rancid.

9. The thing is, Obama didn't do any of this without permission. He got permission from every single Democratic voter who supported and loved him. Every time his people threatened members with primary challenges (and he did), he was doing it with Democratic voters' endorsement.

10. No one was honest. Not the centrists or the left. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, 350.org and various spinoff movements refused to admit that Obama was hostile to their values. And gradually I realized it's because they just don't see power.

11. Most Dems think injustice is what lives in the heart. It isn't. It's what lives in our institutions. Corporate power is autocracy, but to know the autocracy, you have to learn about trade, finance, law. Liberal democracy is all about equality.

12. Our political order is oriented around legitimizing only those who can claim some form of victimization. It's why the woke stuff/white supremacy is so powerful. It's a fundamentally anti-enlightenment model of politics.

13. You can see how the Chinese government, which is a truly fascist power, uses illiberal arguments to advance its agenda. The idea that Chinese people's feelings are hurt, the claims to racial grievance, attacks on liberal democratic forms of government, the CIA in Hong Kong.

14. Tim Geithner was not a racist. But Tim Geithner did this. "According to a 2013 study of TARP investments, black-owned banks were ten times less likely to receive bailout money than nonminority-owned banks."

15. Democrats do not see corporate power where racism and autocracy is institutionalized, because it conflicts with the left-libertarian narrative that only victims have a right to be heard.

16. It's improving, rapidly. @BernieSanders in 2016 gave voice to frustrated Democrats, and in 2020, the last debate was basically a rejection of Obama. But even so. We have a lot of work to do. Here's an example. National security.

17. A lot of the energy on the left is focused on sustainability, resiliency, localism. Good. Yay! And a lot of the energy on the right is focused on nationalism, making things in the U.S., protecting our supply chains.

Hey everyone, this is the same thing.

18. At any rate, we have very serious problems. We can't make anything. That knowledge and experience was ripped out by Bill Clinton and it never came back. How are we going to do a Green New Deal? Who is going to do it? We can't build high speed rail in California.

19. Most of our think tanks are corrupted by Chinese and Wall Street money. Our elite class has been trained to be a bunch of useless McKinsey-trained fools.

20. We need a social movement to fix our corporate structures. A real movement. A movement of engineers and farmers and business people and bankers and programmers and students who hate corruption and love liberal democracy.

21. None of us have ever seen liberal democracy work the way it should. This is an accident of history. It's just weird we turned away from liberal democracy in the late 1970s. So we'll have to take it on faith and on archival evidence that it can work.

22. And the Republicans are in worse shape. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were our cult of personality leaders who corrupted us. But Reagan, Bush, Trump is yours. You will have to dig yourselves out, the way us Democrats are slowly doing it. It's possible. It's necessary.

The only thing I'd like to see more than Trump rotting in prison for child rape would be to see Bill Clinton in there with him as a cell-mate. I was on the phone with an old friend today, the guy who first ran against then-Speaker Denny Hastert and who set in motion his eventual downfall. Topic: AOC, who beat Joe "the next Speaker" Crowley, one of the most awesome electoral outcome of 2018. We agreed that Democratic Party elected officials never learn anything substantive. None of them will change any policy-oriented or corruption-oriented behavior to avoid Crowley's fate. Instead, like Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY), Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA), Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL), Stephen Lynch (New Dem-MA), Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ), David Scott (Blue Dog-GA) and Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY), they are leading a counter-revolution against AOC, against "the Squad," against the Green New Deal, against Medicare-for-All and against any semblance of a progressive agenda. That thermometer on the right is how you can contribute to the progressive candidates fighting those 9 reactionary corporate whores.

Yesterday, Caleb Howe, reporting for Mediaite, roasted MSNBC's worst prime time host, Chris Matthews for his defense of all his pals who were raping underage girls under the auspices of Jeffrey Epstein. "Matthews," he wrote, "offered a rather unusual defense of rich politicians like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump who socialized with dead probable human trafficker and rapist Jeffrey Epstein: they like private planes."

The long Hardball segment on Epstein’s suicide covered his death, the theories about how it could have happened, the “chutzpah” of Trump to talk about Clinton’s association, given his own, and the attendant issues with MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler and Vanity Fair’s Vanessa Grigoriadis. They decried Trump’s theorizing about Clinton, and also theorized that Trump and Attorney General William Barr “facilitated” Epstein’s suicide.

But one take offered by Matthews was particularly unusual.

“One thing culturally that goes on in politics that I find really dismaying: politicians need money. A lot of them aren’t that wealthy. They live on their salaries. A hundred and a half a year, they’re not crying, but they love travel and private planes. They to get around for their professional and political reasons,” said Matthews. “They’ve become friends with the wrong frickin’ people. And these people are frightening and they want something, they want the prestige of hanging around a politician.”

“These relationships are awful, the names that have come out. I don’t want to use their names tonight. Why do these guys know a guy like this guy Epstein? Why do you want to know him?” he asked Butler.

It’s more than just the implied absolution, it’s the fact that he declines to say names, he paints them almost as victims. The poor politician is so poor he needs to hang around with pedophiles just to get a few private plane rides. Woe is us!

Liberal writer Naomi LaChance noticed:

It’s extremely embarrassing for MSNBC that Matthews likes politicians so much he didn’t even want to report on the ones who are reportedly linked to an accused child rapist. It seems as though he’s in complete denial that some people in this world are violent abusers. Welcome to 2019, buttercup, that’s the world most of us are living in.

Besides, all three of these men-- Trump, Clinton, and Gore-- have been accused of inappropriate sexual conduct outside of the context of Jeffrey Epstein. (All three men denied the cumulative array of charges leveled against them.)

Amazed that Matthews couldn’t posit another theory as to why these men were acquainted with Epstein, LaChance said he “clearly knows one very clear possible answer and does not want to speak its name aloud.”

Ouch.

How does that fit in with Stoller's theories about Democratic politicians and the direction of the Democratic Party? Maybe a random tweet will help:

Die Essenz von Trump... Soup To Nuts

War against Iran is a wet dream for Bolton

In December of 2016, John Bolton hadn't infiltrated the Trumpist Regime yet. When Alex Campbell predicted a war, it was Bannon, a war of civilizations kind of maniac, who was telling Trump what to do. He's gone and now Bolton is running the show and, if anything, m he's even worse than Bannon-- and even more likely to steer Trump into a war. Yesterday John Marshall noted that "Looking at the escalating (US-created) crisis with Iran, one thing I realize is that a lot of people do not quite know who John Bolton is. They assume-- rightly-- that anyone in the Trump orbit must be either a moral weakling, a crazy person or someone with one foot out the door. All true. But John Bolton is a unique and uniquely dangerous character."

Bolton is a caricature of a militarist and warmonger. He is sometimes classed with the so-called “neo-conservatives” who played the central role getting the country into the Iraq War. This isn’t really correct, either in classification or historical terms. For all their shortcomings many of the leading neoconservative policy hands and intellectuals were big on democracy promotion-- often in foolish ways, usually only when it was convenient and mainly in Europe. But this is at least part of the worldview... In really every context he is for hard US dominance, unilateralism and war as the preferred course of action. Again, he’s really the caricature of a militarist, the kind of one-dimensional, clownishly hawkish type who gets described in small circulation left-wing magazines but can’t possibly exist in real life, only he does exist and his name is John Bolton.

...As I said earlier, there’s really no one left in the Trump national security world to say no to him or ignore intemperate orders. But there is Bolton who is precisely the kind of person who to goad the President into issuing such orders. He’s also precisely the kind of player who would architect together a series of fait accompli that would deprive Trump over much choice of the matter. What seems to have been happening over the last year is that Bolton has been trying to push Iran into a corner and force a military confrontation. That hasn’t worked. So now they appear to be cooking up ‘threats’ from Iran to force the confrontation they’ve been unable to force to date. (I suspect the ‘threats’ are just the garden variety background noise of intelligence, now churned up to provide a pretext for escalation.) Bolton is also highly political in the partisan sense. It would not surprise me in the least if he is pushing Trump on the idea that a war or limited military engagement with Iran would ensure his reelection next year.

Bolton is that bad-- a comically caricatured militarist, an extremely effective and smart bureaucratic player and entirely capable of lying the country into war or playing on the enthusiasms and insecurities of an ignorant President.

Do you remember Larry Lindsey? Chubby guy who was George W. Bush's chief economic advisor? Tuesday he spoke to both the House Republican leadership and, separately, to top committee Republicans. Politico explained why his presentation about China and trade turned a lot of heads. "Lindsey said he enlisted two psychiatrists to analyze the president from afar. China views Trump as a 'total narcissist'-- 'a 10-out-of-10 narcissist,'" he said. Lindsey attributed this to the president’s upbringing and said his mother didn’t pay him adequate attention in childhood... Lindsey said Trump has no long-term plans or ability to think ahead. He said the president has the long-term decision-making ability of an 'empty chair.'" So GOP heads weren't so much turning as they were spinning.




There's an exhaustive piece on Trump's bigotry-- a team effort-- in the June issue of The Atlantic, which I recommend highly. They began by reminding us that "the first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in the New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s real-estate company. 'They are absolutely ridiculous,' Trump said of the charges. 'We have never discriminated, and we never would.' In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. His statements have been reflected in his behavior-- from public acts (placing ads calling for the execution of five young black and Latino men accused of rape, who were later shown to be innocent) to private preferences ('When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,' a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer for the New Yorker). Trump emerged as a political force owing to his full-throated embrace of 'birtherism,' the false charge that the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States. His presidential campaign was fueled by nativist sentiment directed at nonwhite immigrants, and he proposed barring Muslims from entering the country. In 2016, Trump described himself to the Washington Post as 'the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.' Instances of bigotry involving Donald Trump span more than four decades. The Atlantic interviewed a range of people with knowledge of several of those episodes." You should read them here if you needed to be reminded about what a racist sack of shit is living in the White House.

More On The Republican Wing Of The Democratic Party

Executive Vice President sounds so much better than "lobbyist sleaze bag"

At the very end of February, we ran an exhaustive piece on the dangers of electing Kathleen Matthews, Chris Matthews lobbyist wife, chair of the state Democratic Party. Short version: the Democratic Party needs fewer vile millionaire elitists running the party, not more. A few days later the vile millionaire elitist was selected to be interim party chair. She's already running for a full 4 year term, which will be voted on in a couple of months. She admits that party bosses Steny Hoyer, Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin asked her to run.

Her appointment was criticized by former Montgomery County Council member Valerie Ervin (D), who said the process smacked of insiderism. The state party “missed an opportunity to open up the space for a new and different kind of leadership,” said Ervin, who is the first African American woman to be elected to the council.

Yesterday Robert Woodruff, in posting a Hal Ginsberg piece at ProgressiveMaryland.org, wrote about "Democrats slip-sliding back in the centrist, old-boy direction that has brought us Larry Hogan [and asks] where will progressives go instead?" Ginsberg:

Appearances to the contrary, Maryland’s Progressive Democrats have little to cheer about. While over 60% of Marylanders are registered Democrats, Republican Governor Larry Hogan is enjoying “sky-high popularity.” Despite Maryland’s high cost of living, the intransigence of some Democratic legislators and executives has stymied efforts in Baltimore City, Montgomery County, and Prince George’s County to raise the minimum wage to $15. Maryland’s traditionally excellent public schools are struggling to accommodate influxes of immigrants and increasing numbers of students from poor families.

The latest blow to progressives came March 1 courtesy of the Maryland Democratic Party’s eight-member Executive Committee when it elected Kathleen Matthews to be interim chair... The State Central Committee will decide in May whether to elect Matthews, who says she will run, to a full term as Chairperson. She is also promising an open and transparent process. Nevertheless, by installing Matthews as interim chair two months before the election, rather than appointing a current member of the Executive Committee, top party officials have made clear that she is their choice to lead the party over the next four years.

Matthews is a consummate Washington insider. Her duties at Marriott, where her annual salary comfortably exceeded $1 million, included overseeing “a political action committee that contributed over $1 million to House and Senate candidates.” She counts as friends and allies many establishment politicos from both parties who were generous financers of her unsuccessful Congressional bid.

...The Matthews pick exposes the obliviousness of Maryland’s top Democrats to the winds of change buffeting the party both nationally and at home. In the Presidential primaries, self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders inspired millions of young people and independents and nearly upset overwhelming favorite Hillary Clinton. When Sanders withdrew from the race, much of the excitement on the Democratic side left too.

In 2014, Maryland’s Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown ran a singularly uninspiring race and lost. He had campaigned as a reasonable centrist standing between Marylanders and the allegedly right-wing Larry Hogan. Two years later, Jamie Raskin beat Matthews with an unabashedly progressive message and Bernie Sanders’ endorsement.

...As the state struggles with sky-high housing costs, stagnant wages, and overcrowded public schools, Maryland progressives must look beyond the Democrats for political leadership. A party that values so highly a multi-millionaire news personality and corporate lobbyist with no commitment to progressive economic populism does not share our values.

Boo! This isn't a Maryland problem. There are power-mongering elitists like Hoyer and Van Hollen everywhere in America, incongruously, embedded in the Democratic Party. Just look at Charles Peters' new book, We Do Our Part-- Toward A Fairer And More Equal America. A Washington Monthly Peters protege, Paul Glastris, the magazine's editor-in-chief, wrote an appreciation of the book, Recapturing the Soul of the Democratic Party. "We Do Our Part," he wrote, "is a history of how American political culture evolved from the communitarian patriotic liberalism of Peters’s New Deal youth to a get-mine conservatism in which someone like Donald Trump could be elected president."

In the standard telling, the decline of big government liberalism begins sometime around the Tet Offensive and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Peters fixes the date much earlier: 1946. That’s the year a number of senior advisers to the recently deceased FDR, people like Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas, decided to become lobbyists. Few New Dealers had done this before, so the connections and insider knowledge these men possessed were rare and valuable. Arnold and Fortas grew rich and powerful-- the advance guard of what would become a vast Washington industry.

Peters’s concern isn’t just with how lobbying corrupted the political process, though it certainly did that-- Fortas, for instance, was denied the job of chief justice of the Supreme Court thanks to shady payments from a client-connected foundation-- but more broadly with how it corrupted the incentives and worldview of those who came to Washington. Men like Fortas, a brilliant Yale Law School grad from a modest background who owned multiple homes and Rolls-Royces, set a new lifestyle standard in Washington. As more staffers and ex-congressmen followed the lobbying path, those still in government began to see their salaries, which they once considered comfortable, as penurious. (Eventually they became so, as all the high incomes bid up real estate prices and the local cost of living.)

This acquisitiveness was connected to another rising sin: snobbery, specifically the practice of signaling superiority to the hoi polloi through one’s purchases and discriminating tastes in food, drink, and culture. JFK himself, despite his war heroism and inspiring call to service, embodied the trend by marrying the high-born, fashionable Jacqueline Bouvier and surrounding himself with celebrities.

The twin viruses of greed and snobbery are not, to say the least, conducive to a focused and sympathetic concern for average Americans. But Peters reminds us that these behaviors were not widespread among educated people in Washington or throughout America in the 1950s and ’60s. The postwar prosperity and compression of incomes continued, the draft was still nearly universal-- even baseball greats served their two years-- and the federal government continued to deliver impressive new national projects, from interstate highways to Medicare, that the vast majority of Americans appreciated.

...The viruses of snobbery and selfishness spread wildly over the course of the 1970s and ’80s. Graduates from top colleges flocked to high-paying jobs at law firms and investment banks rather than to public service, and the caliber of the civil service accordingly declined. Magazines that catered to consumer chic and cultural signaling, like New York, Vanity Fair, and Washingtonian, grew fat with advertisers and subscribers. On PBS, the TV home of the educated elite, Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street Week became the number one show.

“Money had become a major and open interest of the meritocratic class,” writes Peters, in a way it simply hadn’t been from the 1930s through the ’60s. As a consequence, “the cause of lower taxes and of conservatism in general flourished, as shown by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.” Even elites who didn’t support Reagan were sympathetic to the growing idea that the market should deliver more “shareholder value.” So they didn’t protest (some even cheered) when corporations closed plants, busted unions, and spent their cash on stock buyback schemes rather than on new products and services. To the extent that they expressed their public spiritedness, it was by supporting causes-- gay rights, the environment-- that weren’t the central concerns of most middle- and working-class voters, whose incomes were stagnating while the meritocrats’ were soaring.

The result was greater and greater resentment of the educated elite. The Rush Limbaughs and Roger Aileses of the world fed off that resentment to boost their ratings and advance a conservative movement that didn’t, in the end, improve their audiences’ economic situation-- a fact that Trump exploited by running against establishment conservatives as well as liberal elites.

Peters credits Bill Clinton with being the only Democratic president or candidate in decades who managed, through his policies and gift for empathy, to bridge the gap between the meritocrats and the white middle and working classes. And he sees evidence that Democrats have awakened to the problems of greed, snobbery, and elite detachment, including “the radical increase in awareness of income inequality” and “some meritocrats overcoming their snobbery to make a serious effort to understand the Trump vote.” He also sees signs “that people are beginning to question their relentless pursuit of money, or at least some of the reasons why they think they have to make a lot of money.”

More concretely, he is heartened by examples of elites returning to government service. These include the investment banker Steve Rattner, who joined the Obama administration and helped save the auto industry, and the top Silicon Valley talent Obama personally recruited to the new U.S. Digital Service after the disastrous rollout of the health care exchange website. Peters makes a plea for more Americans, especially liberals, to run for office at the local, state, and national levels-- something that, in the months since his book went to press, actually seems to be happening.

If anything, I think Peters underestimates the degree to which Americans are hungry to serve. What confounds his call for more of the best and brightest to join government is a lack of opportunity. The problem is political. There are eight applicants for every slot in AmeriCorps, the national service program founded by Bill Clinton. But Democrats’ attempts to expand the program have been consistently checked by Republicans. Trump’s budget office has drawn up plans to eliminate it altogether. More broadly, the federal workforce, at 2.8 million employees, is the same size it was in the 1960s when Peters was part of it, even though the U.S. population since then has more than doubled and the federal budget has quadrupled in real terms. Lawmakers control the federal head count and don’t want to be seen as “growing the bureaucracy.” The most Democrats in Congress have been willing to do is beat back repeated Republican efforts to further decimate the federal workforce.

To make up for the inadequate number of staff, the government increasingly relies on contractors. Peters bemoans this trend, citing numerous examples of how it has hurt government’s performance. He’s right. But he doesn’t call for the obvious solution: boost the number of federal employees so more of the work can be done in house. This would require hiring a million new federal workers, according to University of Pennsylvania political science professor John DiIulio, and boosting their pay as well.

That is also the key to curbing the power of lobbyists, which won’t happen merely by inveighing against their greed. Lobbyists’ power comes mainly from their control of information-- about the industries they represent, about the ways government programs work-- that congressional staffers, many of them young and inexperienced, often lack. The way to neutralize that power is to strengthen government’s capacity to get that information independently, by hiring more staffers and researchers and paying them more so they can make a decent living without having to join the private sector.

Of course, a politician who called for hiring a million more federal workers, and raising their salaries, might appear suicidal in the current political climate. But if Peters is correct-- and I think he is-- that a key to bridging the class gap is for more Americans, especially the elite, to serve in government, a political way has to be found. The same bilious anti-government fever that gave America Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich has now given us Trump. Peters reminds us that government service was once a broadly shared and elite experience and value. To cure the fever, today’s liberals must figure out how to make it so again.

I hope you see Kathleen (and Chris) Matthews in this description. And Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, (alas) Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer... the New Dems, the Republicans like Charlie Crist, Tom O'Hallaran and others being recruited into the House Democratic caucus (where they invariably vote with their old comrades across the aisle). Next time you hear some shit-eating New Dem scum bag, whining about the evils of political "purity," kick him in the balls and drop me a note so I can salute you.

The Question Remains … Whose Interests Would Kathleen Matthews Represent If Elected?

-by Jeffrey Hearn

I finished writing the following post when there was about a week left in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign in Maryland’s Eighth congressional district. I was then working for Jamie Raskin, the progressive front-runner for the nomination whose chief rival throughout the primary had been Beltway insider Kathleen Matthews.

But the race had become more complicated when billionaire businessman David Trone entered late and spent over $13 million during the final ninety days of the primary. Some of that money was spent on an ad that aggressively, and many would say unfairly, attacked Raskin and Matthews, and the Raskin campaign pushed back against the Trone ad by criticizing him for going negative. That response effectively rendered this piece unpublishable, so it never saw the light of day. Until now.

A couple of weeks ago, Kathleen Matthews announced that she was throwing her hat into the ring for Maryland Democratic State Chair, after having been recruited to run by establishment Democrats Steny Hoyer, Ben Cardin, and Chris Van Hollen. The piece that follows suddenly seemed relevant again as the question became: Whose interests will Kathleen Matthews represent if she is chosen state party chair? Because the DNC Chair race is not the only place where the future of the Democratic Party will be decided.

The fact that Kathleen Matthews, candidate for Congress in Maryland's Eighth District, is also the wife of Chris Matthews, host of Hardball on MSNBC, has been a touchy subject since her campaign's earliest days, when some of the press coverage of her entrance into the race seemed to suggest that "wife of" was the most newsworthy line on her resume. Offense was quite reasonably taken by some when the candidate's own professional accomplishments couldn't find their way into the headline, but "wife of" could.

That said, the worst offenders on this score tended to be publications for whom the Chris Matthews hook truly was the only thing that made the story newsworthy, either because their focus was the national media beat (Mediaite, the "On Media" column at Politico) or because they were right-wingers obsessed with the MSNBC pundit (Breitbart, NewsBusters.org). It was also true that the "wife of" characterizations provided Matthews with the kind of publicity—favorable publicity, as often as not—that money just can't buy. And even when you're a candidate who can easily self-fund an expensive political campaign if you want to, as Kathleen Matthews can, (see her Financial Disclosure Statement here [pdf]) "earned media" is almost always a nice thing to receive.

Almost always, but not always.

Last month the Chris Matthews factor earned Kathleen Matthews some unwelcome media coverage when David Dayen of The Intercept reported that

48 frequent guests of Matthews’s program … have made donations to the Kathleen Matthews for Congress campaign. These individuals, their spouses, or their political action committees donated $79,050 as of December 31, 2015 — about 5 percent of the $1.5 million Matthews had raised as of that time.

Initially, everyone seemed to see it as a story about Chris Matthews. The entertainment columnist at the Philadelphia Daily News thought the central issue was whether the Hardball host could "fairly interview those contributors on his program and what's the minimum amount of disclosure he needs to provide viewers." Right-wing critics, however, tried to spin the story as a pay-for-play scandal; suggesting Hardball was booking guests in exchange for campaign contributions to the host's wife. This overreaching by the right, in turn, handed the Matthews camp the opening it needed to play the sexism card and attempt to spin the story to it's own advantage.

But the original piece at The Intercept had raised another issue that was lost on the media critics and right-wingers.

"What the donations do reflect are the many political friendships [Chris] Matthews has cultivated as a longtime Washington pundit, whether he personally solicited them or not. In Washington, political friends often help each other out."

The Washington Post, reporting on the reaction of other candidates in the race to the Hardball guest/donor story, then brought the focus back around to the campaign and Kathleen Matthews.

Three candidates in the 8th … say the donations from Washington A-listers raise questions about whose interests Matthews will represent if she wins

Kathleen Matthews began her campaign by seeking to demonstrate her connections to the community she would nominally represent if elected. At her official campaign launch, she started by introducing family, friends, and staff by way of their ties to Montgomery County, or, at least, to "the area." For her part, here is how she put it on the Kojo Nnamdi Show's Politics Hour early in the campaign:

[M]y ties to the area are really deep, not only as a working mom who raised her family here, but also those 25 years on the air [as a local television reporter and news anchor]… so I really know the area, I love the people here, and I share a lot of their concerns and frustration right now with government.

But questions regarding her roots in the community she was presumably running to represent were raised from the beginning, too.

At that Kojo Nnamdi Show appearance, veteran D.C. political reporter Tom Sherwood made reference to hearing her described as "Mile High Matthews," serving on the Boards of D.C. institutions such as the Shakespeare Theater and Ford's Theater and such, but wondered about her ties, not simply to "the area," but to the congressional district she was now running in.

Whose interests … ?

What are your ties … ?

Which community … ?


* * *

It has been known by many names. A generation ago, Lewis Lapham called it "Versailles on the Potomac."

"Like the notables assembled under the king's roof at Versailles, official Washington divides the known world into only two parts. First there is Washington, then there is everyplace else"

More recently, Mark Leibovich of the New York Times profiled "The Club" in its present form in his book This Town. "Washington has become … a permanent feudal class of insiders.," said Leibovich in an appearance on the PBS Newshour. "These are people who are in office, people who were formerly in office, staffers, journalists, hangers-on, and you have this insider class that becomes self-perpetuating."

On an episode of Moyers and Company devoted to the book, Bill Moyers laid out a key observation Leibovich makes regarding the way the Washington establishment works.

[M]any American's see Washington today as a polarized, dysfunctional city. One that is not sufficiently bipartisan. But you describe it as a place that becomes a determinately bipartisan team when there is money to be made.

Then, as Moyers called the names on a "roll call of influence peddlers" for the next twenty minutes, inviting Leibovich to provide examples to illustrate his point about bipartisan team spirit in The Club, one after another, after another, after another of the names called turned out to be contributors to the Kathleen Matthews for Congress campaign.

• Ken Duberstein (former Chief of Staff, Reagan White House, and current Chairman and CEO, The Duberstein Group, gave $1000 to Kathleen Matthews for Congress), Tony Podesta (Founder and Chairman, The Podesta Gorup, gave $500), Steve McMahon (CEO and Founding Partner, Purple Strategies, gave $2700), and Hillary Rosen (Managing Director, SKDKnickerbocker, gave $500), of BP's Gulf oil spill crisis management "Beltway Dream Team"



• Jack Quinn (former Clinton White House Counsel, Chief of Staff, to Vice President Gore, and current Chairman and Co-Founder, QGA Public Affairs, gave $1000)



• John Breaux (former U.S. Senator and current Co-Chair, Public Policy Practice, Squire Patton Boggs, gave $1000), and the late Tommy Boggs (was Senior Partner, Squire Patton Boggs. Widow Barbara Boggs, Treasurer of Kathleen Matthews for Congress, gave $2700)



• Richard Gephardt (former Majority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives, and current President and CEO, Gephardt Government Affairs. Thomas O'Donnell, Managing Partner, Gephardt Government Affairs, gave $2700)



• Evan Bayh (former U.S. Senator and current Senior Advisor, Federal Public Affairs, McGuireWoods Consulting, gave $2000)



• Chris Dodd (former U.S. Senator and current Chairman and CEO, Motion Picture Association of America. Wife Jackie Clegg-Dodd gave $500)



• Byron Dorgan (former U.S. Senator and current Senior Policy Advisor, Arent Fox. Wife Kimberly Dorgan gave $250)



• Anita Dunn (former Director of Communications, Obama White House, current campaign strategist and advisor for Kathleen Matthews for Congress, and, as a Managing Director at SKDKnickerbocker, a partner of the aforementioned Hilary Rosen, gave $2700)

Kathleen Matthews thinks the problem with Washington is that it is a polarized, dysfunctional city, too. As she said on the Politics Hour:

I also think one of the frustrations people have right now is they believe we have gridlock in Washington, and we don't see bipartisan efforts to get to good things on behalf of all the people

As Leibovich has shown, the Beltway establishment stands for nothing if not bipartisanship. For them, it is the hyper-partisanship of the Tea Party and other movement conservatives that is the problem. And, for them, the solution to this problem is clear: a restoration of the ancien regime. A return to power of Versailles on the Potomac, a return to the status quo ante, a return to business as usual.

But, to be fair, it's not as if the Kathleen Matthews campaign slogan is "Let them eat cake!" Far from it.

Enter Digby.

Taking her cue from a classic Sally Quinn article in the Washington Post about the Washington establishment's "let down feeling" in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the progressive blogger Digby coined a term which can help us find Kathleen Matthews' true place in the political landscape: The Village.

It's shorthand for the permanent DC ruling class who have managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.

It's about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for "average Americans" when it's clear they haven't the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.)

… a metaphor for the faux "middle class values" that the wealthy, insular, privileged, hypocritical political celebrities (and their hangers-on and wannabes) present to the nation.

Is Kathleen Matthews a Villager? You decide.

Here's the story she tells:

"I'm the product of the middle-class."

“Our dad worked hard for a medical device company and our mom knew how to stretch a middle class salary to support a family of seven. She was frugal, prioritized education, and encouraged us to give back. I worked during high school and college to help pay for school …”

“In Washington, I found a kindred political spirit in my husband, who had also grown up in a middle class family of 5 children. We started in entry-level jobs in Congress and journalism and have been lucky to move up in careers we love.”

“But you know, [journalism is] not a glamorous life. I mean, you work your butt off in journalism. I worked weekends. I worked nights. … for many years, when I had three kids, I would commute from my home in Chevy Chase, Maryland down to work, do the five o'clock news, go home, pick up dinner at the Safeway, feed my kids, work on their homework, come back and do the eleven o'clock news, and I did that for years.”

"I think people know that I'm just a regular working mom."

“It's very difficult to put together day care scenarios that work on your different shifts. For me, working five, six, and eleven o'clock news, really challenging to find day care on those kinds of shifts.”

“I'm a working mom that raised her kids in Montgomery County, and I bring that experience, which I think relates to a lot of families, working families, in the area.”

“… all the while being a working mom, raising my own kids, struggling, working nights, weekends, trying to get day care, helping my mother, who was dying, getting treatment at NIH, so I know the struggles of working families, I've lived those struggles with you , all of you here in the room.”

“Like many on the panel here, my husband came to Washington, him out of the Peace Corps, me out of college, with college loans and college debt. We got married, we raised three kids, and over eighty years of combined salaries, we're in a position now where I can quit my job and run for Congress full time.”

“So, that's really kind of the thread of my campaign. It's a working mom's campaign, who wants to help more working families in America …”

And here are parts of the story that get left out:

Her father didn't exactly toil in obscurity at some anonymous medical device company, struggling to put food on the table. He was educated at the University of Illinois, and later at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was a student of the renowned architect Mies van der Rohe. He went on to become a faculty member at IIT before going to work for the seminal Silicon Valley biotech firm Beckmann Instruments as an HR executive, not only in southern and northern California, but also in Geneva, Switzerland.

By the time Kathleen and Chris Matthews married, Chris had already served as a speech writer in the Carter White House and would spend the next eight years as a top aide to the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill. And with Kathleen working in local television as a producer (soon to be reporter), it was, from the start, a two-career household as well, so one might reasonably speculate that their student loan payments were nowhere near the burden they have become for so many today.

With Chris rapidly rising through the ranks of the punditocracy after leaving Capitol Hill in 1987, and Kathleen being promoted to anchor at D.C.'s ABC affiliate in 1991, the couple was able to afford a $950,000 home in Chevy Chase, Maryland by 1993. Mark Leibovich would later describe it as "sun-lit, art-filled and cozy, with three Mercedes of various sizes and degrees of wear in the driveway."

Later that same year, Chris and Kathleen Matthews decided they could afford a nanny, too. Hired through the White House Nannies agency (which was doing land office business at the time as a result of the Nannygate scandal that had sunk the nomination of Zoe Baird as U.S. Attorney General earlier that year), the nanny stayed with the Matthews family for three years, from 1993-96.

Kathleen and Chris Matthews had much better luck with the Mount Holyoke graduate I sent them that same month. Gianna cared for their three children while Kathleen anchored the local news and Chris was making his national mark with Hardball. (Barbara Kline, White House Nannies, 2005)

And then there's Nantucket.

In summer, Nantucket is a remarkable re-creation of Washington politics, fundraisers, and restaurant life, confined to a 3.5-by-14-mile resort island. (Sally Brady, "See You at the Shore," Washingtonian, August 2003)

Like many elite Washingtonians, Chris and Kathleen have a summer home on Nantucket, purchased in 2004 for $4.35 million. Five bedrooms, four baths. Inground pool. Five acres leading down to the beach.

When asked about an upcoming Nantucket fundraiser last July, Kathleen made a point of stressing that it would be "hosted by my friends from the Washington area who happen not to be here. I'm here." What she didn't stress was that she had been on Nantucket for the better part of a week the month before to attend the Nantucket Film Festival, and would be back not just for her own campaign fundraiser but for the American Ireland Fund event the next week.

And then there's one other part of the story that doesn't get said: Kathleen Matthews' Financial Disclosure Statement [pdf] reveals that she and Chris are worth, at a minimum, $22.5 million. Wealthier than all but about 20 current members of Congress. Wealthier, in fact, than all but three members of the U.S. Senate, AKA the "Millionaire's Club."

Again, Digby: " [I]t is an extremely common trait among the DC courtiers. They truly seem to believe they are just regular guys --- and therefore, their concerns are the same as regular Americans. Only, you know, they aren't."


* * *

Yes, Kathleen Matthews has lived in Chevy Chase, in Montgomery County, in Maryland's Eighth congressional district, for well over twenty years now. But where, really, has she been putting down roots all this time? Where are her deepest ties? Where has she really been living her life all these years?

Call it Versailles on the Potomac, call it The Club, call it The Village. Whatever you call that place, there can be no denying that Kathleen Matthews is at home there. And as the Hardball guest/donor story and the roll call of the usual suspects Bill Moyers elicited from Mark Leibovich both make clear, that community knows who it thinks would best represent its interests.

So, whose interests will Kathleen Matthews represent if she is elected? The interests of her community, no doubt.

It's just a matter of figuring out which one.

RELATED:

"The Non-Denial Denial: Kathleen Matthews and Marriott's Government Affairs"

"Kathleen Matthews: AKA Kathy Cunningham, Republican Political Operative"

Jeffrey Hearn is an historian by training. He is also a longtime movement progressive a longtime resident of Maryland’s Eighth District, and a Jamie Raskin supporter, something he has previously blogged about here.