Why Did The Democrats Do So Badly Last Night? It Goes Beyond Gerrymandering And Obama's Poor Ratings

DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil will reap big rewards for his incredible string of abject failures yesterday

Guy Cecil, is the Executive Director of the DSCC. He wants to run the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. He-- and Harry Reid-- just cost the Democrats Tim Johnson's South Dakota Senate seat. Cecil recruited reactionary Blue Dog Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who South Dakota voters had rejected in 2010. They decided Herseth Sandlin's pleasant Beltway conservatism was exactly what South Dakota needed. They chased Johnson's son, Brendan, out of the race and handed the Democratic nomination to Herseth Sandlin, who was well aware she could never win a Democratic primary battle. But-- and it was a big but-- when Brendan Johnson bowed out, another progressive jumped in. Enter Rick Weiland. Herseth Sandlin stomped off and disappeared and Cecil flipped out. He and Reid decided to get even and refused to back Weiland, even after South Dakota Democrats rallied around him and made him their nominee. They closed the financial faucets and undercut him to a dull, lazy Beltway media, declaring South Dakota unwinnable. Cecil and Reid worked all cycle to make it unwinnable. Chatter is the Cecil, who just presided over the Senate catastrophe that Patty Murray completely avoided in 2012, will have a big position in the Hillary campaign. Makes perfect sense.

Right after the catastrophic 2010 midterms-- aka- The Great Blue Dog Apocalypse-- I worked with half a dozen congressional offices putting together an indictment of the corruption inherent in the way the DCCC does business. You should read it, if you haven't. It's all about the revolving door between the DCCC campaign operatives who get so many millions of dollars grassroots Democrats are suckered into contributing to the DCCC with all those annoying e-mails and the consulting companies they work for and own. At the time, I wasn't aware of Amy Sullivan's epic 2005 article for the Washington Weekly, Fire the Consultants-- Why Do Democrats Promote Campaign Advisors Who Lose Races? Sullivan focused in on the DSCC and I focused on the DCCC but the same disease afflicts both party committees. (Note: I don't care what diseases afflict the Republicans; I just hope whatever it is hurts them as badly as the Democrats are hurt by their consultant problems.)

I urge you to read the Sullivan piece in its entirety. Much of it is about Joe Hansen, a revolving door DSCC operative who is a partner in a very lucrative Beltway consulting firm. They get rich whether Democrats win or lose. Sullivan explains just how it works, although his own case, working for the DSCC and his own firm simultaneously, isn't the way its done anymore. The crooks are in one cycle and then back at their own firms the next and then back at the committee the next.

How does Hansen defend his performance and the seeming conflict between his roles as DSCC representative and private consultant? Not very aggressively. After I made numerous attempts over two weeks to get an interview with Hansen, he replied with a one-paragraph email, in which he listed the three victorious senatorial and three winning gubernatorial races that his company had worked on this fall, and concluded, redundantly, "Our firm has an unmatched record of success that no other firm can match." The email came from Hansen's DSCC account.

It's important to understand that even for experienced politicians--mayors, governors, representatives--a Senate run can be an intimidating challenge. It involves courting an entirely new world of donors by proving to Washington fundraisers and party leaders that you are a serious contender. Jeremy Wright, who served as the political director for Oregon Senate candidate Bill Bradbury's race in the spring and early summer of 2002, says that candidates are almost required to run two parallel campaigns, "one to get voters to vote for you and the other to get D.C. money by putting together the right consultants to show you're for real." For Democratic candidates in the few targeted races every cycle that are actually competitive, winning without the financial support of the DSCC (or its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) is nearly impossible. While the candidates are grateful for the infusion of cash in the form of committee-sponsored polling, fliers, and commercials, the money comes with strings.

Officially, no favoritism exists. "We don't push one consultant over another," a DSCC spokeswoman told me. "It's more of an informational thing, telling candidates about good people who do a lot of Senate races." But Democrats who have worked on targeted races describe a reality in which they are strongly encouraged-- often with the reminder that precious funds hang in the balance-- to select recommended consultants. "The campaign was pretty paranoid about making sure the DSCC was backing us," explains one veteran of an unsuccessful 2002 Senate race. "We needed the cash. So of course, we were going to go with the consultants they recommended."

No one was in a better position to take advantage of this power relationship than Hansen. As the first man-on-the-ground, his contact with budding campaigns was early and often. "That person has a very large advantage in being able to shape the team," one of Hansen's consulting competitors told me. "You bond with the candidate from the get-go at a pretty stressful time when they're deciding whether to run and how to do it." Another Democrat who has worked with Hansen complains, "Joe is a pretty egregious example of a guy who is sent out as the official representative to help candidates plot their campaign plan, and then when he gets to direct mail, says, 'Oh, by the way, let me switch hats for a second-- I happen to do direct mail.'"

The situation puts candidates-- who are loath to alienate the campaign committee whose financial assistance they desperately need-- in a tricky spot. Even when working with experienced consultants, candidates need to retain some ability to disagree with a proposed idea or strategy. That's hard enough when the consultant is recommended by the party committee. But when the consultant actually is the party committee, the candidate's discretion stays sealed in a tight box. "It was an interesting dynamic, I'll say that," Wright says. "When Joe signed us up, he was on staff for the DSCC. We'd work on DS[CC] stuff during the day, and then he'd take us out to dinner and put on his consultant hat."

This Peters Principle effect of Democratic operatives rising--or muscling their way--up to the level of their incompetence, happens for a simple reason: The consultants are filling a vacuum. After all, someone has to formulate the message that a candidate can use to win the voters' support. Conservatives have spent 30 years and billions of dollars on think tanks and other organizations to develop a set of interlinked policies and language that individual Republican candidates and campaigns can adopt in plug-and-play fashion. Liberals are far behind in this message development game. Indeed, most Democratic elected officials have been running recently on warmed-up leftovers from the Clinton brain trust, ideas which were once innovative but are now far from fresh. With little else to go on, consultants-- many of whom came to prominence during the Clinton years-- have clung to old ideas and strategies like security blankets. "Democratic consultants are being asked to fill a role they're not suited to," says Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network, "to come up with ideas and electoral strategy in addition to media strategy."

Rosenberg hints at a second Democratic deficit: The party has no truly brilliant strategists in positions of power. Such talent is always rare in both parties and tends to come out of the political hinterlands, often as part of a winning presidential campaign team. Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign was waged by a crew of Georgia political operatives with the help of unconventional pollster Pat Caddell. Four years later, Reagan defeated Carter by relying on a California-based gang of professionals. James Carville and Paul Begala were largely unknown before they took Bill Clinton to the White House. And outside the South, the team of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Mark McKinnon weren't much less obscure when they put together the strategy for George W. Bush's winning 2000 campaign.

Republicans have proven much more adept than Democrats at giving their best talent a national stage. While Democrats have permitted a Washington consultancy class to become comfortably entrenched, Republicans have effectively begun to pension off their own establishment. "The D.C. consultants for the GOP have their list of clients, but they're definitely on the outside looking in," Chuck Todd told me. "The Bush people have been very careful to give them work…but they're not in the inner circle." In 2004, seasoned Washington media strategist Alex Castellanos paid the bills with a handful of safe congressional races and a few unsuccessful primary challengers. Meanwhile, nearly every tight Senate race (North Carolina, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Florida) was handled by a Tampa-based firm, The Victory Group.

Republicans, of course, don't have any natural monopoly on strategic talent--they just give their best young strategists chances to run the biggest national races. In all likelihood, there is another Karl Rove or James Carville out in the Democratic hinterlands, who ought to be playing essential roles in the most important races. It might be David Axelrod in Chicago, who developed the media strategy for the then-unknown Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) primary campaign; West Coast strategists Paul Goodwin and Amy Simon, who helped Democrats regain the legislature in Washington state; or even unconventional D.C.-based consultants like Anna Bennett, the pollster who engineered Melissa Bean's upset of veteran Rep. Phil Crane (R-Ill.) in November. But any new talent will likely remain on the national margins-- running races for Congress and judgeships-- until someone breaks up the consultant oligarchy.

The electoral system takes care of dead weight when it comes to politicians. The proof is in the political wreckage evident after yet another year of Democratic defeats at the polls. Dick Gephardt--after 10 years at the helm of the Democratic minority in the House--has decided to go back home to Missouri. John Kerry is returning to the Senate instead of stretching out his legs in the Oval Office. The consultants, however, live on. After pocketing a $5-million paycheck following the election, Shrum is back from a vacation in Tuscany and now advising Sen. Jon Corzine's (D-N.J.) gubernatorial race. Mellman, whose advice helped sink Democrats for two consecutive campaign cycles, continues to line up clients. As for Hansen, his connection to Daschle may not help him now that the South Dakotan has vacated the Democratic leader's office. But don't cry for Joe Hansen--he's the consultant for incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

And, as I've pointed out before, other profit-for-staff-driven Democratic-allied organizations-- EMILY's List is the worst-- are just as bad as the DCCC and DSCC... if not worse. Although almost every Democratic woman candidate is petrified to speak publicly about EMILY's List's shenanigans, I've heard from candidate after candidate the same exact details for years. When EMILY's List "suggests" that the candidates they raise money for hire The New Media, Inc., not everyone is aware that that firm's president, Tierney Hunt, is the wife of EMILY's List Campaigns Director Jonathan Parker. The money EMILY's List demands cannot be spent on something useful-- like a field operation-- but must be wasted on a lame Beltway firm which is going to personally enrich an EMILY's List executive. It's how EMILY's List killed the campaigns this year of Alex Sink, Wendy Greuel, Eloise Reyes and several other women they led down the garden path. Several despairing candidates have said to me that they are forced to sit on the phone all day begging for money and that all the money winds up in the pockets of utterly worthless consultants they are forced to hire. And then they lose. We all lose, except the executives at EMILY's List and the crooked consultants they are enriching-- like Parker's wife.

Is There A Reasonable Democratic Strategy For Mississippi?

Democrats regularly win statewide races in Maine and South Dakota, though DSCC executive director Guy Cecil, some kind of a self-loathing Beltway creature, has written off both states to the Republicans in November. He's much more excited about spending DSCC millions down in Mississippi on behalf of homophobic, anti-Choice Blue Dog Travis Childers. Don't forget, the last two times Democrats won Senate seats in Mississippi were when John Stennis was reelected in 1982, having first become a senator in 1947, and when James Eastland was reelected in 1972, having first become a senator in 1942. When Eastland retired and resigned early, Thad Cochran was appointed to fill the rest of his term and was then reelected for 6 consecutive 6 year terms. He's utterly senile and not capable of being any more than a figure head for his staff now.

If your career has something to do with being a professional Democrat, the Mississippi Senate race might be exciting. Same if you watch politics as a sporting event. Yes, someone with a bluish t-shirt, reactionary Blue Dog Travis Childers, is said by a few idiots to have a tiny chance to win a Senate seat…. if a bunch of unlikely scenarios place out. Sure, ruthless fascists in the McDaniel campaign locking themselves into a courthouse overnight and tampering with the ballots is a fun Republican story… but it is a Republican story, a Mississippi Republican story and what does it have to do with normal Americans?

By hook or by crook, McDaniel is likely to win the June 24 run-off.

Cochran carried large areas of the state on Tuesday, winning 52 of 82 counties. He was strong in metro Jackson, which gave him a 9,000 vote margin. He won the Biloxi-Gulfport and Tupelo-Columbus areas, but by lesser vote margins.

But in several areas where McDaniel won, he won big, with huge margins in his home area of the Pine Belt and tea party strongholds. The Hattiesburg-Laurel area gave him about a 12,000 vote margin.

McDaniel also appeared to pull a couple of upsets, or at least surprises for the Cochran campaign. He won what had been predicted as the battleground, DeSoto County, handily at 63 percent, although turnout there was relatively low. He topped Cochran slightly in Jackson County and kept Cochran's margins relatively slim elsewhere on the Coast, projected to be a Cochran stronghold.

Cochran is believed to have enjoyed at least a small amount of "crossover" Democrats voting for him in the Republican primary. That prospect will likely diminish in a runoff, and those who voted Democratic in the primary are prohibited from voting Republican in a runoff. They might not want to anyway. Democratic nominee Travis Childers is believed to stand a better shot-- albeit a long one-- of defeating McDaniel in a general where Mississippians tend to vote heavily Republican in federal elections.

Both campaigns' cupboards appear bare at this point. At last report, Cochran had $681,000 cash on hand; McDaniel, $237,000. Both are probably much lower after late-race spending on get-out-the-vote efforts.

Cochran raised at least $3.6 million for the primary; McDaniel, $1.2 million. But super PACs and other outside groups spent more than $8 million on the race, including $5 million from national tea-party-oriented groups for McDaniel.

Some of McDaniel's biggest outside benefactors on Wednesday were enthusiastically pledging more support. The Club for Growth PAC vowed to "vigorously pursue this race to its conclusion." Freedom Works for American vowed to "double down" its ground game help for McDaniel. Strapped for cash on his own, McDaniel needs the outside support.

Some of Cochran's third-party support, such as the National Republican Senatorial Committee appeared more reticent about spending more in a internecine Republican runoff battle.

But the Mississippi Conservatives PAC, run by former Gov. Haley Barbour's nephew Henry Barbour, plans to stay in the game. Barbour said the PAC is "reloading the weaponry."

And Cochran has been a consummate fundraiser himself and can likely raise at least enough to mount a serious three-week media campaign.

McDaniel's obvious strategy is to stay the course, capitalize on growing anti-Washington, anti-incumbent sentiment and keep his base fired up, waving signs and ready to vote.

"He was written off by the media and attacked by the establishment, yet here he stands on the cusp of making history," said Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund Chairman Jenny Beth Martin. "With all his momentum, I like his chances in three weeks."

Cochran needs a relatively large turnout for the runoff. He is going to have to clarify his message and keep his cadre of state Republican "establishment" leaders such as Gov. Phil Bryant working for him-- which may become more difficult as they read the tea (party) leaves.

"This race is now about whether we want a U.S. senator who puts Mississippi interests first or a U.S. senator controlled by the outside people who have hijacked the tea party," said Henry Barbour. "The message needs to be about what life would be like without Thad Cochran-- at Ingalls (shipyard) or Keesler Air Force Base or in Meridian-- without Thad Cochran and what life will be like with a candidate who just wants to be another Ted Cruz and make a bunch of speeches and not do anything for Mississippi."

Cochran is going to have to show up. His campaign is increasingly plagued by questions of whether the 76-year-old is actually engaged. His campaign events have been guarded by his handlers, with little or no advance notice to the general public or media, and stump speeches or interviews rare.

Notably, Cochran failed to appear before his supporters gathered Tuesday night for his campaign party. This move is likely to plague him for the next three weeks.

…Club for Growth issued a statement calling on Cochran to withdraw from the race.

Still, for all the Sturm und Drang, McDaniel only finished with around 1,000 more votes than Cochran-- 49.5%. No one can be sure he's going to win what's likely to be a low-turn-out primary runoff. And if he does, the likelihood that he'd beat Childers anymore is enormous.

[E]ven if the national political environment favors Democrats on Election Day, the effect in the Mississippi will probably be minimal. Mississippi is inelastic; it has few swing voters. The state’s large black population routinely gives 90 percent or more of its vote to Democrats, while the white population usually doles out 80 percent or more of its vote to Republicans.

Democrats don’t just lose; they tend to lose by the same amount year after year. In gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections since 2003, every Democratic candidate got between 35 percent and 46 percent of the vote.

It’s possible that Childers will break this streak: He has shown he can win over conservative voters. The state’s 1st District, which he represented in Congress, was more Republican than the state as a whole.

But the partisan gravity in Mississippi is strong and hard to reverse. Childers is a clear underdog.

Clearly, if McDaniel wins, the brain surgeons Guy Cecil at the DSCC hopes to elect a far right fake-Democrat, who would probably switch parties before his term was even half up, and who will certainly be much further right than Manchin. Judging by everything he's been up to since he took over the committee by selecting a weak and ineffective boss, Michael Bennet, Cecil, seems to think this is a far more effective strategy than trying to win states where actual Democrats actually win elections, like Maine (Shenna Bellows) and South Dakota (Rick Weiland). Instead of wasting your resources on trying to elect a Republican disguised as a Democrat in a state that won't elect Democrats, please consider chipping in for Shenna and Rick here.

The Beltway's Not America-- And It Sure Isn't South Dakota

Josh Kraushaar's National Journal post yesterday started off just right: "If Democrats fall a seat short of holding the Senate, there will be a lot of second-guessing on the one race that never materialized but should have held a lot more promise: South Dakota." But then he veered right off the rails. In regard to Rick Weiland's chance of holding the seat for the Democrats he asserts that "even the most optimistic Democrats will acknowledge [he] faces near-impossible odds in the solidly red state." That isn't true. Optimistic Democrats know Weiland could win if he weren't being cock-blocked by DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil. Almost every Democrat in the Senate-- and every single good one-- has already endorsed Weiland but Kraushaar chose not to speak to any of them but to instead play stenographer for the poutraged Blue Dog-loving/progressive-hating Mr. Cecil. "It didn't have to be that way," commiserates Kraushaar, totally with the grain.

The Senate race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson could have been one of the most consequential contests in the country, if Democrats had a little more luck. Just over a year ago, the political talk in South Dakota centered on which of their up-and-coming prospects would run-- former Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, one of the most popular figures in the state after representing it for three full terms in the House, or Tim Johnson's son Brendan Johnson, who's serving as a U.S. attorney. Despite the state's Republican moorings, now-Sen. Heidi Heitkamp's surprising 2012 victory in neighboring North Dakota served as a fresh reminder that strong candidates running in conservative-minded states can overcome disadvantages.

In the delusional Beltway world of the Cecils and Kraushaars, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin is indeed "one of the most popular figures in the state." But not in real life. And even if they're delusional, she isn't. Democrats in the state don't trust her and didn't turn out in 2010 to reselect her, allowing right-wing Republican Kristi Noem to beat her. Herseth Sandlin knew she could never win a Democratic primary and she only agreed to run if Cecil could assure her he would clear the field for her-- which he did, by persuading Brendon Johnson to not run. That's when Weiland jumped in… and Herseth Sandlin jumped out. "She announced," writes Kraushaar, "the desire to spend more time with her family as the reason for stepping aside, but several Democratic operatives familiar with her decision said she didn't want to face any primary opposition, even against a longer-shot candidate like Weiland… Against Weiland, Herseth Sandlin would have been a clear favorite to win the nomination. But against the more-liberal challenger, she would have been forced to defend her vote against the president's health care law, an issue she trumpeted in her unsuccessful 2010 reelection. In a state where Democrats have little margin for error, being pushed to the left in a primary would have been costly in a general election." Cecil has stomped his feet and barked and barked and barked-- and decided to tale it into his own hands to let Mitch McConnell and the Republicans take over the Senate rather than have his fragile ego bruised by something as messy as Democracy-- and dirty fucking hippies. More Krushaar commiseration for poor Cecil: "to the small universe of Democratic activists within the state, Weiland's progressive principles trumped Herseth Sandlin's more-electable profile."

Krushaar gets the rest of the story wrong and just presents a laughable Guy Cecil version, a dress rehearsal for the blame that will be coming his way when he tries getting the campaign manager job for Hillary in 2016. The reason South Dakota should be one of the top DSCC priorities-- and why they should fire Guy Cecil today before he can do any further damage-- has nothing to do with the Republican primary. It has to do with the 3 Republicans running in the general election, the tainted, Establishment corporate shill, Mike Rounds, plus former Republican Senator Larry Pressler and a Tea Party fave, Gordon Howie, the latter two both running as independents-- and both peeling off votes from Rounds.

Rick Weiland can keep that South Dakota Senate seat blue and the Democrats can hold onto the Senate-- despite Guy Cecil and the DSCC. If you'd like to help make sure that happens, please consider contributing what you can to Rick's campaign.


UPDATE: Last Night's Republican Primary

Rick's campaign sent this out this morning about the South Dakota GOP Senate primary and how it served to underscore Mike Rounds' vulnerability, asking that people consider the following:

• Former two term governor, Mike Rounds, spent $2.5 million dollars to win just 55% of the vote, while his four unknown opponents spent less than $75,000 on television advertising and received 45%. This should hardly be reason for optimism in the Rounds' camp.

• Despite Rounds egregiously high spending, he actually LOST ground on his favorable/unfavorable scores! In October, Rounds fav/unfav score was 42%/40%, but by early May, despite spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars on soft-positive 60 second ads, Rounds not only didn't move the dial forward, he slightly moved backwards-- his fav/unfav scores were 41%/41%. The folks who don't like him--half the electorate who can rate him-- are unmoved by his ads. And it's a truism in politics that an impression, once made, is not easily changed.

• One of Rounds' challenges is that he not only faces Rick Weiland in the general election, he also faces former three-term GOP U.S Senator Larry Pressler and former South Dakota GOP State Senator Gordon Howie, the latter two who certainly will draw tens of thousands of votes away from Rounds (GOP challengers to Rounds drew a combined 33,000 votes in the Senate primary yesterday).

• If “Weiland can get around 45 percent of the vote, a reasonable target for a Democrat in the state, and Pressler and Howie together get more than 10 percent, Rounds could wind up coming in second.” -- Tom Lawrence, Prairie Perspective Blog– April 11, 2014

• And this morning, conservative KELO radio host Greg Belfrage reiterated this point on his show-- Howie enjoys wide support among Tea Party Republicans and Pressler still appeals to "old-school" GOP voters.

• The May PPP poll showed that, despite the fact that Rounds had placed far more time on TV than Rick Weiland, he actually trailed Weiland by 2% among those respondents who could rate Weiland either favorably or unfavorably, which clearly indicates that Rounds lead (10%) was due entirely to his unsurprising advantage in name identification (67% for Weiland, 82% for Rounds). As Weiland gets better known-- not difficult in a low-cost television state like South Dakota-- Rounds' lead will shrink, and then disappear.

This race remains what it has been from the start-- entirely winnable, the only question being whether Weiland will received the relatively modest amount of funding that he needs to make his case to the voters of South Dakota. If he does, it's clear that Weiland-- who is outworking Rounds every day-- could easily win.

NRSC Clearly Understands They Can Lose South Dakota, But Guy Cecil Is Still Filled With Poutrage

DSCC executive director Guy Cecil isn't thinking clearly... or doesn't give a shit if the Democrats keep control of the Senate or not. The battle over the Senate could well come down to one state: South Dakota... and Cecil, who rides roughshod over pathetic DSCC chairman Michael Bennet, refuses to play. When Beltway political reporter Alexandra Jaffe asked the question, Why Is Rick Weiland Getting Cold Shoulder?, there is never a mention of Cecil.

No doubt he was just too busy trying to worm his way into the Hillary For President Campaign taking shape, but its hardly a secret that Cecil is still furious that Weiland's entry into the race, wrecked Cecil's dumb centrist plan. South Dakotans defeated Blue Dog Queen Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in 2010 and replaced her with another nothing, Kristi Noem. Noem beat her 153,683 (48%) to 146,561 (46%), in large part because progressives just stayed home rather than vote for the conservative Herseth Sandlin. They didn't hold their noses and vote for her; they say home and grilled hot dogs and burgers. The following election saw a much bigger turnout-- presidential year-- but Noem, with no accomplishments under her belt, beat Democrat Matt Varilek with an even greater margin. He was a classic Steve Israel mystery meat candidate. No one ever knew what he stood for. That's the way the DCCC and the DSCC likes their candidates-- even though candidates like that usually lose.

So around roles the 2014 cycle and Cecil is tripping all over himself to recruit the pathetic Herseth Sandlin, the former chair of the Blue Dogs who was so certain she could never win a Democratic primary that she told Cecil she would only run if he could clear the Democratic field. Cecil gave his word and, sure enough, persuaded Tim Johnson's son, Brendan, to drop out of the race. Sandlin was beaming... until populist Rick Weiland jumped in. Herseth Sandlin stormed out of the race and Cecil-- as well as Harry Reid-- were furious. Cecil probably told Bennet, an idiot, to put on a sad face.

Now Weiland has been picking up a head of steam and has been endorsed by almost every Senate Democrat, including all the good Senate Democrats, from Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley to Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Brian Schatz, Mazie Hirono, Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, Patrick Leahy, Ed Markey, Richard Blumenthal, and Tom Harkin. No Reid, and, of course, no Bennet, who only makes endorsements when Cecil tells him it's OK. But can Weiland win? In South Dakota? You bet he can... unless Cecil sabotages his race. And right now... Cecil is sabotaging his race-- although that isn't what Alexandra Jaffe discusses in her Hill post.

The DSCC has consistently insisted it would have a strong option, likening the race to North Dakota in 2012, when the last-minute entry of Democrat Heidi Heitkamp delivered the party a winning candidate.

But with no other Democrats in the race, there are now no other options for the DSCC. And Weiland is certainly no centrist like Heitkamp. He’s the rare critic of ObamaCare who says it doesn’t go far enough; he opposes the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that remains popular with conservatives; and he has received the backing of Howard Dean’s Democracy for America, a national progressive group.

Critics say that strategy won’t work in South Dakota, with a voting population that’s 45 percent Republican and where GOP 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney won with nearly 60 percent over the vote.

Craig Lawrence, chairman of the South Dakota Republican Party, said he’s confident widespread opposition to the national Democratic Party will deliver the GOP candidate a win.

“How do you spell ‘Obama’? How do you spell ‘ObamaCare’? How do you spell, ‘our decline in image for the United States throughout the world’? How do you spell ‘Harry Reid’?” he said, when asked what he saw as the GOP’s winning argument in the race.

Weiland has, however, distanced himself from Obama on core issues, ranging from possible U.S. military intervention in Syria to the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent actions on ethanol. His adviser Mike Lux said calling his campaign “progressive” would be inaccurate.

“I think he’s running a populist campaign, and I think that a populist campaign has won most South Dakota senate elections in the last few years for Democrats. It’s not a conventional progressive campaign at all,” Lux said.

Lux said Weiland is framing his push for a public option as essentially support for allowing the public to buy into Medicare, which is popular with seniors, and that his opposition to Keystone XL is appealing to farmers and ranchers who know it could hurt their water supply.

Democrats say they’re further heartened by the contours of the GOP primary. They believe prevailing conservative discontent with Rounds, the establishment pick, as well as investigations into potential misconduct involving the state development office during Rounds’ administration, could cripple him for the general.

Lawrence argued there’s no direct connection between Rounds and the alleged misconduct: “There’s smoke but there’s no fire. It will not singe Mike Rounds.”

That could change, however, if national Democrats pour money into advertising pushing the issue-- and in a state as cheap as South Dakota, a small investment goes a long way.

They also believe the entry of Pressler as an independent candidate could split off votes from the GOP nominee and deliver Weiland a win, if the race tightens.

Lawrence predicted that Pressler could draw 8 percent of the vote but that Rounds-- whom the state party has not officially endorsed, but Lawrence and many others see as the clear front-runner-- will be too strong to overcome.

“Mike Rounds is so popular and the Democratic candidate is so comparatively weak that Larry Pressler would have to have an incredible amount of support” to leave an opening for Weiland, he said.

Maybe the DC Democrats are doing Weiland a favor by painting a picture that shows Reid against him. Reid is extremely unpopular in South Dakota and his backing won't do Weiland any good with the state's voters, even if it would with institutional Democratic Party donors. But Rounds has a worse roadblock than the 8% Pressler is bound to take away from the GOP. Meet Mike Rounds-hater, Gordon Howie, the teabagger who is going to deliver South Dakota to a full-fledged Democrat, not a Stephanie Herseth Sandlin or Heidi Heitkamp type from the Republican wing of the party. Craig Lawrence, chairman of the South Dakota Republican Party:

From the moment Gordon Howie filed his petitions for US Senate as an Independent, Republicans from around the state have been ringing our phones off the hook in anger that one of our own would set out to be the spoiler in the race.

Gordon called me this afternoon to ask if the State Party were challenging his petitions,  and I explained that it is not the State Party that may challenge, but that it is impossible for me not to know about or be involved in such a challenge in one way or another.  There is simply too much controversy surrounding his switch from Republican to Independent, and I am the Republican Chairman.

I suggested that if he were to get 12% of the vote as he has in the past, he could be the spoiler who gives the seat back to the Democrats. He said, “I expect to get much more than 12%.”

And the GOP effort to disqualify Gordon from the ballot is going to backfire on them even beyond the very slim odds of them being successful.

Gordon submitted 5200 signatures which is about 59% beyond the minimum requirement and the second largest margin of any candidate for office this year. His petitions, so we're reliably informed, tested in at about 84% accuracy which would mean the SDGOP would need to identify over 1,000 indivuduals on Gordon's petitions who had already previously signed U.S. Senate Candidate petitions this year. This would invovle cross checking each one of his 5,200 signatures against the 25k+ that were submitted previously and doing so by next Tuesday.

Most importanlty, if this were to evolve to a legal dispute, the South Dakota courts have a long and documented history of allowing candadites on the ballot even if they fall below the margin assuming it isn't by a terribly ergrious margin. What a mess! And all it does is drag the already badly wounded Rounds through the mud in the minds of independent voters-- while further infuriating Republicans who lean in a Tea Party direction. You can help Rick Weiland here-- even if Guy Cecil won't.

Can Rick Weiland Ride A Populist Wave Of Resentment Against Big Money Wrecking Our Democracy?

The DSCC preview of the electoral cycle that they hand out to big contributors is as upbeat as they can make it. In the section on South Dakota, where Democrat Tim Johnson is retiring, the DSCC asserts that "Democrats and the DSCC are committed to holding Senator Johnson's seat next year and will devote all the resources necessary to elect a new Democratic senator in South Dakota. Recent polls have shown that Democrats are in a strong position to hold the seat. This is another state where a likely divisive Republican primary could force the eventual nominee to the far right. A Tea Party group, the Senate Conservatives Fund, has already pledged to support a Tea Party candidate to take on the GOP establishment candidate, former Governor Mike Rounds."

Even better than a mere Republican primary battle, there are two Republicans who have already vowed to run in the general election, a prospect likely to make it very difficult for Mike Rounds, an establishment shill, to win against a populist Democrat. One of these two ex-Republicans is former GOP congressman and senator, Larry Pressler and the other is extremist teabagger Gordon Howie, who has expressly threatened to upend Rounds' general election campaign if Rounds beats the lunatic fringe teabagger in the primary, state Rep. and mentally deranged racist Stace Nelson.

“I am a Republican philosophically. I am now a registered independent, but I fully embrace the Republican Party platform. That is a significant difference between me and some other Republicans who are running for office,” Howie told The Hill, a reference to former Gov. Mike Rounds, the Republican establishment pick for the nomination.

…“My Stace Nelson signs are staying up through the primary,” he said. “This is basically a plan B, should Stace Nelson not win.”

Howie said a group of supporters had “done the polling and the foundational work and said, ‘Look, if you get in this thing we think you’ll have a good shot at it.' ” He wouldn’t disclose what people had urged him to get in, or the exact polling numbers.

“I was approached by a group of people who said, ‘If you do not get in, Mike Rounds is the next U.S. senator.' And I’ve never been a Mike Rounds fan. Philosophically, he doesn’t represent our conservative values.”

But while Howie hopes to offer a conservative alternative to Rounds, his candidacy runs the risk of opening a wider lane for the Democratic candidate, Rick Weiland… [Pressler] and Howie could draw Republican votes away from Rounds and deliver Weiland the opportunity to win with just a plurality of votes.

A wealthy friend, a big Democratic donor, sent me the the quote from the DSCC in response to a request that he contribute to the Democratic nominee, prairie populist Rick Weiland. My friend was confused because the DSCC listed the Democratic candidate as "TBD," to be determined, and he isn't prepared to contribute unless the DSCC is signaling they're backing Weiland. Executive Director Guy Cecil, the bag of wind who runs the show at the DSCC, having personally picked the weakest Democratic senator, Michael Bennet, as his "boss," isn't ready to give that signal. Although Weiland has been endorsed by Johnson and former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle, by Independent Bernie Sanders and by almost every Democrat currently in the Senate, including all the champions of ordinary working families: Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Sherrod Brown, Brian Schatz, Mazie Hirono, Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, Patrick Leahy, Ed Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Tom Harkin… Cecil is still in a stage of poutrage that he couldn't get his handpicked Blue Dog, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, who withdrew in a huff when faced with a primary challenge against a real Democrat. Cecil, who has delusions of grandeur and tells everyone he meets he's going to be the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton-- a laughable idea-- is playing with the Democrats' chances of holding onto the Senate majority. He finally did the right thing by endorsing Shenna Bellows but he's still playing childish ego-games with the South Dakota seat.

This week, after the Supreme Court's McCutcheon decision was handed down, Weiland wasn't paying attention to Guy Cecil's dysfunctional management style. He was writing an OpEd, Yelling Fire that went to the very heart of the premise of his entire campaign. All the bolded paragraphs were bolded by Rick, by the way. And when you're done reading, you might want to consider doing what my wealthy friend still hasn't done, contributing to the Weiland for Senate campaign.

The argument that money has the right to speech advanced in Buckley, Citizens United, and now McCutcheon, is of a feather with some of the most infamous decisions of the United States Supreme Court.

The infamy of Dred Scott, Plessy, Minor, and Korematsu is that they denied African Americans, women, and Japanese Americans their fundamental right to have their voices heard equally with those of their fellow citizens. The denial in Dred Scott was far more direct and severe than that of the other cases, but each of these cases involves dangerous denial of that right.

The failure of the Supreme Court to see the danger here results from looking too hard at legal texts and not hard enough at the real world.

For any court to hold that the right of one person to make 100 million dollars in political contributions, and to summon leading candidates for the Presidency of the United States to appear before him so he can judge their fitness for that office, does not infringe upon the rights of his fellow citizens, requires a truly shocking denial of reality.

Political reality today is that America is being turned into a plutocracy by the ability of big money to buy what it wants from Washington, and increasingly from every other level of government as well.

Political reality today is that politicians who used to be public servants are now servants of the big money that elected them.

How else can you explain the endless array of policy decisions at every level of government that are vehemently opposed by large majorities of ordinary citizens, but are made anyway by elected officials. Think about it. 90% plus majorities of the voting public oppose offshore tax havens for billionaires and yet they persist. 90% oppose shutting our government down, yet it is shut down. Oil spills occur, dangerous vehicles are sold, banks evict families from homes they have been conned into buying, payday lenders extort poor families, all practices supported by virtually no one, but permitted to persist, even encouraged by the representatives supposedly elected by the people these things harm.

Each of these policies, and many many more, result from the corrosive effect of big money political contributions. These contributions corrode both parties. They corrode the public's trust in their own government.

They corrode even the word "politics," democracy’s alternative to decision by bloody violence, which has now disastrously been made a synonym for incompetence, greed, and corruption by the mayhem wrought upon it by big money.

When elected officials must spend 80% of their time begging billionaires for money to stay elected, and a Supreme Court does not think that deprives we thousandaires of equal protection of the law, that Court is blind.

The statistics purporting to show that big money influence is not a problem because occasionally a candidate with less money happens to win, are a farce. Of course that happens, but it is irrelevant.  Both candidates are begging for big money, not peoples votes. The staffs of both candidates are meeting with big money donors and lobbyists, not ordinary voters. The consultants who advise candidates make their biggest dollars from big money. Even those in the employ of candidates and elected officials are on the prowl for big money jobs as soon as they can find them.

This and more is what is enabled by decisions like McCutcheon, which defend the right to free speech of a tiny handful of billionaires and powerful institutions by devaluing to the point of near worthlessness the free speech rights of everyone else.

Why, we should ask this court, is the yelling of "fire" in a crowded theater, which is the universally recognized example of speech not constitutionally protected because it infringes on the rights of others, not almost perfectly analogous to what happens when Sheldon Adelson yells in his billion dollar voice, "give me everything I want", so that the 300 million other Americans yelling in their ten dollar voices, "no, please don't," are drowned out?

This and more is why the growth of wealth in America over the last 30 years has gone almost 100% to the richest and most powerful 1% of Americans, and almost not at all to those of us whose voices at the ballot box are being drowned out by a tidal wave of talking money.

The line of "money talks" decisions capped by McCutcheon is a fundamental threat to democracy because it denies the rights of 99% of the American people to compete on a level playing field in the one place that matters most in a democracy, at the ballot box.

That, in my book, reserves for it a place in infamy alongside the very worst decisions ever made by the United States Supreme Court.

Worst, second worst, fifth worst, who cares?  Talking money is destroying our democracy and we need to pass a constitutional amendment to stop it now!

Watch Guy Cecil And Michael Bennet Hand Mitch McConnell The Senate Leader Post

Rick and Rounds

The Rapid City Journal is arguably the most conservative newspaper in South Dakota. And they are certainly more conservative than the Beltway operative who seems hellbent on handing control of the Senate over to the Republicans, DSCC executive director Guy Cecil. Cecil, still pouting that he was unable to deliver the South Dakota Democratic nomination to former Blue Dog chairwoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, has blackballed South Dakota Democratic nominee Rick Weiland. Weiland has been endorsed by Tom Daschle and Tim Johnson and by most of the Democrats in the Senate including virtually all the senators who fight for Main Street rather than for Wall Street: Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Sherrod Brown, Brian Schatz, Mazie Hirono, Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, Patrick Leahy, Ed Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Tom Harkin and, of course, Bernie Sanders, who recognizes a kindred spirit when he sees one. He's also been endorsed by Blue America and, this week, DFA. Missing from the list is Cecil's pathetic puppet, Michael Bennet, ostensibly the chairman of the DSCC, who Patty Murray forgot to explain the facts of life to when she turned over the committee to him. Smart money in DC now predicts Bennet and Cecil will hand the Senate majority over to Mitch McConnell after the November elections. Their refusal to stop pouting and get behind Weiland is one of the symptoms of a sickness they both suffer from: a kind of bizarre DC defeatism that predicts that only conservatives can win elections.

Back to the Rapid City Journal now. Today they predicted something Cecil and Bennet should ponder long and hard-- something Senate Democrats and Daschle have been trying to make them both understand: South Dakota elects authentic populists, not just values-free centrist hacks… like Bennet himself. "George McGovern," wrote their editorial board, "was the original Prairie Populist. In Rick Weiland, we can see a reincarnation of the political philosophies that kept McGovern in Congress for 22 years." They can. Guy Cecil and the clownish Bennet can't. Time for Harry Reid to get more competent leadership for the DSCC and let Cecil go work for Hillary Clinton?

Well on his way to visit all 311 cities and towns in South Dakota in his campaign for U.S. Senate, Rick Weiland stopped by the Journal recently to meet with the editorial board.

The Sioux Falls Democrat hopes that by shaking as many hands as possible and greeting as many voters as he can before November, he will keep the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Tim Johnson in Democratic hands.

He notes that at least one member of South Dakota’s congressional delegation has been a Democrat since George McGovern was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1962. “It’s a tradition in South Dakota to elect Democrats to Congress,” Weiland said.

Weiland has reason to be optimistic, despite the advantage Republicans have in registered voters, because of the open seat. Without an incumbent to fill up an overwhelming campaign war chest, the race could be considered wide open, even with five Republicans, including former Gov. Mike Rounds, in the race, along with former Republican Sen. Larry Pressler, running as an independent.

Despite never having held statewide office, Weiland is no stranger to South Dakota politics. He worked for Tom Daschle when he was a member of the House of Representatives and was his West River director for several years in Rapid City. In 1996, Weiland ran for the open U.S. House seat against John Thune in a battle between political neophytes but lost by 20 points.

Since then, he has worked as regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, AARP and the International Code Council. He and his wife currently operate a successful restaurant in Sioux Falls.

Traveling across South Dakota and stopping in every town along the way is a campaign strategy Weiland learned from Daschle and McGovern, who preached that every voter counts come election day.

Weiland presented a populist message to the Journal editorial board that most of the country’s problems can be laid at the feet of the wealthy and big business that are preventing progress. “Big money has gotten in the way of getting things done,” he said.

Other examples of Weiland’s populism:

• Health care: The Affordable Care Act was poisoned by big insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Weiland proposes letting people choose to buy into the popular Medicare program. Private insurers would be forced to reduce premiums, mostly by cutting CEOs’ pay.

• Farm bill: Too much money goes to big producers.

• Energy: Policies are driven by big oil.

• Taxes: Businesses are not paying taxes, “meanwhile, we’re kicking kids off Head Start.”

• Campaign finance: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is threatening our democracy by allowing large amounts of “dark money” (undisclosed donations) to influence elections.

• Free enterprise: Our economic system has been rigged by big money interests that create an “inequality of opportunity.”

The theme that a few hundred wealthy individuals and big corporations are the cause of all the country’s ills, and who use money and influence to prevent positive change fills a conversation with Weiland.

The back of Weiland’s business card even includes an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that he says he will introduce on his first day in Congress: "So that the votes of all, rather than the wealth of the few, shall direct the course of this Republic, Congress shall have the power to limit the raising and spending of money with respect to federal elections."

George McGovern was the original Prairie Populist. In Rick Weiland, we can see a reincarnation of the political philosophies that kept McGovern in Congress for 22 years.

The balance of power in the United Stated Senate is likely to be determined by who wins in South Dakota. Guy Cecil and Michael Bennet are on the wrong side of that battle. Please step up and help Rick Weiland win in South Dakota-- and keep the Senate blue… and America out of the direct control of the Koch brothers' demented fascism. You can contribute directly to Rick's campaign here.

Guy Cecil counts the ways he can lose the Senate majority for the Democrats, starting with ignoring South Dakota and Maine

A Democracy Dependent Upon The Funders

The video above comes from a TED Talk Lawrence Lessig did last year. He contends, correctly, that we have lost our representative democracy and that we have to act to get it back. Choosing between garbage candidates like David Jolly and Alex Sink won't help anyone get anything back. All it will do is perpetuate the deterioration of American democracy.

This short news story from the Associated Press this week shouldn't surprise anyone by it's specifics. But it is instructional nonetheless. This is what's left of our transpartisan faux-democracy:

Democrat Rahm Emanuel and Republican Bruce Rauner have something in common - many of the same wealthy political donors.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that more than 100 campaign contributors have given money to both men.

The newspaper conducted an analysis of campaign contributions since Emanuel, a Democrat, ran for Chicago mayor and since Rauner launched his campaign for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

Common donors include billionaires Citadel investment firm founder Ken Griffin and Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky.

Emanuel and Rauner both have a background in investment.

But Emanuel and Rauner also were the top contributors to their own campaign funds. Rauner has contributed $5 million and Emanuel has given himself $1.1 million.

Chicago-based political consultant Don Rose says big donors often give to ensure future access to political leaders.

Guy Cecil, the executive director of the DSCC, got to pick his own "boss" this cycle and he picked the weakest, most spineless member of the Senate, Michael Bennet of Colorado, a pusillanimous centrist for whom he had served as chief of staff and who he had helped reelect in 2010 (an election in which Bennet squeaked by with 48.1% of the vote against GOP sociopath Ken Buck). Cecil is calling the shots at the DSCC this cycle and is likely to hand the majority over to the Republicans as he spends all the committee's capital on trying to advance pathetic Beltway centrism. The two best Democratic candidates running this cycle, South Dakota's Rick Weiland and Maine's Shenna Bellows, have been shut out from support by Cecil. This is especially odd since the vast majority of Democratic senators have already endorsed Weiland. His brand of aggressive prairie populism is so foreign to a conservative operative like Cecil that he literally can't understand what Weiland is talking about. Bellows, an Elizabeth Warren type of transformational candidate, might as well be on another planet for a creature of the Beltway like Cecil. (You can contribute to Weiland and Bellows here.)

Steve Israel has guaranteed the Democrats will not take back the House and Cecil/Bennet are guaranteeing they will lose the Senate. Is the strategy just to hope the Republicans overreach so badly that Hilary sweeps in big Democratic gains in both Houses in 2016? How sad is that? And how far have we come from a politics of ideas to a politics based on contributions from the richest fraction of one percent of criminal plutocrats?

Is Economic Justice The Ticket For Democrats-- Or Should They Compete With The GOP For The Economic Inequality Vote?

The Republican civil war is pretty front and center and getting quite a lot of media attention. There is also something of a Democratic civil war brewing, a more ideological/less careerist based one. You may have seen sparks of it last week when the Wall Street owned ConservaDem group, Third Way, went on the attack against Elizabeth Warren and the progressive populism she espouses. Third Way, the Blue Dogs and the New Dems are the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. A virtual whore house of corruption and opportunism, it's the ugly side of the Democratic Party that has nothing to do with serving the interests of working families. It's smaller but immensely better-funded than the real Democratic Party but it has captured much of the party apparatus-- from the DNC, DCCC and DSCC to post-Pelosi House leadership, which includes all corrupt careerists more comfortable with a conservative vision than with a progressive vision (Hoyer, Wasserman-Schultz, Crowley, Israel…).

President Obama's speech Dec. 4th about economic mobility and inequality (above) is not what conservative/careerist Democrats-- who call themselves "centrists"-- think is the way Democrats should be going. Their vision-- the Republican-lite approach which brought on the Great Blue Dog Apocalypse of 2010-- is a proven failure, but it's a vision that has worked for them financially and career-wise, if not for the party and the American people. They don't take inequality seriously at least in part because it's so far from their own experience. All those multimillionaires Rahm Emanuel and Steve Israel have recruited should not have dominant leadership positions in the Democratic Party. They're turning it away from middle class working families. Congressmembers like Sean Patrick Maloney (NY), Jim Himes (CT), Scott Peters (CA), Colleen Hanabusa (HI), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Patrick Murphy (FL), Cheri Bustos (IL), John Delaney (MD), Suzan DelBene (WA), Brad Schneider (IL), Bill Foster (IL), Denny Heck (WA) serve the interests of Wall Street, the wealthy and corporate America, not the interests of working families. This year, Israel is again recruiting anti-progressives to run for Congress while dooming the Democrats to two more years of Republican domination of the House. These leaders are out of step with what the Democratic Party is all about. It isn't about them and their sleazy, greasy careers. It's about the people they purport to represent. Third Way ran to their pals at the Wall Street Journal, a Republican propaganda tool, to declare that progressive policies and economic populism are "a dead end for Democrats," the day after Obama made that speech up top.

Stagnant wages, economic inequality, a dwindling middle class, widening income and wealth gaps between the top 1% and the rest of us and an inability for middle class families to maintain their standards of living are just theoretical to them. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, Jeff Merkely, Alan Grayson, Raul Grijalva, Mike Honda, Keith Ellison, and a small handful of progressives in Congress are addressing economic hardship in a way that the Republican wing of the Democratic Party just can't even comprehend. It's so far from their world that they claim it's just "idealism." When these populist leaders reject the failed European Austerity measures being relentlessly pushed by Paul Ryan and other right-wing corporately-owned hacks, Third Way Democrats are more comfortable with the Ryan vision than what they denigrate as “fantasy-based blue-state populism." Sunday, Paul Krugman explained why the Third Way sell-outs have it so very wrong.

The best argument for putting inequality on the back burner is the depressed state of the economy. Isn’t it more important to restore economic growth than to worry about how the gains from growth are distributed?

Well, no. First of all, even if you look only at the direct impact of rising inequality on middle-class Americans, it is indeed a very big deal. Beyond that, inequality probably played an important role in creating our economic mess, and has played a crucial role in our failure to clean it up.

Start with the numbers. On average, Americans remain a lot poorer today than they were before the economic crisis. For the bottom 90 percent of families, this impoverishment reflects both a shrinking economic pie and a declining share of that pie. Which mattered more? The answer, amazingly, is that they’re more or less comparable-- that is, inequality is rising so fast that over the past six years it has been as big a drag on ordinary American incomes as poor economic performance, even though those years include the worst economic slump since the 1930s.

And if you take a longer perspective, rising inequality becomes by far the most important single factor behind lagging middle-class incomes.

Beyond that, when you try to understand both the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery that followed, the economic and above all political impacts of inequality loom large.

It’s now widely accepted that rising household debt helped set the stage for our economic crisis; this debt surge coincided with rising inequality, and the two are probably related (although the case isn’t ironclad). After the crisis struck, the continuing shift of income away from the middle class toward a small elite was a drag on consumer demand, so that inequality is linked to both the economic crisis and the weakness of the recovery that followed.

In my view, however, the really crucial role of inequality in economic calamity has been political.

In the years before the crisis, there was a remarkable bipartisan consensus in Washington in favor of financial deregulation-- a consensus justified by neither theory nor history. When crisis struck, there was a rush to rescue the banks. But as soon as that was done, a new consensus emerged, one that involved turning away from job creation and focusing on the alleged threat from budget deficits.

What do the pre- and postcrisis consensuses have in common? Both were economically destructive: Deregulation helped make the crisis possible, and the premature turn to fiscal austerity has done more than anything else to hobble recovery. Both consensuses, however, corresponded to the interests and prejudices of an economic elite whose political influence had surged along with its wealth.

This is especially clear if we try to understand why Washington, in the midst of a continuing jobs crisis, somehow became obsessed with the supposed need for cuts in Social Security and Medicare. This obsession never made economic sense: In a depressed economy with record low interest rates, the government should be spending more, not less, and an era of mass unemployment is no time to be focusing on potential fiscal problems decades in the future. Nor did the attack on these programs reflect public demands.

Surveys of the very wealthy have, however, shown that they-- unlike the general public-- consider budget deficits a crucial issue and favor big cuts in safety-net programs. And sure enough, those elite priorities took over our policy discourse.

Which brings me to my final point. Underlying some of the backlash against inequality talk, I believe, is the desire of some pundits to depoliticize our economic discourse, to make it technocratic and nonpartisan. But that’s a pipe dream. Even on what may look like purely technocratic issues, class and inequality end up shaping-- and distorting-- the debate.

So the president was right. Inequality is, indeed, the defining challenge of our time. Will we do anything to meet that challenge?

So far there is just one primary in the House and one primary in the Senate pitting economic populists against Republican-lite candidates. In the Senate race, progressive incumbent Brian Schatz is fighting off a challenge from corrupt conservative New Dem Colleen Hanabusa, an anti-family careerist who is notorious for her cozy corporate relationships and lack of ethics. You can help Schatz balance out the immense amount of money she's getting from shady corporations and EMILY's List here on the Blue America Senate page.

And speaking of the Senate, the lame corporate conservative who runs the DSCC, Michael Bennet, would rather see the Republicans win the South Dakota seat of retiring Democratic Senator Tim Johnson than back progressive, Rick Weiland. Letters like this, which Weiland sent to his supporters yesterday, must drive Beltway hacks like Bennet crazy. He's refusing to back Weiland, although Democratic senators who have include Al Franken, Jeff Merkley, Elizabeth Warren, Barbara Boxer, Brian Schatz, Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, Patrick Leahy, Mazie Hirono, Sherrod Brown, Ed Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Tom Harkin. Even Establishment figures and conservatives like Max Baucus, Chuck Schumer, Mark Pryor, Mark Begich, Mary Landrieu, Bob Menendez, Dick Durban and Joe Donnelly have ignored Bennet and endorsed Weiland. In all, 31 sitting Democratic senators have endorsed him but Bennet doesn't have the power to overrule Guy Cecil, the sleazy operative who pulls Bennet's strings on behalf of consultant-world.

There is no better example of why I am running for Senate than this graph:

If you think this is the result of a properly functioning free enterprise system then you should not be supporting me.

If you think this is the result of a rigged enterprise system, a system so stacked in favor of the super wealthy it literally threatens our nation, then please join our fight.

We can unrig the system! They have the dollars. But we have the votes.

A vote for me is a vote for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of our elections. A vote for me is a vote to make the super wealthy pay their taxes for a change. It is a vote to end offshore tax shelters.

It is time to put ordinary folks back in charge and restore the free enterprise system that rewards hard work instead of big political contributions-- because ordinary folks and hard work are what we have here in South Dakota.

On the House side, the essential primary between a Steve Israel corporate hack and a forthright progressive is being waged in San Bernardino, Califiornia is a D+5 district Israel lost last year to a rich extremist, Gary Miller, by backing colossally unpopular empty suit, Pete Aguilar. Israel, incapable of learning, is backing him again, although progressives and ordinary working families have a real choice this time in Eloise Reyes. Aguilar, who Democrats in CA-31 didn't even know was a Democrat until he decided to run for Congress, came out publicly for cutting Social Security benefits when he told the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin last year that he would vote for Simpson-Bowles which bases it's "balanced" budget on cutting earned benefits to working families. Chained CPI, for example, is one of their many horrible approaches. Eloise Reyes is part of the community and she stands as strongly for economic justice as any working family in the Inland Empire. When asked about expanding Social Security-- the policy goal that flipped out the Third Way hacks to begin with-- she told us that "Social Security was never meant to be a static program. It was designed to span across generations, with the expectation that the circumstances impacting the financial needs and economic security of Americans would undoubtedly vary from one decade to the next. Right now, middle class families are reeling from the impact of the recession. They have seen the value of their homes, their savings and their retirement accounts plummet, and they are depending on Social Security, more than ever, to avoid the impending retirement crisis that so many Americans see on the horizon beyond their working years. Our Social Security program must constantly evolve to adapt to these changing realities. That’s why HR 1374 is such a critical piece of legislation. Not only does it account for the fact that more and more people are using Social Security benefits later into life, but it more fairly values the work of low-wage workers and childrearers who are currently at a disadvantage when it comes to accruing retirement benefits. Even as it expands Social Security benefits, HR 1374 extends the life of the program by at least 35 more years by eliminating the cap on payroll contributions. These are all fair and commonsense reforms that reflect the essential purpose of Social Security and its very critical role in the lives of millions of Americans. Our Social Security program reflects our values, our duties and our commitment to ensuring that our elders, the disabled and those struggling through difficult times do not fall through the cracks. And HR 1374 makes it possible for us to continue keeping that promise to one another."

You'll never hear something like that from Pete Aguilar-- or any of the corporate shills Steve Israel has recruited to run for Congress. You can support Eloise's campaign-- and the campaign of other economic populists running for House seats-- right here.