Who Can Win The Conservative Lane To Take On Bernie? None Of These Clowns?

The fight for the conservative lane is in full swing, and yesterday, Bloomberg's campaign manager dismissed Biden's strategy for beating out Bloomberg, Klobuchar and Mayo Pete. Biden's plan is to win big in South Carolina and get the corporate media to market him as the "come back kid." Yesterday, Kevin Sheekey, the Bloomers campaign manager, claimed "South Carolina is not going to matter" and that "Super Tuesday is going to be really definitional for this race."

The Real Clear Politics polling average for South Carolina has Biden way ahead again because of a just-released poll from Monmouth. The polling average has Biden at 34.3%, Bernie at 20.0%, Steyer at 14.0% and no one else in double-digits. Here's the Monmouth poll released yesterday (including changes since their October survey):

• Status Quo Joe- 36% (+3)
• Bernie- 16% (+4)
• Steyer- 15% (+11)
• Elizabeth- 8% (-8)
• Mayo- 6 (+3)
• Klobuchar- 1% (flat)
• undecided- 15% (flat)

Biden is going on Chris Wallace's Sunday show on Fox to declare that he's the comeback kid after the (expected) big win among elderly rural voters who think he's the second coming of Obama and are largely unaware that his political foundations are completely steeped in racism. (Trump will make sure they know if Biden makes it to November.) So will these folks change the Super Tuesday dynamic across the country? I doubt it. Bloomberg's folks agree with me that it won't and Bernie is doing his own thing and largely ignoring the increasingly vicious and desperate squabbling in the conservative lane. He knows he'll have to fight one of them in the end-- probably at a brokered convention-- and is just trying to pile up as many delegates as he can while they work at undercutting each other.

Mayo Pete (Twerp) is also keeping his nose to the grindstone, with a strategy of forgetting about winning any Super Tuesday states and instead targeting a few congressional districts where he thinks he can eke out a few delegates, like he did in Nevada.

Buttigieg’s campaign said in a memo that its objective on March 3 is to “minimize” Sanders’ margins and maximize “delegate accumulation by [congressional] district, not states.” Anticipating a drawn-out primary process, Buttigieg is looking to survive deeper into the calendar, making it to mid-March contests in the Midwest that might provide more opportunities for him.

Buttigieg is focusing on selected districts in smaller media markets throughout the country to rack up delegates, from Austin, Texas and its suburbs to San Diego, northern Maine, and other locales where Democrats flipped House seats in 2018. But it’s a risky strategy to maintain momentum, and that risk is born out of necessity.

...“Pick a place and try for a win. Otherwise, if you’re playing just to pick off delegates, then that’s what you say if you’re in trouble,” the strategist said, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “If it’s a math game, then you’re just doing it to be at the convention, and you’re not playing to win.”

In its memo, Buttigieg’s campaign pledged to “limit Sanders’ delegate lead to no more than 350 pledged delegates.” States on Super Tuesday account for about a third of the total delegates handed out in the Democratic presidential race.

“How many districts are each candidate hitting threshold and by what margin? To me, that’s the most important question on Super Tuesday,” said Michael Halle, an adviser to the Buttigieg campaign. “You gain the most efficiency by becoming viable.”

But even among his supporters, there’s a fear that Buttigieg’s best days in the presidential race already happened.

“We’re definitely worried about him not making it to Maryland,” which votes in late April, said Raina Chambers, a 49-year-old from Beltsville, Maryland, who saw Buttigieg speak in Arlington, Va., on Sunday.

Her husband, Michael Chambers, added, “but if Pete doesn’t make it, I’d be fine with Michael Bloomberg, too.”

No doubt. Most Mayo Pete supporters would be just fine with any status quo piece of shit, if not Bloomberg, then Biden or Klobuchar or Mark Warner of Chris Coons... anyone who doesn't champion the working class. Hey, what about John Delaney or Michael Bennett? Why is no one talking about digging up Frackenlooper?

As for that convention... the NY Times went into fantasyland yesterday. Don Beyer (New Dem-VA) is a multimillionaire, a status quo politician who would never feel comfortable around a President Bernie. "At some point you could imagine saying, 'Let’s go get Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi,' he said, while preparing to introduce the former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend., Ind., at a campaign event near his home on Sunday. 'Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate.'" Drunk? Insane? Fatally conservative? All of the above?

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials-- all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention-- and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, echoing many others interviewed, said that superdelegates should choose a nominee they believed had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump if no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primaries. Mr. Sanders argued that he should become the nominee at the convention with a plurality of delegates, to reflect the will of voters, and that denying him the nomination would enrage his supporters and split the party for years to come.

“Bernie wants to redefine the rules and just say he just needs a plurality,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I don’t think we buy that. I don’t think the mainstream of the Democratic Party buys that. If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.”

While there is no widespread public effort underway to undercut Mr. Sanders, arresting his rise has emerged as the dominant topic in many Democratic circles. Some are trying to act well before the convention: Since Mr. Sanders won Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, four donors have approached former Representative Steve Israel of New York to ask if he can suggest someone to run a super PAC aimed at blocking Mr. Sanders. He declined their offer.

Others are urging former President Barack Obama to get involved to broker a truce-- either among the four moderate candidates or between the Sanders and establishment wings, according to three people familiar with those conversations.

William Owen, a D.N.C. member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind.

People close to Mr. Obama say he has no intention of getting involved in the primary contest, seeing his role as less of a kingmaker than as a unifying figure to help heal party divisions once Democrats settle on a nominee. He also believed that the Democratic Party shouldn’t engage in smoke-filled-room politics, arguing that those kinds of deals would have prevented him from capturing the nomination when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008.

“If Bernie gets a plurality and nobody else is even close and the superdelegates weigh in and say, ‘We know better than the voters,’ I think that will be a big problem,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, a Sanders supporter who is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Others in the party view Mr. Sanders as such an existential threat that they see stopping him from winning the nomination as less risky than a public convention fight. Many feared that putting Mr. Sanders on the top of the ticket could cost Democrats the political gains of the Trump era, a period when the party won control of the House, took governor’s mansions in deep red states and flipped statehouses across the country.

Aside from Mark Warner, one of the richest politicians in America and a conservative, Chris Coons, the Delaware conservaDem who is a Bidenesque character but not senile, and Pelosi, the second most hated politician in America after Mitch McConnell, other fantasies brought forward by The Times include Sherrod Brown and Kamala Harris.

Jack Holmes, politics editor at Esquire on that Times rubbish: "For all the worried talk of Sanders as another George McGovern, a chaotic convention where the delegate leader is jettisoned for someone chosen by The Folks Behind the Curtain could shake the public's faith in the Democratic ticket nearly as much as McGovern's display of catastrophic judgment in the Eagleton Affair. More to the point, these Wise Men of the Democratic Party are not, at least as they appear in The Times, particularly wise. A number of them seem to think they can randomly choose a person who is not running to be the nominee... There seems to be an overwhelming sense among delegates to the Democratic National Convention that the election can only be won by sticking to the old ways, by returning to the Before Times. What no one seems willing to contemplate is that we are never going back. There is no normal to go back to. Just as NeverTrump Republicans have mostly convinced themselves he's an aberration within their party, it seems the Democratic Establishment has convinced itself he is not the symptom of any deeper, structural problems in how we run our shop. There was something so fundamentally broken in this country that we elected a racist game-show host over a former Secretary of State the last time, and now a man who calls himself a democratic socialist-- whose actual policies are more New Deal Democrat-- is winning the primary race. Maybe it's because he's promising to transform the way we do things in a country where the actual voting public doesn't seem to like how things are done."

Remember a few paragraphs up you read "William Owen, a D.N.C. member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind?" Maybe The Times should have introduced him by explaining that Owens is a Republican donor and healthcare lobbyist. You know... just for a little context. The Intercept's Lee Fang reported that Owen runs a lobbying firm-- Asset & Equity Corporations-- which helped finance right-wing Republican senators Mike Rounds (SD), Dan Sullivan (AK) and Mitch McConnell (KY) last year. Confronted by Fang, Owen said "I am a committed Democrat but as a lobbyist, there are times when I need to have access to both sides and the way to get access quite often is to make campaign contributions. I’m a registered lobbyist and I represent clients and they have interest in front of Congress and I attend the Senator’s Classic, which is a Republican event, each year." Why should Owen be a DNC member, a super-delegate or someone with any power whatsoever in determining who the nominee is?

Sunday: Bernie appears at the L.A. Convention Center with Public Enemy, Sarah Silverman and Dick Van Dyke. 5pm, although doors open at 3pm. I bet they'll be registering voters.

Who Will Save The Grotesquely Corrupt Democratic Party Establishment From Bernie's Zeal For Reform And Fair Play?

Votes have finally still dribbling in from the New Hampshire primary when I was finishing up on this post. 100% of the votes have now been counted and all the candidates-- except Status Quo Joe, who was in South Carolina-- were already off to Nevada. The New Hampshire numbers were catastrophic for Biden but didn't cause him to drop out the way they did for Andrew Yang, Michael Bennet and Deval Patrick. These were the numbers available (with all 100% in):

• Bernie- 76,324 (25.7%)
• Mayo Pete- 72,457 (24.4%)
• Klobuchar- 58,796 (19.8%)
• Elizabeth- 27,387 (9.2%)
• Status Quo Joe- 24,921 (8.4%)
• Steyer- 10,7727 (3.6%)
• Tulsi- 9,655 (3.3%)
• Yang- 8,315 (2.8%)
• Deval- 1,266 (0.4%)
• Bennet- 963 (0.3%)

Wednesday morning, the media spin was how Bernie didn't do well, how well conservative candidates Mayo Pete and Amy Klobuchar did, how badly Biden had done and, most of all... who will stop Bernie?

Do you remember how Harry Reid and his Las Vegas thugs fixed the Nevada primary for Hillary in 2016? Reid, a shady status quo establishment character, is, naturally enough, a big Bloomberg booster. He told Vice that Bloomberg "has a plan, that’s for sure. You have to recognize, the man-- he really was a good mayor of a huge, huge, city, the largest city in America. I like him, I’ve always liked him. Nobody’s done more on guns and climate than he has. No one." What's Mini-Mike's plan beyond spending a million dollars a day on Facebook ads? And what's he done for Climate? And what does Reid know about Climate? It sure looks like the remnants of Reid's greasy political machine is up to its old tricks. The Nevada Independent got its hands on a flyer the Culinary Union sent out to its members. Imagine for a moment that someone wants to give you a dollar, but that that entails you giving up your dime pr even half-dollar. That's how the Nevada Democratic establishment is framing Bernie's Medicare-for-All plan-- giving up your half dollar and neglecting to mention the dollar. [It's also the way the Republican Party explains Medicare-for-All.] The establishment warned Culinary Union members-- in both English and Spanish-- that Bernie is trying to "end Culinary Healthcare."

The Culinary Union, which provides health insurance to 130,000 workers and their family members through a special trust fund, strongly opposes Medicare for all on the basis that it would eliminate the health insurance they have negotiated for over several decades. Health insurance provided by the Culinary Health Fund is considered to be some of the best in the state, and the union even opened a 60,000-square-foot state-of-the-art health clinic a couple of years ago for its members.

The union, considered an organizing behemoth in the Silver State, has been known to tip the scales in elections in the past. Though the 60,000-member union has not yet decided whether it will endorse in the Democratic presidential primary, the flyer appears to be part of a coordinated campaign ahead of Nevada’s Feb. 22 Democratic presidential primary and shows the union will not be sitting idly by, with or without an endorsement.

A spokeswoman for the Culinary Union said the flyer is also going out to members Tuesday night via text and email.

Another handout that the Nevada Independent reported on last week obliquely accuses Sanders and Warren of wanting to take away union members’ hard-fought health plans and warns that electing a candidate who supports Medicare for all would lead to four more years of a Donald Trump presidency.

The new flyer makes more clear the distinction the union is drawing between Sanders’ and Warren’s plans. The flyer also lauds the four other presidential hopefuls-- former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and California billionaire Tom Steyer-- for backing more modest plans to establish a government-run public health care option that would “protect Culinary Health care.”

The only other difference the flyer draws between the six candidates is on the issue of “good jobs.” The flyer says that all of the candidates all would work to “strengthen organizing, collective bargaining, and right to strike,” but only Klobuchar would “work with unions on regulations about technology at work,” which has been a major concern for the Culinary Union given the rise of automation in the service industry.

The Intercept noted that "the DNC is acting shady in managing the Democratic primaries... [and] As Michael Bloomberg buys his way into the Democratic primary, he is plastering the airwaves with hagiographic advertisements that ignore his awful record on race, labor unions and how he escalated the Stop-and-Frisk program as mayor of New York."

Lee Fang, also writing for The Intercept yesterday went after Mini-Mike's barrages lies, a barrage that is starting to define his campaign, The most obvious place to start is the Stop-and-Frisk policy that most New Yorkers viewed as an outgrowth of Bloomberg's low-key racism but that he is trying to bullshit his way away from, just the way Mayo Pete has tried too do about his own mayorial racism. Let's start by watch this clip from Ari Melber's Tuesday show:





Fang wrote that "In response, the Bloomberg campaign released a misleading statement on Tuesday claiming that he simply inherited the policy and later reduced the practice. 'I inherited the police practice of stop-and-frisk, and as part of our effort to stop gun violence it was overused... 'By the time I left office. I cut it back by 95%, but I should’ve done it faster and sooner. I regret that and I have apologized-- and I have taken responsibility for taking too long to understand the impact it had on Black and Latino communities.'"

The statement drew immediate backlash over its twisting of history. In 2001, New York City maintained an aggressive program of stopping and searching people throughout the city, with an overwhelming focus on young African American and Latino men. But, under the Bloomberg administration, the program vastly expanded, from around 97,296 stops in 2002 to a height of 685,724 in 2011-- a more than sevenfold increase during the former mayor’s tenure.

Far from changing course over the mayor’s focus on “racial equity,” as he has since claimed, the practice was clawed back by several lawsuits, which charged that the law enforcement program violated the basic constitutional rights of residents. U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, in a scathing decision, noted that over the course of 2.3 million frisks, weapons were found only 1.5 percent of the time. The decision pointed out that over half of the stops included African Americans and about third Latino, with less than 10 percent targeting white people.

The Bloomberg administration fought alongside New York’s notoriously aggressive police union to continue the program, arguing that the stop-and-frisk effort was focused on suspects with “furtive movements,” in “high-crime areas” and those with a “suspicious bulge.” But the judge knocked down those assertions, noting that such claims are vague and subjective.

In the comments that circulated online this week, Bloomberg can be heard speaking at an Aspen Institute conference in 2015 defending the program’s racial slant as justifiable given the proportion of crime in African American and Latino communities. “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops,” said the billionaire former mayor. “They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York; that’s true in virtually every city.”

While data does reflect that violent crime tends to cluster in particular neighborhoods and among young men, the Bloomberg administration’s stop-and-frisk program went well beyond targeting based solely on objective evidence. Expert testimony in federal court found that the New York Police Department carried out far more stop-and-frisks on African American and Latino residents even when controlling for precinct-level crime statistics and socioeconomic characteristics. In other words, the evidence showed that minorities were targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of suspicion than white people.

The charge of racial bias was also backed up by multiple investigations and media scandals. In one case, a low-level police officer recorded his superior instructing him on how to target residents for stop-and-frisk in a particular neighborhood. “I have no problem telling you this: male blacks, 14 to 20, 21,” the officer said in the recording. In another case, a young Harlem teenager surreptitiously recorded officers stopping and frisking him. Asked why they had targeted him, the officer replied, “For being a fucking mutt.”

What’s more, the true extent of the program may never be known. Every time a New York police officer engages in stop-and-frisk, they are expected to fill out a form for the action to be recorded by the city. Court monitors have noted that there is evidence that many stops go unrecorded or are improperly documented. Current New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who succeeded Bloomberg in 2014, dramatically curtailed the police program, prompting backlash from the police union. Last year, the New York Police Department reported 11,008 stops, a small fraction of the amount of stops during the Bloomberg era.

Bloomberg has attempted to use his vast fortune to rebrand his image. The Bloomberg Philanthropy has given grants to various civil rights groups and worked to build schools, libraries, and community centers in low-income and minority neighborhoods, a fact often cited during Bloomberg’s campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

The billionaire executive’s largesse, however, can’t conceal Bloomberg’s own words defending the racial bias in his approach to law enforcement. The Aspen Institute comments in 2015 were among many instances in which he defended the program. In 2013, during a radio program, Bloomberg declared, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It’s exactly the reverse of what they say.”

And by the way, you've heard about the two billionaires-- one relatively benign and one possibly as bad as Trump-- trying to buy the election, right? This chart from Kantar's Campaign Media Analysis Group shows spending on TV (just TV) advertising through January 29. It is absolutely jaw-dropping! I've never seen anything like it.

What is the Democratic Party establishment so scared about-- and why are they right to be scared? No more feathering of nests at the expense of them working class, for one thing. Chris Maisano: "Forty years of neoliberalism have beaten down and disorganized the US working class. The Bernie Sanders campaign is showing how electoral politics can be used to re-politicize working people-- and organize collectively for their class interests... In an environment of profound social fragmentation, it should not be surprising that popular discontent has found expression through the Sanders campaign and the 'political revolution' it spearheads. The decline of organized labor and the social disintegration of many working-class communities means that only a relatively small fraction of workers are positioned to pursue effective forms of collective action in their workplaces or communities. Election campaigns are therefore one of the few channels currently available to engage and politicize a mass working-class audience, reconstitute the working class as a political subject, and create a more favorable environment for workers to organize both inside and outside the electoral arena. The Sanders campaign is priming working people to think of themselves as members of a class with an interest in political revolution. How could this be anything but a boon to the Left and the prospects for labor movement revitalization?"

Do You Want The Election To Be All About Who Is The Bigger Liar, Trump Or Biden?

Democratic primary voters have been smelling Biden's bullshit and have been turning away-- some in disgust and some in disappointment. Like Trump, he's incapable of stopping himself from lying. Like he Trump, he lies about all things, great and small. He was one of the architects of the Iraq War and he lied over and over and over again, claiming he opposed it. CNN: "Biden dishonestly suggested on Saturday that he had opposed the war in Iraq "from the very moment" it began in 2003-- even though Biden's campaign said in September that he "misspoke" when he made a similar claim... It's false that Biden opposed the war from the moment Bush started it in March 2003. Biden repeatedly spoke in favor of the war both before and after it began."

Another bunch of Biden whoppers are the string of lies he's been telling about Social Security, denying he's been working for years to cut both Social Security and Medicare. Anyone who's ever paid attention to Biden's political career knows full well that he's always been one of the Democrats' biggest proponents of Austerity. Here he is on the floor of the Senate in 1995 demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security. At first he claimed Bernie "doctored" the tape, but when people asked if Bernie also doctored the Congressional Record, Biden shut up about it:





Two of America's best investigative journalists, Ryan Grim and Lee Fang tried getting to the bottom of Biden's Social Security lies last week. They began by pointing out that Status Quo Joe's "defense of his record has included multiple television interviews, public comments, and even an ad attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders for 'dishonest smears' challenging him on Social Security. In the ad, Biden makes a sweeping claim: 'I’ve been fighting to protect-- and expand-- Social Security for my whole career. Any suggestion otherwise is just flat-out wrong.' At Vice’s Black and Brown Forum in Iowa this week, when pressed on his proposal to freeze Social Security payments by moderator Antonia Hylton, he simply lied: 'I didn’t propose a freeze.'" He's as shameless a liar as Trump.

Biden has argued for cuts or freezes to Social Security throughout much of his career. Earlier in January, The Intercept wrote about several instances in which Biden advocated for cutting Social Security over the course of his career. Biden, when he acknowledges his past support for cuts, portrays the advocacy as deep in the past. But a close inspection finds reams of more recent evidence of Biden’s support for cuts — including in Biden’s recent recounting of a conversation he had with China’s president, Xi Jinping, and in his choice of Bruce Reed, a longtime deficit hawk, as a senior policy adviser in his current presidential campaign.

Reed, a longtime Biden aide, played a central role in advocating cuts to the New Deal-era program as a co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, as the top staffer for a controversial commission dedicated to slashing the deficit, and then as Biden’s chief of staff during the Obama administration. In Washington, D.C., he would be the last high-level staffer a campaign would bring aboard if it was genuinely intent on expanding, not cutting, Social Security.

Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for Biden, said that, as president, Biden would push to expand Social Security. “As President, Joe Biden would expand Social Security benefits-- paid for with new taxes on the wealthiest Americans. And as Senator Sanders himself said in 2015: ‘Joe Biden is a man who has devoted his entire life to public service and to the wellbeing of working families and the middle class,’” Bates said.

The Cuts came closest to happening amid talks between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans aimed at hammering out a so-called grand bargain. The most prominent vehicle for those negotiations was known as the Bowles-Simpson Commission, a bipartisan panel charged with making recommendations to Congress on how to reduce the federal debt. It was chaired by Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erskine Bowles, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina.

And the staff director for Bowles-Simpson? Bruce Reed. “Our team was led by Bruce Reed, and believe me, there wouldn’t be a Simpson-Bowles Report without Bruce,” Bowles later wrote. The chairs of the commission recommended reducing Social Security benefits for the top half of earners, cutting the amount the benefit grew relative to inflation and raising the retirement age to 69. Progressives skewered it, with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noting that “it raises the Social Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen-- completely ignoring the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the program most.”

“Simpson-Bowles is terrible,” he concluded. “Yes, I know, inside the Beltway Simpson and Bowles have become sacred figures. But the people doing that elevation are the same people who told us that Paul Ryan was the answer to our fiscal prayers.”

The commission failed to secure the supermajority needed for its recommendations to move on to Congress, but the administration was far from done try to implement them. After finishing with the commission, Reed was brought on as Vice President Biden’s chief of staff, to continue to work on a grand bargain. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington group dedicated to cutting Social Security and other entitlement programs, celebrated the appointment. We can’t think of a better person for the job,” CRFP said in a statement. “We hope Bruce will be able to leverage his expertise in this new position, and that his appointment portends positive steps from policymakers in the Administration in tackling our rising deficits and debt.”

At the time, the Fiscal Times wrote, “The recent appointment of Bruce Reed, the Executive Director of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, as Vice President Biden’s Chief of Staff is the latest signal that the administration plans to endorse many of the Commission’s recommendations. Since one target for deficit reduction appears to be Social Security and social insurance programs more generally, it’s essential to understand the important role that social insurance plays in the economy.”

National Journal reported that Reed helped Biden shape his approach to the debt-reduction commission, “often sitting right behind the vice president in meetings with Republican leaders.” Reed, National Journal noted, had sided with a cadre of other Obama administration advisers to “back cuts to Medicare and Social Security despite pushback from some Democrats who opposed touching entitlements.”

Reed was not some entry-level staffer. By that point, he had been a top domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration, where he had championed the reform of welfare and otherwise advocated for slashing government spending. He was also co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, which represented the pro-business wing of the party that rose in the 1980s.

The DLC was the only influential Democratic institution to lobby not only for cutting Social Security benefits, but also supported the push for privatization of Social Security. In the 1990s, DLC began calling for “limited privatization” of the program that would allow individuals to invest part of their benefits in the stock market. “Personal accounts would refashion Social Security from a system of wealth transfer into one that also promotes individual wealth creation and broader ownership,” the DLC argued, encouraging the Clinton administration to embrace a grand bargain with Republicans.

In 1998, a plan to embrace the grand bargain came close to fruition. In secret negotiations between House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Bill Archer, R-Texas, and President Bill Clinton, a proposal was hatched to reduce Social Security benefits and embrace partial privatization in exchange for Gingrich to drop his demand for new tax cuts. That plan came perilously close to being implemented, but was blown up by Gingrich’s drive to impeach Clinton rather than cut a deal.

After Reed left the DLC and joined the debt commission, the organization continued to lobby for cuts to Social Security and a hike in the retirement age. The DLC submitted comments to the Bowles-Simpson panel suggesting that Social Security consider an approach that included “offering ways to mix part-time and online work with partial Social Security benefits after age 67 and into the eighth decade of life.”

Reed has remained in Biden’s inner circle. The campaign paid him more than $35,000 for “policy consulting” last year. As Politico reported, Reed routinely travels with Biden, continuing to serve as the former vice president’s chief policy adviser on the road.

The next phase of the Obama-era bargain talks, in the wake of Bowles-Simpson, became the so-called Biden Committee, a series of negotiations over deficit reduction chaired by Biden, staffed by Reed, and joined by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor; Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD); and others. Biden, in talks that were covered closely in Bob Woodward’s book The Price of Politics, put Social Security and other cuts on the table but couldn’t get to a yes because Republicans refused to agree to any tax cuts. (Fly-on-the-wall books on the later years of the Obama administration lack the drama of Trump-era tell-alls.)

In the summer of 2011, the talks evolved into the Super Committee, made up of six Democrats and six Republicans from the House and Senate, charged with coming up trillions in budget cuts. Woodward obtained a copy of the administration’s recommendations to that committee, and it largely mirrored what was on offer during the Biden Committee talks and included significant cuts to Social Security.

But then came Occupy Wall Street. By the fall, coverage was dominated by protests that began in New York City around the slogan “We are the 99 percent,” calling attention to vast wealth inequality and the country’s superrich in a way that hadn’t happened since the days of the robber barons. The movement spread to cities and towns across the country, with encampments springing up in downtowns in every region. That fall, after Bank of America announced a new $5 monthly fee for debit cards, it faced so much backlash that it backed down and rescinded the fee.

In early November, a group of protesters set out from New York to Washington, calling themselves Occupy the Highway and aiming to hit the capital on November 22, the day the Super Committee was due to issue its legislation, which was designed to glide through Congress.

On November 21, the Super Committee collapsed, lacking the votes to get the legislation out of its own committee. “Super Committee Fail = Occupy Wall Street Win,” celebrated Michael Glazer, an organizer of Occupy the Highway, in a statement that day. “The so-called Super Committee was a failure from the beginning. No one has the courage to stand up inside our corrupt political system and fight for regular Americans. So, we will continue to take a stand outside the system.”

The willingness of that faction of protesters to even acknowledge the Super Committee was controversial inside Occupy, which considered direct interaction with the political system futile at best and corrupting at worst. But as Glazer emphasized, Occupy had blown up the committee from the outside by changing the political terrain. Concerns over the deficit and a preference for austerity were replaced by a conversation about economic inequality, one that would ultimately boost the Sanders campaign in 2015 and put an end, for the time being, to Democratic attempts to cut the deficit by trimming entitlement programs.  (It wasn’t completely dead: An ad Biden released this week includes footage of Biden telling Paul Ryan, at a vice presidential debate, that he is committed to protecting Social Security. The Obama administration’s 2013 budget included Social Security cuts regardless. By 2015, those cuts were out.)

But even while the logic of the party changed, deficit scolding had become such a firm element of Biden’s brand that he had a hard time letting go. In 2018, at a speech at the Brookings Institute, Biden again returned to Social Security, criticizing then-House Speaker Paul Ryan’s recent tax cut but agreeing with his focus on Social Security and Medicare.

At a speech in July 2018, Biden again addressed Social Security and Medicare, relaying an anecdote in which Chinese leader Xi Jinping asked him if China’s investments in U.S. debt were safe and specifically if the United States planned to do something about the cost of entitlement programs-- Social Security and Medicare-- which Xi saw in conflict with meeting U.S. obligations to China. “I said don’t buy any more of our T-bills,” Biden whispered, as he does when he’s letting the audience believe that he’s letting them in on something secret or saying something verboten.

“‘I hope you’re able to do something about your entitlement problem,’” Biden said Xi told him. “And I said, ‘With regard to our entitlement problem, Mr. President, ours is a political problem, and it’s soluble, but my god, your problem, your one-child policy has produced a circumstance that by 2022, you’ll have more people retired than working.’”

It’s a story Biden has been telling versions of since 2011, and it has consistently cast entitlements as a problem to be solved. Biden’s reference to “our entitlement problem” as “a political problem” that is “soluble” suggests that his view of the programs hadn’t evolved over the past 40 years, though his official position in his 2020 campaign is the opposite, that benefits should be expanded, not shrunken.

This past week, Biden steadily ratcheted up his revision of his record. At Vice News’s Brown and Black Forum in Iowa on Monday, he was pressed on Social Security. “Do you think though that it’s fair for voters to question your commitment to Social Security when in the past you proposed a freeze to it?” he was asked by Vice moderator Hylton.

“No, I didn’t propose a freeze,” he said.

“You did,” she corrected.

On Tuesday, he released an ad attacking Sanders for what he called “dishonest smears.”

...On Wednesday, Biden joined the crew at MSNBC’s Morning Joe and was asked about the Social Security flare-up. “I have 100 percent ratings from the groups that rate Social Security [votes], those who support Social Security,” Biden said.

The claim was in line with, but more specific than, his earlier assertion of “I’ve been fighting to protect-- and expand-- Social Security for my whole career.”

It’s also not true. A review of media reports from the 1990s shows that groups dedicated to protecting Social Security, including the AARP, saw Biden’s votes and advocacy as a betrayal. Ahead of the critical vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment in 1995, the Delaware News Journal carried a story that was headlined: “Biden gets blasted on budget bill: Seniors head list of groups pressing him to reconsider.”

The story began: “Angry lobbying groups for senior citizens, children and families, and congressional watchdogs united Friday to denounce Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. for his support of the GOP’s balanced budget amendment.”

The article noted that Biden himself had previously warned that “Seniors are going to pay a big price” thanks to the amendment. An AARP representative is quoted saying that Biden “can’t have it both ways” and that the bill “is nothing more than a raid on Social Security’s trust fund.”

Another News Journal article from the time reported that the “defections” of Biden and another Democratic senator “were a serious blow to opponents of the legislation, said David Certner, an official of the American Association of Retired People, which fears that the amendment will erode Social Security benefits.”

There were a number of groups scoring votes on legislation around Social Security at the time-- meaning that they gave ratings to legislators based on their votes-- including the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the National Council of Senior Citizens. Biden did not get 100 percent scores from any of those groups because of his votes to undermine Social Security.

The amendment passed the House and fell one vote short in the Senate, the Constitution just barely dodging the bullet. Ultimately, the focus on the measure’s impact on Social Security, according to the New York Times, swayed enough Democrats to stop it. In the House, then-Rep. Sanders had zeroed in on the amendment’s effect on Social Security. “The balanced budget amendment will be a disaster for working people, for elderly people, for low-income people,” he said on the House floor. “It will mean, in my view, the destruction of the Social Security system as we know it.”

Sanders was asked on Friday if he would apologize to Biden for criticizing him on Social Security, as he had apologized for a surrogate’s op-ed that argued Biden had a corruption problem. “No,” Sanders said. “There are ways to raise money in order to protect the working families of this country. Cutting Social Security ain’t one of ’em.”

Dick Gephardt And Status Quo Joe Are A Certain Kind Of Democrat-- One Where A "P" Works Better Than A "T" As A final Letter

These people all belong in prison-- but only because no one would ever agree their crimes are capital offenses

Dick Gephardt’s dream was to be President or Speaker of the House or very wealthy; he never made it beyond majority leader, but he sure did become very wealthy, selling access to his friends in office to the highest bidders. Now he’s one of the nation's most contemptible Goldman Sachs and PhRMA lobbyist scumbags. Believe it or not, he was once an actual contender for president (of the United States). First elected to Congress by the St. Louis Democratic Machine, he never experienced one moment of politics that wasn’t drenched in corruption, criminality and convenient flip-flopping on any issue he needed to switch positions on. People outside DC sensed he was a piece of shit and-- like Biden-- all his attempts to run for president, starting in 1987 were smartly rebuffed.

After he helped Bush and Cheney trick Congress into declaring war on Iraq (2002), his political career as a Democrat was pretty much done. He didn’t run for a 15th term in Congress but he switched from anti-Choice to “pro”-Choice and tried to run for president again. That’s how I allowed myself to interact with him, against my own better judgment. I’ll make the story of how, as short as I can. The RIAA had paid a huge bribe to the Democratic Party in order to get Congress and President Clinton to go along with some internet publishing deal. But they wanted a president of one of the labels to go thank Clinton personally and there was no one else among the label presidents who had ever experienced the internet, so I was chosen. Therefore they put the bribe in my name, without even asking me-- of even telling me. I’ll skip over the Clinton part and how he and Charlie Rangel tried shaking me down for more cash and go right to the Gephardt story.

By the 2004 campaign my name was on all the political fundraising call lists as a mega-donor because of that RIAA bribe I had nothing to do with. The good news was that I got calls from some cool people, like Howard Dean, but the bad news is that I got attention from the shady characters like Al Gore-- I’ll never forget his wife, who I loathed for her censorship attempts, asking me while I was dancing with my boyfriend at the White House if I would become a Gore bundler-- and Dick Gephardt. Gephardt insisted on meeting me in person even after I told him bluntly that I was firmly and irrevocably backing Howard Dean because he was opposed to the war Gephardt helped Bush start. So I met him. Terry McAuliffe was there too. I felt like I was drowning in a cesspool of the kind of criminality that was destroying politics. Once I made it clear to Gephardt that I wouldn’t give him 5 cents if his life depended on it, he dismissed me and I knew without a doubt I would never hear from him again. (His last campaign puttered out after one of his staffers called a Dean aide a “faggot” and punched him.) Among Gephardt’s endorsers were Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Sherrod Brown, and lots of Blue Dogs who were soon defeated in their own reelection attempts. Gephardt, who had once won the Iowa caucuses, came in 4th in 2004 and that was that. He has devoted the rest of his life to crime, handing out bribes on behalf of corporations instead of taking them for himself from corporations the way he used to.

He immediately went to work for them after losing his presidential bid

So why bring this turd up? He led the battle against the public option in 2009 and has worked diligently to keep drug prices high by pushing to extend patents and block generic drugs from coming to market. It’s largely due to the efforts of Dick Gephardt that drug prices are often TEN TIMES higher in the U.S. than in other countries. And, as Lee Fang, just reported for The Intercept Gephardt is still helping PhRMA rip off the American public as he nears his 80th birthday. Ironically, for me at least, the lead picture in Fang’s article is Gephardt and McAuliffe. Today-- no surprise-- Gephardt is paid to act as a general in the war against Medicare-for-All.

Fang noted that the mere prospect of single payer has elicited swift derision from some corners of the Democratic Party, with Dick Gephardt “laughing off the idea at a health insurance conference earlier this month. ‘Not in my lifetime,’ scoffed Gephardt, when asked if the United States will ever adopt such a system. Gephardt, who serves as a Democratic ‘superdelegate’ responsible for choosing the party’s presidential nominee, was asked about the possibility of single payer at the Centene Corporation annual investor day conference at The Pierre, a ritzy five-star hotel in New York City. ‘There is no way you could pass single payer in any intermediate future,’ Gephardt declared. America, he added, has the ‘greatest health care system in the world, bar none.’ And while single payer would provide universal coverage, there would be less quality and innovation without the ‘involvement of the private sector.’ Haley Barbour, the former Republican National Committee chair, another speaker at the event, chimed in to agree. ‘Hear, hear. Put me down as agreeing with Leader Gephardt as usual,’ Barbour chuckled.”

The claim that single payer suppresses innovation is an old argument that does not stand up to scrutiny. Most medical innovation in the U.S. are already government funded, through universities receiving federal subsidies and grants, as well as through the National Institutes of Health. A single-payer insurance system, like Medicare, would simply negotiate for lower prices from providers, and would likely steer savings towards greater investments in research and development. Claims about lower quality care are also highly disputed, given that countries with single payer and tightly regulated universal health systems perform much higher than the U.S. in a range of health outcomes.

Despite well-entrenched opposition from much of the private health care industry, political momentum for single payer has enjoyed a rapid boom of late.

Does it make your blood boil? It does mine. It makes me want to commit myself to electing Bernie to the presidency and progressives to Congress even more. I spoke with some of the congressional candidates who are running on Medicare-for-All platforms and asked them how they deal with political opponents who use these same manufactured lies about Medicare in their campaigns. Eva Putzova isn’t from the Dick Gephardt wing of the party. She served as a Bernie delegate from Arizona to the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and she’s been fighting for working families every since. The revolving door between politics and corporate lobbyists is not something she looks at kindly, primarily because the results are horrifically damaging to the people she is running to represent in Congress. “We need to implement a single payer, Medicare for All system that will remove the profit-making insurance and pharmaceutical industries from the influence and control they presently exert on health care policy, and policy-makers,” she told me earlier today. “In no other industrialized nation do these profit-making interests have such influence as in the U.S. We need to chase these ‘money lenders from the temple’ as rapidly as possible in order to provide good, quality, universal healthcare to all Americans.”

Massachusetts progressive Brianna Wu addressed her comment directly-- “Here’s what I have to say to those elected officials and candidates who don’t support Medicare For All-- you’re simply not spending enough time listening to your constituents. I can’t count how many people in my district have told me they have no healthcare or inadequate health care. They don’t go to a doctor when they get sick because they just can’t afford it. Some have gone bankrupt because of obscenely high medical bills. These are real people who work hard for themselves and their families. In one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, it isn’t just unfair, it should be criminal. My opponent, Rep. Stephen Lynch, has said that he isn’t yet convinced that Medicare For All would be a good idea. I’m sure that’s true. He enjoys his cadillac insurance plan as a congressman. So do his campaign donors who work for the insurance industry. It’s clear that Rep. Lynch isn’t spending enough time listening to his constituents. If he and other establishment-backed elected officials did listen, they would learn that their days in office are numbered, and that we need Medicare For All. Now.”

Heidi Sloan has a keen understanding of how congressional agendas need to be analyzed. A TX-25 progressive, she is campaigning heavily on Medicare-for-All and for cleaning up campaign finance corruption and the revolving door between congressional offices and lobbying firms. "The most effective piece of the Affordable Care Act was the Medicare expansion, and now we have a movement of people demanding the expansion of Medicare to every person in this country. We have real enemies in this fight, people like Roger Williams who oppose us because his class interests conflict with the goal of single-payer universal healthcare. The ruling class is smart enough to realize that workers who don't depend on employers for healthcare are a lot more likely to go on strike or walk away from a lousy job. Besides, even one of the richest members of Congress doesn't want to lose contributions after the for-profit industry funding his campaign is abolished. He'd rather corporations profit off of the denial of healthcare than to have less industry money to run on. Roger Williams has got to go, and all of the crooked politicians who take corporate money have to go with him."

David Scott stays quiet in Congress-- a career-long backbencher and Blue Dog with a tendency to back Republicans back in Georgia. This year there’s a strong progressive contesting the right to represent the suburban district south and southwest of Atlanta-- Dr. Michael Owens. Yesterday he told us that his platform has "included Medicare for All since day one of my campaign-- which is in stark contrast to my opponent’s stance. This is very unfortunate especially when you consider that there are parts of my district that rank among the least insured in the whole state. This is typical of Scott. He has consistently not supported Medicare for All. In the 114th, 115th and now in the 116th Congress, Scott hasn’t backed Medicare-for-All legislation. I would have signed on as an original cosponsor of Pramila Jayapal’s H.R. 676.  Remember, Georgia currently has the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States-- 46.2 deaths per 100,000 live births. More than 60 of Georgia’s 159 counties do not have a pediatrician. My opponent’s solution is the same that it has been over the last 15 years-- to host a one-day ‘health fair.’ This is a far cry from the bold health care solutions we need. 'Affordable and accessible health care' is a term we should learn to not trust. We also shouldn't trust an elected official who has received over $400,000 from the insurance industry over the last 4 election cycles. The women, children and men of my district and of this country need a single payer system, specifically Medicare for All, to ensure that all Americans have healthcare. Not 'affordable and accessible' healthcare via insurance companies whose goal is to maximize profits and deny and delay coverage. Healthcare is an an American crisis and we must put the need of the people over the greed of the health insurance industry."

Rachel Ventura’s New Dem opponent, Bill Foster, is a total DC insider who plays all the lobbyist games that see congressmen betraying the interests of their constituents for the interests of their campaign donors and other insiders. It might not be as bad if he lived in the district and met some of the folks he’s supposed to be representing. Last night, Rachel told us that “In 2018, Americans spent an all-time high of $360 billion on prescription drugs! Bill Foster won’t support Medicare for all because he supports a tiered healthcare system for those who can afford better insurance. We all deserve to have quality healthcare! Dick Gephardt and my political opponent have one thing in common. They are both part of our political past. Gephardt’s candle is fading quickly and it won’t be long before we are passing single-payer healthcare. We will do things different when I am elected to represent the people of Illinois’ 11th congressional district. There is an intelligent group of young people running for office this cycle, and we are going to win. We will join those who are already reshaping the political landscape in Washington and fighting to represent people over corporations. Change starts in the political campaign. I won’t be taking a penny from big PhRMA or from the for-profit healthcare system. I will have no problem hanging a “not for sale” sign on my office door and refusing meetings with those who have corrupted our political system to a point where voters, in desperation, choose a chaotic outsider like Donald Trump. It’s time to put the past behind us. The old way of doing things and the old players who are still scrapping for relevancy in this changing system will one day be written about as the dark ages in American history.”

Explaining Medicare For All-- Mark Gamba In A Blueberry Patch And Bernie In The Den Of The Beast

You like Bernie's progressive agenda? Elizabeth Warren's progressive agenda? Even if America elects one of them-- or, hopefully, both of them-- to run the executive branch, without a more progressive legislative branch, much of that agenda will be stymied. As we saw Thursday, Medicare had been blocked since 1915 by a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans until a Democratic landslide in 1964, a landslide that made the GOP irrelevant and took power away from the Southern Democrats (the garbage members called Blue Dogs and New Dems today). We simply must replace Blue Dogs, New Dems and Republicans with progressives in Congress. It is urgent for anyone who, for example, wants to see Medicare-For-All and the Green New Deal become realities.

Mark Gamba, the mayor of Milwaukie, Oregon, is running for the congressional seat help by one of the most reactionary and destructive Blue Dogs in Congress, Kurt Schrader. OR-05 is a district where Bernie swamped Hillary Clinton and, on primary day, beat Trump as well. Kurt Schrader-- an implacable Medicare-for-All and Green New Deal foe-- is out of step with voters in his own district.

No one who doesn't understand Medicare-- and neither of these galoots do-- can ever understand Medicare-For-All

Back in May, Lee Fang, reporting for The Intercept, wrote that the Blue Dog PAC, Center Forward, hosted a bunch of anti-healthcare lobbyists and congressional staffers at a luxury resort to plot how to kill Medicare for All, exactly the way conservative Democrats and Republicans used to plot how to kill Medicare itself between 1915 and 1965. "Center Forward’s big idea on Medicare Part D, for instance," wrote Fang, "is to maintain lobbyist-authored provisions of the law that bar the government from bargaining for lower prices for medicine. [At this point, the Blue Dogs are literally to the right of Trump!!] Such restrictions cost taxpayers and patients as much as $73 billion a year while boosting the profits of drugmakers. Center Forward endorses the idea with a testimonial from Mary Grealy, a lobbyist for a trade group that represents pharmaceutical companies.

The schedule shows that the health care discussion was led by Center Forward board member Liz Greer, a lobbyist at Forbes Tate; the firm manages the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future coalition designed to undermine Medicare-for-All. Paul Kidwell, a lobbyist from the Federation of American Hospitals, and Larry Levitt, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, also spoke. No proponents of Medicare-for-All were included. Kidwell’s trade association is part of the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future group opposing single payer.

The ethics disclosure shows a large number of senior aides attended the event.

Several aides to Democratic leadership filed disclosures showing that they received paid travel to attend the Center Forward retreat, including chiefs of staff to Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC, and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD). The retreat included chiefs of staff to leading centrist [still using the wrong word-- "centrist"-- to describe raging conservatives] Democrats, including Reps. Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL) and Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM). Officials from the Blue Dogs, Problem Solvers Caucus, and the New Democrats were also in attendance.

Unlike the previous branding of Blue Dogs, who were once billed a “big tent” designed to bring conservative ideas into the Democratic Party, the centrist push now explicitly includes Republicans. Senior aides to Reps. Sean Duffy (R-WI), Rodney Davis (R-IL) and Will Hurd (R-TX) attended the retreat as well.

The Ethics Committee rules bar registered lobbyists from arranging luxury travel for Congress. Although Center Forward’s board is made up almost entirely of registered corporate lobbyists, the event forms were signed by the group’s executive director, Cori Kramer, who is not a registered lobbyist-- a technicality that helped elide the prohibition on lobbyist-funded travel. The forms show the group spent as much as $560 per congressional aide for transportation, food, and lodging.

Please consider contributing to the campaigns of the vetted progressives, like Mark Gamba's, running robust primaries against reactionary Blue Dogs this cycle by clicking on the thermometer above.

With most of the MSNBC hosts and commentators swinging so far away from anything remotely progressive-- just think of Claire McCaskill as their mascot-- I was shocked yesterday to see Bernie on Morning Joe and Joe Scarborough and Mike Barnicle way ahead of, say, Rachel Maddow, when it comes to understanding the progressive agenda and to grokking what Bernie (and Elizabeth) are trying to do for America. Listen tp Mike Barnicle expressing an understanding of Medicare that is lightyears ahead of what Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan even comes close to. Watch how Bernie responds to questions from the Morning Joe panelists, some of whom are very conservative and were quite hostile to his programs:

Cheri Bustos May Be Too Thick To Understand Why, But Primaries Are A Crucial Component Of American Democracy

AOC, Ayanna, Rashida-- 3 perfect voting records + more

Now that Congress has been taking some tough votes, there are just 13 freshman members left with crucial vote scores that give them “A” grades. And only 6 are left with perfect 100% crucial votes scores: Jahana Hayes (D-CT), Andy Levin (D-MI), Joe Neguse (D-CO), AOC (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

There are 28 non-freshmen who are also in the 100% category this cycle, several of them voting way better than usual because of fear of being primaries from the left— Adam Smith (New Dem-WA), Pete DeFazio (OR), Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY), Frank Pallone (NJ), Danny Davis (IL), Suzanne Bonamici (OR), Sheila Jackson Lee (TX) and Yvette Clarke (NY).

Of Massachusetts’ 9 members of Congress— all Democrats— 5 have primaries: Richard Neal, Joe Kennedy III, Katherine Clark, Seth Moulton, and Stephen Lynch. One who doesn’t is Ayanna Pressley, a freshman in the 7th district (Boston’s Back Bay, East Boston, Fenway and Roxbury and south through Dorchester and Hyde Park as far as Randolph, and north through Brighton, Cambridge, Somerville and Chelsea as far as Everett). It’s the bluest district in Massachusetts— by far, D+34. In fact, it’s the bluest district in New England.

Pressley had a very tough case to make against incumbent Democrat Mike Capuano, largely because he was one of the most progressive members of Congress. But she beat him pretty handily:

It wasn’t so much because Capuano was ideologically out of sync with the district; is was more because he was just out of touch with much of a district that grew younger while he grew older. I was less than generous about her primary win:

Mike Capuano, a sterling progressive, was at a disadvantage being a long-time incumbent as well as white and male. The fact that he's probably further left than she is-- and certainly further left in the largely unexamined area of foreign policy— where he's for peace and she's... an AIPAC supporter, doesn't matter to the folks looking for another scalp and without the discernment to fully understand the difference between a corrupt conservative like Joe Crowley, who earned disdain and defeat, and Mike Capuano, who was steamrolled by identity politics.

In their intercept piece, Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani hit all the right questions. "The challenge to Capuano raises a slew of political questions in the Trump era: Under what circumstances does a member of Congress deserve re-election? In a race between two similarly positioned politicians, how important is identity? How important is a progressive track record?"

There are some similarities between Ocasio-Cortez’s and Pressley’s bids: Pressley is black, meaning that, like Ocasio-Cortez, she is a women of color running to unseat a white man in a majority non-white district. But, unlike Ocasio-Cortez and [Kara] Eastman, both of whom ran with sparse political resources— few campaign dollars and virtually no major establishment endorsements— Pressley is backed by major donors and powerful figures within the Democratic Party’s elite. According to Politico, Pressley, a former aide to then-Sen. John Kerry, was urged by the “donor class” to make her run. Federal Election Commission reports show she has raised over $1 million, more than double the amount raised by Ocasio-Cortez and more than triple the amount raised by Eastman before election day.

While Ocasio-Cortez and Eastman won by sharply criticizing the moderate voting records of their primary opponents, Pressley has demurred repeatedly when asked to point to major policy areas in which she disagrees with her opponent.

Pressley has garnered some support from establishment forces: Her campaign contributors include Boston-area megadonor Barbara Lee; Minyon Moore, a so-called Democratic National Committee superdelegate and principal of the corporate lobbying firm Dewey Square group; and [establishment] Super PAC strategist Guy Cecil. She also appears to be gaining momentum among progressives. She has been endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez and Democracy for America. Meanwhile, progressive groups are seizing upon the Pressley campaign as an opportunity for change.

“Congressman Mike Capuano has been a fine, progressive member of Congress, but having an experienced progressive like Ayanna Pressley on the ballot is an unmissable opportunity for Massachusetts to both ensure a leading woman of color represents its only majority-minority district and add the voice of just one person of color to New England’s currently all-white congressional delegation,” said Jim Dean, chair for Democracy for America, in a statement. Jonathan Cohn, co-chair of Progressive Massachusetts, explained that his group also endorsed Pressley over Capuano because of the “need for more diverse representation in Congress and the need for more activist leadership from Democrats in Congress.”

Justice Democrats, the new advocacy PAC spearheading progressive primary challenges across the country, endorsed Pressley over Capuano. Alexandra Rojas, a spokesperson for the group, said the group “would like to see fresh leadership, especially from women and people of color, in one of the few majority-minority districts in the country represented by a white man.”

...Capuano, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, blazed an unusual path on Capitol Hill. He has championed “Medicare for All” for over a decade, helped establish the influential Office of Congressional Ethics, and, as Congress has increasingly abandoned its corporate oversight responsibilities, has made a name for himself dressing down the chief executives of big banks, airlines, and other industries for engaging in fraud and abuse.

For some activists on the left who have supported Capuano’s policy stances, the prospect of challenging the progressive stalwart is a misguided venture. Robert Naiman, policy director of the progressive think tank Just Foreign Policy, said he has cheered on the wave of progressive insurgent candidates, but was surprised to see Capuano— who is known for his progressive foreign policy stances— facing a challenge. Naiman, a watchdog on foreign intervention, rattled off a list of foreign policy stances Capuano has staked, agitating for peace even against his own party, from leading the opposition to the war in Yemen to maintaining a lonely battle against President Barack Obama’s war in Libya.

“Taking down Capuano? That would be terrible,” Naiman said. “He’s a progressive champion.”

In the few areas in which Pressley says she presents an alternative to Capuano, the contrast is nonetheless muddled. Pressley said she pledged to decline corporate PAC money, while Capuano has not. That may be true in the 2018 Democratic congressional primary, but Pressley fundraised from corporate, police, and lobbyist-run PACs while a member of the city council, ethics disclosures show, before taking the pledge this cycle. (Pressley’s campaign did not offer comment for this article.)

Records show that the Pressley Committee, the registered entity for Pressley’s municipal campaigns, received donations from several corporate lobbying PACs, including the Nelson Mullins Riley Scarborough and Nixon Peabody. Individuals from the powerful Massachusetts corporate lobbying firm Dewey Square Group have donated 18 times to Pressley’s campaigns.

...Another area where Capuano’s long national record stands in contrast to Pressley’s local profile is on foreign policy-- particularly American wars abroad. Questionnaires sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, a grassroots pressure group focused on curbing the power of the Pentagon and ending military adventures overseas, provide one of the few windows into the candidates’ views in this area. But, in her responses, Pressley declined to take a position on whether she would “vote to terminate the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan” or whether she would support legislation to prohibit “stationing military forces [in Syria], and providing assistance and training to insurgents.”

Explaining her non-answers, Pressley wrote that she would seek to exhaust other diplomatic and nonmilitary options, but wanted to avoid closing the door on the possibility of supporting future military solutions to ending the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan. Capuano, in contrast, answered “yes” to both questions in the survey. He also noted that he introduced legislation to require congressional authorization for the use of force in Syria; was one of only 11 lawmakers to file a lawsuit against Obama for using military force in Libya without congressional approval; and has voted on several occasions to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

While local Massachusetts media has largely ignored foreign policy in its coverage of the primary race, the issue looms large among those who have served with Capuano.

“I have long looked to my Progressive Caucus colleague Mike for his leadership and principled advocacy on U.S. foreign policy,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Given the Trump administration’s constant warmongering, progressives in Congress need Mike Capuano’s unwavering moral courage, now more than ever.”

This week, after careful consideration of the two candidates, Massachusetts Peace Action decided to endorse Capuano.

Celebrate Pressley's win for what it is-- not for what it isn't. I have no doubt that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is going to be a huge upgrade from Joe Crowley. We'll see if we can say the same thing about Ayanna Pressley and Mike Capuano next year.

I would have much rather seen Brianna Wu beat right-of-center, anti-Choice Democrat Stephen Lynch, also in Boston (MA-08)— but progressive activists largely ignored that race. And Lynch rolled right over her.

That said, I'm sure Ayanna Pressley will be a much better member of Congress than most-- even than most from Massachusetts. Or, at least, I have reason to hope so. On the other hand, is Barbara Lee safe in her seat? Mark Pocan? Jim McGovern? Raul Grijalva? Jerry Nadler? Alan Lowenthal? Do their records as fighting progressives count for anything?

Blue America is backing progressive challengers this cycle against conservative Democratic incumbents— Marie Newman against Blue Dog Dan Lipinski (Chicago), Shaniyat Chowdhury against New Dem Gregory Meeks (Queens), Michael Owens against Blue Dog David Scott (suburban Atlanta) and Eva Putzova against Blue Dog Tom O’Halleran (Arizona). We’ll be endorsing one of the candidates running against Steny Hoyer and we’re vetting several others around the country as well. All of the incumbents have earned primary defeats and all of the candidates we have endorsed will make much better representatives in Congress. (Please consider contributing to their campaigns by clicking on the Primary a Blue Dog 2020 thermometer on the right.)

But primarying a progressive against a challenger— even a good one— is still a path we haven’t been willing to go down. This week our candidate in Queens, Shaniyat Chowdhury, introduced me to a progressive activist not far from where I live— young woman who is eager to beat a strongly progressive member of Congress I had once helped win. His voting record is fine but he hardly turned out to be an AOC or a Rashida Tlaib. She made her case like this:

I'm challenging Representative X because while he calls himself a progressive-- he falls short in many ways.

While I've been organizing against war profiteers, he's been taking money from them, as well as private prisons, Monsanto, pharma, insurance companies, etc.

While he's constantly out in the media bashing Donald Trump personally, he is silent on many of the policy reasons we should be countering Trump: His provocations of war with Iran, coup attempt in Venezuela, and the slew of corporate execs he's been appointing to top government positions.

I fault Democrats in general for not providing an alternative to the Neo-conservatives' foreign policy agenda, and believe it's important that Members of Congress play a leading role creating a vision of what real diplomacy looks like.

To date, for instance, many Dems have simply discounted diplomatic attempts with North Korea as impossible with Trump in charge. As unfortunate as it is that he's our President, I believe our pursuit of peace must be non-partisan and maximize any and all openings for diplomatic engagement.

Mr. X has also repeatedly supported efforts to suppress dialogue and peaceful protest of Israel's occupation of Palestine, which I find offensive and unconstitutional.

In one of the most progressive districts in the country, I believe we deserve a real progressive, who will put the people's priorities above all else. I know I can be that leader.

I would love to discuss the matters in greater depth, if you are interested.

I’ll meet up with her next week and blog about how that goes, OK? I'm probably more eager than you are to see how this turns out-- and this isn't the only instance of this nature looming.