Do Democrats Think They're Bulletproof, or Do They Not Just Care about Winning in 2020?

by Thomas Neuburger

Some flavor of this piece has been written many times, but it bears repeating. One of these two things must be true:

• Either Democratic Party leaders, who define by their actions the Party they completely control, must think they're electorally bulletproof, completely immune from rejection by voters whose interests they claim to serve,

• Or the Party's leaders — Pelosi, Schumer, Clyburn and all the rest — think they themselves will be fine next year no matter what happens in November, think so little will change for them, that they're perfectly fine losing in November, thank you very much.

It can't be any other way. Democratic leaders, all of them, are showing no fear at all that any of their actions now will affect the election, or that any of their actions now will eject them from Party power and DC status and privilege — membership in the "Oh It's You, Senator" Club.

Zero fear. Do Party leaders think their actions are invisible to ordinary Americans? Or that the press will cover them so favorably (because, Trump) that they can do any damn thing their donors want them to do and suffer no blowback at all?

Apparently yes. And perhaps they're even correct in thinking this.

Here's just a taste of the evidence from the past few days of Party actions they have been nervous about. First this from David Sirota at his new Substack site.

Dems Give Unanimous Consent To Trump
Traumatized a generation ago, party leaders' default setting during a crisis is fear-driven acquiescence.

Why do Democrats want to win Congress if they don’t want to use power? What is the entire point of Democrats raising money and ginning up activist energy to win control of the U.S. House, if when a crisis hits they just pass whatever Mitch McConnell sends them? Is there anything they’ll actually negotiate for? And why won’t they flip the script and force McConnell to vote yes or no on their own agenda?

These are the questions bouncing around my mind as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi accede to another GOP-written stimulus bill -- and I think ultimately the answer has to do with deep-seated, self-destructive fear that was internalized by party leaders a generation ago during another national crisis.

Before we get to that, consider the present: the GOP bill adds more money for testing, hospitals and small business loans — the latter including a few vaguely positive tweaks, but no serious measures to prevent those loans from being raided by big business.

McConnell had the nerve to write a multi-trillion dollar check to large corporations, and then turn around and block money for state aid -- and he actually admitted he blocked it specifically because he doesn’t want states using it to prevent cuts to the retirement benefits of teachers, first responders, firefighters, cops and other public-sector workers....

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein points out that the legislation doesn’t include any resources for first responders, budget-strapped states or food stamps. It doesn’t include any new oversight of the first bailout bill. It includes nothing to help states move to a vote-by-mail system in the event that coronavirus complicates in-person voting during the general election.

It basically doesn’t include any alleged Democratic Party priority at all.

Frankly, he's much too kind; his subhead gives them way too much credit on the blind vs. evil scale. Are Democratic leaders showing fear and learned helplessness, cowardice in the face of McConnell and Trump's attacks? Or are they simply letting Republicans do what they and their donors want done anyway, to "write a multi-trillion dollar check to large corporations"?

Either way, Sirota says it doesn't have to be like this. House and Senate Democrats have good alternative choices:

Senate Democrats could put up some kind of fight -- they could filibuster, they could try for amendments, they could do anything other than just voice vote through whatever McConnell gives them.

House Democrats could do even more. They literally control the House. It is theirs. They could pass their own emergency legislation and dare McConnell to reject it, at a time when he is running for reelection and polls show he is one of the country’s most unpopular senators.

But they refuse -- and their rationale is revealing.

Yes, Democratic leaders want to placate their corporate donors by passing corporate bailout bills. Yes, they are part of a bipartisan establishment that takes orders from K Street. That’s all true. [emphasis added]

One of the great mysteries of this last round of bailout is, Where was the House bill? There was none.

Next, from Matt Taibbi at his own Substack site:

Why Did Democrats Nominate Donna Shalala to the Bailout Oversight Panel?
With the Congressional Oversight Committee, Democrats had a rare opportunity to reverse public perception about the party’s closeness to Wall Street. Instead, they punted again

First, he notes that "the Congressional Oversight Committee is not about health, but high finance, and Shalala appears to know nothing about that." He follows with this from David Dayen:

She holds shares in Boeing, as well as Alaska Airlines and Spirit Aerosystems, which builds a lot of pieces of Boeing aircraft. She owns Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell, and Occidental Petroleum at a time of a historic crash in oil price… She owns retailers and retail producers Ralph Lauren, L Brands, Burlington Stores, and Five Below… She owns big banks JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York Mellon, BBVA Compass, and HSBC…

Then Taibbi adds: "Shalala owns between $301,000 and $615,000 in UnitedHealth, suggesting she wasn’t much troubled by the suit accusing the firm of overbilling Medicare for billions – not a great look for someone now charged with watching for the same kind of behavior with significantly larger stakes. Worse, Shalala has between $202,000 and $550,000 in a series of iShares exchange-traded funds. These are BlackRock funds, at the center of the Fed’s new bond-buying programs already discussed at length in this space."

This, he notes, puts "a big-name Clinton apparatchik with millions invested in the very financial markets that stand to rise from bailout programs."

Taibbi's conclusion, that this "seems like a major unforced error, to put it mildly," is similarly excessively kind. From Taibbi I understand that — he's more reporter than partisan, and that's what reporters say when they don't want to editorialize in their own voices. (Sirota is at least as much partisan as reporter, so I expect something more to the point from him.)

Finally, I offer this, from Nina Turner:

Over 43,000 US millionaires to get ‘stimulus’ averaging $1.6 million each, committee finds | https://t.co/Kub3mTuGwA

This 🤬right here is unacceptable. The vast majority of Americans are suffering especially the poor. Congress come back to work. https://t.co/vz1D2XpvGL

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) April 20, 2020

The linked headline says it all, or most of it. From the linked article, we find this:

The [CARES] act allows pass-through businesses that are taxed under individual income versus corporate an unlimited amount of deductions against their non-business income, such as capital gains, according to The Washington Post. They can also use losses to avoid paying taxes in other years.

Hedge-fund investors and real estate business owners are “far and away” the ones who will benefit the most, tax expert Steve Rosenthal told the Post.

The CARES Act passed 419-6 in the House and 94-0 in the Senate.  Hands across the water.
 

Trump Lying-- And Lies-- Have Come To Define The Republican Party. It's Tragic But They Deserve It

It should always be news, even if it's the same story every single day-- which it basically is: Trump is a goddam congenital liar. He lies about everything... small pretty things and important business of the country. He's disgusting and for those of us who never watched his wretched TV game show, we're far less happy by having his putrid visage on our TVs every night. I doubt there has ever been a White House occupant so hated as Trump. Yesterday, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler noted that there aren't enough Pinpcchios for Trump's CrowdStrike obsession. The garbled English of a someone who is both senile and a moron makes it hard to understand what he;'s even saying, like this idiotic quote: "The Democrats, a lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine. It’s very interesting. It’s very interesting. They have this server, right? From the DNC, Democratic National Committee. The FBI went in and they told them, 'Get out of here. You’re not getting it. We’re not giving it to you.' They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian. And I still want to see that server. You know, the FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?"

Steve Doocy of Fox and Friends, whose head normally resides up Trump's ass, pulled it out long enough to ask during a November 22 interview, for a clarification: "Are you sure they did that? Are you sure they gave it to Ukraine?" Trump responded "Well, that’s what the word is," whatever that's supposed to mean. The word? From? Putin? Kessler pointed out that the orange baboon "persists in pursuing a debunked conspiracy theory. Somehow, we’ve never gotten around to assigning a Pinocchio rating for this claim. Maybe that’s because there aren’t enough Pinocchios available in our system to truly do this justice. Note to the president: When even one of your strongest TV allies expresses skepticism about a claim, it’s probably time to drop it."

This is a hoax hatched by Russian intelligence. No one believes it-- except Trump... and the 36% of Americans too stupid to be aware that Trump lies whenever he opens his mouth.

Fiona Hill, testifying before Congress: "Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves."

Trump’s GOP allies on the committee-- treasonous Republican garbage like Gym Jordan (R-OH), Devin Nunes (R-CA), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), John Ratcliffe (R-TX), Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH) "reacted with some outrage at her comments, insisting that they did not deny Russian involvement. Yet just hours later, Trump once again insisted the real culprit was Ukraine.

In the space of 10 sentences, Trump told four whoppers. Ukraine does not have the server, the FBI did not need physical possession to investigate, CrowdStrike was not founded by a Ukrainian, and it is not a Ukrainian company. It is dismaying that despite all of the evidence assembled by his top aides, Trump keeps repeating debunked theories and inaccurate claims that he first raised more than two years ago.

There are some days when we wish we were not limited to just Four Pinocchios. We were tempted to display 16 Pinnochios, four for each false statement. But this claim will certainly end up on our list of the Biggest Pinocchios of 2019. Four Pinocchios

The topic didn't have to be CrowdStrike or Ukraine or anything specific at all. The topic is the shit-pile the Republican Party has become. Next week's New York Review of Books has a brilliant essay-- two reviews by Joseph O'Neill, No More Nice Dems-- that gets right to the heart of the problem. The 2 books O'Neill reviewed, or rather used as his platform, are Meaghan Winters All Politics Is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States and Dana Fisher's American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave. O'Neill began by noting that "In the realm of state government, the Republican Party is wiping the floor with the Democrats. The 2016 elections are remembered for the presidential race, but they also gave the GOP control of sixty-eight state legislative chambers to the Democrats’ thirty-one. Amazingly, the lives of almost half of the national population came under the sway of a Republican trifecta—that is, a state government with all three branches controlled by the GOP. Even after the 2018 Blue Wave, the score was 61–37, Republican to Democrat." The sickness of the GOP is, alas, reflected in the Democratic Party establishment. As bad as they are, do you want to surrender to the embraces of Chuck Schumer, Dan Lipinski, Cheri Bustos, Michael O'Halleran, Steny Hoyer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rahm Emanuel, Greg Meeks, Jim Costa, Kyrsten Sinema... The worse the GOP gets, the more leeway the Democrats have to get sloppier and more corrupt and more corporate.

What’s salient here is that Republican dominance represents an extraordinary political overperformance. Republican state governments strongly align themselves with the national party leadership-- and by conventional measures, and certainly by comparison with the Clinton and Obama administrations, the national GOP has long been a disaster. Every Republican administration from Reagan onward has crashed the economy and exploded deficits. (Trump has already achieved the latter.) Their track record on health care is one of failure. Their handling of national security has been catastrophic (see the September 11 attacks, the rise of ISIS, Trump-Russia, climate change). Their criminality and corruption is scandalous: fraud, perjury, bribery, Boland Amendment violations during the Iran–contra affair, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, theft, and misuse of public funds are just some of the crimes committed by Republican administration officials and operatives-- and that’s without counting those chalked up under Nixon and Trump.

And it’s not as if red-state governments have been better. For at least a quarter-century, GDP growth in blue states has exceeded that in red states. Living standards-- educational attainment, household income, life expectancy, tax equity-- tend to be distinctly higher in blue states. These disparities are mitigated by what economists call “fiscal flows”-- blue staters subsidizing red staters in the form of federal taxes. When states go all-in on Republican economic strategies, not even fiscal flows can avert disaster, as the fates of Kansas and Oklahoma have revealed. Some red states even reject fiscal flows: fourteen have refused the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, with predictable consequences. If you wanted to tank the country, or part of it, your best bet would be to get Republicans to run things.

So why do they keep winning state races? To put it another way, why do Democrats-- the party of prosperity-- keep losing to them? Can this be changed? How much does it matter?

Meaghan Winter’s All Politics Is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States looks into these questions with remarkable clarity and tenacity. She closely inspects liberal grassroots activism in three states-- Missouri, Colorado, and Florida-- that “are not places where it is inevitable that right-wing politicians will control the narrative and agenda. Nor are they places where a progressive movement is easy to assemble.” Her method was to visit these regions repeatedly over a period of years; to intimately acquaint herself with the local issues and people and developments, which involved spending hours watching legislative committees at work; and to attempt to gain insight into what a sustainable and progressive reinvigoration of the Democratic Party might require.

Winter’s starting point is that effective political engagement at the state level is not only intrinsically desirable but that, “especially ahead of redistricting, there is no way for a political party or social movement to win long-term without building strategic power in cities and states.”

This might seem obvious. The maps of most congressional districts are determined by state legislatures. After the midterm election of 2010, Republicans used their state-level wins to ensure dramatic partisan overrepresentation in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Virginia, Indiana, New York, and Michigan. This guaranteed a Republican majority in the House of Representatives that could be undone only by an election like the 2018 Blue Wave. Gerrymandering was also applied to statehouses. This gives the GOP a continuing advantage, in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, in the redistricting that will follow the 2020 census.

Nonetheless, the importance of regional politics hasn’t been obvious, or obvious enough, to the Democratic powers-that-be: as Winter writes, “for years, it has been an open secret in political circles that Democrats and progressive interest groups have prioritized federal candidates and policy at the expense of the states.”

Winter suggests that this is because, first, there has been a generational conviction among baby boomers that federal politics is the most instrumentally effective. And second, the liberal political apparatus is “largely guided by the moral whims of rich people.” She gives the billionaire presidential candidate Tom Steyer as an example. Liberal megadonors with private foundations are reluctant to invest in uncharismatic, long-haul grassroots projects. They are typically afraid of appearing “political.”

... The subject of what should be done differently by Washington Democrats, in Congress and in the national organs of the Democratic Party, is a huge one. In essence, Democratic officials are about as useless as they could be in the matter of turning, and keeping, the political map blue. They need to change how they think about their jobs and their responsibilities.

They need to embrace partisan commitment. It is mystifying and demoralizing for grassroots activists that their basic assumptions (say, that the Republican Party, not just the Republican president, is unfit for power in a democracy) find no echo among their Washington representatives. When ordinary people are emptying their wallets, getting arrested, and putting their careers on hold to fight for the cause, the least they expect of the well-paid professional politicians they have worked to elect is that they will conduct themselves with equal determination and will side with them, not Republicans. Republican politicians, some Democratic officials seem not to grasp, are not guys in a bar with opinions different from your own. They are people who have chosen to devote their lives to undermining the core interests of your supporters and their families and communities. When Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island and a loud Trump fan, recently announced his retirement, he was lauded by Schumer for being “principled” and having “stood head & shoulders above everyone else.” If the Democratic Party is to remain viable, that kind of thing has to stop.

Democratic officials also need to start outmaneuvering the Republicans in Congress. Here, Democrats have a couple of no-brainers. The fact that each state is allocated two Senate seats, regardless of population, means that a Republican majority will likely prevail in the Senate for at least four of every six years-- which in turn means that judicial appointments will remain largely in Republican hands. It’s essential, therefore, that Democrats at the first opportunity grant statehood, and four Senate seats, to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. It surely goes without saying that they should immediately naturalize 11 million undocumented Americans, ideally with voter registration as part of the administrative process.

They need to favor proactive policies that address the concerns of their grassroots base rather than the wishes of corporate donors or of mythic pipe-smoking moderates in Ohio.

Finally, and very importantly, they need to use their national visibility to message effectively and develop a clear “brand.” This is another enormous subject. A powerful brand has deep structural benefits. A successfully Democratic branding strategy would involve, at a bare minimum, negatively branding the GOP, not just Trump, at every opportunity-- on the economy, on national security, on American values.

This is a feasible program. It will probably require a generational overhaul of Democratic officialdom. There are promising signs. The new chairman of the Wisconsin Democrats is Ben Wikler, formerly of the progressive action group MoveOn. His up-to-date grassroots expertise has ensured that in Wisconsin, a must-flip state for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, local partisan activism is at an extraordinary level a full year before votes are cast. Wikler is thirty-eight years old. He thinks very differently from, say, Joe Biden. Biden, like so many other Democratic leaders of a certain age, possesses sensibilities, strategic instincts, and values shaped by decades of losing ground to the GOP. He asserts that, once Trump is gone, Republicans will have an “epiphany” and discover inner moral resources. You could call Biden and his ilk Charlie Brown Democrats. They believe, against all the available evidence, that Lucy van Pelt will one day let them kick the football, and eventually they hoof at the ball in the unconscious hope that Lucy will indeed whisk the ball away. This generation of whiffers views Republican dominance as natural and, ultimately, acceptable. That won’t cut it.

Does Something As Amorphous As "The Democratic Party" Stand For Something?

"Conservative Democrats" are careerist politicians, not actual grassroots voters

I guess that depends on how you define it. Who is the Democratic Party? I would say anyone who has registered as a Democrat. Fair enough? Who is not the Democratic Party? The elected party officials, who try to define it by looking in the mirror. Their positions are transitory and their careerism is the most deadly weapon wielded against the party and what it is supposed to stand for. I would define the modern Democratic Party as part of the vision espoused by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. If he was still alive, Roosevelt would still be president of the United States. Bill Clinton made a concerted and somewhat successful effort to turn the Democratic Party away from its working family roots and towards the interests of his own corporate donors. It's been a lot of bad news for the party since then. A little reminder:

• 1932- FDR- 57.4% (472 electoral votes)
• 1936- FDR- 60.8% (523 electoral votes)
• 1940- FDR- 54.7% (449 electoral votes)
• 1944- FDR- 53.4% (432 electoral votes)

• 1992- Clinton- 43.0% (370 electoral votes)
• 1996- Clinton- 49.2% (379 electoral votes)

You can have capitalism or you can have a planet-- but you can't have both. Or... depending on the definition of "unfettered," you can have unfettered capitalism or you can have a planet-- but you can't have both.

Friday, Richard Rodriguez, a board member of Our Revolution from Illinois, wrote an essay for The Hill, DCCC is out of step with Democratic values. "The latest shakeup over a lack of diversity in senior leadership at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee," he wrote, "shows that House Democrats’ campaign arm remains out of touch with the values of its grassroots Democratic voters." Not just out of touch-- antithetical to the values of the grassroots of the party. Illinois Blue Dog and ultimate careerist Cheri Bustos, the new DCCC chair, is a perfect symbol of what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party. 

This first became evident in March when DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos announced a “blacklist” policy, which sought to stifle the people-powered democratic process by requiring political consultants to sign a loyalty pledge to incumbent Democrats. Recent comments from black and Latino lawmakers about a lack of diversity in senior leadership, as well as complaints about a tone-deaf approach to issues relating to race, show that the DCCC continues to refuse to evolve and change. Instead, there seems to be an implicit policy of silencing new voices and sidelining historically marginalized communities in order to protect the power of the status quo.

At a time when President Trump is openly voicing racist rhetoric and seeking to divide us, the Democratic Party has to be a model of the America we are proud to be-- an America that welcomes new voices, embraces diversity and opens the doors of power wide.

This spring, Our Revolution met with Rep. Bustos after holding rallies outside her office and delivering more than 30,000 petitions opposing the blacklist policy. After promising to follow up with us, Rep. Bustos has remained silent-- and the blacklist policy has remained in place. The recent staff shakeup is another symptom of the same problem.

  Our nation is a diverse melting pot of hard-working Americans. Sadly, not all politicians are doing their best to serve all their constituents. Not all Democrats are created equally, and some are not aligned to the principles and morals of their congressional district.

Congressman Daniel William Lipinski of Illinois’ third congressional district is one of the Democratic Party’s more conservative members. Lipinski voted against the landmark Affordable Care Act in 2010 and is anti-abortion. In 2018, he survived a close primary against author and small businesswoman Marie Newman. On April 16, Newman officially announced that she will challenge Lipinski in a rematch for the spring 2020 primary.

Even though the party doesn’t need to fear losing a seat in this solidly Democratic area, the DCCC is trying to handpick its preferred candidate, rather than let Chicago-area voters decide which candidate is best for them without outside interference.

Democrats are a diverse coalition of voters seeking real change and a return to the ideals of shared prosperity with racial, gender, climate, social and economic equality for all. Democratic congressional candidates in Mississippi and California may not agree on everything, but voters deserve the right to choose an alternative if the current representative is not reflecting their values and morals or fulfilling their needs.

No congressional district is the same, and a one-size-fits-all candidate is not good for the Democratic Party. Banning vendors and consultants who help Democratic primary challengers is wrong. The blacklist policy deters all future leaders looking to make a difference.

At Our Revolution, we are committed to fighting for the political change that is so desperately needed in American politics. We need an economy that works for everyone. We need health care for all. We need a political system that works for the people, not the deep-pocketed special interests. In 2020 and beyond, we need candidates on the ballot who make these issues their top concerns. We need candidates who are responsive to the people, who have said over and over again that the issues that they care about are affordable health care, fighting climate change, high-quality public education and so much more.

Rodriguez is talking more about the manifestations of the problem with the party-- the take over by the careerist congressional wing-- than about the underlying problems. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are not the heads of the party-- not by any stretch of the imagination. She leads the House Democrats-- poorly-- and he leads the Senate Democrats-- even more poorly. The interests of their two caucuses are often at odds with the interests of the working class/the party grassroots. Primaries of shitbags like Joe Crowley-- who Pelosi and her team had already picked as her successor-- are extremely important and absolutely necessary for many reasons, including as a wake-up call that these people do not own their transitory positions.

Strong challenges to incumbents remind the members of Congress who they work for, who is the boss. Defeating incumbents and replacing them with progressives is as important as replacing Republicans at a time when the Democratic majority is growing in the House-- not because of the inept DCCC, but because of the inept Donald Trump. This cycle, targeting reactionary, out-of-touch incumbents like Lipinski-- as well as Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA), Stephen Lynch (New Dem-MA), Bill Foster (New Dem-IL), Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY), Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ), Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY) and David Scott (Blue Dog-GA)-- is the way to keep the congressional wing of the party on its toes. Hopefully there will be many more serious challenges this cycle. It's a shame the challenges to Pelosi, Hoyer and Bustos are well-meaning but scattered, unfocused and weak. (Click on that Blue America 2020 primaries thermometer above and give what you can to the candidates who can actually win some of these races.)

Last month, Pelosi-- using GOP talking points-- told the DCCC that Bernie is unpopular in the suburbs and that if he wins the nomination it could be a threat to the Democratic House majority. She's lost her mind. Members of Congress have told me that she has threatened them with repercussions if they endorse Bernie. That should tell you a lot about who she works for and how she's changed... and what she deserves.

How Democrats Can Win with a Mandate in 2020, and Why They Likely Won't

"With no emerging leaders, no clear message, Democrats flounder," says the headline (source). The headline is false. These Democratic leaders are firmly in charge.

by Gaius Publius

Thomas Frank, author of the widely acclaimed book Listen, Liberal — widely acclaimed at least among the insurgent, anti-corporate wing of the Democratic Party — recently published a long article in Harpers demonstrating that Donald Trump could well be reelected president in 2020. His reasons include the effect of economic prosperity as an offset to moral repugnance (see Bill Clinton in 1996) and Trump's still high (and increasing) popularity among his supporters.

A note about Trump's support: The most recent CNN/SSRS poll, for example, shows Trump's approval among all respondents at a near-term high, 42% approval, vs. 54% disapproval. More importantly, in the same poll his approval among Republicans is 86%. (The most recent Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows Trump's approval among likely voters even higher, at 49%.)

As Howie pointed out recently, "If he's not king of America, he is king of the GOP." The implications of this are huge, as we watch the Mueller take-down operation turn the screws on Trump's money operation. On that, more later.

Democrats Can Elect the Next Fake-Populist Republican

One of the offshoots of Frank's thesis is that Democrats are quite likely to bring about this outcome — Trump's reelection — themselves. Here's the short version of this argument, from a follow-up interview with Thomas Frank by Jon Wiener and published in The Nation:

JW: Okay, what about Mueller saving us?

TF: Every Democrat that I talked to is counting on Mueller to deliver the midterms for them. This has worked for Democrats before. The famous Watergate class in Congress in 1974 was entirely the doing of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, and the Democrats are basically expecting that to happen again. It looks like it will work.

JW: What’s wrong with that?

TF: It breeds a kind of passiveness among Democrats where they never have to think about their own message. 

That's probably enough in itself to make the point clear. Since Trump's election, Democrats have only once concerned themselves with revising their message — their early, ill-fated, short-lived, badly-received PR effort known as the "Better Deal," with "better jobs" and so forth. This was especially rich after spending all of the previous two years laughing off Sanders' actual populism as impractical.

The Better Deal campaign died almost the day it was born, and Democrats today are doing nothing to revisit and learn from the failure of 2016, other than continuing to announce in every conceivable way their 2016 theme, "We're not him."

And lest you think the failure of 2016 should be counted successful thanks to the popular vote, consider: The Party turned a blowout into a squeaker, by rejecting a populist candidate who filled football stadiums in favor of an Establishment candidate who couldn't fill a gymnasium — in a change-year election.

Frank continues:

They [Democrats] may succeed in the coming midterms, but that’s a recipe for disaster in the long term. If Trump is not running for reelection three years from now, there’s going to be another Trump. The Republicans are never going to retreat from what this guy showed them in 2016. They now understand how you beat the Democrats. The next Trump is not going to be so vulgar, he’s not going to have affairs with porn stars, he’s not going to pick fights with NFL players. So the Democrats have to be thinking bigger. They can’t think “Oh, he screwed up. Great! Now we get back in.”

Frank believes Republicans now understand how to beat Democrats. The method is to run alongside the crowd that wants to overturn the Establishment — in both parties — and not against it. All they need do is find a candidate who will keep the base of Trump voters intact and attract enough independents who are both left-leaning and hate what the Democratic Party has become. In other words, all they need do is run a pro-change-appearing populist with a toned-down hint of the taint of Trumpian vulgarity — just enough to attract, not enough to repel.

If they offer such a candidate, and the Democrats offer their own pro-change-appearing candidate (for example, Cory Booker or Kamala Harris), the remaining left-leaning, betrayal-remembering independents will likely stay home. After that, it's anyone's call who wins. And God forbid the Democrats offer a likeable hack like Biden, or anyone else with his history of obvious subservience to money and power. It's over then for sure. 

How Democrats Can Win With a Mandate

So how can the Democratic Party claim victory from the jaws of opportunity in 2020? By offering an actual change candidate of their own to run against the Republican fake. By running alongside the crowd that still wants to overturn the Establishment, and not against it. By offering someone real for change voters to vote for.

By offering, in other words, the 2020 version of Bernie Sanders.

Frank again:

JW: How can we defeat this phenomenon once and for all? Don’t we need a progressive like a Bernie Sanders who would raise the minimum wage, make college tuition-free, bring Medicare for all—and actually make life better for ordinary middle- and working-class people?

TF: Yes. I don’t want to put any proper names on it, like a certain senator from Vermont, but the bottom line is this: If the economy booms and wages go up, it’s going to be hard to beat Trump in three years. The Democrats cannot stick with the Clinton and Obama approach where you identify yourself with what I like to call the ideology of the 1990s, the “catechism of tech, bank, and globe,” as I say in the article. There’s really only one set of successful politics for an age like this one: It’s the politics that we identify with the party of Lyndon Johnson, the party of the New Deal. What Trump has offered is a kind of weird replica of that. But as I have said many times, the real thing would beat the fake.

"The real thing would beat the fake." In 2016 Republicans offered a fake populist, and the Democrats offered a fake Republican. In that contest of fakes, the populist won ... barely. The first party to offer a real populist to the same electorate will sweep into office with a mandate.

Will the Democratic Party actually offer such a candidate, offer the "next Sanders," or even the last one, to 2020 voters? Not as currently led.

GP
 

Do Mainstream Democrats Really Want to Eliminate Carbon Emissions and Fossil Fuel Use?

Rep. Joe Kennedy III gives the official Democratic Party response to Trump's State of the Union address (source). Can he see global warming from his house? Unlike the rest of us, apparently not.

by Gaius Publius

“We can’t have an energy strategy for the last century that traps us in the past. We need an energy strategy for the future – an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy.” 

– Barack Obama, March 15, 2012 (quoted here; emphasis mine)

I raise the following questions because, as regular readers know, the coming climate disaster is regularly on my mind.

Do mainstream (corporate) Democrats really want to eliminate carbon emissions and fossil fuel use?

Or do they, like President Obama, want an "all of the above" energy strategy that maintains fossil fuel use (and continually enriches Big Oil firms) into the indefinite future?

Let's consider.

As a candidate in the 2016 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton pointedly and angrily refused to stop taking money from fossil fuel lobbyists, nor would she commit to banning fracking.

For the 2018 cycle, very few Democratic candidates for national office support a ban on fracking, and very few (about 45 candidates by my count) have signed the pledge not to take money from Big Oil in any of ways it hands out money: "Taking the pledge means that a candidate’s campaign will adopt a policy to not knowingly accept any contributions over $200 from the PACs, executives, or front groups of fossil fuel companies".

Just 45 candidates have signed at last count, among literally hundreds of Democratic Party primary and general election candidates. And most of the signers are of the rebellious "Bernie Sanders" stripe — Randy Bryce, Ro Khanna, Doug Applegate, Kevin de Léon, to name a few — people, in other words, generally unwelcome at Party leadership tables and events.

And now comes the "official" Democratic Party response to Trump's State of the Union address to Congress — from good-looking, groomed-for-Party-success Rep. Joe Kennedy III (Mass.) — and not one word about the climate.

From the Huffington Post:

Democrats Ignore Climate Change In State Of The Union Rebuttal

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was the only one to bring up global warming after the second-hottest year on record. 

The Democratic Party omitted any mention of climate change in its rebuttal Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address.

In his speech, Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) didn’t bring up global warming, sea-level rise or the surge in global greenhouse gas emissions, which threaten to become worse as the Republican White House ramps up fossil fuel production to unprecedented levels.

The Democratic Party omitted any mention of climate change in its rebuttal Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address.

In his speech, Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) didn’t bring up global warming, sea-level rise or the surge in global greenhouse gas emissions, which threaten to become worse as the Republican White House ramps up fossil fuel production to unprecedented levels.

The 37-year-old former prosecutor and grandson of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who was assassinated in 1968, lamented the Trump administration’s “all-out war on environmental protection,” made a passing reference to a “coal miner” and lionized Americans with the courage to “wade through floodwaters, battle hurricanes, and brave wildfires and mudslides to save a stranger.”

Yet, like Trump, the Democrat neglected critical milestones in the climate crisis in his speech.

I don't count this an error, but a strong indicator of policy. And if Kennedy or another corporate-representing Democratic Party official rises up later to adjust this "oversight," I recommend discounting it, just as you would discount a statement like "Of course I love you" that comes many days or weeks later than when it should have been said.

Who Is Joe Kennedy III?

Joe Kennedy III is being called, for all of the obvious reasons, a "rising star" in the Democratic Party. And certainly, Democrats are positioning Kennedy as such by handing him the opportunity to give the Party's official response.

Why am I calling him a "corporate-representing" Party official? Here's a list of his top contributors for the previous 12 months (h/t Lee Fang):

 Click to enlarge.

Rising star Joe Kennedy is also one of the fewer-than-100 House Democrats still not backing Medicare for All. He's opposed to free public colleges, taxing Wall Street, and marijuana reform. In 2015, for example, Kennedy voted to let the DEA arrest medical marijuana patients and providers.

He is kindly described as a "backbencher" and less kindly as "corporate owned."

The best characterization of Kennedy I came across in researching this piece is by Michael Steel, former press secretary to John Boehner: "Rep. Joe Kennedy (Mass.) is an old Democrat’s idea of what a young Democrat should be."

Can Democrats Free Us from Fossil Fuels?

Back to the original question and why it matters. First, do mainstream, Party-backed Democrats really want to bring carbon emissions to zero in a strong, proactive way? Apparently, obviously, not.

Second, if mainstream Democrats won't commit to freeing us from the death grip of oil and gas companies — and, I have to say it, the death grip of the money-obsessed sociopaths who run them — then this country will never free itself, not ever, even after the crisis is so far advanced that even a brick knows to take action. That refusal will leave a mark on us that will last millennia, assuming our species survives that long.

Third, if mainstream Democrats, as they continue to be challenged by Sanders and others to adopt climate policies that are actually effective, publicly refuse to do so — well, that's going to leave a mark on the Democratic Party at the ballot box as well.

It won't be as long-lasting a mark as the other one, but it could doom the Party to irrelevance for the next generation, or until actual progressives actually challenge — in a Party-dividing way — the corporate-owned for leadership, and win.

What are the odds of that happening in time to make a difference?

California resident waters a roof as the Thomas Fire approaches the town of La Conchita. Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times/Getty (source)

I guess the answer depends on what "in time" means. For many, "in time" means "now."

GP
 

The Democratic Party Establishment Is Both Inept And Corrupt-- Which Is Worse?

Shattered by Nancy Ohanian

Stanley Greenberg is as establishment a Democratic Party pollster and strategist as you're going to find. I would have guessed he would disagree with lots of what was in my two posts about the state of the Democratic Party this week-- the autopsy on Monday and yesterday's look at what the DC Democrats (don't) stand for. He's married to top Pelosi ally Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Rahm Emanuel's coffin was housed in their basement all while he ran the DCCC. But... in Susan Glasser's New Yorker feature of the Democratic Party civil war this week, Greenberg rails about how conservative Democrat Ralph Northam is running a shitty campaign in Virginia as if he's "Hillary Clinton. 'He is running on the same kind of issues, and has the same kind of view of the world. It’s the Republicans who talk about the economy, not the Democrats.' This was the approach that doomed Clinton against Trump. The electorate was angry in 2016 and remains angry now, Greenberg said, and Northam, a Norfolk doctor, didn’t get it. Neither did Clinton and the team of Obama veterans who staffed her Brooklyn headquarters. 'If you live in the metro areas with the élites, you don’t wake up angry about what’s happening in people’s lives,' Greenberg said." Welcome to the club, Stan! I gave up the opportunity to sit in on a Pelosi telephone briefing so I could read over Glasser's story again before going on the air with Nicole Sandler yesterday.

Greenberg and other prominent Democrats think Señor Trumpanzee could be reelected in 2020 "unless the Party figures out, and fast, a way to tackle the problem that sealed Clinton’s fate in 2016: how to appeal to the disaffected white working-class voters who provided Trump’s unlikely win a year ago." Greenberg is still stewing of Hillary's "failure to heed the advice of him and others to appeal to the Party’s traditional working-class voters in the Midwest. Compounding the errors, Clinton’s team conducted no state polls in the final three weeks of the campaign, relying instead on flawed data analytics to predict turnout and the vote. As a result, it didn’t even know that final disaster loomed. 'Malpractice and arrogance contributed mightily to the election of Donald Trump,' Greenberg concluded." The villain? Young and data-driven campaign manager Robbie Mook, former executive director of the DCCC in a year where Obama won and the DCCC failed miserably to recapture the House, almost entirely because of Mook and his incredibly incompetent staff. While he was Hillary's campaign manager Mook ignored everyone with a different perspective than his own. That's a big part of why she lost. (As we mentioned yesterday, he and his lot have been contributing massively to defeat populist Lillian Salerno and push one of their own pointless establishment kind, Ed Meier, as the TX-32 nominee.)

Should Democrats bet their future on attacking Trump and pledge, as the California billionaire donor Tom Steyer now wants them to do, to pursue Trump’s impeachment, at all costs, if they win back the House next year? Should they give up on the white voters who went for Trump in 2016 even though many had been reliably Democratic in the past? Was Clinton’s defeated primary challenger, Bernie Sanders, right to try to pull the Party to the left?

Without a resolution to these questions, the next Democratic nominee may well end up caught in the same trap in which Hillary Clinton found herself, stuck defending the legacy of the two-term Obama Presidency, even as the economic dislocations of the Obama era fuelled the rise of populism on both left and right.

It can be difficult, if not impossible, in Washington these days to pay attention to the Democrats’ war within while what appears to be the full-fledged implosion of the Republican Party unfolds. After all, hardly a day goes by when the President of the United States isn’t publicly attacking leaders in his own party, and being attacked back. And this week brought a new obsession: the first indictments in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that the brewing fight over the Democratic Party’s future gets so little airtime. In the wake of Trump’s win, it’s easy to blame Hillary Clinton for being a flawed candidate with a tin ear for politics. Or to rationalize Trump’s unexpected victory as an accident of history. But I haven’t talked with a single Democrat or independent analyst who doesn’t think that the Party remains in serious danger of another electoral catastrophe.

...When Democrats handicap their prospects for 2020 these days, the list of potential candidates is huge and invariably includes septuagenarians like Sanders and former Vice-President Joe Biden—both of whom appear eager to run—as well as an array of younger, relatively unknown officials, like Kamala Harris, the former California attorney general who is now a first-term senator. While the Democratic National Committee is now being led by Obama’s former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has promised a technocratic approach to the problem of resurgent Republicans, the energy in the rank and file remains with the Bernie bros and Sandersistas, who are determined to pull the party to the left—toward a future of universal health care and free college for all. Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, could appeal to this fervent new activist base, and conceivably win the nomination in 2020. But more centrist Democrats worry that she couldn’t do so without forever alienating not only the Trump base but also the Wall Street moneymen who have provided the Party with key financial backing ever since Bill Clinton introduced his New Democrats to the nation, in 1992. As for Trump’s angry white working class, no one’s sure if there are any Democrats at all in the mix for 2020 who can really speak to them. And to the extent that there are such politicians, figures like Biden or Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, no one’s sure there’s a real place for such a candidate in a party moving left quickly.

“The Democratic Party today is divided over whether it wants to focus on the economy or identity,” Greenberg said when we talked. That is, as he pointed out, just what the Clinton campaign was fighting about a year ago. Greenberg and others who came out of the Bill Clinton era-- like the former President himself-- had never really let go of the economy-first mantra that got them to the White House in a different time, and they felt that there was a generational conflict with the Obama operatives who held sway over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 strategy. It was a fight that dogged the Clinton campaign all the way until its final days, when Greenberg and his allies inside the campaign pushed unsuccessfully to close with a focus on her plans for the economy.

“The caricature of this debate is, Bill Clinton says you have a problem and the numbers people say you don’t,” Jake Sullivan, who served as Clinton’s top policy adviser for the campaign after working with her closely at the Obama State Department, recalled. But it wasn’t that Hillary Clinton’s team disagreed over the problem, he insisted, just over what to do about it: “Everybody recognized we had a huge working-class, non-college white issue. The question was, How do you add up to victory? Do you attack it head-on or by compensating elsewhere? That was the fundamental strategic debate.”

And it still is.

Oops, not mention of Wassermann Schultz and the way she cheated to guarantee Hillary would win the nomination. As an unrepentant an establishment figure as the DNC's own Donna Brazile blew the roof off that yesterday with a guest post at Politico: Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC. She admits she had promised Bernie when she took the helm of the DNC after the convention that she would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team-- which, of course, included fired DNC chair Debbie Wassermann Schultz-- had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. "I’d had my suspicions," she wrote, "from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails." But she wanted proof. She claims Obama neglected the DNC and left it to rot while Wassermann Schultz "had not been the most active chair in fundraising," diplomatically not mentioning that Wassermann Schultz employed all the DNC's tools to raise money for herself-- voraciously as she tried to build a case for why she should be House Speaker-- not for the party. By the time Hillary took over the DNC she made it "dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations." Brazile says she found the proof she looked for that the fix was in. Everybody blamed Wassermann Schultz for everything. There can be no doubt she was behind everything that went wrong at the DNC, at least according to Brazile's account.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary [Gensler, DNC CFO] said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”

The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.

I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.

...Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially… money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

...The agreement-- signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias-- specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings... This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination... The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

I talk with so many solid young political leaders, almost every day. And really good members of Congress too, like Ted Lieu and Ro Khanna in my own state, for example. I have to keep reminding myself why any of them would want to be associated with the Democratic Party. And there is literally only one conceivable answer, aside from vestigial values long abandoned in all by name: the lesser of two evils. That's it!

Do The DC Democrats Stand For Something? They Used To

I wish Stephen Jaffe's insurgent campaign in San Francisco was catching on faster. For one thing, it might focus Pelosi on saving her own hide and leave her with less time and energy for interfering in so many primaries across the country. Pelosi isn't even especially ideological in her interference. The DCCC always picks New Dems and Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- this cycle conservatives like Jay Hulings (TX-23), Paul Davis (KS-02), Elissa Slotkin (MI-08), Brad Ashford (NE-02), Dave Min (CA-45), Hans Keirstead (CA-45), Angie Craig (MN-02), Mikie Sherrill (NJ-11), Anthony Brindisi (NY-22), Roger Huffstetler (VA-05), Jana Lynne Sanchez (TX-06), Gretchen Driskell (MI-07), Dan McCready (NC-09) and Brendan Kelly (IL-12)-- but Pelosi has a different criteria than the conservatism and penchant for corruption that motivates the DCCC. Pelosi is looking for multimillionaires like herself. Congress has more multimillionaires than ever before-- and they're not all Republicans. I know it's a tangent but I bet you want to see the list. These are the 2 dozen richest members of the House:

• Greg Gianforte (R-MT)- $315 million
• Darrell Issa (R-CA)- $255 million
• Michael McCaul (R-TX)- $108 million
• John Delaney (New Dem-MD)- $92 million
• Jared Polis (New Dem-CO)- $91 million
• David Trott (R-MI)- $73 million
• Vern Buchanan (R-FL)- $50 million
• Diane Black (R-TN)- $46 million
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)- $40 million
• James Renacci (R-OH)- $32 million
• Suzan DelBene (New Dem-WA)- $31 million
• Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)- $29 million
• Roger Williams (R-TX)- $27 million
• Tom MacArthur (R-NJ)- $26 million
• Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ)- $25 million
• Chris Collins (R-NY)- $24 million
• Joseph Kennedy III (D-MA)- $19 million
• Don Beyer (New Dem-VA)- $16 million
• Fred Upton (R-MI)- $14 million
• Kenny Marchant (R-TX)- $14 million
• Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)- $13 million
• Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)- $13 million
• Nita Lowey (D-NY)- $12 million
• Trent Franks (R-AZ)- $10 million

There are dozens more multimillionaires in the House-- and for some reason no one can understand-- Pelosi busies herself recruiting more. What the Democrats need more of in Congress are Americans from working families who are in touch with the problems other American working families are concerned with-- more men and women like Randy Bryce (D-WI), Jared Golden (D-ME), Katie Hill (D-CA), Jenny Marshall (D-NC), Paul Clements (D-MI), Sam Jammal (D-CA), Lillian Salerno (D-TX) who understand what solidarity means. Instead, Pelosi recruits multimillionaires to run against them.

The most outrageous example this cycle is how the DCCC steered some worthless multimillionaire into working and middle class district nowhere near his $10 million beach front mansion. CA-39 doesn't have a beach-- or $10 million mansions, but the DCCC had another multimillionaire in mind as the candidate in Gil Cisneros' district (Hans Keirstead) so they plopped Cisneros, an "ex"-Republican who won $266 million in a lottery-- much of which he's been willing to spread around to buy endorsements from corrupt Democrats-- in CA-39, where Sam Jammal, a regular middle class guy, is running. What's funny is that another multimillionaire jumped into the race and gave his campaign $2,000,000 on day one-- 4 times more than Cisneros has put top of his own loot so far.

In Maine there's something called The Donors' Table, led by notorious hedge fund billionaire, slumlord and Pelosi donor Donald Sussman. Even though Maine Democrats were coalescing around a working class kid from the district-- veteran and state House majority whip Jared Golden-- someone who has what it takes to engage and beat GOP incumbent Bruce Poliquin-- Sussman saw an opportunity to buy a congressional seat for a fellow multimillionaire, inheritor Lucas St Clair from Portland, the kind of riche-rich outsider candidate ME-02 voters will never back in a million years, not even in a Democratic wave election. But Sussman and Pelosi insist that Congress needs someone with a bank account like theirs.

Want me to go on? There are at least 9 Democrats vying to run for the north Dallas seat occupied by Republican slime dog Pete Sessions. But who do you think the Democratic Establishment favors? Ed Meier has $438,414.21 in cash on hand, and reported, as part of his $585,951.45 haul, personal donations from multiple top officials from Clinton and Obama world, such as former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, former Clinton aide Neera Tanden, Washington attorney Robert B. Barnett, Georgetown professor Peter Edelman, former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, longtime Clinton loyalist Minyon Moore (a slimy payday lender lobbyist), Monsanto lobbyist Jerry Crawford, former Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines, former U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar (Blue Dog) of Colorado, Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan, former Rep. Ellen Tauscher (New Dem) of California and the leadership PAC of conservative Virginia Senator Mark Warner.

The progressive in the race, Lillian Salerno, is trying to win the primary by running a campaign based on ideas and by presenting solutions to real problems that face real voters. And that brings us to A Post-Obama Democratic Party in Search of Itself, Robert Draper's piece for the New York Times Magazine this week. His premise is that Obama "left behind a party struggling to find an identity-- and to reconnect with voters in time for the 2018 elections." Clueless beyond fathom, Pelosi and the DCCC is behaving as if the answer is multimillionaire candidates... lots and lots of them-- "to reconnect with voters?" As an identity? Really?

Immediately after the Democratic Party electoral collapse exactly 12 months ago, Pelosi set up a conference call with her members. There was no way Trump could win. He did. There was no way the DSCC wouldn't win back the Senate. They didn't. There was every opportunity for the Democrats to slash the GOP majority in the House, maybe even win back power. What a joke!

Several members on the call later told me they expected their leader to offer some show of contrition, an inventory of mistakes made or, at minimum, an acknowledgment that responsibility for the previous night’s disaster began at the top. Already, Trump’s sweep of what had for years been Democratic strongholds in the Rust Belt had led to a fast-congealing belief that the party had lost touch with white working-class voters.

But Pelosi sounded downright peppy on the call, noting a few vulnerable House seats that the Democrats had managed to hang onto. As for those working-class voters, “To say we don’t care about them is hard to believe,” Pelosi insisted, according to a transcript of the call I obtained. “I have to take issue and say I don’t think anybody was unaware of the anger.” The Democrats weren’t out of touch, she said. They just hadn’t made their case clearly enough to voters-- or as she put it, “We have to get out there and say it in a different way.”

...In late July, Pelosi, Bustos, Jeffries and Cicilline stood on a stage with six other Democrats under a wiltingly hot summer sky in the city park of Berryville, Va.-- a town of 4,306 residents in a purple district within easy driving distance of Washington-- and unveiled their new agenda, titled “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future.” The phrase, which had been poll-tested by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was an intentional echo of F.D.R.’s New Deal — and, less intentionally, of a Papa John’s pizza slogan. But its biggest debt was to the author of The Art of the Deal, and to his crimson-jowled populism.

“A Better Deal” called for retraining in America’s fading manufacturing sector, renegotiating trade deals, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and fighting the corporate consolidation that had affected the prices of everything from eyeglasses to beer. None of the 10 speakers invoked President Barack Obama. In fact, one of the key provisions in “A Better Deal”-- renegotiating drug prices for Medicare recipients-- was an implicit rebuke of the former president, who had agreed with the pharmaceutical industry to freeze Medicare drug prices in exchange for its support of the Affordable Care Act.

But even before the rollout, Pelosi diminished the substance of “A Better Deal” in an interview with the Washington Post, clarifying that it was not “a course correction, but it’s a presentation correction.” A Quinnipiac poll in August found that only 33 percent of Democrats and 12 percent of independents had a favorable opinion of the new Democratic agenda. The self-consciousness of the rebranding, one congressman mused to me at the time, “seems like what you would do in a different era.”

There was a stiff-jointedness to the whole spectacle, a sense of the Democrats’ trying to regain the use of muscles they had let atrophy over the previous eight years. Obama, after all, used to make this sort of thing look easy. Conflating the American story with his own-- “This is who we are”-- the president conveyed, even in policy irresolution, an unshakable sense of his and America’s place in the world. “I love the guy, I miss him,” Scott Peters [a conservative, multimillionaire New Dem] said of Obama. “But organizationally, the party is in disarray. We’re at the lowest level of elected officeholders since Hoover. We got a bit lazy and found ourselves relying on Barack Obama’s charisma, and it left us in bad shape.”

Organizational and technological lapses do not fully account for the Democratic Party’s travails. “All that stuff is like the field-goal team,” the Obama strategist David Axelrod told me. “None of it will help you if you haven’t already moved 80 yards down the field. Being technologically proficient wouldn’t have saved Obama if he didn’t also have a consistent, compelling message.”

But that message had grown threadbare by 2016. No longer was it sufficient to campaign on hope and change, or even on the president’s successful efforts in 2009 to stave off a deep recession. The uneven economic recovery raised questions about the party’s obliviousness to the impunity of Wall Street and the gap between the megawealthy and everyone else. Hakeem Jeffries, the New York congressman who was an author of “A Better Deal,” admits, “We developed a blind spot for the economic challenges that still remained unmet.”

By the end of Obama’s presidency, the Democratic Party had lost nearly a thousand seats in state legislatures across America. It had forfeited its majority in both the House and the Senate. A mere 16 of the nation’s 50 governors were Democrats-- and that number dwindled to 15 in August, when Jim Justice of West Virginia announced with a grinning Donald Trump at his side that he, too, had decided to become a Republican.

But in four special elections to fill seats vacated by House Republican incumbents this year, the Democrats fell short-- and in the case of Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, lost by four points even after raising an unheard-of $23 million. His was the most expensive House race ever, and the fact that Democratic donors spent so heavily on a loss may help explain why the party’s fund-raising has diminished since then. The Democrats’ base-- young and nonwhite voters-- is no better than Trump’s at showing up for midterm elections and is unhelpfully clustered in urban districts. Many suburban and rural districts were artfully gerrymandered by Republican state legislators after the 2010 census and have proved impenetrable since then; they aren’t likely to change hands without a healthy number of recent Republican voters being persuaded to vote Democratic. [Draper is incorrect about that; the Democrats don't need any Republican voters at all-- just lots and lots of independent voters, though demoralized Republicans staying home will also help.]

There is also a less quantifiable problem, the one that vexed Pelosi’s team in the months after the election: the Democratic Party’s chronic difficulty explaining just what it stands for. “There’s a deep worldview among conservative intellectuals that moved its way through a fear of fascism in the 1940s, through think tanks and campaigns and the California tax revolt of the 1970s,” Felicia Wong, president of the progressive Roosevelt Institute, says. “And basically the Democrats don’t have that. The New Deal was one thing, and the Great Society was another thing. The party never fully recognized that Jim Crow and segregation were economic decisions. That left Democrats with an incoherent economic argument. The result is that they lack a historical vocabulary.”

Questions about the interplay of race and economics, of course, aren’t just historical after the 2016 election-- as much as politicians and operatives might want them to be. Plenty of progressives hold the view, as the MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid has argued on Twitter, that white working-class voters “resent the changes that racial and religious multiculturalism have brought to societies where people like them have been the majority.” But a former colleague of Reid’s at MSNBC, Krystal Ball, now president of the People’s House Project-- which seeks to elect Democratic congressional candidates in G.O.P. districts-- insists that the primary motivation of these voters is economic. “People who are holding onto their livelihoods by their fingernails thought that at least Trump gave a crap,” she says. “Maybe it was a pack of lies he was selling them, but at least he didn’t hold them in contempt. And frankly there’s a lot of contempt from certain corners of our party. And a billion dollars’ worth of ads saying we’re not elitists won’t change that.”

Early on the morning of July 27, a group of House Democrats held a private gathering in the Capitol basement with a special guest: Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor and former Obama chief of staff, who over a decade ago, when he was an Illinois congressman, served as chairman of the D.C.C.C. Looking ahead to 2018, Emanuel offered a broad-brushstroke plan of attack: “Find the specific issues that resonate in your district,” he said, according to one meeting participant’s notes. “We want to appeal to Trump voters who are already pulling away from him.” In particular, “Suburbs are our best opportunities.” On the matter of ideological purity, he was blunt: “It’s not a question of left versus center-- it’s forward versus backward.”

If this advice sounded familiar, it was because Emanuel advocated the same strategy a dozen years earlier, when he was trying to lift his party out of the trough it had occupied since the Newt Gingrich-led takeover of the House by the Republicans in 1994. Emanuel focused on recruiting more centrist candidates who were well liked in their districts rather than on ideological darlings of the national party. “The people who criticized me back in 2006 were from my own party,” he told me recently. “When I was recruiting candidates, I’d get yelled at: ‘Why is he getting all these sheriffs and military guys?’ It’s because they were running in red districts!”

Nearly every one of Rahm's recruits, mostly New Dems and Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party lost their seat-- and their conservatism dragged the party into perdition in 2010 from which it still hasn't recovered. Emanuel's candidates, which included all the same kind of garbage candidates the DCCC is recruiting again this cycle, including the "ex"-Republicans, turned off the Democratic base and ruined the Democratic legislative agenda. Democrats didn't come out to vote in 2010 and 63 Democrats lost their House seats, Rahm Emanuel's biggest accomplishment other than his personal accomplishments of enriching himself by working for Wall Street in a fake $14 million job after pushing through NAFTA. That completely alienated Democratic voters from the Democratic Party which was, pre-Emanuel/pre-Clinton, still widely seen as a vehicle for the legitimate interests of the working class. Draper's interpretation" "The election cemented Emanuel’s legend as a tactician."

Then Draper really buys into the Beltway convention wisdom that's never righted never will be right. He gets right into David Krone, Harry Reid’s former chief of staff, who thinks it's all about winning, no matter what a piece of shit you actually win. Sound like Trump, doesn't it? Krone's ideas are all ass-backwards-- pass garbage like ObamaCare because "compromise" even if its so flawed that it's barely supportable and has given the right a weapon to beat the Democrats nearly to death. But... "compromise." He worships Emanuel and Pelosi (and, of course, Reid) and can't see how their poor excuse for leadership has destroyed the Democratic Party from inside. "Prevailing in some red districts," he wrote, "may require, at minimum, tempering the party’s progressivism on social issues." Why's that? Just because every numbskull loser has said it before. Tempering = losing. That's what Democrats have been doing-- tempering and losing. This week Tony Fabrizio, Trump's top campaign pollster, admitted that Bernie would have won. He fights for what's right, untempered-- and people figured it out. Draper, though, would rather interview right-wing Democrat Christian Bustos and let her lie unchallenged-- and without even identifying her as a Blue Dog and mentioning her horrible voting record (an "F" from ProgressivePunch) as she intones about how her "core values are very much in line with what hard-core Democrats believe."

Draper is supposed to have some kind of political credibility but he hadn't watched the most important campaign video of the cycle, Randy Bryce's intro clip, until everyone he interviewed told him to. The guy who was instrumental in making Bryce's video, Bill Hyers:

“What’s terrible about Democrats like Rahm Emanuel,” Hyers said, “is that it matters more to them if you’re a candidate who can raise money from very wealthy people than if you have an argument to make. They look at everything through the old Clinton triangulation strategy. Put out very carefully prepared statements. Don’t let anyone get to your right. Deny and ignore. Never have an honest dialogue. It was a bad strategy back in the ’90s. But it’s even worse today, because we can now have 24-7 access to candidates, and people can see when they’re not being authentic. Everything Hillary Clinton did was carefully scripted-- they could see that.”

Hyers’s client Bryce has been the undisputed breakout star of the 2018 cycle so far; the announcement ad has attracted millions of views. (Such enthusiasm, it should be said, does not yet make Bryce any less of a long shot: The D.C.C.C. does not currently include Wisconsin’s First District among its 80 targeted seats.) The afternoon we met, Hyers showed me a rough cut of an ad for his newest client, a former Army champion boxer and ex-opioid addict from Staten Island named Boyd Melson-- known in the ring as the Rainmaker-- who is running for New York’s 11th District. Melson’s YouTube rollout, like Bryce’s, is replete with stirring proletarian imagery: neighborhoods festooned with American flags, an aloof Republican incumbent dodging town halls, Melson alone in the ring pummeling the air with slow-motion jabs. It suggests a trailer for “Rocky Goes to Washington.”

Melson turned out to be a dud of a candidate and is about to withdraw from the race. The other two awesome videos Draper ballyhooes were for Amy McGrath (KY) and Hans Keirstead CA), but both have turned out to be typical DCCC candidates who look good on paper (or even film) but just don't have what it takes.

But Draper spoke to another blue collar candidate like Bryce, Jared Golden from Lewiston, Maine, one of the great candidates I mentioned earlier who Pelosi and her allies are trying to bury under sea of money. "Lewiston today is a hollowed-out exoskeleton of a textile mill town," wrote Draper, who then quoted Golden: "Our way of life is under attack here. We’re a classic case of the America that’s being left behind. The social-identity issues that have been emphasized in Portland don’t resonate in rural Maine. It’s damaged the Democratic brand here, to be honest. We’re a community of hard-working people who may not be highly educated, but that doesn’t mean we’re not intelligent. The majority of the folks here voted for Donald Trump, and I can tell you that the description of them as a basket of deplorables is just dead wrong." Golden has little use for the national Democrats' "A Better Deal" slogan. "It’s going to take more than a glossy new policy document to take back the U.S. House." That thermometer on the right? That's to help Bryce and Golden and other candidates like them. Please click on it and check it out.

The Republicans have a one-size-fits-all attack strategy they use against Democratic candidates: Pelosi puppet! It worked against a hollow nerd like Ossoff. Bryce and Golden are far more aware of Pelosi's actual short-comings than either Ryan or Poliquin. That kind of Republican attack isn't going to work in WI-01 or ME-02.