DCCC Lost All The Races Yesterday-- But Progressives Did Well

DCCC chair Cheri Bustos should resign

Last night 3 important congressional races ended. Nancy Pelosi, Cheri Bustos and their DCCC need to think closely about what happened. One contest was a primary in Omaha and two were special elections to fill seats in Wisconsin and California where members had retired, respectively one Republican and one Democrat. In each special election, the victor will fill the seat until January, at which point the winner of the regular November election will take the seat.

Let's start, though, with the primary in Nebraska. Kara Eastman, a community activist and outspoken progressive, beat Ann Ashford the wife of the former (defeated) Blue Dog congressman, Brad Ashford, in a two-to-one landslide. The DCCC was less overt in their support for Ann Ashford than they had been in their over-the-top backing for Brad in the 2018 primary. In 2018, Kara beat Brad Ashford 21,357 (51.6%) to 19,998 (48.4%). The DCCC was so incensed that Kara beat their pet Blue Dog that they removed NE-02 from their priority list and refused to help Kara win. She only lost by a 2 point margin against GOP incumbent Don Bacon-- 126,715 (51.0%) to 121,770 (49.0%). Let's not allow that to happen again this coming November. Please write to Cheri Bustos and Nancy Pelosi and demand they support Kara Eastman this cycle-- and contribute to her here or by click on the 2020 congressional thermometer on the right.

Yesterday's primary showed Kara with a great deal or-- and much more-- support, despite the Ashfords pouring over $350,000 of their own money into her campaign.

The Omaha World-Herald reported that Kara "earned her chance for a rematch against the two-term Republican incumbent Tuesday night by topping two other rivals in her party’s primary. She immediately took aim at Bacon, saying his record of reliable votes for President Donald Trump and his party don’t fit in a swing district like the Omaha-area 2nd. 'People are looking for leadership and for representation that actually represents the district, and not just somebody who’s going to align himself with his party,' Eastman said."

Two years after a fired-up base of progressives helped upstart Eastman upset former congressman Brad Ashford in the Democratic primary, she easily outpolled his wife, Ann Ashford, and Omaha restaurateur Gladys Harrison in Tuesday’s vote.

That gave her a second chance against Bacon, who beat her by just fewer than 5,000 votes-- about 2% of all cast-- in the 2018 general election. She said she thinks it will be a different race this time.

“It’s already very different in the direction this country has moved,” she said.

...A centrist former Republican, Ashford echoed Bacon from two years earlier in arguing that Eastman’s policies are too extreme for most voters in a district that includes Douglas County and western Sarpy County.

The key example both Ashford and Bacon cite is Eastman’s support for “Medicare for All,” the single-player, universal health care system that would do away with private health insurance.

But the 48-year-old Eastman hasn’t backed down from her support for the health care plan championed by liberal firebrand Bernie Sanders, noting the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the pitfalls of a system that mostly relies on people getting their health insurance through their employer.

Eastman offered herself as “an authentic Democrat.” And much like two years ago, she benefited from an army of grassroots progressive volunteers, who shifted this spring from going door to door to making thousands of calls from phone banks.

...Eastman and Bacon now enter a fall campaign that will likely be heavily influenced by the top-of-ticket battle between Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden. While the two congressional candidates competed two years ago, the presidential race is sure to change the dynamics.

Bacon on Tuesday night said he wished the president were at times more diplomatic. But on issues from abortion to taxes to trade, he said, the president’s positions align well with the district.

“I want that conservative philosophy in the White House,” he said.

Bacon also believes Trump’s supporters will be highly motivated in November. The Republican wave that Trump created in 2016 helped Bacon to his 1-point victory over then-incumbent Brad Ashford.

...But Democrats are heavily motivated to oust Trump, which could drive Democratic turnout in the swing district. And this time Eastman will have the support of the national Democratic establishment, which failed to jump in with both feet to help her when she lost narrowly two years ago.

In charging she is too extreme, Eastman said, Bacon is just “following the Republican playbook” in a race he knows he’s in danger of losing.

“He’ll say that I’m too extreme when he has voted 95% of the time with Donald Trump, and even signed a pledge to not disagree with the president, which is crazy,” Eastman said. “He is the definition of extreme.”

No one expected the Wisconsin special election to switch the 7th district from red to blue. The PVI is R+8 and when Sean Duffy was reelected in 2018 against Democrat Margaret Engebretson, it was a 60.1% to 38.5% wipeout, Duffy winning 23 of the 26 counties, including the 3 big ones, Marathon, St. Croix and Oneida. Although Obama won the district in 2008, he lost to Romney in 2012 and Trump beat Hillary decisively-- 57.7% to 37.3%.

Last night Tom Tiffany was an easy winner over Democrat Tricia Zunker, 109,592 (57.22%) to 81,928 (42.78%). Zunker, president of the Wausau School Board and an associate justice for the Ho-Chunk Nation Supreme Court, did better than either Margaret Engebretson did in 2018 or then Hillary had done in 2016. But not better enough. They will face off again in November. Zunker addressed her supporters last night on Facebook Live, noting that "we laid the groundwork for a Democratic win in November. This isn’t the result we were hoping for, but we did something incredible here. We did something that no one thought a Democrat in this district could do, in spite of a global pandemic. We did something incredible despite the fact that legislators refused to switch to mail-in voting to protect the health and safety of Wisconsinites." Tiffany outraised her by over a million dollars. Their debates were about issues like abortion and gun control.

The other special election-- in CA-25 (Santa Clarita Valley, Antelope Valley and Simi Valley-- was more of a contest. Although the district has a Democratic registration advantage, Republican Mike Garcia, a Trump loyalist, beat Christy Smith, a centrist Democrat. As of this month, the voter registration numbers were very much favorable to the Democrats:

• Democrats- 161,693 (38.41%)
• Republicans- 133,771 (31.78%)
• No party preference- 98,717 (23.45%)

Although Christy Smith was offering nothing but another centrist nothing-- with lots of meaningless partisan endorsements and a meaningless platform-- I predicted she would win anyway, albeit narrowly (and she well may in November). At the time, I noted that her only chance to win would be to reach out to the 6.5% of primary voters who had cast primary ballots for progressive Cenk Uygur and consolidate the Democratic vote. She chose to reach out to Republicans instead and ignore progressives. That proved our "Anonymous Strategist" correct this past Sunday when he predicted she would lose, unable to inspire Democrats to vote.

This morning I reached out to Cenk and asked him why he thought she lost. He was kind:

Republicans vote more. It was a low turnout election and they almost always win those. Probably any Democratic candidate would have lost but the Democratic Party's insistence on picking the least dynamic or populist candidate doesn't help. Mike Garcia was more populist than Steve Knight and the whole Republican Party supported him and helped him win the primary. On the Democratic side, the party despises populism so they all went in very aggressively for the establishment candidate. In primaries, especially very short ones like this, party endorsements make a huge difference and the establishment rules the day. In general elections, undecided voters have the opposite motivation-- they don't like the establishment.

  The Republican Party gives their candidates the trappings of outsiders and the Democratic Party gives their candidates the appearance of being insiders. Independent voters don't like insiders. They're independents-- by definition they're outsiders. It also doesn't help that the Democratic Party leaders are lions against progressives in primaries and lambs against Republicans in the general. How much more vitriolic were they against me than Mike Garcia? If they fought him half as hard as they fought me, they might have had a chance.

This is what happens when the Democratic Party establishment backs candidates with nothing to offer but someone they imagine is the lesser of two evils. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This time didn't. This one wasn't even close:

Republican Former Reality TV Actor Is Resigning

Who remembers MTV's The Real World, one of the first "reality" shows? It started running in 1992 and, after 33 seasons, finally died in 2017. Sean Duffy, pretending to be a lumberjack, was on Season 6, in the Boston season. He played role of the season's Republican dipshit, often arguing with a liberal black woman, Kameelah Phillips, who he called a bitch in episode 4 and a racist who he compared to Hitler in episode 21. After the show was filmed Duffy met another conservative, Rachel Campos and married her. He went to law school and now they're about to have their 9th child. He was appointed district attorney for Ashland County, Wisconsin in 2002 and was never opposed when he ran for reelection in 2002-2008. When long-time congressional incumbent Dave Obey announced he was retiring, Duffy managed to win the district (2010, the Teabagger Cycle) 52-44% against state Senator Julie Lassa. He won the 4 subsequent reelection bids convincingly.

Now 47, Duffy has been uncomfortable in the House ever since his BBF, Paul Ryan, left and yesterday announced he would be resigning next month, thus triggering a special election. The latest GOP gerrymander has turned WI-07 pretty red although the first time he ran, Obama won (under the new boundaries). The PVI is a very daunting R+8 and Trump crushed Hillary by twenty points-- 57.7% to 37.3%. In the 2016 Democratic primary, this was Bernie territory. He didn't just beat Hillary in every county, he was also competitive with Trump in all but the deepest red ones and beat Trump outright in several. This list of counties is in order of which ones have the most voters:

• Marathon-

Bernie- 11,655
Hillary- 8,047
Trumpanzee- 13,299

• St Croix-

Bernie- 5,671
Hillary- 4,891
Trumpanzee- 6,700

• Oneida-

Bernie- 3,809
Hillary- 2,493
Trumpanzee- 4,327

• Douglas-

Bernie- 4,510
Hillary- 3,574
Trumpanzee- 3,676

• Polk-

Bernie- 2,473
Hillary- 2,174
Trumpanzee- 3,542

• Barron-

Bernie- 2,960
Hillary- 2,570
Trumpanzee- 4,217

• Wood-

Bernie- 6,747
Hillary- 4,424
Trumpanzee- 6,941

• Lincoln-

Bernie- 2,439
Hillary- 1,732
Trumpanzee- 3,060

• Vilas-

Bernie- 2,140
Hillary- 1,412
Trumpanzee- 3,241

• Clark-

Bernie- 1,942
Hillary- 1,475
Trumpanzee- 2,823

• Chippewa-

Bernie- 5,114
Hillary- 4,021
Trumpanzee- 5,832

• Langlade-

Bernie- 1,436
Hillary- 1,192
Trumpanzee- 2,407

• Bayfield-

Bernie- 2,604
Hillary- 1,484
Trumpanzee- 1,599

• Sawyer-

Bernie- 1,652
Hillary- 975
Trumpanzee- 2,034

• Taylor-

Bernie- 1,278
Hillary- 850
Trumpanzee- 2,100

• Washburn-

Bernie- 1,417
Hillary- 1,059
Trumpanzee- 1,926

• Burnett-

Bernie- 933
Hillary- 917
Trumpanzee- 1,628

• Ashland-

Bernie- 2,304
Hillary- 1,346
Trumpanzee- 1,367

• Price-

Bernie- 1,393
Hillary- 854
Trumpanzee- 1,673

• Rusk-

Bernie- 1,093
Hillary- 817
Trumpanzee- 1,617

• Forest-

Bernie- 647
Hillary- 609
Trumpanzee- 1,110

• Iron-

Bernie- 543
Hillary- 437
Trumpanzee- 940

• Juneau-

Bernie- 1,843
Hillary- 1,357
Trumpanzee- 2,780

• Florence-

Bernie- 293
Hillary- 175
Trumpanzee- 653

• Monroe-

Bernie- 3,533
Hillary- 2,270
Trumpanzee- 3,613

• Jackson-

Bernie- 1,845
Hillary- 1,294
Trumpanzee- 1,804

Duffy is a member the House Financial Services Committee and a staunch ally of the Wall Street banksters. While serving on the committee he has taken $3,960,753 in legalistic bribes, more than any other member of Congress from Wisconsin other than Paul Ryan. There has never been a vote for which he didn't take the side of the banksters over the interests of his own constituents. Not ever. Not once.

Yesterday he posted his resignation intentions on Facebook:

Next to marrying Rachel, representing you-- the people and families of Wisconsin’s 7th District-- in Congress has been the highest honor of my life. Together, we have engaged in the most important battles of our time: protecting freedom of speech and religious liberty, taking care of our veterans, defending the unborn, and saving American jobs and American capitalism.

After eight and a half years, the time has come for me to focus more on the reason we fight these battles-- family.

As you all know, raising a family is hard work. It's especially true for one as large and busy as mine. Being away from home in Washington four days a week is challenging and for that reason, I have always been open to signs from God when it comes to balancing my desire to serve both my family and my country.

Recently, we’ve learned that our baby, due in late October, will need even more love, time, and attention due to complications, including a heart condition. With much prayer, I have decided that this is the right time for me to take a break from public service in order to be the support my wife, baby and family need right now. It is not an easy decision-- because I truly love being your Congressman-- but it is the right decision for my family, which is my first love and responsibility.

On September 23, I will step down and allow others to step forward to begin laying out their own vision and plans for leading this beautiful district and the most honest, hard-working, family-oriented, patriotic, and God-fearing constituents in America.

I will be forever grateful for and humbled by the faith and sacred trust you have put in me all these years. I am especially grateful for the prayers said on behalf of our family. We hope they keep coming! I will miss being your Congressman, but I am also looking forward to having more time with my family, being home for more birthdays and hockey games, and having time to enjoy and care for our new baby girl, who is already so loved by our family.

A special thank you to my chief of staff, Pete Meachum, my district director, Jesse Garza, and the rest of my loyal and competent district & DC staff. They are the reason you have enjoyed the best and most attentive customer service this district has ever had to resolve your federal issues and problems. I am so proud of what they do and have full confidence they will continue to seamlessly provide these valuable services during the coming transition.

The neo-Nazi Trump-enabler and head of the ill-starred NRCC, Tom Emmer (R-MN), said that "This district is a Republican stronghold, and whoever the socialist Democrats nominate will be forced to answer for their party’s radical agenda of open borders, socialized health care and a lust for impeaching President Trump," simple(minded) quote the GOP has on file to use in all cases for this kind of situation. Rumors are that Duffy plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 2022, when Ron Johnson is retiring.

State Senator Chris Larson told me, flatly, that "Duffy has been a festering pool of hatred, division, and conspiracies since he started. Might just be time for him to cash in before Warren or Bernie ends the money train from DC."

The Republicans jockeying for support to replace him are former state Sen. Sheila Harsdorf, current state Senator Jerry Petrowski and Rep. Romaine Quinn. Democrats thinking of running include progressive activist and farmer Tony Schultz, former state Rep. Maddy Wright, state Senator Janet Bewley (an establishment Dem), state Senator Patty Schactner, and former Ashland City Councilwoman and former Duffy opponent Kelly Westlund, a strong progressive.

Happy 420 Day-- A Guest Post From Kyle Frenette

As we explained about a week and a half ago, Kyle Frenette is the progressive Democrat running for the old Dave Obey seat in northern Wisconsin, currently occupied by Ryan ally Sean Duffy. Frenette is well known in the music industry as the manager of Eau Claire's Grammy-winning Justin Vernon and his band, Bon Iver. His platform includes raising the minimum wage, establishing universal healthcare and making broadband internet a public utility instead of a private luxury. And legalization of marijuana. He thought today would be an auspicious day to lay out his marijuana legalization plank. Here it is-- and if you click on the Green Wave thermometer below, you can contribute to Kyle's campaign and to other candidates with legalization planks as part of their platforms.


For Too Long, Marijuana Has Been Wrongfully Labeled And Misunderstood In This Country
by Kyle Frenette,
Candidate For Congress, WI-07

30 states have legalized the use of marijuana in some capacity. Nine states plus Washington, DC have legalized the drug for recreational use. It’s time for America to fully legalize marijuana.

The issue is not the drug itself, but the stigma surrounding it; a stigma caused by misconception, racism and criminalization. Marijuana has been proven beneficial for so many, and the drug’s illegal status has caused more harm to American society than its side effects.

Here in Wisconsin, I know folks who have had to go to extreme lengths to obtain marijuana legally for medicinal use or travel across state lines for a duration of time to use the drug for treatment. This shouldn’t be the case. I envision a future in which my children and their children view the federal prohibition of marijuana the same way we view the prohibition of alcohol today-- strange and unnecessary.

The progress we’ve seen by individual states in recent years on this issue has been nothing short of encouraging, but it’s time to act on the federal level. The benefits outweigh the pitfalls.

CURB THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC

The federal legalization of marijuana would go a long way to ending the opioid epidemic in America.

There is no reason marijuana should still be classified as a Schedule I drug along with heroin and ecstasy—not when cocaine, methamphetamine and most prescription opioids, like oxycodone and fentanyl are classified as Schedule II by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Our country’s opioid crisis has reached epidemic proportions. The National Institute of Drug Abuse reports that more than 115 people die from an opioid overdose in the U.S. every day. And this plight has reared its head right here in the 7th district: from July 2016 through September 2017, the Midwest saw a 70% increase in opioid overdoses.

Opioids and methamphetamine, with their high-risk of addiction and overdosing, have continued to ravage communities in Wisconsin and across our nation. Meanwhile, marijuana has been proven an effective substitute for prescription opioids in treating pain.

In a recent study conducted by the Minnesota Department of Health, it was found that out of a sample of 2,245 patients taking various pain medications to treat intractable pain, over half (58%) were able to reduce their use of other pain medications while taking medical cannabis. Specifically, opioid medications were reduced for 38% of those patients sampled.

As your Representative, I will champion the federal legalization of marijuana to help curb the opioid epidemic and prevent more lives from being lost and families from being ripped apart in northwestern Wisconsin.

INCREASE MEDICINAL BENEFITS

On a national level, marijuana needs to be re-classified, decriminalized and recognized for its medicinal benefits so that more research can be done and the drug can continue to help more people.

Marijuana is not just an effective pain management tool; it has been proven to treat various other ailments. For example, many neurological disorders and their side effects like seizures caused by Epilepsy or muscle spasms caused by Multiple Sclerosis. Cancer patients use it to manage pain and reduce nausea caused by chemotherapy. It has also been used to increase appetite and limit weight loss in some patients suffering from HIV or other chronic illnesses.

Due to marijuana’s Schedule I classification by the DEA and the strict federal regulations surrounding it, research into other medical uses have proven difficult. For example, when it comes to certain psychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety disorders, a correlation has been found in self-medicating in states where marijuana is legalized. But due to marijuana’s Schedule I classification by the DEA and the strict federal regulations surrounding it, research into these and other potential medical uses have proven difficult and slow-moving.

In Congress, I will support legislation to legalize marijuana in America to make studying the drug easier and to improve the overall health and well-being of those who benefit from its use.

DECREASE MASS INCARCERATION

Most Americans view marijuana as a relatively safe drug while too many futures are being tarnished due to its criminalization.

From the inception of the War On Drugs in the 1970s, our country’s prison population has increased at an alarming rate. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world with an estimated 2.3 million people behind bars. In 2016 alone, more than 80% of the 1.5 million drug arrests were for possession only. And enforcing such laws mostly pertaining to the prohibition of marijuana costs our country about $3.8 billion per year.

Our current drug laws are not only counterproductive, they are also racially skewed. While marijuana use is relatively equal across all races, minorities are disproportionately singled out when it comes to drug related arrests.

It’s said that restrictive marijuana laws have not limited the use and accessibility of the drug. In fact, marijuana use has more than doubled in recent decades. As a result, popular opinion has shifted in favor of legalization, particularly among younger generations.

The case for legalization is growing every day. Once elected, I will push to legalize marijuana so that money is no longer wasted and less futures are ruined by the enforcement of unnecessary laws.

SPUR AGRICULTURAL OPPORTUNITY & ECONOMIC GROWTH

It’s no question that the benefits outweigh the pitfalls when it comes to the growing and selling of marijuana.

Our country’s drug laws are outdated when it comes to marijuana and limit the drug’s economic potential. Economic growth due to the cultivation, sale and taxation of cannabis in states that have adopted legalization prove that it can be a high commodity.

In Colorado alone, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana in 2012, the cannabis industry created 18,000 full-time jobs and brought in $2.4 billion in 2015. And when it comes to taxation, it’s reported that that marijuana has more than tripled tax revenue brought in by alcohol in that state. Nationally, at its current rate of state legalization, an estimated $40 billion in economic output is predicated by the year 2021 when it comes to the legal cannabis industry. Why not increase those odds with federal legalization? Think of all that those funds could be used for: investing in education, infrastructure, and more drug treatment programs to assist further in ending the opioid epidemic.

In Wisconsin, (where medical marijuana is legal but very limited in comparison other states) when signing a bill that legalized hemp farming for the first time in 80 years, Governor Walker proclaimed our state as “America’s Hempland.” This is a good step forward, but the restrictive nature and limited access to seeds due to federal regulations on hemp’s close cousin will stifle industrialized hemp’s economic benefits for our state.

As the Representative of northwestern Wisconsin, I will work to federally legalize marijuana to create jobs and spur economic growth not just for our great state but for the entire country.

New Candidate-- Meet Kyle Frenette (WI-07)

Let me put a new candidate on your radar. I've been hearing about him from friends in the music business. That's because this Wisconsin kid from Chippewa Fall, a small town north of Eau Claire in WI-07, Dave Obey's old seat-- a massive district covering all of northwest Wisconsin. It stretches from Bayfield and Ironwood in the north down into River Falls and the Minneapolis suburbs in the southwest across to Chippewa Falls on Lake Wissota and east through Marshfield and Wausau to Rhinelander and Eagle River. Obama won the district in 2008, lost narrowly to Romney when the state legislature gerrymandered it in 2010 and Trump beat Hillary with a hefty 57.8% to 37.3%. The competitive 2015 PVI (R+2) is a far more challenging R+8 now. But Frenette thinks that's a mountain he can scale.

He's best known as the manager of Eau Claire's Grammy-winning Justin Vernon and his band Bon Iver. The music business is fascinated by his run for Congress and Pitchfork did a piece at the end of February, right after he announced, about why he's running. "He's running, wrote Amanda Wicks, "on a progressive platform with a focus toward raising the minimum wage, establishing universal healthcare, and making broadband internet a 'public utility instead of a private luxury.'"

Frenette has his work cut out for him. He’s seeking to unseat Republican Rep. Sean Duffy (formerly a Real World and Road Rules cast member), who has held the position since 2011, in a district that supported Donald Trump during the 2016 national election. And that’s if he gets through what’s supposed to be a crowded Democratic primary in August.

Pitchfork spoke to Frenette over the phone from northwest Wisconsin late last week about why he decided to run, the parallels between the music industry and politics, and what Justin Vernon thinks of his campaign. Frenette says he’ll bring Wisconsin to Washington, and he helped punctuate that point by scraping the newly fallen snow off his windshield as he discussed his motivation.

Pitchfork: Since Donald Trump’s election, more people have been getting involved in politics, but not everyone is running for Congress. What made you want to go that extra mile?

Kyle Frenette: Backwards policies that suppress the resources and opportunities available not just to people here in the 7th District of Wisconsin and across the state, but everywhere in the country. I grew up in a time when those resources and opportunities were available to me, like the internet providing a window to the outside world beyond my small town of 14,000 people in Chippewa Falls. We’re finding that the majority in control right now are in favor of suppressing all of that [in reference to Net Neutrality being rolled back], making it harder and harder for your everyday American to achieve what we grew up learning. Personally, so many of my friends still call northwestern Wisconsin home, so I saw an opportunity-- given the work Justin and I have done over the past ten years-- to amplify the voice of normal people, not the lobbyists, not the special interest groups.

We elected a celebrity president. My opponent Sean Duffy, he’s a former “Real World” cast member. So if celebrity is what it’s going to take to get people’s attention these days in the age of reality television then I’m going to use the success that Justin and I have had to amplify a better voice.

Throughout the 22, A Million tour, you guys have partnered with numerous progressively-minded organizations with an eye toward gender equity. In your opinion, why is progressive the best way forward?

In taking a look at everything that’s going on, and looking at both sides of the argument, the progressive direction is the one that appeals most to me, and the one that makes sense for most people. Greed is a really powerful drug, a really powerful emotion. I’ve had successes beyond my wildest dreams, but I work in an industry that’s somewhat elitist and I’ve seen the power of what money can do. That’s not to say both sides haven’t been conflicted, but progressive values speak to the heart of the masses, and who we are as human beings and taking care of one another. That’s where I lean philosophically and personally, and the direction I would feel most comfortable having children and giving to future generations.

How do you think you can influence the conservative mindset?

I’ve had a hard time with that, even in talking with family. We’re seeing more and more how divisive politics are and how divided as a country we are. For me, it goes back to the values that I was taught growing up here. We need to come together and we need to listen to each other. That’s it. If we don’t agree, that’s fine, but this divisiveness that’s fueling so much of our politics these days, it might very well be the end of us. Good leadership is about taking in all sides: evaluating a situation based on political factors, socioeconomic factors, human factors, and then making the right decision and going forward. For me, that decision should benefit as many people as possible.

Duffy last won the district by 61 percent and Trump carried it in 2016. Have you seen a general attitude shift in the past year away from GOP values?

Completely. We’re seeing this all across the country-- the pendulum has swung all the way to the right and now it’s centering. Here in the 7th, we had a special state Senate election in January; the candidate in District 10, Patty Schachtner, received national attention because she won, and she was outspent 5-to-1 by those backing the Republican candidate. It was a complete underdog race, and it was a surprise to me and a lot of folks. If that and Virginia [where Democrat Danica Roem unseated Republican Robert G. Marshall in Virginia’s House of Delegates race] and Alabama [where Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore for what was previously a Republican Senate seat] are any indication of where we’re heading, then I have hope. I’m just trying to be a part of that change and amplify people’s voices.

You’ve mentioned the music industry in light of what you’d face in Washington. What parallels do you see between the two?

The same types of things happen in the music industry [as they do in politics], but I’m going from a lake full of piranhas to an ocean full of sharks. Justin and I have been so fortunate in building something and having the support of so many to do things that we wanted: Maintaining our integrity, staying true to who we are, staying in this place and reinvesting back into our communities, and pushing the envelope a bit. All of those elements factor into the leadership that I’ve brought to Bon Iver and to my management company. If I can do an ounce of that in Washington and bring some of my Wisconsin values, then I’ll feel good.

Bon Iver’s song “Wisconsin” soundtracks your new campaign ad. Will he always have a place in your campaign, or will you distinguish yourself from that past eventually?

I haven’t thought about that all that much. It’s so much of who I am. Both him and I are just small-town Wisconsin, and we jumped into this for the last decade and never really lost sight of who we are. I’m using the opportunity I have to do good, and we definitely disagree on things, but we’ll see.

What was his response when you said you were running?

Oh, I haven’t been able to walk into a room without him telling everyone, which was to a point, like, “Dude, calm down.” He’s really happy.

Justin recently played two previously unreleased tracks—both titled around cities in Wisconsin-- at the For Emma, Forever Ago anniversary show, and then of course there’s “Wisconsin.” That state spirit he’s attempted to capture in his music, how do you see it influencing your move forward?

Well, Justin writes from the heart, he always has. Everything we’ve done has come through not leaving the center of who we are and where we come from, and you can hear that in the music. That’s what I think attracts so many people to the music. It’s true. So much of what he’s singing about, even when you can’t understand him, feels like a shared human experience. It’s absolutely beautiful, the song “Hayward, WI.”

And it’s in your district.

It is. Hawyard is in the heart of the 7th District.

Any plans to share that song officially?

Like he said at the show, he wrote that during the For Emma sessions at the cabin. I remember when he showed it to me 10 years ago, he had showed me “Blood Bank” and that song. We were like, “These are different. They’re more story based, they’re less ethereal, they’re more literal. ‘Blood Bank’ seems like the one to go with.” We just sat on “Hayward” for a long time. He’s played it live once or twice, but I don’t know. It’s hard to say.



It can affect us on that human and emotional level. I think that video we made for this campaign strikes that balance really well, and that in and of itself creates human connection. Hopefully it will yield more opportunities to come together and to just listen to each other.

Trump And Ryan Set Out To Make War On The Poor-- Take Wisconsin, For Example

This morning Carol Shea-Porter hosted a roundtable discussion at the Strafford Nutrition Program in Somersworth to highlight what her office called "the devastating harm President Trump’s budget blueprint proposal would cause to New Hampshire communities that rely on programs like Meals on Wheels." Despite Mick Mulvaney's lies on Meet the Press yesterday-- namely that the feds' cut to Meals on Wheels only amounts to 3% of their budget-- the truth is that 35% of Meals On Wheels funding comes from the federal government and the proposed cuts in the Trump budget would be catastrophic. Trump has made it commonplace for public officials-- especially his own-- to lie at will and assume there will be no accountability. Meals on Wheels, however, may be their donnybrook. Every really far right congressmen-- like Pete Sessions in the suburbs north of Dallas-- say they can't go along with Ryan on this one. But on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Ryan this:

Are you comfortable with cutting funding for Meals on Wheels which supplies food-- and seniors depend on it-- to two-and-a-half million elderly Americans?

Simple straight forward question that, in light of Trump's budget, had to be asked. Ryan said he wants spending caps because they "make us focus on cutting spending that is wasteful spending" and that started babbling about "waste, fraud and abuse." What the hell is he talking about? Meals on Wheels, which began in Pennsylvania in 1954 and turned into a national program in 1974, delivers meals to individuals at home who are unable to purchase or prepare their own meals-- the housebound elderly poor and handicapped. Research has consistently shown that these meals significantly improve diet quality, increase nutrient intakes, reduce food insecurity and improve quality-of-life among the recipients. The program also reduces government expenditures by reducing the need of recipients to use hospitals, nursing homes or other expensive government-subsidized services. Meals on Wheels provided approximately 218 million meals to 2.5 million Americans, half of whom are veterans, at an annual cost of $2,765 each. Mulvaney's claim that the program is "just not showing any results" is widely rejected by... everyone who isn't part of the Trump Regime.

Over the weekend, the biggest newspaper in Wisconsin-- a state whose 10 electoral college votes Trump won (with alleged vote machine tampering) 1,409,467 (47.9%) to 1,382,210 (46.9%)-- 27,257 votes (1% of the total)-- looked at how TrumpCare would impact Trump voters in rural parts of the state. Former reality TV personality-turned-right-wing congressman, Sean Duffy, was the first member of Wisconsin's congressional delegation to jump on the Trump bandwagon. His sprawling northern district-- WI-07-- was solidly Democratic, the home of Dave Obey, until recently, when the DCCC ceded it to Duffy. In 2014 they refused to support progressive Kelly Westlund and last year they refused to support progressive Mary Hoeft. The district, strong Bernie territory in the primary, is not on any DCCC target lists for 2018, despite the fact that Obama beat McCain there 53-45% and then lost narrowly to Romney 50.9-47.8%. Instead, the DCCC brain surgeons are only looking at Trump's 57.8% to 37.3% win over Clinton. (Bernie would have won the district.) WI-07 was Trump's strongest district in the state-- and the one that will suffer the most if TrumpCare passes. Trump won 50-60 year old Obamacare enrollees in Wisconsin by 15 points-- "and they disproportionately live in rural areas that voted for Trump and are represented by Republicans in Congress."

Take the case of a fairly typical Obamacare enrollee-- a 60-year-old with an income of $30,000.

Nationwide, this man or woman would lose an average of $4,150 per year in health care tax credits and subsidies under the GOP plan, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But those cuts would vary dramatically from county to county.

In Wisconsin, the cuts would be much smaller in the southwest and south central parts of the state. In Sauk County, for example, a 60-year-old with an income of $30,000 would lose $1,300 in tax credits and subsidies for his or her health care plan compared to current law.

But in some northern and western counties, that assistance would decrease by more than $7,000.

The main reason?

Under Obamacare, the financial aid people get to help them buy their health insurance is more generous in areas where health care costs are higher. Those areas include many rural counties where there are fewer health care providers.

“They’re getting a larger tax credit under the Affordable Care Act. And they would lose out on that under the House bill,” Cynthia Cox, an analyst with Kaiser, said of those areas.

Under the GOP plan, tax credits would not differ from county to county or region to region. There would be no boost in aid for people in places with high health care costs. That’s why those enrollees would see the biggest decline in their tax credits.

And because those areas are disproportionately rural and Republican, that complicates the politics of getting the GOP plan through Congress, where it may be voted on this week.

Republicans are weighing changes in the bill to secure the votes they need from within their own party for final passage, and those changes could include tweaks to the tax credits.

The biggest losses in tax credits in Wisconsin would occur in two mostly rural congressional districts, the northern seat held by Duffy and the western seat held by Democrat Ron Kind.

Duffy’s district has the highest number of Obamacare enrollees in the state (more than 35,000 last year) and Kind’s has the third highest.

Both areas were carried by Trump last fall. They are also the two congressional districts in Wisconsin that saw the biggest swings toward the GOP in 2016.

In both districts, a 60-year-old making $30,000 would lose an average of more than $5,500 a year in health care tax credits under the GOP plan, based on a Journal Sentinel analysis of the Kaiser data.

For older, low-income couples, the loss in tax credits would top $15,000 in parts of both districts.

“When I saw their plan ... I immediately said, ‘This is not going to be good for rural Wisconsin or rural America generally,’ which is ironic, given where (Trump’s) base of support came from,” said Kind, who voted against the GOP plan when it was approved along party lines by the House Ways and Means Committee.

“Without the means to pay for (plans), they won't be able to get covered,” said Kind.

Duffy said Saturday he has concerns about the ability of some older people to purchase a health care plan with the GOP tax credit as it is currently designed.

“The final page hasn’t been written” on the bill, he said. “Maybe we can improve the amount of money that an individual in their 60s gets in regard to their refundable tax credit.”

But Duffy said he did not favor the approach under Obamacare of offering bigger tax credits to people in higher-cost counties (though that has meant more generous subsidies in his rural district). And that view appears to be the prevailing one among House Republicans.

Duffy said that is the kind of government “micromanaging … we’re trying to get away from.”

More broadly, Duffy argued that Obamacare was unpopular in his district and was making health care more costly. He argued the GOP plan would create more competition, lower costs and, as a result, “my communities will get helped far more than what they have under Obamacare.”

While northern and western Wisconsin would see the biggest losses in tax credits under the GOP plan, parts of southern Wisconsin would be hurt a lot less.

The district that would see by far the smallest cuts in tax credits for older enrollees is one that voted heavily against Trump: the seat anchored by Madison and represented by Democrat Mark Pocan.

In Pocan’s district, the average loss in tax credits for a 60-year-old with a $30,000 income would be less than $2,000 a year-- a much smaller reduction than in northern Wisconsin.

And a 40-year-old enrollee in Pocan’s district with the same $30,000 income would actually get more assistance, not less, under the GOP plan, which treats younger and higher-income enrollees more favorably than the current system.

There were roughly 240,000 people enrolled in health plans on the federal marketplace under Obamacare last year in Wisconsin. The analysis in this story is based on just one measure (premium subsidies and tax credits) of how those Obamacare enrollees would fare under the GOP plan.

For example, it does not take into account the loss of cost-sharing subsidies for lower-income enrollees, the impact of Medicaid changes and cutbacks, or the potential of higher premiums for older enrollees.

A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that the GOP plan would save more than $300 billion over 10 years but would result in an additional 24 million people being uninsured.

You hear a lot of this from Trump voters in the Midwest: "Originally the president said he wasn’t going to do nothing to Medicaid. Now they say he wants to take $880 billion out of Medicaid. That’s going to affect a lot of people who can’t afford to get insurance." That may account for his steadily plummeting favorability ratings-- down at 37% now. The NY Times reported yesterday that "As Republicans in Washington grapple with how to meet their promise of undoing the greatest expansion of health care coverage since the Great Society, they are struggling with what may be an irreconcilable problem: bridging the vast gulf between the expectations of blue-collar voters... who propelled Mr. Trump to the presidency, and longstanding party orthodoxy that it is not the federal government’s role to provide benefits to a wide swath of society. If they push forward the House-drafted health bill, which could come to a vote as early as this coming week, Republicans may honor their vow to repeal what they derided as Obamacare, but also risk doing disproportionate harm to the older, working-class white voters who are increasingly vital to their electoral coalition."

A new Pew Research Center survey indicated that the number of Republicans making below $30,000 a year who believe the federal government has a responsibility to ensure health coverage for all had risen to 52 percent from 31 percent last year. And while just 14 percent of Republicans who make between $30,000 and about $75,000 last year said the government bore responsibility for health care, now 34 percent of such voters do.

“This is a function of Donald Trump engineering a takeover of the Republican Party,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster. “It was takeover more than assimilation, and this is the eminently predictable result.”

But now that it is Mr. Trump’s Republican Party, those who elected him will expect him to fulfill his campaign commitments.

2018 should be a good electoral year for Democrats in Wisconsin-- if only there was no DCCC. The DCCC isn't targeting any Wisconsin GOP-held districts and plausible candidates don't want to run because they don't trust the DCCC not to interfere with their fundraising efforts and undermine their campaigns. So, even with the popular Tammy Baldwin at the top of the ticket, it now looks like Sean Duffy, as well as sociopaths Glenn Grothman, Mike Gallagher and Paul Ryan will all get free tickets to reelection courtesy of Nancy Pelosi and Ben Ray Lujan. well... at least Green Day will be on with Stephen Colbert tomorrow night. And even if no one at the DCCC understands their resistance, normal voters do-- in Wisconsin and everywhere else.

Two Charts That Help Explain Why Pelosi's Hopelessly Inept DCCC Isn't Capable Of Winning Back Congress

Just above we have the election results for two blue Miami-Dade congressional districts, FL-26 and FL-27. The Republican House incumbents, respectively Carlos Curbelo, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, won both.

In 2012, Obama won Miami-Dade 540,776 (62%) to 332,602 (38%). This year, Hillary did even better than Obama did-- 623,006 (63.7%) to 333,666 (34.1%). Even the hapless Patrick Murphy-- the worst possible Senate candidate the DSCC could find-- won in Miami-Dade (Rubio's home base) 528,555 (54.6%) to 419,623 (43.3%).

Obama beat Romney in FL-26 53-46% and beat him in FL-27 53-47%. I don't have the final numbers for the presidential campaign by congressional district but Hillary did better than Obama did in winning both FL-26 and FL-27. Although the Democrats had a fatally-flawed candidate-- corruption mired conservative Joe Garcia-- they fought hard and the DCCC and House Majority PAC wasted $6,101,294 in the district, one of their top spends of 2016. They spent nothing at all in FL-27. That may seem odd, considering it's right next door and just as blue as FL-26, perhaps bluer now.

But that's easily explained. FL-27's Republican incumbent, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is under the protection of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She makes sure no viable opponent is ever nominated against Ros-Lehtinen and that no money is ever spent against her. Washerman Schultz has gotten away with this for a full decade, even though she was caught doing it and publicly chastised (or gentled wrist slapped anyway). This time the opponent was Scott Fuhrman, a worthless millionaire who self-funded $694,718 into the race but brought in only $7,488 in small contributions, and had nothing whatsoever to offer working families. But he still managed to do substantially better than the Blue Dog/New Dem-endorsed Garcia who the DCCC spent all those millions of dollars on. Fuhrman got 129,548 votes (45.1%) and Garcia got 115,348 votes (41.2%). That can of thing only makes sense in DCCC-world. The DCCC will do the same thing next cycle as well, throwing away two prime pick-ups because no one wants to get in a mud-wrestling match with a disgusting, vicious animal like Wasserman Schultz.

And here's another chart, this one showing the two sprawling congressional districts in northern Wisconsin, WI-07 and WI-08. Trump surrogate and former reality TV actor Sean Duffy represents WI-07 to the west and Reid Ribble retired, leaving an open seat in WI-08 to the east. Obama won both districts against McCain (with 53% in WI-07 and with 54% in WI-08) and then lost both districts against Romney, 51% to 48%. The DCCC decided to go for what looked like the easier district, WI-08, which had no incumbent. So they threw $551,076 for garden variety moderate Democrat Tom Nelson. They gave exactly zero to progressive Berniecrat Mary Hoeft, by every standard (except the DCCC's), the far better candidate. A half million dollars for Nelson bought him 135,648 votes (37.3%). Mary would probably have won with any reasonable amount of support. She managed to raise $105,417 from the grassroots-- to Duffy's $2,155,137. (She received a modest boost from the Working Families Party, which spent $128,528 against Duffy independently.) She got more raw votes than Nelson and a greater percentage of the vote to boot-- with zero investment from the DCCC or House Majority PAC. Her total was 137,910 (38.2%).

Clearly, something is wrong with the way the dummy-conservaDems who run the DCCC-- Ben Ray Lujan, Steve Israel, Cheri Bustos and Kelli Ward-- are recruiting candidates and funding campaigns. And that didn't start in 2015. It goes back to the way Rahm Emanuel shaped the DCCC to be a vehicle for the Republican-wing of the Democratic Party. And the Democrats have lost not dozens of seats, but scores of seats, under the Pelosi chairmen and their miserable and corrupt, failed, unaccountable staff.

Instead of trying to figure out what went wrong, they just deny anything went wrong, pat each other on the back, find someone or something else to blame and declare it could have been worse if not for their own brilliance. If they don't even recognize that going from 257 seats in 2008 to 193 seats in 2010 and to 188 in 2014 (a loss of 69 seats) is a disaster, how will they ever deal with the core philosophy, strategy and tactics that have the House Dems sink lower and lower?

2018 could be a banner year for House Democrats-- but not with this turgid DCCC that is incapable of winning. Remember, in 2010, 65,237,840 Americans voted for Democratic House candidates (and 52,249,491 voted for Republicans). This year just 35,624,357 Americans bought the DCCC's non-message, while 40,081,282 Americans voted for Republican candidates. The Democrats had a net gain of six seats this year where they needed 30 and the bar for success was a minimum of 15-20. But even where the Democrats had 4 of their most important successes in building a worthwhile team for the future-- WA-07 (Pramila Jayapal), CA-44 (Nanette Barragan), MD-08 (Jamie Raskin) and NH01 (Carol Shea-Porter), the DCCC had no involvement whatsoever and spent zero dollars. If you would like to help Blue America congressional recruiting efforts for 2018, this is the place.

Clintonism: Re-Defining Progressivism, Populism And The Democratic Party-- And Not In A Good Way

Congressman Wright Patman (D-TX), chairman of the House Banking Committee, 1963-74, led the fight in Congress to stop the manipulators of the Federal Reserve System from 1937 to his death in 1976

It flipped me out earlier in the cycle when Obama sent out numerous communications-- including radio ads-- to Democratic base voters in Florida, particularly African-Americans, that reactionary New Dem Patrick Murphy is a progressive. The only relationship that Patrick Murphy has with progressives is that he opposes their agenda and that he was running against one, Alan Grayson. But, then again, maybe it's just about how you define "progressive." After all, Murphy doesn't mind if women get abortions or gays want to get married or even if lots of undocumented immigrants come over the border. If that's how you define progressive... ok, Murphy's a progressive. A look at his voting record, on the other hand, paints a picture of Wall Street's most devoted Democratic puppet in Congress, something borne out by Wall Street campaign contributions this cycle. Murphy has gotten more loot ($2,013,462) from the Finance Sector than any other non-incumbent running for the Senate-- more than any Republican and more than many incumbents. The banksters have given more to Murphy than to embattled allies like Ron Johnson (R-WI), John McCain (R-AZ), Mark Kirk (R-IL), Richard Burr (R-NC), Joe Heck (R-NV), Roy Blunt (R-MO), men who have served them faithfully for years or even decades and are now facing defeat. But getting Murphy into the Senate is a Wall Street priority, even if they love Marco Rubio and were a significant part of his aborted presidential campaign.

In fact, more than any other Democrat running for the Senate, Murphy is seen as the not-Elizabeth Warren candidate. He's the one who has worked in the House Financial Services Committee to help the Republicans with their efforts to undo all the consumer protections Warren was able to incorporate into Dodd-Frank. But if decades old battles for gay rights and women's equality is the ultimate definition of "progressive," maybe Obama wasn't as much of a liar as he sounded and maybe I was too hasty to point out that Murphy's parents' and Saudi allies' promises to help fund his presidential library-- surely a progressive place in the making, no?-- weren't really the motivation for the lie.

Notorious bankster errand boys Chuck Schumer and Patrick Murphy

Anyway, yesterday Matt Stoller, a Bernie Sanders Senate staffer, published the article of the day, How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul and the period he wrote about, the mid to late 1970s-- was actually just before Patrick Murphy was born. The liberal reformers who came in on the coattails of Americans' disgust with Nixonian sleaze, didn't understand that banksterism was the enemy either. And they screwed things up in a way to make it possible for Wall Street toadies like Patrick Murphy, Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) to thrive within the Democratic Party today.

It's entirely consistent with Stoller's nature to launch right into a defense of an old racist, pro-war congressman who few people outside of obsessed political junkies have ever heard of. "One of their first targets," he wrote, "was an old man from Texarkana: a former cotton tenant farmer named Wright Patman who had served in Congress since 1929. He was also the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency and had been for more than a decade. Antiwar liberal reformers realized that the key to power in Congress was through the committee system; being the chairman of a powerful committee meant having control over the flow of legislation. The problem was: Chairmen were selected based on their length of service. So liberal reformers already in office, buttressed by the Watergate Babies’ votes, demanded that the committee chairmen be picked by a full Democratic-caucus vote instead. Ironically, as chairman of the Banking Committee, Patman had been the first Democrat to investigate the Watergate scandal. But he was vulnerable to the new crowd he had helped usher in. He was old; they were young. He had supported segregation and the war in Vietnam; they were vehemently against both. Patman had never gone to college and had been a crusading economic populist during the Great Depression; the Watergate Babies were weaned on campus politics, television, and affluence."

In reality, while the Watergate Babies provided the numbers needed to eject him, it was actually Patman’s Banking Committee colleagues who orchestrated his ouster. For more than a decade, Patman had represented a Democratic political tradition stretching back to Thomas Jefferson, an alliance of the agrarian South and the West against Northeastern capital. For decades, Patman had sought to hold financial power in check, investigating corporate monopolies, high interest rates, the Federal Reserve, and big banks. And the banking allies on the committee had had enough of Patman’s hostility to Wall Street.

Over the years, Patman had upset these members by blocking bank mergers and going after financial power. As famed muckraking columnist Drew Pearson put it: Patman “committed one cardinal sin as chairman. ... He wants to investigate the big bankers.” And so, it was the older bank allies who truly ensured that Patman would go down. In 1975, these bank-friendly Democrats spread the rumor that Patman was an autocratic chairman biased against junior congressmen. To new members eager to participate in policymaking, this was a searing indictment.

...Not all on the left were swayed. Barbara Jordan, the renowned representative from Texas, spoke eloquently in Patman’s defense. Ralph Nader raged at the betrayal of a warrior against corporate power. And California’s Henry Waxman, one of the few populist Watergate Babies, broke with his class, puzzled by all the liberals who opposed Patman’s chairmanship. Still, Patman was crushed. Of the three chairmen who fell, Patman lost by the biggest margin. A week later, the bank-friendly members of the committee completed their takeover. Leonor Sullivan-- a Missouri populist, the only woman on the Banking Committee, and the author of the Fair Credit Reporting Act-- was removed from her position as the subcommittee chair in revenge for her support of Patman. “A revolution has occurred,” noted the Washington Post.

Indeed, a revolution had occurred. But the contours of that revolution would not be clear for decades. In 1974, young liberals did not perceive financial power as a threat, having grown up in a world where banks and big business were largely kept under control. It was the government-- through Vietnam, Nixon, and executive power-- that organized the political spectrum. By 1975, liberalism meant, as [Michigan's Bob] Carr put it, “where you were on issues like civil rights and the war in Vietnam.” With the exception of a few new members, like [George] Miller and Waxman, suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism had vanished.

Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics. They restructured “campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization.” They took on domestic violence, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, and sexual harassment. They jettisoned many racially and culturally authoritarian traditions. They produced Bill Clinton’s presidency directly, and in many ways, they shaped President Barack Obama’s.

The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. This is not what the Watergate Babies intended when they dethroned Patman as chairman of the Banking Committee. But it helped lead them down that path. The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump.

In March, we spent some time talking about Thomas Frank's new book, Listen Liberal-- Or What Ever Happened To The Party Of The People. Stoller's analysis is very much in synch with the one offered by Frank, namely that the Democratic Party no longer prioritizes the interests of working families but instead super-serves the interests of the top 10%, a professional class for whom Wall Street is not as mortal an enemy as has proven itself to be to the working class.

Stoller lionizes the contributions of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who, he wrote, essentially formaled "the populist social sentiment of the late 19th century into a rigorous set of legally actionable ideas. This philosophy then guided the 20th-century Democratic Party."

Brandeis’s basic contention, built up over a lifetime of lawyering from the Gilded Age onward, was that big business and democracy were rivals. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” he said, “but we can’t have both.” Economics, identity, and politics could not be divorced, because financial power-- bankers and monopolists-- threatened local communities and self-government.

This use of legal tools to constrain big business and protect democracy is known as anti-monopoly or pro-competition policy. This tension stretched back to colonial times and the nation’s founding. The British East India Company was a chartered corporation organized to monopolize the tea business for its corporate owners and the Crown-- which spurred the Boston Tea Party. Alexander Hamilton’s financial architecture concentrated power and wealth-- which prompted the founding of the Democratic Party along more Jeffersonian lines, promoting private small-land ownership. J.P. Morgan’s and John D. Rockefeller’s encroaching industrial monopolies were part of the Gilded Age elite that extorted farmers with sky-high interest rates, crushed workers seeking decent working conditions and good pay, and threatened small-business independence-- which sparked a populist uprising of farmers, and, in parallel, sparked protest from miners and workers confronting newfound industrial behemoths.

In the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson authored the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Federal Reserve Act, and the anti-merger Clayton Act, and, just before World War I intervened, he put Brandeis on the Supreme Court. Franklin Delano Roosevelt completed what Wilson could not, restructuring the banking system and launching antitrust investigations into “housing, construction, tire, newsprint, steel, potash, sulphur, retail, fertilizer, tobacco, shoe, and various agricultural industries.” Modern liberals tend to confuse a broad social-welfare state and redistribution of resources in the form of tax-and-spend policies with the New Deal. In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy. The New Deal divided power, pitting faction against other faction, a classic Jefferson-Madison approach to controlling power (think Federalist Paper No. 10). Competition policy meant preserving democracy within the commercial sphere, by keeping markets open. Again, for New Deal populists like Brandeis and Patman, it was democracy or concentrated wealth-- but not both.

...Underpinning the political transformation of the New Deal was an intellectual revolution, a new understanding of property rights. In a 1932 campaign speech known as the Commonwealth Club Address, FDR defined private property as the savings of a family, a Jeffersonian yeoman-farmer notion updated for the 20th century. By contrast, the corporation was not property. Concentrated private economic power was “a public trust,” with public obligations, and the continued “enjoyment of that power by any individual or group must depend upon the fulfillment of that trust.” The titans of the day were not businessmen but “princes of property,” and they had to accept responsibility for their power or be restrained by democratic forces. The corporation had to be fit into the constitutional order.

Remember, it was the great bankers and managers of the “money trusts,” such as J.P. Morgan, who sat astride wide swaths of corporate America through their investment and lending power, membership on boards of directors, and influence over industrial titans. Among other things, they maintained a sufficient concentration of power to keep prices up, workers disorganized, and politics firmly within their grasp.

New Deal fears of bigness and private concentrations of power were given further ideological ammunition later in the 1930s by fascists abroad. As Roosevelt put it to Congress when announcing a far-reaching assault on monopolies in 1938: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” In 1947, Patman even commissioned experts to publish a book titled Fascism in Action, noting that fascism as a political system was the combination of extreme nationalism and monopoly power, a “dictatorship of big business.”

This basic understanding of property formed the industrial structure of mid-20th-century America and then, through its trading arrangements, much of the rest of the world. Using this framework, the Democrats broke the power of bankers over America’s great industrial commons. To constrain big business and protect democracy, Democrats used a raft of anti-monopoly, or pro-competition, policy to great effect, leading to vast changes: The Securities and Exchange Commission was created, the stock exchanges were regulated, the big banks were broken up, the giant utility holding companies were broken up, farmers gained government support for stable agricultural prices free from speculation, and the chain stores were restrained by laws that blocked them from using predatory pricing to undermine local competition (including, for instance, competition from a local camera store in San Francisco run by a shopkeeper named Harvey Milk).

Competition policy was also a powerful political strategy. Democrats lost the U.S. House of Representatives just twice between 1930 and 1994. To get a sense of how rural Democrats used to relate to voters, one need only pick up an old flyer from the Patman archives in Texas: “Here Is What Our Democratic Party Has Given Us” was the title. There were no fancy slogans or focus-grouped logos. Each item listed is a solid thing that was relevant to the lives of conservative white Southern voters in rural Texas: Electricity. Telephone. Roads. Social Security. Soil conservation. Price supports. Foreclosure prevention.

Foreclosures protected homes against bankers. Farm-to-market roads allowed communities to organize around markets. Social Security protected one’s livelihood in the form of unemployment insurance and old-age benefits. Price supports for family farms protected them from speculators. And rural electrification and telephones shielded communities from the predations of monopolistic utilities. Packaged together, these measures epitomized the idea that citizens must be able to govern themselves through their own community structures, or as Walt Whitman put it: “train communities through all their grades, beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves.” Patman’s ideals represented a deep understanding that sovereign citizens governing sovereign communities were the only protection against demagoguery.

The essence of populist politics is that political and economic freedom are deeply intertwined-- that real democracy requires not just an opportunity to vote but an opportunity to compete in an open marketplace. This was the kind of politics that the Watergate Babies accidentally overthrew.

The story of why the Watergate Babies spurned populism is its own intellectual journey. It started with a generation of politicians who cut their teeth on college-campus politics. In their youth, they saw, up close, not the perils of robber barons, but the failure of the New Deal state, most profoundly through the war in Vietnam. “We were the ’60s generation that didn’t drop out,” Bob Edgar, a U.S. representative from the class of 1975, told me. The war in Vietnam shaped their generation in two profound ways. First, it disillusioned them toward the New Deal. It was, after all, many New Dealers, including union insiders, who nominated Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and who supported a war that killed millions, including 50,000 Americans their age. And second, higher education-- the province of the affluent-- exempted one from military service, which was an explicit distinction among classes.

...For younger Democrats, the key vector for these ideas was an economist named Lester Thurow, who organized the ideas of Galbraith, Stigler, Friedman, Bork, and Jensen into one progressive-sounding package. In an influential book, The Zero-Sum Society, Thurow proposed that all government and business activities were simply zero-sum contests over resources and incomes, ignoring the arguments of New Dealers that concentration was a political problem and led to tyranny. In his analysis, anti-monopoly policy, especially in the face of corporate problems was anachronistic and harmful. Thurow essentially reframed Bork’s ideas for a Democratic audience.

With key intellectuals in the Democratic Party increasingly agreeing with Republican thought leaders on the virtues of corporate concentration, the political economic debate changed drastically. Henceforth, the economic leadership of the two parties would increasingly argue not over whether concentrations of wealth were threats to democracy or to the economy, but over whether concentrations of wealth would be centrally directed through the public sector or managed through the private sector—a big-government redistributionist party versus a small-government libertarian party. Democrats and Republicans disagreed on the purpose of concentrated power, but everyone agreed on its inevitability. By the late 1970s, the populist Brandeisian anti-monopoly tradition-- protecting communities by breaking up concentrations of power-- had been air-brushed out of the debate. And in doing so, America’s fundamental political vision transformed: from protecting citizen sovereignty to maximizing consumer welfare.

The Watergate Babies began to coalesce around their own sense of this new intellectual economic philosophy to deal with the stagnating economy around them. In an early sign of where it would lead, President Jimmy Carter deregulated the trucking, banking, and airline industries, with help from economist Alfred Kahn, Senator Edward Kennedy, and Kennedy’s young aide, future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Democrats then popularized supply-side economics in a Thurow-influenced and Democrat-authored 1980 Joint Economic Committee report, “Plugging in the Supply Side.”

In 1982, journalist Randall Rothenberg noted the emergence of this new statist viewpoint of economic power within the Democratic Party with an Esquire cover story, “The Neoliberal Club.” In that article, which later became a book, Rothenberg profiled up-and-coming Thurow disciples like Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Bill Clinton, Bruce Babbitt, Richard Gephardt, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, Paul Tsongas, and Tim Wirth, as well as thinkers like Robert Reich and writers like Michael Kinsley. These were all essentially representatives of the Watergate Baby generation. It was a prescient article: Most Democratic presidential candidates for the next 25 years came from this pool of leaders. Not all Watergate Babies became neoliberals, of course. There were populists of the generation, like Waxman and Miller, but they operated in an intellectual environment where the libertarian and statist thinkers who rejected Brandeis shaped the political economy.

Democrats and Republicans still fought. Neoliberals, while agreeing with Reagan Republicans on a basic view that the structure of corporate America should be as depoliticized and as shielded from voters as possible, still vehemently opposed Ronald Reagan on environmental policy, foreign policy, and taxes. But the very idea of competition policy, of inserting democracy into the economy, made no sense to them. Previously, voters had expected politicians to do something about everything from the price of milk to mortgage rates. Now, neoliberals expressed public power through financial markets. As libertarian and future Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had written a decade before, “The ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market.”

...When Bill Clinton took office as the 42nd president, the Watergate Babies would finally have their chance to govern... Clinton Democrats eventually came to reflect Dutton’s political formulation, more diverse and less reliant on the white working class. His administration looked like America-- with women, African Americans, Latinos, and gays and lesbians represented-- and most were educated at top universities. Thurow’s influence was also notable. Clinton stripped antitrust out of the Democratic platform; it was the first time a reference to monopoly power was not in the platform since 1880. Globalization, deregulation, and balanced budgets would animate Clinton’s political economy, with high-tech and finance leading the way.

And it seemed to work. From 1993 to 2001, GDP growth averaged 4 percent, up from 2.8 percent from 1981 to 1993. The median family income increased by $6,000, with the lowest inflation rate since the 1960s. Plus, 22 million jobs were created, 7 million people came out of poverty, America saw the highest homeownership rate ever, the national debt nearly disappeared, and interest rates came down. African Americans experienced pay increases for the first time since the 1960s. Goldman Sachs called it the “best economy ever,” and BusinessWeek lauded a “New Age economy of technological innovation and rising productivity.” The administration put this additional fat of the land toward third-world debt relief, student aid, empowerment zones, and community block grants. (When George W. Bush came into office after Clinton, The Onion’s headline read, “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Over.’”)

At the end of his presidency, Clinton explained his success. He praised Greenspan’s stewardship of the Federal Reserve. He said that the key to noninflationary growth was ensuring that workers did not demand raises beyond the rate of productivity, while unleashing businesses to pursue the most profitable lines of investment through deregulation and globalization. He implicitly touted the theory of capital shortage: Inflation resulted from overregulation and deficits, which took money out of the hands of businesses. Putting money and power back into the hands of businesses with deregulation and a balanced budget led to low interest rates, massive corporate profits, productivity growth, and broad prosperity. Bork and Thurow, in other words, were right.

Clinton’s policy framework diverged with that of his Republican predecessors in many ways, not just on social policy but also on raising marginal tax rates on the wealthy. In terms of concentrations of power in the private sector, however, it was more a completion of what Reagan did than a repudiation of it.

From telecommunications to media to oil to banking to trade, Clinton administration officials-- believing that technology and market forces alone would disrupt monopolies-- ended up massively concentrating power in the corporate sector. They did this through active policy, repealing Glass-Steagall, expanding trade through NAFTA, and welcoming China’s entrance into the global-trading order via the World Trade Organization. But corporate concentration also occurred in less-examined ways, like through the Supreme Court and defense procurement. Clinton Library papers, for example, reveal that the lone Senate objection to the Supreme Court nominations of both Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was from a lurking populist Ohio Democrat, Howard Metzenbaum, who opposed the future justices’ general agreement with Bork on competition policy. And in response to the end of the Cold War, the administration restructured the defense industry, shrinking the number of prime defense contractors from 107 to five. The new defense-industrial base, now concentrated in the hands of a few executives, stopped subsidizing key industries. The electronics industry was soon offshored.

But who could argue? The concentration of media and telecommunications companies happened concurrent with an investment boom into the newest beacon of progress: the internet. The futurism, the political coalition of the multiethnic cosmopolitans, the social justice of the private centrally planned corporation-- it worked. Clinton’s “Third Way” went global, as political leaders abroad copied the Clinton model of success. A West Wing generation learned only Watergate Baby politics, never realizing an earlier progressive economic tradition had even existed.

Despite this prosperity, in 2000, the American people didn’t reward the Democrats with majorities in Congress or an Oval Office victory. In particular, the rural parts of the country in the South, which had been a traditional area of Democratic strength up until the 1970s, were strongly opposed to this new Democratic Party. And white working-class people, whom Dutton had dismissed, did not perceive the benefits of the “greatest economy ever.” They also began to die. Starting in 1998 and continuing to this day, the mortality rate among white Americans, specifically those without a high school-degree, has been on the rise-- leaving them scared and alienated.

...By 2008, the ideas that took hold in the 1970s had been Democratic orthodoxy for two generations. “Left-wing” meant opposing war, supporting social tolerance, advocating environmentalism, and accepting corporatism and big finance while also seeking redistribution via taxes. The Obama administration has been ideologically consistent with the Watergate Babies’ rejection of populism. Modern liberal political culture epitomizes Dutton’s ideas. And its accomplishments are impressive. As late as 1995, a majority of Americans did not approve of interracial marriage. Today, gay marriage is the law of the land, and intermarriage rates are high and growing. Culturally, the United States is a far more tolerant and open society.

Dealing with a financial collapse in the early years of his administration, Obama’s political-economic framework supported concentrated yet regulated financial power. From 2009 to 2010, the administration prioritized the stability of a concentrated financial system over risking an attempt to end the foreclosure wave threatening the American housing market. In the last seven years, another massive merger boom has occurred, with concentrations accruing in the hospital, airline, telecommunications, and technology industries. Progressive corporations like Google are key pillars of a cosmopolitan liberal culture. This is the world of the Watergate Babies and the libertarian and statist thinkers who shaped their intellectual understanding of it.

But what intellectuals like Thurow, Galbraith, Greenspan, Bork, and so forth didn’t foresee was political disillusionment on a vast scale. In 2014, for example, voting rates in some states dropped to levels unseen since the 1820s (when property-franchise laws were in force). Meanwhile, American soldiers once again find themselves in a quagmire; this time, in the Middle East. Despite their best efforts, U.S. institutions seem as out-of-control and ungovernable as they did when the 1975 class came into office.

For most Americans, the institutions that touch their lives are unreachable. Americans get broadband through Comcast, their internet through Google, their seeds and chemicals through Monsanto. They sell their grain through Cargill and buy everything from books to lawnmowers through Amazon. Open markets are gone, replaced by a handful of corporate giants. Political groups associated with Koch Industries have a larger budget than either political party, and there is no faith in what was once the most democratically responsive part of government: Congress. Steeped in centralized power and mistrust, Americans must now confront Donald Trump, the loudest and most grotesque symbol of authoritarianism in politics today.

“This,” wrote Robert Kagan in the Washington Post, “is how fascism comes to America.” The nation is awash in commentary and fear over the current cultural moment. “America is a breeding ground for tyranny,” wrote Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine. Yet, Trump’s emergence would not be a surprise to someone like Patman, or to most New Dealers. They would note that the real-estate mogul’s authoritarianism is not new in American culture; it is ubiquitous. It is consistent with how the commercial sphere has developed since the 1970s. Americans feel a lack of control: They are at the mercy of distant forces, their livelihoods dependent on the arbitrary whims of power. Patman once attacked chain stores as un-American, saying, “We, the American people, want no part of monopolistic dictatorship in … American business.” Having yielded to monopolies in business, the nation must now face the un-American threat to democracy Patman warned they would sow.

Americans have forgotten about the centuries-old anti-monopoly tradition that was designed to promote self-governing communities and political independence. The Watergate Babies got rid of Patman’s populism for a lot of reasons. But there was wisdom there. In the 1930s, Patman said that restricting chain stores would prevent “Hitler’s methods of government and business in Europe” from coming to the United States. For decades after World War II, preventing economic concentration was understood as a bulwark against tyranny. But since the 1970s, this rhetoric has seemed ridiculous. Now, the destabilization of political institutions suggests that it may not have been. Financial crises are a regular feature of the U.S. banking system, and prices for essential goods and services reflect monopoly power rather than free citizens buying and selling to each other. Americans, sullen and unmoored from community structures, are turning to rage, apathy, protest, and tribalism, like white supremacy.

Ending the threat of authoritarianism is not a left-wing or right-wing problem, and the solution does not reside in building a bigger or a smaller government. Restoring political stability means structuring society’s public and corporate institutions so they can be governed by human beings and communities. It means protecting the property rights of citizens and not confusing property with arbitrary tollbooths erected by tech billionaires. And it means understanding that protecting competitive markets and preventing concentrations of power are essential components of democracy.

Fortunately, Americans are beginning to remember what was once lost. Senator Elizabeth Warren often sounds like she’s channeling Wright Patman. Senator Bernie Sanders stirred enormous enthusiasm in a younger generation more in touch with their populist souls. Republicans even debated putting antitrust back in their party platform. President Obama has begun talking about the problem of monopolies. Renata Hesse, the head of the government’s antitrust division, recently gave a blistering speech repudiating Bork’s corporatist ideas. And none other than Hillary Clinton, in an October 3, 2016, speech on renewing antitrust vigor, noted that Trump, while a unique figure, also represents the “broader trends” of big business picking on the little guy.

Restoring America’s anti-monopoly traditions does not mean rejecting what the Watergate Babies accomplished. It means merging their understanding of a multicultural democratic society with Brandeis’s vision of an “industrial democracy.” The United States must place democracy at the heart of its commercial sphere once again. That means competition policy, in force, all the time, at every level. The prevailing culture must be re-geared, so that the republic may be born anew.

Note:

When he was still Chairman of the House Banking Committee, Patman once famously asked the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, testifying in front of his committee, "Can you give me any reason why you should not be in the penitentiary?" A year after being deposed in a 152-117 caucus vote in 1975, Patman died of pneumonia and was replaced by an ultra-conservative Democrat, Sam Hall, who was later nominated for a judgeship by Reagan, making way for the district to turn red. It is now one of the most Republican districts in the country, Obama getting only 25% of the vote there in 2012; 24% of the population is black or Latino. When people talk about Hillary gaining on Trump in Texas, this isn't the part of Texas they're talking about. They're talking about well-off suburbs around San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Dallas and Forth Worth, traditionally Republican areas, not traditionally Democratic areas that have been left behind and have slipped into the Republican orbit. 

Mary Hoeft is the progressive Democrat running for the northwestern/central Wisconsin congressional seat (WI-07), currently held by Trumpist and former reality TV character Sean Duffy, who currently earns his campaign funds as chairman of a House Financial Services Sub-committee on Investigations and Oversight by pointedly not providing any oversight or doing any investigations of crooked (albeit generous-- at least to Rep. Duffy) banksters. Last night, after reading Stoller's article, Mary drew a sharp contrast between herself and crooked members of Congress from both parties who put Wall Street's interests above the interests of their own constituents.

I refuse to balance Patrick Murphy's advocacy on behalf of Wall Street with his advocacy on behalf of reproductive rights, gays, and undocumented workers. To do so would be naïve. Pope Francis spoke out against the naivete of those who believe good will come as droplets of water trickle down from the pool of riches our wealthiest bathe in. Americans are drowning in those droplets. My opponent Sean Duffy is an easier enemy to see coming. He advocates against reproductive rights, gays, and undocumented workers. But Murphy is equally responsible for the chasm that now divides our wealthiest from the rest of America.

Needless to say, Hoeft is one of the progressives who won her primary, only to be promptly ignored by the very conservative and very Wall Street-friendly DCCC. They're not helping her, even though her district is very swingy and was only recently held by a Democrat, Dave Obey (who is campaigning for her), and was won by Obama against McCain, 53-45%. Please consider contributing to her grassroots campaign by tapping the thermometer below:

And An Update For Capitol Hill:

Today one of the congressmembers who helped write Dodd-Frank sent me a note:

Dear Howie:

Even when we were writing the Dodd-Frank Act, in the wake of the financial meltdown, there was only mild attention to what might be done to prevent another meltdown, rather than any focus on the distribution of wealth and financial power. That latter subject is essentially verboten; instead, we scold the GOP about bathroom laws and personal indiscretions. On the contrary, Democratic candidates ritually and habitually deny any motivation to “penalize success,” especially when talking to wealthy donors.