Do Blue Dogs Do More Harm Or More Good To The Democratic Party? Meet Abigail Spanberger

Spanberger won her seat without Republican votes but now she caters almost exclusively to GOP voters

Virginia elected two freshmen from red districts, Elaine Luria, who replaced Scott Taylor in VA-02 (primarily Virginia Beach, York County and part of Norfolk plus Hampton) and Abigail Spanberger, who replaced Dave Brat in VA-07, a much redder district that includes 10 counties, the largest of them being Chesterfield, Henrico, Spotsylvania and Culpepper. Luria's district has a PVI of R+3 and Spanberger's is a much more challenging R+6. Obama lost both districts both times he ran. Trump won VA-02 48.8% to 45.4% and VA-07 50.5% to 44.0%. These were the congressional results:

In both cases, the Democrats outspent their GOP rivals-- in Spanberger's case by about double-- and both were tough, hard-fought races. Today, both districts are being heavily targeted by the NRCC for blue to red flips. They are trying to get Taylor to challenge Luria to a rematch and there are half a dozen Republican candidates lining up to challenge Spanberger, three of whom are very credible, a state senator and two state delegates, all military vets like Spanberger.

Although both freshmen have earned "F" ratings from ProgressivePunch, neither has a Democratic primary opponent, at least not so far. There are 5 very conservative Democrats tied for the 193rd among 235 Dems in the House. Each has a rotten score of 64.29%-- besides Luria and Spanberger, Angie Craig (New Dem-MN), Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY) and Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ). Despite Cheri Bustos' bullshit about "protecting freshmen" with her ugly anti-primary rule, none of these particularly bad freshmen has a primary opponent.

Back to Luria and Spanberger, both seem to have made the decision that it's more important to protect their careers than to embrace Democratic values and ideals. Aside from their crappy voting records, neither has co-sponsored Pramila Jayapal's Medicare-For-All Act, AOC's Green New Deal Resolution, nor John Larson's Social Security 2100 Act (which is sponsored by 206 Democrats so far). Do Luria and Spanberger think their constituents don't want to see Social Security protected? Republicans aren't going to vote for either of them in 2020. Their paths to reelection are all about encouraging a big Democratic turnout and appealing to independent voters (not Republican voters). Their time in Congress so far will deflate Democratic base turnout, not inflate it.

Not everyone agrees. In a p.r.-agency-generated paean to Spanberger, Her Party Is Liberal. Her District Is Conservative. Moderate Democrat Fights To Survive In The Middle, the Washington Post's Jenna Portnoy, came up with every excuse in the book for protecting a faux-Democrat from the Republican-wing of the party, despite her atrocious record. Within her first week in Congress, Spanberger has already "informed the leadership that demonizing the border wall was not the way to keep control of the House. 'Listen, in my district I am hearing, Build a wall! In my district we are losing the messaging that Democrats can be strong on borders,' said the 39-year-old from the Richmond, Va. suburbs, according to the congresswoman and others who were there. It was a critical moment for Spanberger, one of dozens of new Democratic lawmakers from red districts who helped their party seize control of the House last year. These members will have to win reelection if the party is to hold the chamber in 2020."

"These members will have to win reelection if the party is to hold the chamber in 2020." Never These members will have to persuade voters in their districts that building a wall is bad policy and there's a better way to achieve what they want. That's always too difficult for the Democratic Party to articulate these days. Instead we get this canned, subversive drivel:

They face a double challenge: Not only do they have to strike a balance between loyalty to the Democratic Party and fidelity to their more conservative districts, but they also have to fight the leftward tug of progressives who want universal health care, impeachment of President Trump and a Green New Deal.

Spanberger and the other moderates must find ways to separate themselves from a freshman class defined by lawmakers such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and Rashida Tlaib (MI), proud members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

“It’s a tough tightrope act [Spanberger] has to perform,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Public Policy and Government at George Mason University. “She has to stay politically centered as much as possible, given the nature of her district, while at the same time work effectively with her party leadership who are pushing a more progressive agenda.”

Yes, "politically centered." Who defines that? Who determines which policy prescriptions are part of the "center?" Trump and McTurtle? The financiers who own and operate the GOP, the Blue Dogs, the New Dems and No Labels/Problem Solvers? Certainly, never the timid, self-loathing, geriatric Democratic Party leaders. Count on that. "As she fights the pull of the progressives," continued Portoy, "and learns her way around Congress, Spanberger already faces a Republican opponent -- Tina Ramirez, a Hispanic single mother and activist in the cause of religious freedom." There's another term a hack journalist is happy to throw around without thought in the world about what it means-- "religious freedom?" Freedom to what? Discriminate against gays? Is that what it comes down to today?

That puts Spanberger on an immediate campaign footing, just six months after she beat Rep. Dave Brat (R) in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District by emphasizing her national security background, independence and civility.

In her first weeks in office, she visited the White House with Democratic and Republican members of the Problem Solvers Caucus to discuss ending the government shutdown that had begun in December. She signed on to letters and legislation spearheaded by Republicans. She voted against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA), whom Brat and other Republicans frequently invoked during the 2018 campaign as embodying a liberal elite.

Still, some Republican voters remain wary.

Who the fuck cares about Republicans being wary? Her path to reelection is through independents not Republicans. Is that too hard a concept to grasp? No Democrat, no matter how far to the right ever satisfies Republicans. They will label her Spanberger a socialist no matter what she does. Needless to say, the idiot reporter interviewed hard core Republicans. Paul Johnson voted for Brat. Does someone expect him to switch to Spanberger now? He told Portnoy that Spanberger "portrayed herself as somewhat independent-- I don’t have the impression she is exactly what she has sold herself as. He was pissed off that she voted for H.R. 1, "legislation containing measures including restricting partisan gerrymandering, creating automatic voter registration, making Election Day a federal holiday and requiring super PACs to disclose donors." Johnson asserts that that means she was "siding with Nancy Pelosi, taking some of these extreme positions, taking rights away from the states." If Spanberger wants his votes, there's exactly one way to get it-- jump the fence like so many Blue Dogs have done in the past, and join the GOP. Another superfluous Brat supporter Portnoy dug up said "he would consider voting for Spanberger if she upheld 'Virginia conservative values.'" She has done exactly that, but Republicans will still spend immense amounts of money telling Republican voters that she's a socialist and in a lesbian/Muslim relationship with Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

At times, she has supported Republican-led amendments, to the chagrin of Democrats, as when she and 26 other moderate [ah... that word hack DC journos love to use to describe the far right of the Democratic Party] Democrats helped Republicans amend a bill to expand federal background checks for gun purchases. They added a provision that says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement must be notified when an undocumented immigrant seeks to purchase a firearm.

“It’s incumbent on all of us to give her the room she needs to do the art of the possible for her district,” Rep. Don Beyer (New Dem-VA) said.

Loosely quoting Pelosi, he said, “We didn’t take back the House winning blue seats.”

Spanberger wants to position herself as a pragmatist, compromising to effect change gradually.

“If we are just driven by ideology, we will achieve nothing for the people who actually need it,” she said during an interview interrupted by well-wishers at a coffee shop in her district.

She pointed to Brat, the Republican she defeated, noting his membership in the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which she said repeatedly sabotaged efforts at compromise when Republicans controlled the House.

Brat’s hard-line approach, combined with his cool relations with supporters of former House majority leader Eric Cantor, whom he defeated in a nasty 2014 GOP primary, made his last term rocky. His relationships with Democrats were toxic, especially after he complained that “the women are in my grill no matter where I go” in part because he refused to hold town halls after Trump’s election. When he finally relented, he faced angry crowds.

Spanberger, on the other hand, has held five subdued town halls in her first four months.

During the campaign, she bonded with other first-time candidates with similar national security backgrounds. The nine new lawmakers with security backgrounds coordinated their choices in the office lottery so that they work near one another.

The women in the group are particularly close and text one another often. They are Democratic Reps. Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), who worked at the CIA; Chrissy Houlahan (PA), an Air Force veteran; Elaine Luria (Va.), a retired Navy commander; and Mikie Sherrill (NJ), a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor. They all flipped red seats to blue and understand the delicate politics of swing districts.

Call them what you like, they may have been war heroes (or not), to me they are political cowards unwilling to stand up for the progressive values that differentiate the Democratic Party from the Republican Party. "We come from places where different ideologies live side by side," Houlahan said, "and we have a real responsibility to legislate that way. I feel like the narrative is that the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the left." And, yes, yes, of course Houlahan has also earned an "F" from ProgressivePunch for her putrid voting record. The House Democratic Party leadership wanted exactly this when they went out and recruited women who were conservative-leaning military vets.

To Spanberger, the liberal goal of transforming the complicated health-care system into a single government-financed program simply is not realistic. She cited the Affordable Care Act, still the subject of GOP ire a decade after it became law, as evidence that muscling legislation through can backfire.

Instead, she thinks small steps can make health care more affordable: Allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, insist on transparency from pharmacy benefit managers, and ease the passage of generic drugs into the market. She is one of nine co-sponsors of the House version of Medicare-X, a plan from Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine (VA) and Michael F. Bennet (CO) that would allow all Americans to buy into public health insurance.

Spanberger also opposes the Green New Deal, a broad set of goals to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. “What’s really challenging is it’s been presented to the American people as if it’s policy,” she said. “There are literally people who think if we were to vote on this tomorrow, we could save our planet.”

Spanberger, who leads the House agriculture subcommittee on conservation and forestry-- a rare honor for a freshman and in a field she said remains a mystery to her-- is studying how climate change affects farmers.

Environmental activists in her district seem unfazed by her opposition to the Green New Deal.

Lee Francis, deputy director at the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, said he appreciates her opposition to offshore drilling and her desire that the United States rejoin the Paris climate agreement. (Spanberger also announced that she recently had solar panels installed on her home.)

“Democracy is slow,” Francis said. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”

Spanberger had not seriously considered running for public office until a friend and former CIA colleague, Charlotte McWilliams, sent her a link to Emerge America, a program that trains female candidates.

The experts encouraged her to run for school board, but Spanberger followed her instinct to aim higher.

In a recommendation letter that McWilliams wrote to Emerge about Spanberger, she said their CIA training was “designed to be a pressure cooker” and that “Abby never lost her cool.”

Spanberger served undercover for her entire career in the CIA, where she worked on counterterrorism and nuclear proliferation. She and McWilliams each had three children in their CIA years.

...She said she’s also working to gain the trust of Republicans in Congress, using some of the skills that she honed at the CIA.

First, she looks for a connection. She’ll sometimes enter the House floor through the GOP section, which allows her to stop and chat with members of the other party. If they’re from rural communities, she tries to connect over common issues, such as the scarcity of broadband Internet service.

But for every Republican she wins over, more hope to unseat her.

In addition to Ramirez, GOP observers name state lawmakers Nicholas J. Freitas (Culpeper), John McGuire (Henrico) and Bryce E. Reeves (Spotsylvania) as potential challengers.

National Republican groups are painting Spanberger as no different from Ocasio-Cortez.

“She’ll find out the hard way that there are two teams,” Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist and former executive director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, said of Spanberger. “There aren’t three teams. Even voting with her team 90 percent of the time may not be good enough to get reelected.”

The DCCC Is Hiding NRA-Democrats Jeff Van Drew, Ann Kirkpatrick, Anthony Brindisi And Elaine Luria

I've reported this here before but bear with me a moment; there's a reason I'm repeating it now. The week Andrew Janz declared he was running for Congress and eager to take on Devin Nunes in the Central Valley district (CA-22) that stretches from Clovis and the neighborhoods and suburbs north and east of Fresno through Dinuba and Visalia and down beyond Tulare, he called to ask about a Blue America endorsement. He was a brand new candidate without the consultants who teach new candidates what to say and not say. He has them now. But then he was still speaking from the heart, raw and unfiltered. I asked if I could run him through some of the questions we talk about with candidates. He agreed immediately. And we ran into problems right off the bat. He didn't know what single payer or Medicare for All meant. He grew exasperated and asked if he could just tell me his motivations for running. I said sure. He said the death penalty and the Second Amendment. I was confused and asked him to explain. He said he wanted to see the death penalty more widely used and that Congress needed to protect the Second Amendment. I asked him if he was a Democrat. He laughed and said Democrats in the Central Valley are different from Democrats on the coast.

Janz isn't on the DCCC's Red to Blue list yet but he's clearly being supported by the establishment and the DCCC's stalking horse, the scam known as End Citizens United has endorsed him. His issues page was written by his consultants and it's a garden variety Democratic position page across the board, nothing innovative, no passion... just standard issue D for Democrat; no mention of the death penalty he told me was motivating him to run and his gun position-- while saying nothing about banning the manufacture and sale of automatic weapons-- is also standard DCCC fare for candidates, albeit nothing like what he told me less than a year ago:

I am in a unique position to tackle gun safety issues with credibility in Congress. As a prosecutor, I deal with violent crimes daily, and as a gun owner, I support an individual's right to bear arms. I am committed to enacting universal background checks, and closing gun show and private sale loopholes. Additionally, I believe that no one who commits a violent crime or who is mentally ill should have access to guns. Specifically, I support a measure banning those who are convicted of committing domestic violence from owning a gun. I also strongly support the no-fly no buy list. My opponent Devin Nunes has an A rating from the NRA and has accepted over $20,000 in contributions from them. I will never take a dime from the NRA or any organization that opposes common-sense gun safety legislation that will save lives and end the epidemic of mass shootings in America. 

Many politicians whose views are aligned with the NRA have moved swiftly to distance themselves from the group. Very few Democrats still take bribes from the gun makers and their lobbyists. Only a few hard core gun nuts among the Blue Dogs and New Dems-- 4 to be precise-- still do: like Collin Peterson (MN), Henry Cuellar (TX), Sanford Bishop (GA), and Ron Kind (WI). So far no non-incumbent candidates have taken any money for their congressional races from the NRA. But several have very extreme NRA records, particularly gun-fanatics with clear records they can't run away from, DCCC recruits as bad as any Republican gun nut and day of any week: Anthony Brindisi (NY), Jeff Van Drew (NJ), Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ) and Elaine Luria (VA). The vast majority of DCCC endorsed candidates are either Blue Dogs or New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. There's virtually no chance that Brindisi, Van Drew, Kirkpatrick and Luria are the only NRA Democrats among them; they're just the ones who haven't been able to obscure their records, the way Janz has.

The DCCC recruited Jeff Van Drew to run in an open New Jersey House seat

One of the slimiest of the former DCCC chairmen, Steve Israel, a former Blue Dog who was forced to leave Congress to avoid legal prosecution, penned an OpEd for The Hill on Monday: The 'Teen Party' can change Congress like the Tea Party. The DCCC, incapable of creating its own energy, is desperate to capture and exploit the energy being created by the March for Our Lives activists. There is nothing they want more than to pin the gun deaths on the Republican Party and paper over the fact that they have been RECRUITING, not just endorsing, NRA allies to run for Congress. "[I]ntangible energy in the environment," wrote Israel about elections, "the charge in the air. It makes everything mechanical and methodical almost irrelevant. It’s like an electromagnetic pulse that can render sophisticated technology useless. We saw that energy gather in Saturday’s 'March For Our Lives' in Washington and in 800 sibling marches against gun violence held in 390 of 435 congressional districts, according to organizers at supportive national organizations. And it very well may work at changing the majority in Congress and changing the laws."

Keep in mind, the DCCC adamantly refuses to disassociate itself from the NRA-Democrats or to kick like the likes of Van Drew, Luria, Kirkpatrick or Brindisi off their Red to Blue list. If you contribute to the DCCC-- or to DCCC fronts like End Citizens United-- your money will go to the blood-soaked campaign coffers of gun fanatics, of that you can be certain. Steve Israel is hoping the DCCC can trick the Match for Our Lives activists into being foot-soldiers for their partisan objectives, a DCCC equivalent of the Tea Party.

The energy transmitted almost instantly, echoing and amplifying across kitchen tables, in diners and coffee shops, in workplaces, and at rallies, protests and boisterous congressional town halls. The Tea Party disabled the precise engineering devised by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to protect its House majority. It swept over its canvassers, drowned out its paid advertising, claimed 63 Democratic seats and toppled its majority (aided and abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which opened the floodgates of money for Republicans).

Now, we see it again, only in hard reverse. Not a Tea Party, but a Teen Party. Not in the diatribe of pundits, but in 11-year-old Naomi Wadler’s captivation of her audience at a rally on Saturday. In the thousands of voters drawn to rallies by the energy of children too young to vote. In the hand-drawn signs and the spontaneous chants of “vote them out” that I heard at a rally in Huntington, Long Island, that attracted more than 1,000 people. I used to represent that community in Congress, and getting 100 people to show up for a political event was almost impossible.

Something powerful is in the air when a discussion of “midterms” at the kitchen table isn’t about school exams but about elections. Of course, the energy isn’t spent efficiently across the map. In blue districts, it won’t make a difference between a member of Congress who is servile to the gun lobby and one who isn’t. In unwinnable bright red districts, it may depress turnout, but in the absence of a criminal indictment or the incumbent representative being caught in bed with a copy of President Obama’s autobiography, it won’t change the outcome.

But in the 48 or so districts that are competitive, in suburbs and exurbs, that mysterious energy tosses the toss-up districts. If the Teen Party, like the Tea Party, ramps up town hall meetings, channels their energy and masses in districts that matter, vulnerable Republicans will find themselves in a perilous place-- on the wrong side of energy, and maybe of history as well.

If the DCCC is serious about supporting "the Teen Party," they should immediately dump NRA-Dems and vow to not spend another dime trying to elect Kirkpatrick, Brindisi, Van Drew, Luria or any other NRA allies they have endorsed. They should get their resumes ready. This is NOT the position of the Blue Dogs, the New Dems, the DCCC or the Democratic Party:

Politicians-- either represent the people or get out;
The people demand a law banning the sale of assault weapons;
The people people demand we prohibit the sale of high capacity magazines;
The people people demand universal background checks.
Stand for us or beware: the voters are coming