The Culture Of Compromise... And Looking Ahead To 2022

On Monday morning, the Washington Post published an increasingly rare solo-piece-- rather than team effort-- this one by Annie Linskey: Biden's Flexibility Could Mean Bloody Fights. So! Someone has noticed! "He remains vague on policy." You think? Linskey started her piece by going right to the heart of why there is so much mistrust of the Biden campaign on the left and why even some of the most fervent Trump detractors are reluctant to commit to the hold-you-nose electoral strategy. "When Joe Biden released economic recommendations two months ago," she wrote, "they included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers: allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account. But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden’s agenda. 'They basically said, Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into it,' said one investment banker, referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). The banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls... The Biden campaign said the economic recommendations were produced jointly by supporters of Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and were never intended as official policy."

This reluctance to be pinned down on policy details is central to Biden’s campaign, which has focused on a pledge to “restore the soul of the nation” rather than any particular legislative holy grail. While Biden has issued a raft of proposals, he’s often taken an all-things-to-all-people approach, sometimes making strong public declarations while relying on aides to soothe critics behind the scenes.

That strategy, reflecting a decades-long career in which Biden has seen himself more as mediator than ideologue, has helped him unify the party’s liberal and moderate wings behind the shared goal of defeating President Trump. But it also is laying the groundwork for bitter internal battles, should Biden win the presidency, on topics from race to climate to trade, while Wall Street leaders plan to have their way with a president many expect to be unusually susceptible to outside pressure.

...“We knew we weren’t going to get Medicare-for-all,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). “The question then for me was: How do we get some foundational pieces of Medicare-for-all, even if the words ‘Medicare-for-all’ aren’t there?”

Biden’s team agreed, for example, that low-income Americans would be automatically enrolled in Biden’s public option and that Medicare, not a private company, would run it-- significant concessions that nonetheless fell under Biden’s original framing.

“A good tell about how Biden would operate is there’s room for him to run as long as he doesn’t feel like he’s overturning his brand of moderation,” said one liberal who negotiated with Biden’s team.

Sounds like a bloody 4 years are coming up-- with a 2022 catastrophe in the making, when voters-- furious that the Biden administration, along with a Democratic-controlled Senate and House, are unable to deliver on anything of importance to working families. The 2010 midterm disaster will look like paradise compared to the Republican resurgence in 2022. The Biden campaign is about two things: a wrecked old man who wants it to say he was president on his tombstone and a coalition of conservatives and wary normal people who want to get rid of Trump. Policy-wise, there is no there there and 2021 is not going to be pretty as disparate groups fight for a piece of the pie.

Last week, reviewing John Nichols' book, The Fight For The Soul Of The Democratic Party, for Jacobin, Paul Heideman, asserted that this predicament is nothing new since The Soul of the Democratic Party Has Always Belonged to Capital. When did the Democratic Party go bad. Many say it was "with Bill Clinton and the Third Way in the 1990s" while other say it was "with Carter’s embrace of austerity" while other "more conspiratorially inclined parts of the left have argued, when JFK was assassinated? Or has the party never been anything more than 'history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party?' Where you draw the line says a good deal about your politics." Nichols, he wrote, "draws the line very early indeed, with the removal of Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket in 1944. The book is written explicitly as an intervention into current debates over the future of the party, and its argument that for most of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party was degenerating, is reflective of the radicalism of one pole of that debate. For Nichols, Wallace represents the real soul of the New Deal Democratic Party. A proud progressive, dedicated anti-racist, and passionate anti-fascist, Wallace attempted to continue Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy, only to be stymied by more conservative forces inside the party. This narrative occupies the book’s first half, while the second half covers the history of the party in the seven decades following Wallace’s defeat in 1944. The result is a readable introduction to both Henry Wallace, one of the most interesting American politicians, and the Democratic Party’s long history of betraying progressive ideals."

Did someone mention "the Democratic Party’s long history of betraying progressive ideals?" There is no better emblematic case of that than Joe Biden, you know... the guy all your progressive friends are telling you have to vote for in November (as part of the existential fight against fascism). In the same issue of Jacobin, Luke Savage is as pessimistic about a Biden presidency as I am. Does no one else see the disaster on the horizon. I explained it to one of my favorite Members of Congress the other day. She didn't say she disagreed with my prediction of a 2010 midterm-redux in 2022, only "Let's get there first," meaning electing Biden and a huge load of conservative Democrats to Congress first. Thanks, but no thanks. She wanted me to help her raise money for Blue Dogs and New Dems running for the House. I love her but... give me a break. Blue America works to defeat conservatives, whether Republicans or fake Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Savage takes issue with the idea that Biden, like Ed Markey, is a flawed liberal who could-- again, like Markey-- embrace the Sunrise Movement and everything would be hunky-dory. Markey-- who hold the #1 lifetime position at Progressive Punch-- may be a flawed liberal, but Biden isn't and never was a liberal. He's a conservative-- a really, really bad conservative-- as bad as his hair plugs and fake teeth. As imperfect as the results show ProgressivePunch's system is, it's the best measurement Ive found and, as you see, Markey's record is significantly better than either Elizabeth Warren's or Bernie's.

The 10 best Dems in the Senate

No, I don't believe for one second that Markey's more progressive than either, just that he's at #1-- which says something-- where as the senators more ideologically aligned with Biden-- both now and when he was amnestying atrocious senator himself-- are in a whole different category of Democrats:

The 10 worst Dems in the Senate

Chuck Schumer plucked Kyrsten Sinema-- then head of the Blue Dogs and sporting the single worst voting record of any House Dem-- out of the House and gave her the Democratic Senate nomination in a year when a Democrat was going to win in Arizona. He just did the same thing with another Arizonan likely to prove as far right as Sinema, Mark Kelly. And it doesn't stop there. Schumer has guaranteed the most conservative Democratic-controlled Senate in anyone's lifetime: Hickenlooper (CO), Cunningham (NC), Harrison (SC), Bollier (KS), Ossoff (GA), Heger (TX), McGrath (KY), Gideon (ME), Gross (AK), Greenfield (IA)... And Cheri Bustos is doing a similarly horrible job in the House. The Red-to-Blue program is nearly identical with the list of New Dem and Blue Dog endorsements. It will be a Biden Congress.

Markey did, after all, vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq and support NAFTA. He even backed the USA PATRIOT Act back in 2001 (though voted against its reauthorization in 2005, 2010, and 2011). That he nonetheless won the respect of so many young left-wing voters therefore does yield an important lesson for other Democratic candidates and elected officials.

As former Sanders organizer Claire Sandberg put it earlier this week: “Corporate Democrats want to make the Left out to be purity-obsessed and unwilling to compromise, but the Left rallied around a longtime politician with a mixed record because he actively courted their support and became a champion of one of their major legislative priorities.”

Where I differ from [Michelle] Goldberg is in thinking that this is the kind of lesson a politician like Joe Biden either wants to or could conceivably learn. Near the end of her piece, Goldberg writes: “I hope Joe Biden listens. Young voters favor him over Trump by large margins, but their lack of enthusiasm could dampen turnout.” She quotes Sunrise’s Executive Director Varshini Prakash: “The best thing that Joe Biden could do would be to speak in clear, exciting visionary terms about exactly what he plans to do to tackle the climate crisis, racial inequality, and economic inequality.”

It’s a capital suggestion-- and one Biden is certain to ignore. That’s because, whatever officially appears in the Democratic platform (Goldberg, for example, cites the recommendations of the Sanders/Biden joint task force) is entirely secondary to the political coalition Biden is trying to build, and the one he built to win the Democratic nomination.

Much like Hillary Clinton did in 2016, Biden is aiming to win the presidency by motivating conservative-leaning suburban voters and some Republicans-- with more traditional (and liberal- and progressive-minded) Democratic constituencies turning out in sufficient numbers where it counts. The former group was largely the target audience for this year’s DNC, which  pandered endlessly to the sensibilities of anti-Trump Republicans and rich suburbanites. The latter, meanwhile, gets lectures about how they need to be more enthusiastic while young voters get virtual Biden/Harris lawn signs in Animal Crossing instead of Medicare For All.

Centrist Democrats do want the support of young and left wing voters, of course. But they uniformly want it on their own centrist terms.

All this may be a strategic choice on Biden’s part, but it’s also a feature endemic to the faction that controls the Democratic Party as a whole. Biden’s nomination, which party power brokers ultimately did everything they could to ensure, represented a very conscious repudiation of the alternative course offered by Bernie Sanders-- one which was decidedly less interested in the votes of suburban conservatives and, perhaps more importantly, which pledged to reject the dictates of the donor class that Democratic elites have long embraced.

As such, there is simply no incentive structure in place to shift Biden from his current course.

In Massachusetts, a hitherto quite conventional liberal politician recognized that it would be in his interest to harness the energy and power of young activists. He embraced their agenda and saved his career in the process. Whether Markey’s shift represented a sincere change of heart or pure political self-interest is a secondary matter: he faced an existential challenge and pivoted towards the only constituency he believed could save him from defeat. The young left, which Biden’s candidacy has always been about marginalizing and repudiating, enjoys no such leverage with Biden.

Goldberg is absolutely right to argue that the Markey campaign yielded real lessons for centrist Democrats. The problem is assuming those are lessons that centrist Democrats are under any real pressure to learn.

The Stop Bernie Movement Is Inherently Anti-American

He Can Do It, detail, by Nancy Ohanian

We should know results from Iowa soon but an AP VoteCast just released within the hour indicates that "The first voters to make their choice in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination are desperate for fundamental change to the political system. Roughly two-thirds of Iowa caucusgoers said supporting a candidate who would transform how the system in Washington works was important to their vote." And the two big issues are both Bernie issues-- healthcare and the Climate Crisis. Only a third of caucus-goers said that they would prefer restoration of the political system to the way it was before when Status Quo Joe was VP.

Yesterday, our old friend Tim Canova, a progressive Democrat who took on status quo establishment hack Debbie Wasserman Schultz, only to see her political machine rig the election against him, wrote to his supporters that "The past few days have brought news that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is stacking the deck again in its 2020 presidential nomination process, much like the DNC did in 2016. First, Tom Perez, the DNC chair, announced a tidal wave of appointments of corporate lobbyists to the party’s Convention Committee-- a practice started at the DNC by Debbie Wasserman Schultz when she was putting both thumbs on the scales against Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. Several days later, the DNC announced it was relaxing its own debate rules to make room for billionaire candidate Michael Bloomberg in the next debate. This comes after months of DNC strict adherence to debate rules to undermine the candidacies of Tulsi Gabbard, Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, and just about anyone else outside the top tier of candidates – even though nearly half of Democratic voters remain undecided in many key states. Next came news reports that the DNC may amend its rules to allow superdelegates to vote on the first ballot at the Convention– clearly aimed at blocking Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard, if need be, at the Convention."

He wrote that he is "not among those surprised or suddenly outraged by the DNC’s latest actions. Nothing much changed after 2016. The party remains owned by and under the control of the same powerful corporate interests that have selected past presidential nominees and have impeded all kinds of progressive reforms under Democrat and Republican administrations alike. Our fight in South Florida is the same fight across this country, to restore democracy by first restoring integrity and justice to our elections. We need a system of 100% hand-marked paper ballots counted by hand in public, as was done in the United States for more than two centuries. With the Iowa Caucus just days away, it’s good to remember why it’s difficult for the DNC or anyone else to steal Iowa. It’s because Iowa is a caucus, and therefore by its very nature, the votes are made publicly and counted in public. The same cannot be said of primaries, all of which use electronic voting machines that are inherently vulnerable to outside hacking and insider manipulation of the software. It’s important to also remember that the DNC establishment has not changed its stripes. Since the 2016 election, lawyers for the DNC and Wasserman Schultz have even argued in open court that the DNC has the right to rig its own presidential primaries and nominations process, and that it has no duty to abide by its own rules in its own corporate charter. Anything to rig elections against the party’s own grassroot supporters."

It isn't just the Republicans and Vladimir Putin who are out to steal U.S. elections. Establishment Democrats can be just as self-interested and ruthless. That said, I do want to add that Christine Pelosi, one of the loudest progressive voices on the DNC told me that there is virtually no chance that the Stop Bernie plot to allow superdelegates to vote on the first ballot will succeed. "This," she said, "was a handful of DNC members who griped about having to go to a second ballot and wondered if they could change the call to convention and roll back our reforms. WILL NOT HAPPEN... as the most prodigious author of DNC Resolutions, I know the members very well and am aware of their concerns about decisions made without transparency and about a repeat of 2016." I trust her judgment on this.

I also trust Luke Savage's view, written out yesterday for Jacobin, about the impetus behind the Stop Bernie Movement. He wrote that "'electability' is the public rallying cry of the Stop Bernie campaign. But look a little closer, and the real issue becomes clear: the establishment fears having a democratic socialist in the White House."

Bernie Sanders’s recent rise in the polls has elicited an entirely predictable reaction from all the usual suspects who make up America’s op-ed pages. But, personally offended as the chatterati are, there are signs that the prospect of a Sanders victory in the Democratic primary contest is awakening an altogether more vicious beast that’s long been in the Vermont senator’s crosshairs.

This week, NBC, the Associated Press, and Politico all reported on the emerging anxiety within elite Democratic circles about Sanders’s ascent in the polls and nascent efforts by operatives to arrest his momentum. As journalist Andrew Perez noted, all three reports cited one Matt Bennett, cofounder of the organization Third Way, who issued boilerplate warnings about the supposed dangers of a Sanders nomination. In a pattern that is almost certain to be repeated in the coming weeks and months, Bennett’s intervention was framed as an earnest expression of concern by a moderate Democrat mindful of taking what he believes to be a major political risk

But it was actually something else, given Bennett’s job at a self-identified “think tank” that has received extensive contributions from corporate patrons, including health insurance company Humana and Koch Industries. Washington is packed with groups like Third Way and others in the same mold, the function of which is to provide a layer of institutional sediment separating corporate interests from the mouthpieces they fund to advance their interests. In the gelatinous mass of lobbyists, megadonors, corporate spokespeople, and political operatives resulting from this arrangement, it can often be difficult to tell where the private sector ends and the public sector or party apparatus begins.

Nonetheless, Bennett’s anguished intervention is a telltale sign that panic about Sanders is starting to spill outside the op-ed pages and into the boardrooms of corporate interests-- from pharmaceutical companies to Wall Street investment firms-- who have an immediate pecuniary interest in opposing his program. If Sanders’s performance in the first round of primaries and caucuses matches current expectations, big business will undoubtedly intensify its efforts to stop him-- likely aided, as in this case, by centrist Democrat operatives who sit at the noxious juncture of party politics and corporate agitprop.





A more overt harbinger came in the form of a recent MSNBC appearance by former Obama administration adviser, Wall Street financier, and Narandra Modi enthusiast Steve Rattner-- who currently works as Michael Bloomberg’s personal money manager and is reportedly worth well over $100 million. Though he took care to repeat the meta argument so fashionable among neoliberal Democrats that Sanders “can’t win,” Rattner’s primary concern seemed to be something else:

The more that Bernie Sanders rises... the more people are getting scared about a Bernie Sanders candidacy, for two reasons. First, because they think he’ll lose. And second, they think if he wins, he’ll implement the kinds of policies... which are so far away from the center of the Democratic Party. So there’s a lot of activity around trying to quote “stop Bernie,” although it isn’t called by that just yet.

Rattner is, of course, quite correct to suggest that a Sanders presidency would move to implement policies opposed by the “center of the Democratic Party”-- an innocuous-sounding phrase leveraged to obscure the vast web of Wall Street firms, pharmaceutical giants, insurance companies, and other corporate interests that have long found a home within the Democratic establishment, dictated the limits of the party’s policy agenda, and stuffed the upper echelons of its donor and consultant class.

More than any expressed concerns about his viability in a general election, opposition to the Sanders program and what it would mean for corporate balance sheets is what Stop Bernie is really about.

The anti-Bernie smear ads on TV in Iowa and New Hampshire could easily be seen as... well, almost pro-Bernie. David Doel showed them on his show and explained why they're so patently ridiculous and utterly ineffective. Spoiler: "Bernie Sanders wants to give everyone health insurance. He's more radical than Obama was!"

What About Bernie Sanders/Stacey Abrams?

In a column over the weekend, Max Boot noted that Trump has as yet been unable to adjust "to the brutal reality of dealing with a Democratic-controlled House. When Republicans were in control of both chambers, he could plausibly threaten lawmakers because of his cult-like hold on 80-plus percent of Republican voters. But his base is only 35 percent or so of the entire electorate, and Democrats are not intimidated by him. His aura of invincibility has been cracked-- and, with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III scheduled to report, the worst is yet to come. Two painful, punishing years loom."

"Democrats are not intimidated by him." Well... Nancy Pelosi obviously isn't. Nor is Ted Lieu. Ro Khanna isn't. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have made it apparent that they're not afraid of him. As far as I can tell, most congressional Democrats aren't. But what about the freshman members from the red-leaning districts? Some of the New Dems and Blue Dogs, in fact, have been nearly as obsessed with Trump's supporters as Boot's cowardly Republicans are. As we've seen, some of the worst of them-- take Michigan New Dem Elissa Slotkin (the hot dog heiress)-- who was already warning that Democrats had to compromise with Trump on his vanity-wall when Pelosi shut Trump down. Others were whining that $15/hour is too high for a minimum wage, using failed Republican arguments nearly a century old.

If preserving Elissa Slotkin's seat becomes a greater priority than passing a minimum wage that real Democrats, who are not hot dog heiresses. had campaigned on, someone needs to tell Ms. Slotkin she's in the wrong party.

Over the weekend, likely Bernie running mate, Stacey Abrams (D-GA) told Britni Danielle of Essence that during her race for governor she "focused on expanding the electorate, not simply on trying to convince disaffected Republicans to join her team. Because of this, she not only turned out more Black and white voters than former President Barack Obama, but she also massively increased Latinx and Asian turnout as well. How? Throughout her campaign, Abrams focused on the issues people cared about most, including education, healthcare, and poverty, which she called 'immoral' and 'economically inefficient.'" That's the way to win in 2020, not by emulating the hot dog heiress.

"Democrats," Abrams told Danielle, "win by telling our story, by engaging communities early and authentically, and by fighting for every vote that shares our values. But too often on the Democratic side of the aisle, the ones who share our values are the ones who least likely to be asked to share their voices... what my campaign demonstrated… is that if you go into communities and treat them with respect, regardless of race, they will vote if we tell them we trust them. So I want us to have 2020 candidates who are actually doing the work of expanding the electorate, not trying to convince people who’ve already told us they don’t like us to change their mind just this once."

Disclaimer: although I once tried-- and got through almost half an episode-- I never watched The West Wing. I had this idea that it was all about what was wrong with the Democratic Party and why we were stuck with Bush, rather than a viable-- even if fictional-- alternative to Bush. So I ignored what "everyone" called the greatest TV show of all times and missed out on so many conversations it was the center of. Last week I found someone who agrees with me: Luke Savage at Jacobin and his excellent little essay Aaron Sorkin’s Road to Nowhere. "Aaron Sorkin wants to give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advice," wrote Savage. "Yet The West Wing creator’s worldview remains a vision of liberalism at its hollowest and most ineffective." Savage was offended that Sorkin was on CNN lecturing "the new crop of young people who were just elected to Congress" about growing up and the "need to stop acting like young people."

It says a great deal about the state of American liberalism that a screenwriter best known for crafting middlebrow dramas famous for their circuitous dialogue remains a house intellectual-- none of it good.

Perhaps better than any other cultural artifact, Sorkin’s The West Wing chronicled the moral and intellectual decline of a post–New Deal Democratic Party, reveling in its shift to a vacuous center characterized by deficit hawkishness, technocratic proceduralism, and smirking, credential-obsessive Ivy League pretension. Serving as a morale booster for Bush-era liberals, the saga of the fictional Bartlett administration ultimately reflected and informed the politics of the Obama presidency and the world views of some of its most influential partisans and operatives.

Its absurdity notwithstanding, the West Wing creator’s patronizing intervention is yet a further illustration of how deeply embedded the discredited politics of the 1990s remain in the liberal imagination, even-- especially-- amid the ongoing nightmare of the Trump presidency. In no more than thirty seconds, Sorkin’s flourish managed to evoke virtually everything wrong with DNC liberalism in the twenty-first century: from its reflexive condescension toward the young and the vulnerable (note the pejorative reference to “transgender bathrooms”) to the various ways it fetishizes personality over program, delights in punching left, and elevates intelligence over ideology.

Indeed, just like the real-world liberalism it has channeled and shaped, Sorkin’s politics have always been concerned more with aesthetics than any specific or programmatic impulse towards reform. The West Wing universe, after all, is one in which an idyllic, two-term liberal presidency warmly embraces the military-industrial complex, cuts Social Security, and puts a hard-right justice on the Supreme Court in the interests of bipartisan “balance”-- all the while making no observably transformative changes to American life. What matters most is how politics look and feel and whether the briskly striding people who staff the corridors of power possess diplomas from the right schools. Idealism, such as it is, has more to do with an abstract faith in American institutions and their inherent greatness (as in, “America is already great”) than any particular desire to make the world a better place or see a coherent set of values reflected within them. In Sorkin’s parochial fantasy, politics at its noblest and most high-minded consists mainly of wonkish sophistry and elegantly crafted speeches designed to offer vague comfort while saying nothing.

If this sounds at all familiar (putting aside the actual plot lines of the show’s seven-season run) it’s because the liberalism that defined the Clinton and Obama eras very much cleaved to a similar script, rooting itself in charismatic yet technocratically minded figures behind whom the elite brokers and corporate actors that dominate American society largely carried on business as usual-- even as millions lost their jobs and homes, saw their wages stagnate, and were crushed by the collective avarice of banks, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical giants.

Challenged by the Sanders insurgency in 2016 and rattled by Trump’s victory, the liberal intelligentsia might have taken stock and reflected-- if only out of pure self-interest-- on their own failures and the deficiencies of their worldview. With a few exceptions, this has not been the case. If anything, Sorkin’s condescension towards progressive lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez suggests that the only thing many elite liberals still know how to do is double down, demand deference, and preach the feel-good platitudes of presidencies past.

No one is going to mistake the Sanders-Abrams White House for Josiah Bartlet's and John Hoynes'-- of that we can be certain. As Matt Taylor predicted at Vice this month, The 2020 Presidential Race Will Put Capitalism's Evils on Full Display. Even with the Warren G. Harding of the Democratic Party-- Biden, the "Back to Normalcy" candidate of an establishment that paved the way for Trump-- still popular, "it's clear," he wrote, "even a year out from the Iowa caucuses that the 2020 contest will be a once-in-a-generation battle over what democracy should look like, over how much the system can be tweaked or just destroyed, and whether Democrats can continue to function as a liberal and progressive party-- or need to become more of a distinctly anti-capitalist one."