What Do You Think-- Should We Make The Democratic Party More Democratic?

I just got off the phone being interviewed by a journalist for GQ about how punk bands fought off Nazi sympathizers from the suburbs who couldn't understand the concept of irony and got uncomfortably serious about fascism. The Dead Kennedys, The Clash, Black Flag are the best known among them early on and soon after, Green Day embraced the mantle. We ended the conversation by me introducing him to Green Day fan and anti-fascism warrior Randy Bryce, you know, to kind of push the discussion into a related, if not obvious, direction.

Bernie wrote a long essay for his followers this week and I'm going to share it in moment but I want to set it up first by urging you to read a Matt Taibbi piece in Rolling Stone first, Why Donna Brazile's Story Matters-- But Not for the Reason You Might Think. His subtitle: "Everyone knew the primary was rigged. The real question is: Why did they bother, when they would have won anyway?" He's not happy about the virtual lynching of Brazile by the online Clinton dead enders who refuse to ever go away and live to destroy the Democratic Party.

The story among other things described how the national Clinton campaign used funds that by rule should have redounded to state Democratic Party offices.

Politico described this situation back then as "essentially… money laundering."

...[T]he idea that Brazile's book amounted to a smoking gun that the primary was "rigged" against Sanders is "problematic" in its own right, for two reasons:

1) That the DNC had things stacked against Sanders from the start wasn't secret. After all, the DNC wouldn't even let Sanders use their headquarters as a venue to announce his candidacy, way back in April of 2015. As the book Shattered explains it, DNC officials felt it was inappropriate to "give Sanders the imprimatur of the party." He made his announcement on a strip of grass outside the Capitol. He was never treated by the DNC as a real candidate, not from the first minute of his campaign.

2) But it didn't matter! Clinton would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway. As her proponents have repeatedly pointed out, the race wasn't that close. Even as a Sanders supporter, I concede this.

But that is what's so weird. Why bother monkeying around with rules, when you're going to win anyway?

Why not welcome Sanders and the energy he undoubtedly would (and did) bring into the party, rather than scheme to lock him and others out?

There are a lot of people who are going to wonder why so much time is being spent re-litigating the 2016 campaign. It sucked, it's over: Who cares?

It does matter. That race is when many of the seeds of what will be the defining problems of our age first began to be sown.

The rise of Trump and the crypto-fascist movement that crushed establishment Republicans is half of the story. The sharp move among many white middle American voters away from Beltway Republicanism toward something far darker and more dangerous crystalized in 2015-16. So it has to be studied over and over.

But there is an ugly thing on the other side that also began at that time.

This is when establishment Democrats began to openly lose faith in democracy and civil liberties and began to promote a "results over process" mode of political thinking. It's when we started hearing serious people in Washington talk about the dangers of "too much democracy."

This isn't about Hillary Clinton. It's about a broader movement that took place within the Democratic establishment, and spread rapidly to blue-friendly media and academia.

It's a kind of repeat of post-9/11 thinking, when suddenly huge pluralities of Americans decided the stakes were now too high to continue being queasy about things like torture, extralegal assassination, and habeas corpus.

In the age of Trump, we're now throwing all sorts of once-treasured principles-- press ethics, free speech, freedom from illegal surveillance-- overboard, because the political stakes are now deemed too high to cede ground to Trump over principles.

But this distrust of democracy began before Trump was even a nominee. As Brazile notes, it started within the ranks of the Democratic Party near the outset of the campaign.

It would have been a huge boon to Clinton's run if the DNC had welcomed not only Sanders but other serious candidates into the race, in the true spirit of what the primary process is supposed to represent-- the winnowing of many diverse views into one unified message.

But the attitude in Washington is now the opposite. Primary challengers are increasingly seen as reprobates who exist only to bloody the "real" candidate. So they should be kept down and discouraged whenever possible.

As the campaign continued, and we saw both Trump's rise and results like Brexit, the "too much democracy" argument began to emerge even more, along with the embrace of techniques that would have horrified true liberals a generation ago.

In the last year, we've seen the blue-state establishment celebrate the use of the infamous FISA statute against American citizens, and the use of warrantless electronic surveillance against the same.

We've seen the ACLU denounced for defending free speech and we've seen sites like Buzzfeed celebrated for publishing unverified and/or slanderous material, usually because the targets are politically unpopular.

Liberals used not to believe in doing these things not only because they understood that they would likely be the first victims in a society stripped of civil protections (a school district forcing the removal of Black Lives Matter stickers is a classic example of a more probable future in a world without civil liberties).

No, they eschewed these tactics because they genuinely believed that debate, discussion, inclusion and democracy brought out the best in us.

The point of the Brazile story isn't that the people who "rigged" the primary were afraid of losing an election. It's that they weren't afraid of betraying democratic principles, probably because they didn't believe in them anymore.

If you're not frightened by the growing appeal of that line of thinking, you should be. There is a history of this sort of thing. And it never ends well.

That's where Taibbi ends and Bernie begins. "People are hurting in this country," he wrote, "and our job is not to be distracted by political gossip and Donald Trump's tweets. Our job is to revitalize American democracy and bring millions of people into the political process who today do not vote and who do not believe that government is relevant to their lives. Our job is to create an economy and government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent and wealthy campaign contributors." He was just getting warmed up, believe me...

Here's the problem: the strategy the Democratic Party has been pursuing in recent years has failed. Since 2009, Democrats have lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures across the country. Republicans now control the White House, 34 out of 50 governorships as well as the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. In dozens of states, the Democratic Party is virtually non-existent. Too much is at stake for our country and our people for us not to learn from our past failures and move forward in a way that makes the Democratic Party stronger so we can take on and beat Trump and the right-wing Republican agenda.

What the recently released book excerpt from former interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile made clear is that unless we get our act together, we are not going to be effective in either taking on Donald Trump or in stopping the extremist right-wing Republican agenda. We have to re-establish faith with the American people that in fact we can make positive changes in this country through a fair and transparent political process that reflects the will of voters across this country.

In order to do that, we need to rethink and rebuild the Democratic Party. We need a Democratic Party that opens its doors to new people, new energy and new ideas. We need a Democratic Party that is truly a grassroots party, where decisions are made from the bottom up, not from the top down. We need a Democratic Party which becomes the political home of the working people and young people of this country, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American ... all Americans.

And we need to make it abundantly clear that the Democratic Party is prepared to take on the ideology of the Koch brothers and the billionaire class-- a small group of people who are undermining American democracy and moving this country into an oligarchic form of society. YES. We will take on the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street, corporate America, the insurance industry, the drug companies, and the fossil fuel industry.

Now, what the Establishment (political, economic and media) wants us to believe is that real and fundamental changes in our society are impossible.

No. We cannot guarantee health care to all as a right. No. We cannot revitalize the trade union movement, raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour and provide pay equity for women. No. We cannot effectively compete in the global economy by making public colleges and universities tuition-free. No. We cannot lead the world in combatting climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels. No. We cannot reform our broken criminal justice system or finally achieve comprehensive immigration reform.

They want us to think that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, a nation which has more income and wealth inequality than almost any nation on earth, the best that we can do is to accept tiny, incremental change.

I could not disagree more.

Right now, a Democratic National Committee Unity Reform Commission, comprised of people who supported our campaign, people who supported Secretary Clinton's campaign, and people appointed by DNC Chair Tom Perez are working on a set of policies that will determine the future direction of the Democratic Party. In many ways, this Unity Commission will determine whether the Party goes forward in a dynamic and inclusive way, or whether it retains the failed status quo approach of recent years. It will determine whether the Party will have the grassroots energy to effectively take on Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their reactionary agenda or whether we remain in the minority.

In my view, this Commission must:

• Make the Democratic Party more democratic and the presidential contests more fair by dramatically reducing the number of superdelegates who participate in the nominating process. It is absurd that in the last presidential primary over 700 superdelegates (almost one-third of the delegates a candidate needed to win the nomination) had the power to ignore the will of the people who voted in the state primaries and caucuses.

• Make primaries more open by ending the absurdity of closed primary systems with antiquated, arbitrary and discriminatory voter registration laws. Republicans are the ones who make it harder for people to vote, not Democrats. At a time when more and more people consider themselves to be Independents our job is to bring people into the Democratic Party process, not exclude them. It is incredibly undemocratic that in some states voters must declare their party affiliation up to six months before the primary election.

• Make it easier for working people and students to participate in state caucuses. While there is much to be said for bringing people together face-to-face in a caucus to discuss why they support the candidate of their choice, not everybody is able to attend those caucuses at the time they are held. A process must be developed that gives everyone the right to cast a vote even if they are not physically able to attend a state caucus.

• Make the DNC's budget and decision-making processes more open and transparent. If we are going to build a Party that relies on working people who are willing to give $5, $10 and $27 donations, they deserve to know where that money is going and how those decisions are made.

I look forward to following the progress of the Unity Reform Commission, and I urge Chairman Tom Perez and the entire Democratic National Committee to develop policies which move the Democratic Party forward in a very different direction-- a direction that will lead us to national and statewide victories. It's important that you do the same:

Please sign the petition calling on the Democratic National Committee and Chairman Tom Perez to accept, support and implement policies which make the Democratic Party more inclusive, more democratic and more transparent.

Right now, our job is to come together, and not be distracted by the political gossip and drama of the moment. We must fight President Trump's destructive efforts to divide us up by the color of our skin, our gender, our religion, our sexual orientation or our country of origin. We must rally the American people to oppose Trump's proposal to provide massive tax giveaways to billionaires while taking away the health care that millions now have.

But we must also make it clear-- if we are going to elect Democrats who will move us forward as a country-- that we must institute long-needed reforms in the Democratic Party. When we do that, we will not only create a dynamic and progressive party, we will be able to transform our nation and create a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

Four Lies About Donna Brazile that Party-Protecting Reporters Made Viral

A slogan you will never see from the national Democratic Party until its current leadership is cleaned out and gone (source)

by Gaius Publius

The larger story — Those who control most of the Democratic Party, and those in the media who aid and abet them, are to their last breath fighting any attempt to turn the country and the Party in a more progressive direction. That resistance to change (the other #resistance, by the way) ended in Party failure during the electoral revolt of 2016, and it will continue to end in Party failure unless the Republican Party succeed in failing first.

The attempt to keep control of the Party out of the hands of anyone with Sanders-like appeal and policies is relentless and ongoing, and its media enablers are well placed and ubiquitous. The latter include many New York Times writers and editors; many Washington Post writers and editors; most journalists, commenters and hosts at NBC and MSNBC; and more.

The smaller story — That game of enabling resistance to change is playing out now in the mainstream Party and media reaction to Donna Brazile's recent revelations.

Donna Brazile, Dupe of "Russian-Fueled Propaganda"

As soon as the first Donna Brazile excerpts were published alleging collusion between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC to make sure Clinton was the nominee, collusion which started as early as 2015, the attacks on Brazile began. As a reminder, here are a few of the articles covering Brazile's original charges:

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC [Brazile book excerpt; Politico]

Former DNC chair torches Clinton in new book [CNN]

Book Reveals Clinton Campaign Effectively Controlled DNC As Early As 2015 [NPR]

The reaction from both Party operatives and their friends in the media was immediate and brutal.

One recent example: The go-to charge usually leveled against Sanders supporters and Republicans — that anyone critical of the Democratic Party mainstream is a dupe of "Russian-fueled propaganda" — was wheeled out and leveled against Donna Brazile, a Party insider for decades, as well:

 Jesse Ferguson, DCCC and HFA insider, on Donna Brazile (click to enlarge)

Charges of "Russia! Russia! Russia!" are being made meaningless by this kind of mindless, automatic response to any and all enemies, no matter who or where.

Lies and Lying Liars — False Claims Against Donna Brazile That Journalists Helped Make Viral

In particular, four false charges against Brazile, refutations of her claims that are grounded only in lies, have been spread recently by mainstream journalists and publications in their own kneejerk attempts to defend the Party from attack, often using Twitter to make the false charges go "viral."

Let's look at one such charge in depth, courtesy of this piece by Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept. Then we'll list the other three with only brief comment. Again, note:

• Each of these charges is false.
• Most have been retracted, though almost invisibly.
• Few of the retractions have been acknowledged by the original authors of the charges.

The first false accusation in depth:

Viral Falsehood #1: The Clinton/DNC agreement cited by Brazile only applied to the General Election, not the primary.

On Wednesday, Politico published a blockbuster accusation from Donna Brazile’s new book: that the DNC had “rigged” the 2016 primary election for Hillary Clinton through an agreement that gave Clinton control over key aspects of the DNC, a claim that Elizabeth Warren endorsed on CNN. The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly, but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news.

The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense: that Brazile was wrong because the agreement in question (a copy of which they provided to Seitz-Wald) applied “only to preparations for the general election,” and had nothing to do with the primary season. That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked. This post documents how quickly this claim was endorsed on Twitter by journalists and Democratic operatives, and how far and wide it therefore spread.

The problem with this claim is that it is blatantly and obviously false. All one has to do to know this is read the agreement. Unlike the journalists spreading this DNC defense, Campaign Legal Defense’s Brendan Fischer bothered to read it, and immediately saw, and documented, how obviously false this claim is[.]

Note not only the substantive point — that the charge can be proved false just by reading the agreement — but the methodology used to spread it. In this specific case the methodology was: "The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly, but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news. ... The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense. ... That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked."

This means that the "DNC-loyal journalists" who spread this story either did not read the agreement or did not care if their assertions were untrue. Their main purpose in either case seems simply to be this — Allow no harm to come to the pro-corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

Behavior like this is the very essence of propaganda and the opposite of responsible journalism.

Three More False Claims Against Brazile

Greenwald's piece details three more false claims made against Brazile that mainstream media editors and writers helped spread. These claims are:

Viral Falsehood #2: Sanders signed the same agreement with the DNC that Clinton did.

Viral Falsehood #3: Brazile stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee.

Viral Falsehood #4: Evidence has emerged proving that the content of WikiLeaks documents and emails was doctored.

About the first, Sanders made public his own agreement, which showed no such thing. About the second, the Washington Post's editors made that claim in a much retweeted headline to a story that contained no such statement.

The final claim — that the leaked Wikileaks documents were doctored — is simply an evidence-free assertion that many reporters and Party insiders seem simply to want to be true. About that, Politico wrote:

Clinton’s team hasn’t challenged the accuracy of even the most salacious emails released in the past four days, including those featuring aides making snarky references to Catholicism or a Bill Clinton protégé describing Chelsea Clinton as a “spoiled brat.” And numerous digital forensic firms told POLITICO that they haven’t seen any proof of tampering in the emails they’ve examined — adding that only the hacked Democrats themselves could offer that kind of conclusive evidence.

Would it not be incredibly easy to prove the claim true, by simply producing a single doctored email? The fact that none has emerged, that not one email released by Wikileaks has been challenged by its authors, itself compels the conclusion that no leaked email has been forged.

For the Many or For the Few?

Thus the battle rages, between the defenders and enablers of the Party status quo and those who wish to change it. But as these skirmishes appear and fade from the national media radar, keep the following more important points in mind:

     1. The nation has had it with pro-corporate, big-money governance. The electoral revolt of 2016 has failed in both parties, which is not good news. In general, if electoral solutions prove impossible, non-electoral solutions will be tried. Non-electoral "solutions" are by definition real revolutions.

     2. If the Democratic Party can't be fixed, it will continue to be abandoned.

     3. The deadlines of our twin tsunamis are short. We have less than a generation, likely fewer than two presidential cycles at most, before all hell breaks loose.

Those twin tsunamis are first, undeniable, irreversible climate chaos and the panicked reaction to it by rich and poor alike. (If events follow the pattern, the rich will abandon the poor, and the poor will take revenge.) And second, uncontrolled public rage against "government for the few," an anger that will explode like a pressure cooker if there's no alleviation.

As a visual example of the forces aligned for change, and the forces aligned against it, recall this:

(Click to enlarge)

Keep this also in mind. It's not just the parties making this mess; it's their media enablers, greater and lesser, that keep the pressure on an  increasingly unforgiving public. Media enablers are just as much at fault as those whom their lies defend.

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!

The Rotgut Democratic Establishment Trash Still Hates Bernie More Than They Hate Trump

It infuriates garbage Democrats and their media shills that Bernie is the most popular and beloved politician in America. It absolutely unhinges them. I wonder which contemptible establishment whores-- "many" contemptible establishment whores-- Edward-Isaac Dovere was referring to when he wrote Tuesday that "many top Democrats are furious that Bernie Sanders appears to be running for president again, or at least planning to drag out his decision long enough to freeze the race around him." Wasserman Schultz? Some of the other Clinton garbage who turned America over to Trump? Schumer? Hoyer? Dovere is an imbecile himself so he could well be referring to any congressional jerk foolish enough to talk with him in confidence.

He quickly managed to slip in that Bernie will "be 79 the next time the New Hampshire primary rolls around" and that Jane Sanders' college is being investigated for "potential bank fraud," typically ugly Dovere-branded sliming, the specialty Politico keeps him around for. He also accused Bernie of daring to introduce Medicare-For-All legislation and trying to "force others to sign on" and of daring "to put himself at the center of the conversation."

Another congressman told me today that Dovere is the "biggest asshole pretending to be a journalist... I ever met... [If] I see him coming, I turn around and walk in the other direction."

Another indictment Dovere thrust at Bernie: "He’s joining Ohio Gov. John Kasich for a CNN town hall tonight that’s being held on the evening of the Center for American Progress forward-looking Ideas Conference-- an event Sanders wasn’t invited to. Some of his moves, like collecting names and email addresses via RSVPs to his “unity tour” with new Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez for his Friends of Bernie Sanders group-- a mailing list the DNC itself won’t have any access to-- have alienated his allies on the left." Dovere is just pulling that nonsense out of his ass, of course. No allies of Bernie's on the left are alienated by any such thing. If course to a numbskull like Dovere, "left" means anyone not quite as far right as Paul Ryan or Mark Meadows, or any "ex"-Republican he can find to call Bernie names.

Former DNC chair Donna Brazile warned party leaders against relying on Sanders, unless they’re willing to give in on opening the party to more independents like he wants.

"He's not someone who we should go to, to build or rebuild or expand our party unless he's willing," she said.

Sanders, who has re-registered as an independent and made a point of asserting that independence while he was on tour with Perez, is nonetheless the most popular Democrat and the most popular active politician in the country. He’s savoring it, whether in the stops he’s planning to make this weekend in Montana for Democratic House candidate Rob Quist, or his trip to Iowa, home of the caucuses he nearly won, on July 15 for the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement's "action convention.”

The Democratic establishment has all but abandoned the Montana special election-- just the way they did with Berniecrat Jim Thompson in Kansas. Quist is too independent-minded and progressive for them. They're pouring millions into the more "moderate" Jon Ossoff race in Georgia and nothing close to what's needed in Montana. Blue America is recommending contributions for both candidates-- party unity. And speaking of party unity, Our Revolution endorsed Jimmy Gomez Tuesday, despite the fact that Gomez-- a solid progressive-- was a Hillary backer in 2016.

In Congress, a number of up-and-comers say they’re glad to see Sanders pushing the party toward an economic focus, and away from the social issues of Hillary Clinton’s failed “Stronger Together.” Those voices, and the people who show up by the thousands still at Sanders’ stops around the country, are the ones the gripers should be focused on, his supporters say-- not nursing old grudges or complaining that Sanders would torpedo their chances.

Starting with healthcare-focused rallies in January that he encouraged Senate Democratic leaders to do more widely, Sanders continues traveling the country. He’s also using his newfound celebrity to elevate local-level fights like a unionization drive in Mississippi and the candidacy of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tom Perriello, whose effort is being managed by one of his former top staffers.

Touring the country with Perez, Sanders sought to stamp his economic populism on the head of the DNC. But people familiar with the arrangement said he also spent much of the time traveling with the party chair on their private Gulfstream jet getting to learn about Perez’s personal history, which he hadn't bothered to read up on earlier.

“For years, our fellow activists on the left have said we need an antidote to the tea party. This is what an antidote to the tea party looks like,” said former NAACP President Ben Jealous-- an Our Revolution board member-- at the group’s meeting in Maryland last month.

Sanders loyalists say they’re eager to stir up the internal fight that they say the party needs to have. To Sanders, it’s the natural next step in his pursuit of the 40-year-old goal of upending the established political system, which they see millions of voters having supported last year. And each passing day of the Trump administration, along with the Democrats’ resistance, has vindicated his belief that substantive change can come when masses rise up.

“Our party is divided into various wings, and Bernie clearly represents one of those wings. It is a progressive, activist, economic populist wing to the party,” said Mark Longabaugh, one of the top strategists for the 2016 campaign, who said he’s among those who’d be ready to sign up again. “The rest of the party still hasn’t wrapped its mind around it.”

Sanders sees everything he’s doing as maximizing his sway in the Senate, using the speculation to build his center of gravity. To the extent he has thought about 2020, he hasn’t gotten into how different the race would likely be if it’s a packed field, rather than the binary choice of 2016.

If he were to run again, he would almost certainly be by far the most famous entrant, dominating the left and sucking up far more television coverage than he did before. But he would also have four years' worth of new baggage to contend with, including barbs from [vile, repulsive, contemptible] Clinton allies [typified by crooks and cheats like the universally-despised, outside of Clinton establishment circles, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rahm Emanuel] who still quietly blame him for her loss.

Back to Montana for a moment; internal polls are now showing that Quist has caught up with the rich Republican candidate and Bernie's upcoming rallies in Montana this weekend are such a big deal that the first venue in Missoula this Saturday has been changed from the 1,200 seat Wilma Theater to the 7,500-seat Adams Center Field House.

The Wicked Witch Is Not Dead

Good news: Debbie's fired. Bad news: guess who they want to replace her with

Debbie Wasserman Schultz was finally put out of her misery by her pals in the Democratic Establishment today, as she was forced to walk the plank hours before the opening of the Democratic Party's national convention in Philly. In terms of her toxicity to Democratic values and principles, nothing has changed at all; she's still the foul fount of pay-to-play corruption and a selfish and misguided Republican-lite approach to governance that she was yesterday, last week, last month, last year and all through her miserable political life.

The breach of the Democratic committee’s emails, made public on Friday by WikiLeaks, offered undeniable evidence of what Mr. Sanders’s supporters had complained about for much of the senator’s contentious primary contest with Mrs. Clinton: that the party was effectively an arm of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. The messages showed members of the committee’s communications team musing about pushing the narrative that the Sanders campaign was inept and trying to raise questions publicly about whether he was an atheist.

...Convention organizers had expressed nervousness on Sunday about the specter of Ms. Wasserman Schultz appearing onstage at all during the four-day convention. They were worried that what they intended to be a well-choreographed event, which officials hoped would contrast with the sometimes chaotic Republican National Convention, could be marred by Mr. Sanders’s backers booing and heckling her.

Although the new Interim Chair of the DNC, Donna Brazile, immediately apologized to Bernie, to the party and to the country for Wasserman Schultz's "stupidity," all the creepy corporate Dems who have enabled #DebtTrapDebbie from day one-- from Obama and Hillary all the way down the food chain-- tried to treat this outrage as routinely as possible. I was surprised no one suggested she was leaving the DNC chair to spend more time with her family. One thing she can't do, is use it as an excuse any longer for not debating Tim Canova in her tightening congressional race. Here was Obama's sickening and deceitful statement. It's good he's eating crow; he appointed her and held her in while she was on her reign of terror.

For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful. Her leadership of the DNC has meant that we had someone who brought Democrats together not just for my re-election campaign, but for accomplishing the shared goals we have had for our country. Her critical role in supporting our economic recovery, our fights for social and civil justice and providing health care for all Americans will be a hallmark of her tenure as Party Chair. Her fundraising and organizing skills were matched only by her passion, her commitment and her warmth. And no one works harder for her constituents in Congress than Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Michelle and I are grateful for her efforts, we know she will continue to serve our country as a member of Congress from Florida and she will always be our dear friend.

No shame at all. Hillary was equally deceitful-- as is her default position on all things:

I want to thank my longtime friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her leadership of the Democratic National Committee over the past five years. I am grateful to Debbie for getting the Democratic Party to this year's historic convention in Philadelphia, and I know that this week's events will be a success thanks to her hard work and leadership. There's simply no one better at taking the fight to the Republicans than Debbie-- which is why I am glad that she has agreed to serve as honorary chair of my campaign's 50-state program to gain ground and elect Democrats in every part of the country, and will continue to serve as a surrogate for my campaign nationally, in Florida, and in other key states. I look forward to campaigning with Debbie in Florida and helping her in her re-election bid--because as President, I will need fighters like Debbie in Congress who are ready on day one to get to work for the American people.

Now let's get another professional shit-eating statement-writers to do one for Biden and one for Kaine. And Pelosi (who hates Wasserman Schultz's guts). Just to show how incapable they are of learning anything from this, they are actually considering putting disgraced and failed former DCCC head Steve Israel in as DNC chair now.

On CNN with Jake Tapper just before Wasserman Schultz was shoved overboard Bernie has said he doesn't "think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC not only for these awful emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don't think her leadership style is doing that." He took a more diplomatic approach after he announced her contentious-- much negotiated-- departure. "Debbie Wasserman Schultz," he wrote, "has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party. While she deserves thanks for her years of service, the party now needs new leadership that will open the doors of the party and welcome in working people and young people. The party leadership must also always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race."

Can you imagine the riot that would have taken place on the floor of the convention if Wasserman Schultz had slithered out to greet the delegates? She made up the chair throwing incident in Las Vegas but there would have been a real one in Philly if they didn't push her out! Just before she "resigned," Tim Canova, her congressional opponent had issued a statement about her latest attempts to undermine the Democratic process. "We started this insurgent campaign," he wrote, "to expose Debbie Wasserman Schultz's pro-corporate, anti-progressive policies and her corruption at the Democratic National Committee. Now, millions of people are seeing what we've always known to be true thanks to these leaks. Our opponent and her staff rigged the system against Bernie Sanders, used their positions of power to try and censor the press, and even coordinated against our campaign... Thanks to the recent Wikileaks disclosure of 20,000 emails, we now know just how rigged the system has become in the Democratic Party from Wasserman Schultz’s DNC and staff. We’ll save you the trouble of having to read them all-- here are some of the highlights:

• Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her DNC staffers mentioned me and my campaign for her House seat dozens of times. They used party resources to monitor our campaign and strategize on Wasserman Schultz’s response, including her response to Bernie Sanders’ endorsement of me. They coordinated a response to the Florida Democratic Party’s decision (at the time) to block our access to the voter file, something they have claimed to have no involvement in.

• Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to censor Mika Brzezinski, MSNBC co-host of “Morning Joe” after Mika called on her to resign from the DNC for her failed leadership and biased use of the DNC to harm the Bernie Sanders campaign. Wasserman Schultz complained directly to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about the negative coverage and demanded that Mika “apologize” to DWS. Soon after, Chuck Todd did a “softball interview” with Wasserman Schultz.

• DNC staffers repeatedly mocked Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Wasserman Schultz called Jeff Weaver, Bernie’s campaign manager, a “damn liar” and “scummy” in emails to DNC staffers. In addition, there is significant evidence that the DNC was coordinating with the Clinton campaign during the primary.

Tim went on: "Leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee show that the system is rigged against anti-establishment progressives... For months, Wasserman Schultz has been telling the media that she is “too busy” to debate me. Wikileaks shows that she was furiously lobbying for tickets to the Broadway musical Hamilton. This is particularly disturbing, when combined with her dismal voting record: last year she had the highest absentee rate of the Florida delegation, with the exception of Marco Rubio!

"Wasserman Schultz has rejected debates not because she’s so busy, but because she cannot possibly defend her record of swimming in corporate lobbyist money and pushing for corporate interests over those of South Florida residents-- as evidenced by her support of predatory payday lenders, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, private prisons, and Big Sugar and Big Agribusinesses that have fouled our waterways. If Wasserman Schultz is unwilling to defend her record, she should drop out of our House race. Voters deserve better than an insider politician who shows such open disdain for democracy."



She won't have that excuse to use any longer for not debating Tim. Please consider contributing to his campaign by clicking the thermometer below. Many years ago I released a record by Rochester, New York's legendary New Math, They Walk Among You on my indie label. For the past 10 years, whenever I wrote about Wasserman Schultz, the title track (above) has played in my mind. If FL-23 voters decide to replace her with Tim Canova, that's one nightmare that will be put to rest.

Update: Rove Is Happy, Happy

This was a press release Karl Rove's operation put out this morning. Funny, huh? I'm not laughing.

Outgoing DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz may not be feeling much love from Democrats at the Democratic National Convention, but here at American Crossroads we feel tremendous gratitude for Wasserman Schultz’s record at the helm of the Democratic Party.

“Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s leadership of the Democratic National Committee has been absolutely invaluable for the Republican Party,” said Steven Law, president and CEO of American Crossroads. “Because of her strategic vision, Republicans hold the Senate, have a historic majority in the House, and dominate governorships and state legislatures throughout the country. Now she has helped divide the Democrats in 2016 in a way we never dreamed possible. We stand with Debbie and thank her for everything she has done for the cause.”

Reform, American Style

If you caught NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) on Meet the Press laying out, lamely, the GOP's "gauzy agenda," you may have noticed two things-- that DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen looks brilliant and energetic in comparison (which is a riot-- but even high ranking Republicans admit that Sessions is a catastrophe for the Party of No) and that the GOP has no agenda except to go back to the Bush era nostrums that nearly wrecked the economy and from which the Republicans are now endeavoring to prevent President Obama from digging out from under. Yesterday at Washington Monthly Steve Benen didn't miss a beat in recognizing a clear and developing pattern. "We need to go back to the exact same agenda." Benen seems incredulous. "In context, the agenda Sessions seems to want 'to go back to' was that of the Bush/Cheney administration and the Republican Congress. Indeed, GOP leaders are not only urging a return to failed Bush policies, they're even praising the failed former president.

The chairmen of the two Republican campaign committees defended the presidency of George W. Bush in television appearances over the weekend, a preview of the GOP's planned pushback against expected Democratic attacks on the last president.

"People had jobs when Republicans were not only in charge but George Bush was there," said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (Texas) during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press.

John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told C-SPAN's Newsmakers program that "Bush's stock has gone up a lot since he left office," adding: "I think a lot people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush's administration, and I think history will treat him well."

"Republican committee chairmen like Sessions and Cornyn," Benen reminds us, "are supposed to know better. Indeed, the entire campaign is quickly becoming inexplicable. In recent weeks, we've seen high-profile Republicans urge the party to return to Bush's economic agenda, Bush's Social Security agenda, Bush's tax policies, and Bush's regulatory agenda. With just four months to go before the midterm elections, Republican candidates seem to seriously believe if we just go back to the policies that failed miserably, and created our current mess(es), we'll all be better off. Dems have been trying to push this argument for months, and for some reason, the GOP now appears intent to help. It seems more than a little risky."

So why do Democrats cater to these discredited losers? Why do they water down every good idea so that the end results are things-- like the painfully too small Stimulus and the so-so healthcare reform bill and the Wall Street-friendly financial reform bill-- that just don't do the job Americans elected Obama and the Democrats to do? Yesterday we got word that the latest compromise with the Devil will result in teaching jobs being sacrificed on the altar of perpetual war.

House Democratic leaders will accept the Senate’s plan to pass a stripped-down supplemental spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while seeking another vehicle for money to prevent the layoffs of some 140,000 teachers, a well-informed House aide said Monday.

The decision reflects the reality that Democrats lack the votes in the Senate to attach billions of dollars in help for states to keep teachers on the payroll this fall... In the Senate, Republicans and some Democrats have objected to the added domestic spending being added to a war supplemental, even if it is offset by other cuts. The budget deficit can’t take another hit, those senators say.

They mean, can't take a hit for teachers and education, not for endless, pointless, disastrous wars... that's fine (of course; some things never change, regardless of cute campaign slogans).

So this afternoon the Senate dramatically ended the conservative filibuster on extending unemployment benefits-- at least until after the midterms. Democrats-- from Obama and Pelosi right on down the food chain to... Donna Brazile-- have been castigating Republicans for blocking benefits. "Because of the Republicans, about 33 people lose their benefits every minute," says Brazile in a Democratic Party e-mail (Speaker Pelosi tweeted that 2,642,581 Americans had lost their benefits since the GOP started on this particular hissy fit, so well summed up by Alan Grayson last night). Well, it isn't false, but Brazile forgot to mention-- as did Obama, Harry Reid, Pelosi and everyone else-- that not only have a couple Republicans finally signed on, but that one putative Democrat, Ben Nelson (D-NE), was the single vote that prevented unemployment benefits from passing last time. Taking advantage of Robert Byrd's death, Nelson crossed the aisle and voted with most of the Republicans to ensure the death of unemployment insurance for those 2,642,581 Americans the Speaker was lamenting in her eloquent tweet. 

If you don't think Obama, the DNC, the DSCC and the execrable OFA will do all they can to help Nelson get re-elected in 2012, you haven't been paying attention. "Conservatives in the Senate," wailed Brazile, "have been at this for weeks-- abusing the rules to block Democrats from passing legislation. Their filibuster means millions of people lose their unemployment checks, and the entire economy suffers because of it." Let me look through this letter again for a mention of Ben Nelson. Nope-- zilch. Brazile, the Vice Chair for Voter Registration and Participation for the DNC, offers not a word about Ben Nelson, no mention that if he had died instead of Byrd, millions of unemployment checks would already have gone out.

This all brings us back to the filibuster, and why conservatives-- yes, on both sides of the aisle-- have kept it alive. These kinds of reforms are next to impossible to achieve because there always seems to be a corporate-friendly conservative ruling coalition-- usually always bipartisan-- running the show. The filibuster isn't even etched in stone, and there was once a time when progressives almost got rid of the equally idiotic Electoral College. Allow me to quote from the Gospel According to Rick, actually from Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, on the time progressive reformers almost abolished that profoundly oligarchic impediment to democracy in 1970:

Another longtime dream of reformers was to do away with antiquated and antidemocratic electoral college. The House had passed a bill for direct popular election of presidents in September of 1969 by a vote of 338 to 70. But as Senator Strom Thurmond knew better than anyone else, the South's major political trump card was the threat of a renegade third-party presidential candidate using his electoral votes to keep either of the major parties from an electoral college majority. Thurmond [R-SC] had Senate Judiciary chair James Eastland [D] of Mississippi bottle the bill up in committee. Birch Bayh [the progressive father of the conservative shithead Bayh from the same state] threatened to block consideration of [segregationist posterboy] Harrold Carswell unless the debate came to the floor. When it did, in the summer of 1970, Thurmond, Eastland and Sam Ervin filibustered. Nixon tried to use the presidential bully pulpit to force a vote. Stirringly he intoned, "Our ability to change this system in time fir the 1972 elections is a touchstone of the impulse to reform in America today. It will be the measure of our ability to avert calamity by anticipating it." ... His motives, though, were not noble. Getting rid of the electoral college would crush George Wallace's power as a presidential candidate. Unfortunately for Nixon [well, really for America], cloture failed, and the electoral college survived its greatest threat in two hundred years.

At least the unemployment benefits that were restored today will be retroactive. But what happens on December 1? Will Republicans and a lame duck Congress be ready to deliver a small lump of coal to millions of American families for Christmas this year? Who will be leading the "War on Christmas 2010"? Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Miss McConnell? According to the video below, it looks like McConnell is already practicing: