The White Working Class Is Not Sold On Biden, But Will It Abandon Trump In The COVID-Election?

Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg recently watched a series of focus groups of white working class voters in rural Wisconsin, the Mahoning Valley region in Ohio, northern Maine and suburban Macomb County, Michigan, all swing areas where Trump did well. Vote-rich Macomb County, for example, gave Trump a 53.6-42.1% victory over Hillary in 2016, after going for Obama both times he ran. Trump won the northern Maine congressional district, which also voted for Obama twice, by an astounding 10 points-- 51.4% to 41.1%. In 2018 though, the district ousted its Republican congressman and elected, Jared Golden, a Democratic state legislator in his place.

Greenberg wrote that what he watched told him that "the heartbreaking health care crisis that is ravaging working-class and rural communities threatens to cut short Donald Trump’s political career, and demands a forceful response from opposition Democrats. It will teach big lessons about how to reach working people who are struggling, regardless of color." He shared his findings with the American Prospect, noting that "In 2016, a white working-class revolt enabled Trump to win [working class] men by an unimaginable 48 points and women by 27. But disillusionment was real in the midterms: The Republican House margin dropped 13 points across the white working class. In the new poll, Trump lost a further 6 points with white working-class women, where Biden only trailed Trump by 8 points (52 to 44 percent). While Trump has been throwing a lot of red meat to his base, white working-class men have not been dislodged from their trajectory, as Trump’s margin eroded another 4 points."

These are mostly low-wage families, many with children raised by a single parent. They are consumed with rising opioid deaths and disabilities and a deadly expensive health care system. That was a big part of why they voted for Donald Trump in 2016: so he could end Obamacare and its costly mandate, and deliver affordable health insurance for all. When he failed to do so, many voted against the Republicans in the midterms.

But the pandemic was the perfect storm. I have never seen such a poignant discussion of the health and disability problems facing families and their children, the risks they faced at work, and the prospect of even higher health care and prescription drug costs. The final straw was a president who battled not for the “forgotten Americans,” but for himself, the top one percent, and the biggest, greediest companies.

That is why most in the Zoom focus groups pulled back from President Trump. Three-quarters of these voters supported Trump in 2016, but less than half planned to vote for him now. Even those who still supported him did not push back when other participants expressed anger with his doing nothing about health care, fostering hatred and racism, dividing the country, siding with the upper classes, and having no plan for COVID-19. This is a life-and-death issue for them, as much as nearly any other group in American society.

The same voters were still very cautious about Joe Biden, who seemed old and not very strong, but most importantly offered the prospect of only minor changes to the health care system and seemed unlikely to challenge the power of the top one percent. Like lots of other working people, they are looking for a leader who will make big changes in health care, fight for working people over big business, and unite the country to defeat the current economic and public-health crisis.

Working-class anger with the establishment after the financial crisis of 2008 ran deep into the Democratic base of Blacks, Hispanics, unmarried women, and millennials, too. Many were not initially enthusiastic about the Affordable Care Act, and in election after election failed to rally fully for Democratic candidates until the 2018 midterms, when Democrats ran on “health care, health care, health care!” The pandemic may allow progressives to battle for working people, regardless of color.

In today's working-class and rural communities, health care is everything. In introductory remarks, participants in the focus groups went right to the personal health care crises they were facing every day.

“My wife is disabled,” said one man from Wisconsin. “My daughter has 30 percent immune system left so she’s bouncing around from doctor to doctor and the wife says don’t bring [the pandemic] home.” Another Wisconsin man spoke of his terminally ill seven-year-old son. A woman in Maine explained how she nearly bled to death and had a $24,000 medical bill “on my credit report for who knows how long.” One woman from Ohio had two kids with autism, and another had a grandson with allergies, requiring access to a lifesaving EpiPen. “I haven’t been able to get him one for the last three years, I can’t afford it... my insurance won’t cover it,” the woman said. Prices have skyrocketed for EpiPens and remain stubbornly high.

As I was observing the Zoom group, I initially wondered whether the focus group recruiter had used some specialized list to find the participants. But then I checked the census data on disabilities.

Across the country, 12.6 percent of the population has disabilities, rising to 15.1 percent in rural areas. Black and Native American populations are more likely to have disabilities than their white counterparts. The rate is over a quarter for those 65 to 74 years old and half of those over 75 years-- all groups that are overrepresented in these rural areas. And structural racism has played a powerful role here: 20 percent of Blacks with disabilities were employed at the beginning of this year, compared to 30 percent of whites and Hispanics with disabilities.

Then I looked at census data for the congressional districts where these sessions were being held. It was a new window into America in the pandemic. In suburban Macomb County, the disability rate looks like the rural areas, with 14 percent of both whites and Blacks disabled. In northern Maine, the numbers show one in five with disabilities, slightly more for whites. In Ohio’s Sixth Congressional District, both one in five whites and Blacks are disabled. And seniors in these areas are even more disabled than other rural Americans.



TRUMP KNEW IN FEBRUARY-- AND LIED TO THE PUBLIC


So COVID violently brought together the personal health crises of these people and the failed and corrupted government response, breaking their emotional bond with Trump.

Just throw out the words “health care,” and people relayed a train of horrors: a “$16,000 deductible,” employers throwing them off health insurance, “ridiculous” premiums, a $400 bill for their asthma medicine paid for out of pocket. They spoke of the frustrations of making too much money to be eligible for Medicaid but not enough to stay in the solid middle class. They explained how people avoid treatment because they can’t pay the associated costs. “The way we deliver health care is just unbelievable,” said one woman from Michigan, “the amount of waste and how much it costs to let people go bankrupt to pay for medical bills.”

Most of the respondents live on the edge in a virtual “minimum wage” economy, where companies don’t care about their employees and look just to enrich themselves. “You’re just a number now,” said one Ohio woman. They fight for every dime, as they are being overwhelmed by a health care crisis that they recognize Donald Trump has failed to fix. And importantly, for working families outside poverty, the health care reforms passed by the Democrats-- the Affordable Care Act and insurance on the health care exchanges-- just were not much help.

Discussion of the Affordable Care Act did not sound ideological, as they talked about their direct experience with insurance on the exchanges, which in the words of one woman “costs a lot of money and doesn’t pay for much of anything.” The health care system is failing them, and they want someone to fix it. And Joe Biden’s rhetoric has not been very reassuring that he would make big changes. “He’s been vague on health care,” one woman from Wisconsin said. “I want to know the specifics of what he’ll do to make it better.”

These working-class and rural swing voters voted overwhelmingly for Trump, but their response to him is now profoundly shaped by what has happened in the COVID-19 crisis. They think he failed to take the virus seriously and has just made a mess of it. They think he is failing at the most important issue for them.

What was striking is how the usual Trump deflect-and-blame strategy no longer works with these swing voters. “It seems like a lot of the stuff he’s saying could be proven wrong,” said one man from Wisconsin. “He just won’t admit where things are, he’s out of touch with reality,” said another woman. “It’s just embarrassing to have a country with the highest COVID cases, highest COVID deaths,” said a man in Michigan. “We’re supposed to be the leader in the world and we completely fumbled the ball on this.”

Respondents despaired about the lack of a national plan of action, with everyone “just left on their own.” Meanwhile, there was dismay that the president gave more care to his family’s businesses than the rest of the nation. One woman theorized that he didn’t shut down domestic travel “because he owns hotels.” These participants are paying a lot of attention to the position of Trump’s family in the administration and how the bailouts and loans are benefiting his family business, his cronies, and the top one percent.

At the same time, they are on a financial knife’s edge, worried about being one bad break away from being homeless. The focus groups happened after the $600 federal unemployment benefit ended, and those in the groups who were out of work despaired of getting by without that. Nearly all of them supported Trump in 2016 because he was a businessman who would grow the economy. But now they’re scared about the economic damage. Trump reminding these voters of his great economic successes before the pandemic fell flat. His economic bravado was not reassuring at a terrifying moment. “I remember my father watching the news and crying, and I find myself crying sometimes when I watch the news,” related a woman from Wisconsin. “And I think, oh god, I’m turning into my parents. You have no choice. The things you see are gut-wrenching.”

In emails we asked the participants to send to President Trump, you can feel that the spirit that led them to join the working-class revolt is just broken. While some hope he will get back in the right direction, most used their email to express their deep disillusionment. You can feel that they wanted a president who didn’t divide the country and make it a “laughingstock” (two writers used that exact word) internationally. They wanted a president who put the interests of the people, not just big business, first.

“I supported you in the beginning over Hillary but in the end unfortunately, you show me you’re just not for the people,” wrote one man from Wisconsin. “You lied to the American people about COVID,” wrote another. “You are everything that is wrong with America, you have effectively ruined this country,” added a woman from Ohio. “Congrats, you suck.”

It is critical to listen for what they did not say: “What an ass I was to vote for that guy in the last election.” They did not regret or say they made a mistake. All working Americans have been in financial trouble since the 2008 crash, and rising health care problems and disabilities, health care costs and deductibles, and empowered insurance and pharmaceutical companies were an explosive brew. It is why many working people voted for Trump in 2016. It is why many working-class Democrats of color and millennials failed to turn out and defend Obamacare in midterm elections and in 2016. All these voters had reasons for those choices.

COVID has shattered so many lives, but also seemingly insurmountable political barriers. The great majority of working people, regardless of color, are desperate for a government that stops taking direction from the pharmaceutical companies, and brings the boldest feasible changes to our health care system.

Western Riverside County (CA-42) is one of the fastest growing areas in southern California-- and one of the last southern California districts with a Republican member of Congress, in this case "Crooked" Ken Calvert. In 2016, Trump won the district, although by smaller margins than McCain or Romney. Still, his 53.4% to 41.4% win over Hillary was substantial. In 2018, the anti-red wave wasn't big enough to dislodge Calvert. This year, though, the Democrats nominated a better candidate, independent minded progressive Liam O'Mara. His district shares a lot of traits with the districts Greenberg was looking at. There is a white plurality and nearly 40% of the adults did not go beyond high school. About 21% are blue collar workers and 44% are sales and service workers. Liam had quite a lot to say about it, as you might expect. Please read it-- and then consider contributing to his campaign by clicking on the Bluer California thermometer below.

There is a lot of anger in the Inland Empire. The biggest challenges Democrats have faced out here have to do with the targets of that anger. Lacking the populist energy nationally to focus it on the élites who have kept wages low and costs high, too much of the population has been susceptible to fearmongering about immigration and crime. In election after election, Calvert has been all-too-happy to shift the blame for his policies onto working class brown and black people, maintaining a firm lock on the working class white vote in the district.

A couple of key factors now threaten that strategy, both in 2020 and long term. The first is demography. While white voters remain solidly in the majority for the district, they are not as monolithic in their views, with many more recent migrants from other parts of southern California attracted by lower housing costs. And the district is a lot more diverse than it once was, with large immigrant communities from Asia, and with Hispanic people making up more than a third of the total.

The other important change is to the national conversation on economics. It is true that Biden is exactly the kind of milquetoast neoliberal who has said he cares about the people but delivers mainly for the super rich, and he will not excite people at the polls. That he isn't Trump just won't be enough in this area, even with the pandemic raging. Bernie won the district by a very solid margin in the primary, and were he our standard-bearer, retiring Crooked Ken Calvert would be much easier. But the shift in policy emphasis matters still for our own race, and it is why we have drawn in so many new voters and historic independents this year.

Given the very real impact on ordinary people of rising costs and stagnant wages, this country needs to turn around. It elected Barack Obama because he spun a tale about hope and change that resonated with a country in the grip of recession. There was a historic opportunity in those first two years to realign the economy to favour growth for all, not just the one per cent. Alas, Obama failed completely to rise to the challenge of the day, preferring to bail out the people who caused the problem, not those who suffered its effects. At the end of the day, exactly the same people and ideas were left in charge. This is how we got Trump. And people really thought Biden was their best shot against him? For some reason, "It's the economy, stupid!" remains one of the hardest lessons for this party to learn.

If Democrats really want to win nationally, not just against Trump but consistently, and regain ground in the swing states, we must get back to our New Deal roots and tear up the nonsensical DLC crap that's driven the party since the 1970s. And a new batch of policy-driven challengers across the state and country give me hope that we're gaining ground at the grassroots at least. The Squad is already set to double this year, and there are a lot of great challengers running in red districts as well as the safely blue seats.

The purplish districts are where the real action is, in my view. If folks like Kara Eastman, Blair Walsingham, and I can flip red seats, or at the least improve upon past Democratic performance in these areas, we can show that populist issues resonate with a wider share of the population. That is the path back to the unchallenged dominance which the Democratic party enjoyed in the House thanks to the FDR to LBJ economic consensus. Since those days, we have lamentably allowed the fault lines to shift to racial issues and law-and-order dogwhistles, thanks to Republican strategy.

But we didn't need to fall for it! It's the same shit they pulled in the late 19th century against the populist movement of those days, disrupting solidarity with racism. And as I like to remind people, those who reject the lessons of history are condemned to repeat its mistakes. We need to get past the narrow focus on identity politics and work for all Americans again. Yes, the country is more diverse, and we should continue to embrace that diversity... but not at the expense of talking about the cost of living and the declining American Dream.

We need to be laser-focussed on the things that will get the attention of working people overall: The high cost of health care and housing, the unjust tax burden, the lack of affordable child care and elder care, the limited opportunities for education and business-creation, and the high crime rates caused by stubbornly-high poverty. We need to stop ceding the economy to the Republicans and the corrupt neoliberals, and start telling people that they can dream again.

I am running to lower the cost of living for working families, period. I don't talk about Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi because they have nothing to do with my race. I tell people that they'll have a fighter in me-- someone who will go to bat for them against anyone, of either party, who says they need to tolerate the poor conditions they face now. We deserve an economy that works for all of us, and that starts with replacing tools of the ruling class like Crooked Ken Calvert.

Acting Like Republicans Isn't How You Beat Republicans

Conventional wisdom from the corporate media and from #NeverTrump Republicans who saw their party taken over by a carnival barker and 2 bit charlatan, is constant and unwavering: Democrats need to be more like "moderate" conservative Republicans-- you, know, like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Marco Rubio... all the clowns the carnival barker and 2 bit charlatan turned to mincemeat. MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times and-- most of all-- the DCCC, DNC and DSCC all agree: the Democratic Party needs to be your father's GOP. And since Bill Clinton was elected they have been pulling it inexorably intuit direction-- the ONE AND ONLY reason Trump is occupying the White House.

John Harris is a former Washington Post reporter and one of the guys who founded Politico so you might reasonably expect to find him expounding exactly that kind of turgid, fear-based centrism. But... his lead-up article for the debates yesterday, took a very different posture: Democrats Are Veering Left, It Just Might Work. He certainly doesn't like it; he terms it "a prevailing Washington media and political class narrative," "going off the rails" and "saddling themselves with unrealistic positions"-- but he does recognize that it may be the formula to beating Trump. "[A]s Democratic contenders gather on the stage again this week," he wrote, "a competing analysis is gaining power: Going a bit off the rails may be an entirely reasonable track to victory." Don't expect Status Quo Joe, let alone Frackenlooper, to start appearing at events dressed as a sans-culotte, but...

“Candidates who look like they are cautious, modulating, have their foot on the brake are missing the moment,” said veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who is coming out later this summer with a book on how both parties have been refashioned in the Trump era.

The moment, according to Greenberg’s polling and focus-group work, has left voters of all stripes clamoring for disruption. Cultural and ideological currents in society-- more profound than any given day’s Trump uproars-- are giving progressives a better opportunity than they have had in decades to play offense.

This interpretation is notable for the source. Greenberg first drew wide notice a generation ago, with landmark work about how Ronald Reagan captured many working-class Democrats who believed their party’s liberalism was out of step with their lives. He is a veteran of the 1992 “war room” of Bill Clinton-- who won two elections precisely by practicing a brand of defensive politics that required regular reassurance to voters that his activism didn’t mean he liked big government, disliked free enterprise or was sympathetic to 1960s-style radicalism.

Notable also are Greenberg‘s friends who disagree with him. Perhaps no one has been more outspoken in warning that Democrats might be blowing their chance to beat President Donald Trump by swerving too gratuitously to the left than former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. In the latest of a series of commentaries and interviews, he complained in a Medium post that he was part of group “shaking our heads” after the Miami debates as candidates “succumbed to chasing plaudits on Twitter” with strident positions on health care and immigration which risk offending “swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.”

Emanuel, too, is a veteran of Clinton’s war room and White House, and won four House elections and two mayoral elections with his own version of centrism. When he was in Congress, he lived in a basement apartment of a Capitol Hill town house-- owned by Greenberg and his spouse, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT).

“The country is so far away from where it was under Bill Clinton,” Greenberg said in an interview. “People are desperate for government to show it can do big things.”

Greenberg’s and Emanuel’s worldviews are more in tension than outright opposition. Both are alert to the danger that Democrats project that they are more interested in identity politics than representing a unified national interest. Even Emanuel, who draws scorn from the left, supports robust expansion of government’s role to improve health care and education.

Where they differ-- in ways that echo with a broader intraparty debate Democrats are confronting-- is on how they calibrate risks.

One thing that hasn’t changed from the Clinton years, Emanuel believes, is that Democrats must loudly make the case of who they are (pragmatists obsessed with concrete improvements in voters’ lives) and implicitly make the case who they are not (smug and impractical ideologues who live in a leftist echo chamber). That’s why he cringed at seeing candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders call for the abolition of private health insurance, and even several avowed moderates call for decriminalizing illegal border crossings and providing health insurance for undocumented workers.

Greenberg, by contrast, believes that the urgency voters feel for shaking up the status quo means there’s less risk for candidates and the party in going too far than in not going far enough.

He believes the 2020 election will be decided by a couple big questions which favor Democrats: Do you support or oppose America’s accelerating change toward a more diverse and culturally tolerant society that gives more opportunities to historically excluded groups? Do you believe in the power of government to challenge entrenched financial power, and make average people better off?

His belief that Republicans are placing themselves on the electorally losing side of these questions is the foundation of a forthcoming book, R.I.P G.O.P. It is also why he is generally not joining the bed-wetting of many Democratic operatives over the rhetorical and substantive positioning of many Democrats trying to challenge former Vice President Joe Biden’s frontrunner status (Biden for the most part has avoided these extremes, offering himself as a seasoned incrementalist who can beat Trump).

For one thing, Greenberg said, voters properly see most of the Democratic positioning as about making broad statements of values and ideals-- not millstone-around-the-neck commitments that eliminate their ability to maneuver as general election nominee or president.

What’s more, he said, recent focus groups conducted for the American Federation of Teachers by the Greenberg-linked Democracy Corps suggest that a historically damaging charge-- that Democrats’ plans to expand government amount to “socialism”-- is losing some of its potency.

The focus groups with white working class voters outside metropolitan areas in Maine, Nevada and Wisconsin show that Trump uses partisan insults so promiscuously that his rhetoric may be devalued-- participants didn’t find the socialism allegation compelling.

To be sure, wearing a socialism label from Republicans is not an experiment that most Democrats are ready to run. But if the focus groups are correct it may reflect a broader truth about the cycles of American politics: When the ideological tides are moving in their favor, presidential candidates may not have to worry so much about their language, or pay an especially high cost for laying it on too thick.

The best illustration may come from an earlier swing of the cycle, when Ronald Reagan in 1980 dethroned a half-century of New Deal and Great Society dominance of American politics with a brand of free-market, pro-military conservatism that seemed radical at the time. Reagan, many analysts thought, would be doomed by such provocations as launching his general election campaign in Mississippi with favorable references to “states rights,” doubts about his commitment to Social Security, or disparaging environmental laws by saying trees and the Mt. Saint Helens volcano were causing more pollution than anything man-made. Instead, Reagan was seen as right on big questions about realigning the role of government and won 44 states against incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Even a Democratic candidate this year who by temperament is among the least inclined to rhetorical bombast, South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, recently suggested there’s a lesson in this history-- that successful candidates need to both listen to the electorate and push it beyond present boundaries.

In a recent interview with Democratic operative David Axelrod’s Axe Files podcast, Buttgieg said ideas about cutting tax rates and shrinking government in the 1970s were considered “preposterous” but conservatives were so successful in “tugging” the country toward them that by the 1990s that even many Democrats agreed. “It’s time for us to work a little harder to tug the country back.“

This year, he told Axelrod, Democrats can’t project that they are simply the party “promising a return to normal” before Trump when this version of normal “wasn’t working” for many voters.

Like Greenberg, Buttigieg said the risks of being a disrupter shouldn’t be exaggerated: “I do think it’s OK to get a little bit ahead of where the American people are on an issue if we really do believe it.”

Just a teensy weensy bit ahead, like they taught Mayo Pete at McKinsey. Just a teensy weensy bit... and incrementally. Medicare is 54 years old. As Paul Waldman opined yesterday, conservatives didn't like it 54 years ago any more than they back Medicare-For-All today.




And as long as we're on the subject... A newly-released poll from HuffPo by YouGov shows that "Democrats are increasingly unified on everything from a preference for stricter gun laws to opposition to the Hyde Amendment to a belief in man-made global warming. The change has been especially stark on topics revolving around immigration and race. In the past six years, the percentage of Democrats who said that immigrants strengthen the U.S. rose from 58% to 83%. Between 2011 and 2016, the share of white Democrats saying that “over the past few years, black people have gotten less than they deserve” roughly doubled, from 27% to 55%... What does the American public think? Some of the progressive policies being championed poll a whole lot better than others: taxing the wealthy, for instance, is consistently popular, while ideas like abolishing the death penalty or providing reparations for slavery remain a much harder sell. Framing also matters a great deal: support for Medicare for All looks a lot skimpier when Americans are told the plan wouldn’t provide for people to stay on their current private insurance" (idiotic framing that confuses people and makes them think they are losing something instead of gaining something).

But beyond the political viability of specific policies, there’s also a broader question: whether Democrats’ growing liberalism, or their increasingly visible debate over progressive issues, has actually redefined Americans’ image of the Democratic Party or their perceptions about how well the party’s values align with the mainstream.

So far, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds, the answer is no. Views of the Democratic Party, in fact, haven’t really budged in more than four years. The share of Americans calling the Democrats “too extreme,” which stood at 41% in November 2014, now stands at an identical 41%, with only minimal fluctuation in the interim.

The Democratic Party Establishment Is Both Inept And Corrupt-- Which Is Worse?

Shattered by Nancy Ohanian

Stanley Greenberg is as establishment a Democratic Party pollster and strategist as you're going to find. I would have guessed he would disagree with lots of what was in my two posts about the state of the Democratic Party this week-- the autopsy on Monday and yesterday's look at what the DC Democrats (don't) stand for. He's married to top Pelosi ally Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Rahm Emanuel's coffin was housed in their basement all while he ran the DCCC. But... in Susan Glasser's New Yorker feature of the Democratic Party civil war this week, Greenberg rails about how conservative Democrat Ralph Northam is running a shitty campaign in Virginia as if he's "Hillary Clinton. 'He is running on the same kind of issues, and has the same kind of view of the world. It’s the Republicans who talk about the economy, not the Democrats.' This was the approach that doomed Clinton against Trump. The electorate was angry in 2016 and remains angry now, Greenberg said, and Northam, a Norfolk doctor, didn’t get it. Neither did Clinton and the team of Obama veterans who staffed her Brooklyn headquarters. 'If you live in the metro areas with the élites, you don’t wake up angry about what’s happening in people’s lives,' Greenberg said." Welcome to the club, Stan! I gave up the opportunity to sit in on a Pelosi telephone briefing so I could read over Glasser's story again before going on the air with Nicole Sandler yesterday.

Greenberg and other prominent Democrats think Señor Trumpanzee could be reelected in 2020 "unless the Party figures out, and fast, a way to tackle the problem that sealed Clinton’s fate in 2016: how to appeal to the disaffected white working-class voters who provided Trump’s unlikely win a year ago." Greenberg is still stewing of Hillary's "failure to heed the advice of him and others to appeal to the Party’s traditional working-class voters in the Midwest. Compounding the errors, Clinton’s team conducted no state polls in the final three weeks of the campaign, relying instead on flawed data analytics to predict turnout and the vote. As a result, it didn’t even know that final disaster loomed. 'Malpractice and arrogance contributed mightily to the election of Donald Trump,' Greenberg concluded." The villain? Young and data-driven campaign manager Robbie Mook, former executive director of the DCCC in a year where Obama won and the DCCC failed miserably to recapture the House, almost entirely because of Mook and his incredibly incompetent staff. While he was Hillary's campaign manager Mook ignored everyone with a different perspective than his own. That's a big part of why she lost. (As we mentioned yesterday, he and his lot have been contributing massively to defeat populist Lillian Salerno and push one of their own pointless establishment kind, Ed Meier, as the TX-32 nominee.)

Should Democrats bet their future on attacking Trump and pledge, as the California billionaire donor Tom Steyer now wants them to do, to pursue Trump’s impeachment, at all costs, if they win back the House next year? Should they give up on the white voters who went for Trump in 2016 even though many had been reliably Democratic in the past? Was Clinton’s defeated primary challenger, Bernie Sanders, right to try to pull the Party to the left?

Without a resolution to these questions, the next Democratic nominee may well end up caught in the same trap in which Hillary Clinton found herself, stuck defending the legacy of the two-term Obama Presidency, even as the economic dislocations of the Obama era fuelled the rise of populism on both left and right.

It can be difficult, if not impossible, in Washington these days to pay attention to the Democrats’ war within while what appears to be the full-fledged implosion of the Republican Party unfolds. After all, hardly a day goes by when the President of the United States isn’t publicly attacking leaders in his own party, and being attacked back. And this week brought a new obsession: the first indictments in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that the brewing fight over the Democratic Party’s future gets so little airtime. In the wake of Trump’s win, it’s easy to blame Hillary Clinton for being a flawed candidate with a tin ear for politics. Or to rationalize Trump’s unexpected victory as an accident of history. But I haven’t talked with a single Democrat or independent analyst who doesn’t think that the Party remains in serious danger of another electoral catastrophe.

...When Democrats handicap their prospects for 2020 these days, the list of potential candidates is huge and invariably includes septuagenarians like Sanders and former Vice-President Joe Biden—both of whom appear eager to run—as well as an array of younger, relatively unknown officials, like Kamala Harris, the former California attorney general who is now a first-term senator. While the Democratic National Committee is now being led by Obama’s former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has promised a technocratic approach to the problem of resurgent Republicans, the energy in the rank and file remains with the Bernie bros and Sandersistas, who are determined to pull the party to the left—toward a future of universal health care and free college for all. Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, could appeal to this fervent new activist base, and conceivably win the nomination in 2020. But more centrist Democrats worry that she couldn’t do so without forever alienating not only the Trump base but also the Wall Street moneymen who have provided the Party with key financial backing ever since Bill Clinton introduced his New Democrats to the nation, in 1992. As for Trump’s angry white working class, no one’s sure if there are any Democrats at all in the mix for 2020 who can really speak to them. And to the extent that there are such politicians, figures like Biden or Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, no one’s sure there’s a real place for such a candidate in a party moving left quickly.

“The Democratic Party today is divided over whether it wants to focus on the economy or identity,” Greenberg said when we talked. That is, as he pointed out, just what the Clinton campaign was fighting about a year ago. Greenberg and others who came out of the Bill Clinton era-- like the former President himself-- had never really let go of the economy-first mantra that got them to the White House in a different time, and they felt that there was a generational conflict with the Obama operatives who held sway over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 strategy. It was a fight that dogged the Clinton campaign all the way until its final days, when Greenberg and his allies inside the campaign pushed unsuccessfully to close with a focus on her plans for the economy.

“The caricature of this debate is, Bill Clinton says you have a problem and the numbers people say you don’t,” Jake Sullivan, who served as Clinton’s top policy adviser for the campaign after working with her closely at the Obama State Department, recalled. But it wasn’t that Hillary Clinton’s team disagreed over the problem, he insisted, just over what to do about it: “Everybody recognized we had a huge working-class, non-college white issue. The question was, How do you add up to victory? Do you attack it head-on or by compensating elsewhere? That was the fundamental strategic debate.”

And it still is.

Oops, not mention of Wassermann Schultz and the way she cheated to guarantee Hillary would win the nomination. As an unrepentant an establishment figure as the DNC's own Donna Brazile blew the roof off that yesterday with a guest post at Politico: Inside Hillary Clinton's Secret Takeover of the DNC. She admits she had promised Bernie when she took the helm of the DNC after the convention that she would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team-- which, of course, included fired DNC chair Debbie Wassermann Schultz-- had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. "I’d had my suspicions," she wrote, "from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails." But she wanted proof. She claims Obama neglected the DNC and left it to rot while Wassermann Schultz "had not been the most active chair in fundraising," diplomatically not mentioning that Wassermann Schultz employed all the DNC's tools to raise money for herself-- voraciously as she tried to build a case for why she should be House Speaker-- not for the party. By the time Hillary took over the DNC she made it "dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations." Brazile says she found the proof she looked for that the fix was in. Everybody blamed Wassermann Schultz for everything. There can be no doubt she was behind everything that went wrong at the DNC, at least according to Brazile's account.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the thirty-two states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary [Gensler, DNC CFO] said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”

The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.

I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.

...Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially… money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

...The agreement-- signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias-- specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings... This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination... The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

I talk with so many solid young political leaders, almost every day. And really good members of Congress too, like Ted Lieu and Ro Khanna in my own state, for example. I have to keep reminding myself why any of them would want to be associated with the Democratic Party. And there is literally only one conceivable answer, aside from vestigial values long abandoned in all by name: the lesser of two evils. That's it!

Will 2016 Be The End Of The Road For The Republican Party?

In the last few weeks we've referred a few times to the newest poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research's Democracy Corps. Greenberg is Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg and Friday he penned an OpEd for the Washington Post, Why 2016 could be shattering for Republicans. Maybe a better title would have been "Why 2016 could be shattering for Republicans or why it might not be." His premise is that there's a bugeoning new majority pushing for "the revolutionary economic and social changes" that makes the GOP's counterrevolutionary assault antithetical. Works for me... and it was the big talking point when Democracy Corps released their poll a week or so ago.

Greenberg asserted that changes in technology, energy, immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, the family, religious observance and gender roles "are accelerating the emergence of a new America."

Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City’s residents are foreign-born, with Chinese the second-largest group behind Dominicans. The foreign-born make up nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles’s residents and 58 percent of Miami’s. A majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried people, and, in cities, 40 percent of households include only a single person. Church attendance is in decline, and non-religious seculars now outnumber mainline Protestants. Three-quarters of working-age women are in the labor force, and two-thirds of women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their households. The proportion of racial minorities is approaching 40 percent, but blowing up all projections are the 15 percent of new marriages that are interracial. People are moving from the suburbs to the cities. And in the past five years, two-thirds of millennial college graduates have settled in the 50 largest cities, transforming them.

Shifting attitudes were underscored in this year’s Gallup Poll when 60 to 70 percent of the country said gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce are all “morally acceptable.”

The United States is emerging out of its revolutions as racially blended, immigrant, multinational and multilingual-- and diversity is becoming more central to our multicultural identity.

Further, these revolutionary transformations have accelerated the growth of a new majority coalition of racial minorities, single women, millennials and seculars. Together, these groups formed 51 percent of the electorate in 2012, but our analysis of census survey data and exit poll projections indicates that they will comprise fully 63 percent in 2016. With these growing groups each supporting Hillary Clinton by more than 2 to 1 in today’s polls, it is fair to say that the United States has reached an electoral tipping point.

The Republican Party’s battle to defeat this new majority has reached a tipping point, too. The brand of the Republican Party today has probably not been as tarnished since the Watergate era.

Republicans have joined a ferocious and intensifying decade-long counterrevolution in an attempt to stop this new majority from governing successfully. In 2004, George W. Bush campaign strategist Karl Rove launched the battle for American values when he gave up on the so-called swing voter and worked to engage millions more evangelicals. That has required pouring ever more fuel on the fire-- including warning of Armageddon if the liberal Democrats were to govern.

This battle has left the Republicans with mostly married voters, as well as the oldest, most rural and most religiously observant voters in the country. That creates formidable odds against its winning an electoral college majority.

It has also left a Republican Party where three-quarters of its base voters are tea party supporters, evangelicals or religiously observant. That in turn has catapulted to the top of the Republican presidential race candidates who promise to challenge this new America before it’s too late.

That this counterrevolution has reached its own tipping point is evident in the shrinking proportion of people who think of themselves as conservative. When Republicans challenged President Obama in the off-year elections of 2010, 46 percent of the country was conservative at the high point. That figure is now 37 percent.

For Republicans, 2016 will prove to be no normal election, because it will confirm that the new America is here and that the counterrevolution has lost. That is why I expect the result to be shattering for the Republican Party as we know it.

But, as Greenberg's own research has shown, that emerging Democratic majority may not be enthused enough to come out to vote. If Hillary-- who, for example, said last night during the debate that she supports Wall Street because of 9/11 (rather than because the banksters have given her millions of dollars)-- is the nominee, many of these people may say "why bother?" Lesser of two evils? For sure, but is that enough? First woman president-- her best argument-- but is that enough? I'm sure it is for many people; she better hope that'll be 51%. (You can contribute to Bernie's campaign here.)

As for the Republicans, Reuters just released a new poll of Republican voters (Nov. 13). I see they haven't started polling Romney again. They better do something or they're going to wake up with a pretty catastrophic, unpleasant fait accompli.

• Trump 34%

no sale

• Dr. Ben 19.6%
• Rubio 9.7%
• Cruz 7.7%
• Jeb 6.4%
• Wouldn't vote 5.8%
• Huckabee 4.1%
• Fiorina 3.7%
• Rand 3.0%
• Kasich 1.8%

GOP Thinks It's A Good Idea To Hold Tax Cuts For The Middle Class Hostage For Their Wealthy Donors

Only 33% of Republicans want to see Boehner become Speaker

I've been looking into what most of the Republican congressional candidates have in common this year-- no it isn't O'Donnell's anti-masturbation mania-- and it seems to be a threat to block tax cuts for the middle class if the wealthiest 2 or 3% of Americans don't get them too. Their message is, "If the rich don't get their Bush tax breaks extended, no one else will either." Crooked Ohio used car dealer Tom Ganley is a good example. He's trying to buy a seat for himself in northeast Ohio (suburbs of Cleveland and Akron) and he isn't terribly savvy, just sort of parroting the Boehner line. His opponent, progressive Congresswoman Betty Sutton has been an indefatigable fighter for the middle class and is a champion of extending the tax breaks for middle class families. Ganley is more interested in the 3% of Americans who have benefited the most from the Bush economy: " The President just doesn’t seem to understand how dire a situation his policies have created. AND he’s now arguing a step that I believe will certainly make the problem far worse! He’s proposing the elimination of Bush tax cuts for families earning more than $250,000 a year-- in other words, a TAX INCREASE for all those folk. He says he would use that revenue to fund a temporary tax credit for business investment."

A bit to the south of Sutton's district, Congressman John Yarmuth, who represents the Louisville area and is also a firm backer of an extension of middle-class tax cuts and new incentives for small business, is up against Todd Lally, a guy widely seen as dangerously uninformed and angry to the point of becoming unhinged. And Lally, like Ganley, seems obsessed with helping "hard-pressed" millionaires.

Ganley and Lally may be stupider than your average garden variety GOP House candidates, but, essentially, it's the same message wherever you look. When asked directly by the Louisville Courier-Journal if he thought wealthy people were really the ones hurting, he replied, “Yes, I think some of them are.” Economists have concluded that, in fact, the wealth of American millionaires increased by 16% in 2009 alone, while the income of middle-class workers remained stagnate or declined. According to the CBO, extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will cost taxpayers $700 billion over ten years. When confronted with the burden this would place on the national debt, Lally scoffed, reiterated strong support for his millionaire tax plan and offered no plan to pay for it. 

Now, recall that way back on September 12, Boehner, probably drunk, said on Face The Nation that he would vote to extend middle-class tax rates even if it means eliminating the reductions on household incomes exceeding $250,000 a year. He's been walking that back-- in a panic-- ever since. Fearful of the scorn of more Republicans Boehner put together a press conference and said, repeatedly, that he would support only legislation that kept in place the tax cuts for the wealthy as well as for average Americans.

"The Republicans really are put into a very difficult position," said former Republican Representative Bill Archer of Texas, who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax bills. "They are historically for tax relief. In this case, the question is can you be against tax relief if you don't get everything you want?" ... Representative Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, was among Republicans who distanced themselves from Boehner yesterday. "We're for a full, complete extension of the Bush tax cuts," Ryan said on talk-show host Sean Hannity's radio program.

As Dan Pfeiffer explained on the White House blog yesterday, the Republican approach to the scheduled sunsetting on the Bush tax cuts will double the nation's deficit over the next decade!

Instead of joining President Obama in his call to extend the middle class tax cuts to working families, to the people who need it most, McConnell and Boehner’s focus appears to be on millionaires and billionaires who aren’t asking for a tax cut. During these challenging economic times, we simply can’t afford to borrow another $700 billion over the next decade to give an average tax cut of $100,000 to Americans making over $1 million per year.

What’s clear is that Senator McConnell’s and Congressman Boehner’s plan would do absolutely nothing to grow our economy, put people back to work and strengthen America’s middle class. Instead, it would take us back to the same exact failed economic policies that created the mess we’re in: cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires; cut rules for the special interests and big corporations and cut the middle class loose to fend for itself.

...The Congressional Republicans have tried very hard over the past 19 months to convince the American people that they were the only ones who could be trusted with getting spending under control and reducing the deficit. This argument was always laughable, considering these are the same people that took a budget surplus at the end of the Clinton administration and turned it into a $1.3 trillion deficit. Now we have further evidence that, despite all of their bluster about deficits and out of control spending, it’s clear that the Congressional Republicans have no plans to fix these problems and is unprepared to govern responsibly.

Tuesday three of the most committed progressives in Congress, Alan Grayson, Raul Grijalva and Mary Jo Kilroy sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi urging action on the Bush tax cuts before October adjournment. The letter calls for the elimination of tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans who simply don't need them, and use that revenue to help end deficit spending. Boehner and his cronies are already going insane over it-- especially since it was their decades of pushing terrible trade policies that led to the terrible US-China trade deficit and this elimination of unwarranted tax cuts to the wealthy is being touted as a way to get rid of that deficit.

Meanwhile you might be interested in a survey from Stan Greenberg's Democracy Corps that shows how strongly voters support the Democratic position on letting the tax breaks to the wealthy expire while extending them for the middle class.

This will be a tough election, but fortunately, the unfolding tax issue can work strongly to help Democrats and define the choice in the election.  This is a case where Democrats are strongly aligned with public thinking and priorities. Only 38 percent favor extending the Bush tax cuts for those over $250,000-- the official position of Republican leaders and candidates.  Clearly messaging around this choice-- with Democrats voting for middle class tax cuts, while starting to address the deficit and protecting Social Security, contrasted with Republican candidates who still believe trickle-down economics and worsening the deficit-- works for progressives.

With Democrats down by 7 points in the congressional test ballot, they have reason to welcome this potential shift in the dynamic.  Democrats hold the high ground on these issues-- and this one noticeably moves the congressional vote to the Democrats after a debate.  Democrats should embrace a tax debate.  Frankly, they do not have many issues where:

* There is a 17-point margin in favor of the Democratic position, 55 to 38 percent.

* The strong messages gives a disproportionate lift to the Democratic candidates-- scored 13 points better than named Democratic candidates while Republican messages performed half as well.

* There is an opportunity to show seriousness on the deficit, while undermining Republicans on the issue.

* The choice re-enforces Democrats’ core values and strongest framework for the election (for the middle class versus Wall Street).

The payoff from this debate comes in a 2-point narrowing of the Republican lead in the congressional vote after hearing the debate.  And for the most powerful Democratic messages, it narrows the vote by 5 points, to 45 to 47 percent.

This latest poll of likely voters by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps finds majority support for a variety of tax cut measures to protect the middle class. Some of the key findings include:

• Over half-- 55 percent-- support increasing taxes by letting some or all of the Bush-era tax cuts expire. Specifically, 42 percent say the cuts should remain in place for the middle class, but expire for those making more than $250,000.  Just 38 percent say all the tax cuts should remain in place. This is not a purely base issue-- by a 17-point margin, independents favor raising taxes on the wealthy.

• This message is even more popular when it is contextualized by broader economic messages.  By a 10-point margin, voters are persuaded and reassured by the idea of raising taxes on the wealthiest so that revenue can be used for deficit reduction and investment in jobs.

• Majorities clearly side with extending the cuts for the middle class, at least for some time. Voters favor extending the tax cuts for the middle class for two years, as some have proposed, while a similar majority favors extending these cuts permanently. The proposals receive intense popular support from Democrats, with all proposals advocating expiration of tax cuts getting more than six-in-ten support.

President Obama spoke about the hostage-taking from the Rose Garden late yesterday afternoon:

Extending these tax cuts is right. It is just. It will help our economy because middle-class folks are the folks who are most likely to actually spend this tax relief-- for a new computer for the kids or for maybe some home improvement.

And if the other party continues to hold these tax cuts hostage, these are the same families who will suffer the most when their taxes go up next year. And if we can’t get an agreement with Republicans, that's what will happen.

So we don't have time for any more games. I understand there’s an election coming up. But the American people didn't send us here to just think about our jobs; they sent us here to think about theirs. They sent us here to think about their lives and their children’s lives, and to be responsible, and to be serious about the challenges we face as a nation.

Senator David Vitter doesn't pay any attention when President Obama speaks. He summed up the Republican incomprehension of the plight of regular American families nicely and it was caught on tape by Charlie Melancon's campaign. Now Melancon is a conservative Blue Dog, but even he thinks unfair tax breaks for millionaires should be allowed to expire while tax cuts for the middle class stay in place:

The Undersecretary Of Go Fuck Yourself-- Or Why Ryan Lizza Should Lose His License To Practice "Journalism"

If you happen to be strolling down Pennsylvania Ave. and hear someone screaming four letter expletives... well, it isn't Richard Nixon

H. R. Haldeman was the first official presidential chief of staff-- and the first chief of staff to wind up in prison. I'm praying that the damage Emanuel causes won't topple the whole administration and can be contained and results in only one prison sentence. The absolutely clueless and embarrassing puff piece he had Ryan Lizza write about him in the new New Yorker paints him as a naughty and sometimes besieged-- but always brilliant-- rapscallion rather than as a corrupt hack with a great knack for p.r., self aggrandizement and... not much else.

Lizza will never admit that Emanuel dictated the piece, of course-- no one ever does-- but his "critique" of the chief of staff certainly covers all the tropes Emanuel is always having trumpeted by the flacks he gives access. Emanuel's goal seems to have been to paint himself-- even in light of his month-long eye-popping string of screwups that have embarrassed President Obama again and again-- as Mr. Competence. To the undiscerning Ryan Lizza, Emanuel is "known for both his mercurial temperament and his tactical brilliance... When Emanuel left the Clinton Administration, in 1998, he moved back to Chicago, took a job as an investment banker, and in less than three years earned nearly twenty million dollars. In 2002, he won a congressional seat in the city on his first attempt. Three years later, he took over the D.C.C.C., and, more than anyone else, was responsible for restoring Democrats to power the following year. (Not a single Democratic incumbent lost in the general election.) By the time Obama came calling for a chief of staff, Emanuel was the Democratic Caucus chair, making him fourth in the House leadership, and on a path to becoming Speaker." So undiscerning.

I mean, look, earning $20 million in a matter of months as an investment bankster certainly says something, doesn't it? Mr. Jones Lizza doesn't bother figuring out what, though-- just flying the Protestant ethic flag for Emanuel. And though there isn't a word about Blagojevich and only one passing reference to NAFTA, two dirty words that made Rahm Emanuel a Democratic power, Lizza lauds, without explaining, his first congressional win in a race Lizza somehow neglects to explain was so sleazy and corrupt that even by Chicago Machine standards it was shocking. As for Emanuel's DCCC tactical brilliance... well, where to begin? How's about with Emanuel's two top recruits in 2006, a pair of Republicans he got to run as Democrats, Heath Shuler (NC) and Tim Mahoney (FL). Shuler is a rising power among the Blue Dog caucus, votes with Republicans almost more than any other Democrat in Congress, threatened not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, paired up with Tom Tancredo to push a viciously anti-Hispanic immigration bill, and opposed the Stimulus legislation (although, like a Republican, takes credit for the money that his district will see from it!). Now, Mahoney was a millionaire and an admitted Republican and Emanuel, with a little Insider information, persuaded him to switch party registration to run against a popular incumbent in a very Republican district. Once Emanuel forced the actual Democrat, Dave Lutrin, out of the race and Mahoney became the nominee, news broke that the incumbent, Mark Foley, had an ugly sex scandal on his hands. Mahoney-- purely a creature of Rahm Emanuel-- went on to win a convincing victory, the timing of Foley's scandal being so perfect that even though he resigned and withdrew, he couldn't get his name off the ballot. Congressman Mahoney then went on to vote, like Shuler, for the Republican principles and values in his heart. He also cultivated his own ugly little sex scandal and after just two short years was ignominiously defeated for re-election. I bet Lizza hasn't heard of either Shuler or Mahoney. In fact, reading his piece today made me wonder if his trip to visit Emanuel was the first time he'd ever been to Washington, DC.

The closest the toadie-ish Lizza comes to criticizing Emanuel is by way of impersonal anecdote about chief of staff history:

Over the years, some clear patterns about what kind of person succeeds in the job have emerged. James Pfiffner, a professor at George Mason University who has written extensively on the history of the office, cites four chiefs of staff as notable failures: [Sherman] Adams, Haldeman, Donald Regan, who was Ronald Reagan's second chief of staff, and John Sununu, George H. W. Bush's first chief of staff. "All of them got power-hungry, they alienated members of Congress, they alienated members of their own Administration, they had reputations for a lack of common civility, and they had hostile relations with the press. And each one of them resigned in disgrace and hurt their Presidents," Pfiffner said. "Being able to be firm and tough without being obnoxious and overbearing is crucial."

I can picture Lizza sending a draft over to Emanuel's office-- for fact checking, of course-- and Emanuel having an aide get back to him with a suggestion that he follow that with something like "Emanuel's début as chief of staff featured him on the Hill making deals with lawmakers-- politely and with due deference, by all accounts..." Yes, I'm sure... every single one. Lizza, though missing, intentionally or otherwise, everything about Emanuel's history that makes him uniquely unsuitable for the job, did pass along the advice Bush's last chief of staff, Joshua Bolten says emerged from a breakfast he hosted for Emanuel and 11 other former chiefs of staff. Lizza quotes him (directly) saying, "One of the interesting bits of advice that emerged from the breakfast was that you probably shouldn't be a political principal yourself. You need to put aside your own personality and profile and adopt one that serves your boss. I'm not saying you necessarily have to have a low profile, but it can't really be your own independent profile. It's got to be the profile your boss wants reflected, and it has to be a profile that does not compete with the rest of the Cabinet."

So far Emanuel has lived up to his reputation as an egomaniac, glory hound and anal retentive drama queen. As his friend and roommate, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg told Lizza (who doesn't seem to have gotten "it," or at least his role in "it," Emanuel crafts his image carefully to manipulate his public. Remember, for years before he was caught in the lie, he had lost a finger battling a Syrian tank on the Golan Heights, not slicing a pastrami sandwich at a Chicago deli when he wasn't practicing his ballet steps. (He had been in Israel but nowhere near the Golan Heights or any other battlefields; he was learning to make potholders and lanyards at a summer camp at a kibbutz for rich American children.) Greenberg: "He doesn't mind bad publicity. It's part of his cachet, it's part of why he's able to be effective." Depends on who creates the bad publicity; he loves the kind he creates himself-- through naive shills like Lizza-- but when someone throws a little reality in his face, he is quick to lose control of his volatile temper, something that must be devastating for a control freak. In Lizza's only worthwhile moment of the entire drawn out piece, he portrays Emanuel's seething resentment towards someone who actually is an accomplished individual, Paul Krugman. Jane over at FDL not only recounts the Krugman episode, but managed to get Paul to reply:

The question is why Obama didn't ask for what the economy needed, then bargain from there. My view is that Collins et al would have demanded $100 billion in cuts from whatever they started from; and that's not the case he answers.

With publicists like Ryan Lizza trying to pass themselves off as journalists-- and, for the most part, getting away with it, thank the Lord there are people like Jane Hamsher paying attention... oh, and twice in one day!

When Rahm Emanuel went looking for a loyal stenographer to dictate a canonical piece on himself, no surprise his gaze landed on Ryan Lizza, who did the honors for Chuck Schumer in the recent past (wherein Lizza called Russ Feingold "an ass" for proposing a censure resolution against George Bush).  This week's New Yorker carries the 5200 word lap dance in which Rahm finds universal praise from sources carefully chosen to heap said praise upon him.  Paul Krugman gets bashed by Rahm but sadly, there is no room for him to respond.

Today I bantered a little with Emanuel's roomie, Stanley Greenberg and I want to end with something else perceptive he had to say about Emanuel to Lizza: "He's a partisan in the sense that he's a strong Democrat, but he's not an ideological Democrat. He's not ideologically liberal. He comes out of Chicago politics, which is more transactional." Very. And, yes, he's tougher-- or something-- than a pathetic old coot like Ben Nelson.