Can Bloomberg Buy The Democratic Nomination?

Since Bloomberg's $35 million TV blitz started this week, one friend of mine told me that he's considering him and another told me she had made up her mind and that she's all in-- 100%-- on Bloomberg.

Last week, journalist and activist Zaid Jilani penned a tweet storm about rich people buying elections that is very much worth reading. I'm putting the thread in narrative style while keeping it as close to his original as possible. (I think Jilani is supporting Elizabeth Warren, although I'm not 100% sure. I'm positive he isn't supporting Michael Bloomberg.) Jilani:

In 2011 I was working at the Center for American Progress, the main Democratic party-aligned think tank. I was at the weblog covering Occupy Wall Street. So obviously Bloomberg was a hot topic.

I wrote a story about how Michael Bloomberg's then-girlfriend was on the board of Zucotti Park which is where the protesters were. I noted she was drawing over $100,000 in compensation from them, which to me was a lot of money (money at that point my career I'd never seen).

It turned out CAP was soliciting money from Bloomberg. So its president, Neera Tanden, wrote some emails to me and my boss scolding me over the story. She asked if we were aware that CAP was soliciting money from Bloomberg. We said yup, we are. Then she said it was low to go after his girlfriend. I mean, she was pulling in $100,000 from the park he just ordered police to clear of protesters. He deployed riot police to do this!

It was a clear conflict of interest. Then she explained that December was always a tough time of year to be raising money for CAP... Bloomberg has given tens of millions if not more to liberal organizations, campaigns, nonprofits, I think over the course of his campaign you will find a lot of folks are hesitant to say or do anything critical towards him because he has so much money and he's a giver.

Let's remember he funds basically the entire gun control movement in the U.S. (Everytown, Moms Demand). He also finances...you know...an entire news conglomerate.

I don't think Bloomberg has much of a chance winning his race. It's extremely weird to try and win a Democratic primary by entering on Super Tuesday. He'd be better off doing a Perot-style independent run, provided he had popular issue positions (be he doesn't).

But he has more favorable position than anyone else who could possibly try this gambit because a big part of the liberal/Democratic sphere will just lay off of him because he has so much of his money in everyone's pockets. This kind of situation feels unique in American politics.

To some extent this is what the Bernie Sanders candidacy has been about since 2016. The idea that American politics is dictated by money and the need to raise it. Sanders is the first candidate in history to prove you don't need big money.

Money is how the Dem/Republican establishment operates, it's what Michael Bloomberg, Neera Tanden, Joe Biden, etc. know from working in politics for decades and I can hardly blame them for adopting this view given their experience. But Sanders proved another path is possible too.

It's the same reason only Martin Scorcese was willing to come out and say the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are meh. Disney owns so much of the market you can't actually afford to offend Bob Iger.

...Will anyone ask Bloomberg to divest from all of his business interests and philanthropies as he runs for president? That was a real issue for Trump, Bloomberg is like 50 times richer than Trump... You'll notice there haven't been a lot of Congressional Democrats who have said much against Bloomberg in the past few days. Well, he spent $100 million on House Democratic elections in the 2018 cycle. They can hardly argue that Bloomberg's big TV spending on himself ($30 million over this week, whereas Bernie Sanders is slotted to spend $500,000) is undemocratic when a single man was allowed to spend so much money on them.

1) Michael Bloomberg spends $200 million on an initiative announced at US Conference of Mayors

2) Columbia, SC Mayor Steve Benjamin hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2018 initiative (he's head of conference)

3) Benjamin endorses Bloomberg

I'm not saying any of these people are endorsing Bloomberg because he spent some money giving them some trips around the country, I'm saying that the money helps build relationships which are part of how you get endorsements.

I doubt people in Augusta are clamoring to vote for Bloomberg. But through all his philanthropic giving he has built a relationship with the mayor.

Is There A Worse Political Reporter Than Sydney Ember Anywhere? Spoiler: No

Actual enemy of the people

Every now and then, I mention that this Belway reporter or that Beltway reporter is really nothing but a piece of runny dog shit. Sydney Ember is one of those and when I started writing about what a worthless scumbag she was I thought she was a he. It's hard to get away with calling a woman a worthless scumbag-- even if she obviously is one-- but no one objects much when it's a male. Now that I know Sydney is a woman, I have to think of new ways to describe her worthlessness. Katie Halper did a good job of describing one of the NY Times most anti-progressive fake reporters in a new piece for FAIR, Sydney Ember’s Secret Sources. Halper's piece is basically about a prejudiced journalist passing off her opinions as news. "NYT reporter hides corporate ties of Sanders critics she highlights," wrote Halper. "Ember has a problem with Bernie Sanders-- which may be why the paper has her cover him."

Journalist Skip Kaltenheuser wondered how, "with such a stacked deck against him, Bernie has the ability to keep punching. What has happened to The Times' editors that they accept this sort of propaganda rot off the editorial pages? I can’t imagine it doesn’t infuriate those Times reporters who still care about their integrity. Katie Halper’s article on Ember ought to be on the shelf next to Thomas Frank’s Swat Team."

"Ember," wrote Halper, "is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament, history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’ documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and reporters alike."

The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up:  It changed the headline (from “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,” to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories”); deleted a positive quote from a campaign advisor; and added two negative paragraphs. Even after the paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they “thought [the article]  should say more about his realistic chances.” In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’ viability and ability to govern, in other words.

Ember came to the New York Times with a resumé limited to the finance industry: She was an analyst for BlackRock, the biggest global investment management corporation, and the largest investor in coal plant developers in the world. (Her husband, Mike Bechek, is also in the investment business; he was a senior associate consultant at Bain Capital, where his father was CEO.)

Bechek and Ember

Ember was hired by the Times in 2014 to cover advertising and marketing for the paper’s business vertical Dealbook. She started covering politics in May 2018, and immediately got the enviable assignment of covering one of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

Ember has a multi-prong approach to undermining Sanders: She went to great lengths to avoid calling him the frontrunner until he was “no longer” one;  she attributes his political positions to attention-getting, self-serving ulterior motives; frames even his victories and the popularity of his ideas as weaknesses; cherry-picks polls; presents opinions as facts (claiming he’s “outflanked on the left by rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Beto O’Rourke”); and creates false equivalency between Sanders and Donald Trump.

But for the sake of time and length, this piece focuses on her selection and misrepresentation of sources, which have already drawn scrutiny. Brad Johnson, a political analyst with a background in climate science pointed out that Ember quoted a source without mentioning that she’s a corporate lobbyist; journalist Zaid Jilani noted that Ember failed to disclose that another source was a senior advisor for a Hillary Clinton Super PAC. Education scholar Diane Ravitch devoted a blog post to the reporter’s “shameful” reporting on Sanders’ education policy, questioning the authority of her sources.

Ember’s articles on Sanders (sometimes co-written with other Times reporters) often quote as neutral authorities individuals who are on the other side of a wide ideological divide, with longstanding antipathies to Sanders’ left socioeconomic perspective. Moreover, many of these “experts” are corporate lobbyists, whose work in a particular area is not guided by academic, journalistic or other professional standards, but by the economic and political interests of their clients. Ember spins the identity of her authorities, who are themselves professional spinners.

Consider Ember’s March 1 article, which opened with the kind of unflattering headline her stories often bear: “Bernie Sanders Is Making Changes for 2020, but His Desire for Control Remains.” (Headlines, of course, are chosen by editors, not reporters, but in these stories they reflect the slant of the text.) The piece ended on a typically ominous note: “Even if Mr. Sanders does talk more about himself, his competition presents a new set of challenges that his own biography may only compound,” Ember wrote. She brings in an expert to prove her point: “‘At the end of the day, he is still an old white man,’ said Tracy Sefl, a veteran Democratic strategist.”

Sefl is hardly a disinterested authority; she’s a paid political consultant and media specialist who worked as a surrogate and senior advisor for Hillary Clinton. Other outlets mention Sefl’s experience working for Clinton when they cite her, including the New York Times, which has identified her as someone “supporting Mrs. Clinton,” someone who “worked for Mrs. Clinton,” and a “Democratic consultant and Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter.”

A New York Times story (10/22/07) on the 2008 Clinton campaign’s relationship with the right-wing Drudge Report identified Sefl as someone “who has established a friendly working relationship with Mr. Drudge-- and through whom Mrs. Clinton’s campaign often worked quietly to open a line of communication.” The paper also noted that her “fingerprints are usually impossible to spot.” Sefl admitted in an interview (Chicago, 7/13/15):

My solo consultancy doesn’t have a name, quite purposely so. I do often collaborate with other consultants, including Republicans—within reason—when the work warrants it.

Reporter Zaid Jilani caught Ember’s omission, tweeting that she didn’t “note [Sefl] was senior adviser to Ready for Hillary Super PAC or that she was a hired gun at a Republican-led firm Navigators Global.” The piece has since been updated-- without notice-- to describe Sefl as “a veteran Democratic strategist and formerly a senior adviser to the Super PAC Ready for Hillary.”

Sefl’s choice of phrase, “an old white man,” is surely a crude description for someone who, as he has explained, has a strong Jewish identity, shaped in part by his father’s side of the family having been “wiped out” in the Holocaust, and growing up a working-class Jew in Brooklyn. If successful, Sanders would be the first Jewish president of the United States. But Sefl’s dismissive description is consistent with the way Clinton campaign loyalists and much of corporate media continue to weaponize identity politics against Sanders, erasing not only his Jewish identifty, but also his anti-racist record and his supporters of color.

Ember’s February 17 article, “Bernie Sanders Stumbled With Black Voters in 2016. Can He Do Better in 2020?,” published two days before Sanders announced his candidacy, predicted that “his weak track record with black voters-- a vital base in the Democratic Party-- could be a potential threat to his candidacy.” Echoing the conventional wisdom of the 2016 campaign, the piece made no mention of the CNN poll issued two months earlier that found Sanders had a higher approval rating with nonwhite voters than any other major candidate.

Ember’s March 29 article, “Bernie Sanders Says ‘No’ to Incrementalism, Highlighting Divide Among Democrats,” started with a neutral enough headline, but ended with a harsh critique by a fierce Sanders opponent, whose politics the reporter misrepresents:

“The path to the White House and to majorities has to be in a pragmatic, progressive area,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for Policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “If you go too far left, Donald Trump gets re-elected and Republicans control both houses of Congress.”

“Our heads are in the clouds, but our feet are also on the ground at the same time,” he added. He cited his group’s universal healthcare plan, which he said was “just as ambitious” as Mr. Sanders’ proposed “Medicare for all.” There was, however, a key difference.

“It just doesn’t blow up the system,” Mr. Kessler said. “It builds on the existing system.”

But Third Way is a fiscally conservative, not a “center left,” think tank. Given the state of public opinion, a group that pushes to cut Social Security and Medicare, and calls raising taxes on billionaires “soaking the rich,” is to the right of centrist. In 2013, of 29 trustees on Third Way’s board, 20 were investment bankers, three were CEOs and two were corporate lawyers.

Third Way’s “about” section reads, “Our work is grounded in the mainstream American values of opportunity, freedom and security.” They continue, “But we identify as center-left, because we see that space in US politics as offering the only real path for advancing those ideals in the century ahead.” For Third Way, identifying as “center-left” is lip service, a strategic necessity in a nation that has moved to the left and whose demographics promise a more diverse and left electorate to come.

Ember chooses the label that Third Way uses for itself, because if she accurately identified its corporatist mission and positions, she could not use one of its leaders as an objective authority on the efficacy of Bernie Sanders’ proposal of free healthcare for all. It would be obvious that Third Way’s healthcare plan was in no way as ambitious as Sanders’, and that it was using the term “universal” to undermine single payer.

Reflecting its function as a corporate advocate for moving the Democratic Party to the right, Third Way has consistently disparaged Sanders and progressive politics in general. In a 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed (12/2/13), Kessler (and Third Way co-founder and president Jon Cowan) declared that “economic populism is dead,” urging Democrats not to follow Elizabeth Warren and Bill deBlasio “over the populist cliff.” Kessler singled out Sanders in a USA Today op-ed (12/15/17), declaring, “Take It From Voters, Democrats Don’t Want a Bernie Sanders.”

In October 2018, Third Way’s executive vice president Matt Bennet (who can be seen in this video (below) refusing to disclose how much money his think tank gets from Wall Street) disqualified Sanders as a presidential candidate: “The exception is Sen. Sanders. We’re open to everybody except for him.” That would seem to make the organization an odd source to go to to evaluate Sanders’ policy proposals.



But Ember turned to Kessler again in her April 27 article, “Bernie Sanders Opens Space for Debate on Voting Rights for Incarcerated People,” to comment on Sanders’ call to enfranchise the incarcerated:

“There’s a difference between felons who are in prison for nonviolent offenses and those who are in for capital offenses,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. Mr. Sanders’ remarks, he added, “seemed like a bit of a stumble.”

The comment seemed like a bit of a stumble for Kessler, into an area where he has no evident expertise, and, interestingly, where Third Way hardly wades.

Ember’s May 17 article, “Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington,” presented as problematic and incriminating the senator’s support of Nicaraguan Sandinistas and his opposition to the CIA-backed Contra rebels trying to overthrow them-- whose systematic pattern of gross human rights violations in the 1980s included death squad assassination, kidnapping, rape, mutilation and torture. In a subsequent interview, Ember’s first and apparently most pressing question to Sanders was whether he had heard an anti-American chant at a rally he and approximately 499,999 other people attended. Her second question was whether he would have stayed at the event if he had heard it.

While NBC’s Meet the Press (5/19/19) and New York’s Jonathan Chait (5/27/19) accepted and amplified Ember’s framing, other journalists and historians familiar with Latin American history condemned the piece as context-lacking  “neo-McCarthyite,” “‘anti-American’ baiting,” “only slightly more subtle than Fox News.” Calling the piece “fundamentally ahistorical” “bothsidesism,” the Long Version’s Jonathan Katz (5/20/19) wrote that Ember doesn’t “have much experience covering foreign affairs in general or Latin America in particular. It shows.” Journalist Ryan Cooper (The Week, 5/29/19) quipped, “Americans should be very concerned about Bernie Sanders’ record of opposing mass murder.”

For this article on Sanders’ foreign policy past, Ember thought it would be appropriate to get a quote from a significant player in the Iran/Contra scandal:

Otto J. Reich, a former special envoy for Latin America who helped oversee Nicaragua policy for the Reagan administration, said that by the middle of the 1980s a politician like Mr. Sanders “should have known better” than to fawn over Mr. Ortega.

Reagan’s “Nicaragua policy” involved illegally funding the terrorist Contras in an effort to overthrow the elected Sandinista government. And he oversaw it as director of the now defunct State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, working with CIA propaganda experts and Army psy-ops specialists, leaking hoaxes, spreading rumors, smearing, and pressuring and threatening reporters,  in order to whitewash the Contras and demonize the Sandinistas.

Reich’s office was condemned by the U.S. Comptroller General, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Iran/Contra Committee and a House Foreign Affairs committee for conducting “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” including psychological operations (psy-ops) “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.”



Ember, though, offers Reich as an expert witness on Sanders’ Cold War activities:

“He has, by virtue of these travels and associations, joined up with some of the most repressive regimes in the world,” Mr. Reich said of Mr. Sanders, alluding to his visit to Nicaragua and subsequent trips to the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Speaking of travels and associations, as well as Cuba, Ember fails to mention that Reich has worked as a lobbyist for Bacardi-Martini and Lockheed Martin, and tried to get an anti-Castro terrorist a US visa. As historian Greg Grandin told me in an interview (Katie Halper Show, 6/4/19):

The Office of Public Diplomacy was one of the most corrupting and degrading instruments of democracy you can imagine…. It was a destabilization  and disinformation campaign.

“People like Sydney Ember,” he noted, are “the product of that reeducation.”

Back to domestic issues, Ember ended her May 23 article, “Sanders’ Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation,” on a predictably down note:

But while the charter-school issue might be relevant in cities, Mr. Loadholt said, it was hardly top-of-mind for voters in the state’s expansive rural areas, where charter schools are rare. “To a hammer, everything is a nail,” he said. “And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by millionaires and billionaires.”

Ember describes Jarrod Loadholt as “a Democratic strategist who has worked on education policy in South Carolina.” This obfuscating description was one of the many things that led Diane Ravitch to write her blog post, “The New York Times vs. Senator Bernie Sanders. ” I’ll let Ravitch explain:

The real stinker in the Times’ article comes at the end, where the writers quote someone unfamiliar to me. I know many education activists in South Carolina, but I have never run across Jarrod Loadholt…. I googled. He is a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, DC, who was born in South Carolina. I can find no evidence of any involvement by him in any education issues. His specialty seems to be consumer finance. Why was he called upon to put down Senator Sanders’ factual statement that the Waltons, the DeVos family and hedge fund managers are behind the push for charter schools? Senator Sanders made his statement in South Carolina, and Loadholt was born there. South Carolina has dreadful education policy. When did Loadholt work on it and with what results? To the naked eye, he was called upon as a Beltway insider to cut Bernie Sanders down with a false statement. Shameful.

In fact, there are no traces of Loadholt having worked on any education policy. When I tweeted out Ravitch’s piece, he responded, “Lol. I guess if you’re a lawyer or a lobbyist, you could at no point in your life worked on ed policy in SC.” When I asked him if he had worked on education policy, he replied, “My quote speaks for itself. And it’s like a month old.” Loadholt has also tweeted that Sanders is “like a rash.”

Loadholt does have experience as a lobbyist and currently works at Pine Street Strategies, a lobbying firm whose clients include Anheuser-Busch and the National Bankers Association (NBA). It was in his capacity as an NBA lobbyist that Loadholt defended a sweeping rollback of Dodd/Frank banking regulations.  Dubbed the Bank Lobbyist Act by critics, which included the NAACP, the bill made it easier for banks to discriminate against communities of color. Loadholt, however, dismissed the concerns: “[Black] banks don’t have the luxury of waiting on a perfect bill…. If we thought the [bill] did substantial damage to African-Americans, we would not support it.”

Then there’s the June 12 article, originally headlined “Sanders Delivers Defense of His Democratic Socialist Philosophy” and later renamed “Bernie Sanders Calls His Brand of Socialism a Pathway to Beating Trump,” where Ember quoted as an authority Mary Anne Marsh, whom she described as “a Democratic strategist in Boston who worked for Senators Senators John Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy.” Marsh did not mince words in her assessment of Sanders’ politics, policies and electability:

Most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism and his economic policies. Ultimately, Bernie Sanders giving this speech will appeal to his base and no one else, and it gives fodder to Trump and the Republicans.

But the woman linking Sanders’ socialist rhetoric to a Trump victory is not just a Democratic strategist. When reporters at places like the Financial Times, CNBC, NPR, Yahoo! Business and Jewish News Services quote her, they cite her as a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a lobbying and public relations firm. Dewey Square’s corporate clients have included Allegiance Healthcare Corporation, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Coca-Cola, Collegiate Funding Services, Countrywide Mortgage, DuPont, General Motors Corporation, Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA), Mortgage Insurance Companies of America, Purdue Pharma, Starbucks, United Health Group. The US Chamber of Commerce hired the firm to fight for caps on damages that can be paid in lawsuits; the National Restaurant Association paid them to fight against a law that made it easier for unions to organize workers; and Fix the Debt to push its austerity astroturf campaign to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

When Dewey Square was caught (CJR, 2/24/09) tricking senior citizens into signing letters to the editor on behalf of its client Medicare Advantage, Marsh tried to blame the hapless victims who had been lured to events with door prizes and free food and were unaware of what they were signing, positing, “The time that elapsed between the meetings when the seniors saw the letters and the letters’ arrival at the newspaper may have clouded some memories.”

Her career as a lobbyist for many of the industries that would be most impacted by Sanders’ proposals might explain Marsh’s obvious animus against the candidate, as displayed in the May 20 edition of her weekly Fox News column, “Bernie Sanders’ Incredible Shrinking Candidacy-- Why He Won’t Be Dem Nominee.” One of Sanders’ apparent insurmountable weaknesses, she wrote, is that people “remember Sanders didn’t support Clinton in the general election against Trump.” People with better memories recall that Sanders was one of the most energetic surrogates for Clinton on the campaign trail, campaigning constantly for her in battleground states (New Yorker, 11/4/16).

Marsh is right when she says that “most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism,” which is why he’s seen as a unique threat to those who promote rapacious profiteering in the areas of finance, health care, education and the military. Third Way made that clear, once again, at a conference they held last week, where its co-founder Matt Bennett singled out Sanders’ vision from his opponents’: “One is a Democratic capitalist narrative…. The other is a socialist narrative,” notably omitting the “Democratic” descriptor for the latter.

By presenting her sources as objective authorities, instead of paid lobbyists and austerity ideologues, Ember both conceals and advances their agenda, undermining the integrity of the Fourth Estate, our democracy, and one of the most popular politicians.

Thoughts on Warren and Sanders: How Much Change Is Needed in 2021?

The best of all possible worlds?

by Thomas Neuburger

I've written before comparing Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as presidential candidates, but only preliminarily. (See "The Difference Between Sanders and Warren, or Can Regulated Capitalism Save the Country?") But there's much more to say — foreign policy, for example, is barely touched on there — and also much is evolving in their positions, especially Warren's.

That earlier piece focused on the differences between these two candidates based on their economic ideologies. As I wrote then, "Though both would make the next administration, if either were elected, a progressive one by many definitions, the nature of the progressivism under each would be quite different."

In particular, I asked:

Can the current capitalist system be reformed and retained, or must it be partly nationalized — taken over by government — and reduced in size and capacity, for the country to be saved from its current economic enslavement to the "billionaire class"? In addition to questions of personal preference, Democratic primary voters will be asked to decide this question as well.

And the question applies quite broadly. The billionaire class also controls our response to climate change. Is it possible for a "free" market system — a system in which billionaires and their corporations have control — to transform the energy economy enough to mitigate the coming disaster, or must government wrest control of the energy economy in order to have even a hope of reducing the certain damage?

But there are other contrasts between these two as well, other differences, as Zaid Jilani, writing in Jacobin, points out. He begins where we began, with the ideological and philosophical differences:

Why the Differences Between Sanders and Warren Matter

Both are critics of the Democratic establishment. Both are foes of Wall Street. And both are substantive, policy-focused politicians. But that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren share the same worldview.

Sanders tends to focus on “post-distribution” remedies, meaning he prefers to use the government’s power to tax and spend to directly meet Americans’ needs — or replace the market altogether. His social-democratic ideas, like free college and single-payer health care, are now policies most Democrats have to tip their hat to at least for electoral reasons. Warren wants to empower regulators and rejigger markets to shape “pre-distribution” income, before taxes. Less likely to push for big-ticket programs, she wants to re-regulate Wall Street and make life easier for consumers.

So far this is familiar ground.

Different Theories of Change

But as Jilani points out, there are differences in style and "theory of change" as well. ("Theory of change" usually encompasses how a given policy change is to be accomplished, as opposed to what that change should be.) Jilani again:

The two senators also have distinct theories of change. Sanders has long believed in bottom-up, movement-based politics. Since his days as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he has tried to energize citizens to take part in government. He generally distrusts elites and decision-making that does not include the public. Warren, on the other hand, generally accepts political reality and works to push elite decision-makers towards her point of view.

When I worked at PCCC ["the most influential outside PAC supporting Warren" says Jilani], I was once told that Warren decided to run for the Senate after witnessing the amount of power she had as an oversight chair for the bank bailouts. She believed that “being in the room” with decision-makers in the Obama administration was essential to creating change.

About this he concludes: "While Warren wants to be at the table with elites, arguing for progressive policies, Sanders wants to open the doors and let the public make the policy."

"Elizabeth is all about leverage"

These are significant differences, and his observation goes a long way to explaining this item from a long piece published in Politico Magazine in 2016, an article otherwise about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Discussing why Warren refused to endorse Sanders, Glenn Thrush wrote:

Luckily for Clinton, Warren resisted Sanders’ entreaties, for months telling the senator and his staff she hadn’t made up her mind about which candidate she would support. For all her credibility on the left, Warren is more interested in influencing the granular Washington decisions of policymaking and presidential personnel—and in power politics. Warren’s favored modus operandi: leveraging her outsider popularity to gain influence on the issues she cares about, namely income inequality and financial services reform.

“Elizabeth is all about leverage, and she used it,” a top Warren ally told me. “The main thing, you know, is that she always thought Hillary was going to be the nominee, so that was where the leverage was.”

Warren, several people in her orbit say, never really came close to endorsing the man many progressives consider to be her ideological soulmate.

For many grassroots supporters of Sanders, who were also strong Warren supporters prior to his entry into the race, these revelations — "all about the leverage" and "never came close to endorsing" — took the bloom off the Warren rose. For whatever reason, that bloom appears not to have returned, at least not completely.

Jilani's observation in no way diminishes Warren's credibility or core desirability as a candidate. If you care about achieving your goals through "leverage," joining the Sanders campaign, which may have looked to you like a kind of Children's Crusade, would seem foreign to your way of operating.

The Bottom Line — Not Just Method, But Scope

While Jilani notes that many of Warren's past positions, for example, on charter schools and Medicare for All, have grown more progressive, she still doesn't seem to prioritize Medicare for All as strongly as Sanders does.

In 2012, Warren was explicitly opposed to Medicare for All (called "single payer" at the time). "Five years later — after decades of advocacy by Sanders had helped popularize Medicare for All — Warren [finally] decided to endorse the policy," writes Jilani. "But unlike consumer protections or financial regulation, establishing a single-payer health care system doesn’t seem to be a top priority for Warren." He adds, "It’s hardly a surprise that Warren didn’t raise single-payer during her first two campaign events in Iowa and when asked about it by a Washington Post reporter, [she] suggested she didn’t bring it up because no one else at the events raised it."

As noted above, if either were president, the odds that America will change for the better would vastly improve. But each would do that job in a different way. Each has a different philosophy of how government should work, and approach the process of change from different directions — though I have to give Warren credit for picking public fights with fellow Democrats when others are much more timid.

But to these two differences — philosophy and approach — let me add a third, a difference in sweep. The scope of change envisioned and attempted by a Sanders presidency would likely be far greater than that attempted by Warren.

In these times, with a massive climate tsunami fast approaching and a Depression-style rebellion in full view, can America, in this Franklin Roosevelt moment, afford just a better manager of the current system, a better rearranger, and survive?

There's not much question that Warren would better fix the status quo, and be a better choice as president, than 95% of the other candidates on offer. But would a Warren presidency be enough to bring us through this crisis as safely as Washington, Lincoln and FDR once did?

For many true progressives, I think that's the question she'll be asked to answer, and she has about a year, or less, to answer it.
  

Identity Politics Strike Again

This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos made a $10 million contribution to the With Honor Fund, a super PAC that aims to elect military veterans to Congress. More identity group politics? Founder Rye Barcott claims they don't screen "for ideology" but looks for a "common bond of service and commitment to the country." They don't back all veterans, though, and most of the candidates they back are conservatives. Of the 7 progressive veterans running for Congress this cycle that Blue America endorsed-- Doug Applegate, DuWayne Gregory, James Thompson, Jared Golden Randy Bryce Tom Wakely and Tom Prigg, the only one the With Honor Fund backed is Jared Golden (who they spent $622,586 on). Their other IEs were for very right-wing Republicans and conservative-leaning Democrats from the Republican-wing of the Democratic Party. Example: they spent $603,940 on Damon Martinez in Albuquerque, who was beaten by in the primary by Deb Haaland, a progressive. Same in NY-19, where they spent $238,687 on conservative Pat Ryan-- and significant money against his opponents, one of whom, Anthony Delgado, won). You can view all their candidates and expenditures here and here.

If they don't screen for ideology and only base their expenditures on military service but don't back all military veterans... well, I'm sure they know what they're trying to accomplish, even if that isn't in the real world.

Today there was joyous celebrating online because Ayanna Pressley won her congressional race in Boston (MA-07) last night. Mike Capuano, a sterling progressive, was at a disadvantage being a long-time incumbent as well as white and male. The fact that he's probably further left than she is-- and certainly further left in the largely unexamined area of foreign policy-- where he's for peace and she's... an AIPAC supporter, doesn't matter to the folks looking for another scalp and without the discernment to fully understand the difference between a corrupt conservative like Joe Crowley, who earned disdain and defeat, and Mike Capuano, who was steamrolled by identity politics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pressley has said little about foreign policy in her campaign, often resorts to generalities, and has not responded to our invitations to be briefed by foreign policy experts or to hold a forum with her opponent on foreign policy,” said Cole Harrison, the executive director of the activist group. “Capuano, the incumbent, consistently votes to pull troops out of Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, and to cut the military budget. Pressley hasn’t earned the confidence of the peace forces, and we are announcing our endorsement of Capuano for re-election.”

The Massachusetts Peace Action questionnaire also asked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing on a growing movement to pressure Israel over its occupation of Palestinian lands through boycott, divestment, and sanctions. Known by its initials, BDS, the movement has drawn strong opposition from pro-Israel voices, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has worked to outlaw any form of BDS activism.

Pressley declined to take a position on an AIPAC-backed piece of legislation that would impose criminal and civil penalties on some of those involved in BDS activism. The candidate explained that she intends to support “courageous individuals and organizations, among both Israelis and Palestinians, committed to bringing peaceful coexistence to the region.” Capuano took a stand against the anti-BDS bill, explaining that although he is not personally in support of using BDS tactics to pressure Israel, he opposes the anti-BDS bill on “First Amendment grounds” and believes “others should be free to advocate” for the movement.

Pressley is being advised by Alex Goldstein, a former aide to then-Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Goldstein has described himself as a “Jewish Zionist who works every day to fight BDS” and sits on the board of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Boston, which has unsuccessfully argued in favor of passing anti-BDS legislation in Massachusetts.

While finding distinctions between the two candidates’ positions can be difficult, the candidates have been intensely questioned by local media about the issue of housing. In one of their debates, Capuano declined the opportunity to criticize luxury real estate developments in Boston, while Pressley flatly answered that there are too many luxury developments and not enough affordable housing, proposing a “rent relief” tax break for residents spending high proportions of income on housing.

On occasion, however, Pressley has voted on the city council to approve luxury real estate developments, recently voting to support the $1.3 billion luxury Winthrop Tower development, she said, because the builders pledged to include minority businesses. Following the vote in April, Pressley received $1,250 in campaign contributions from the developers of the project, records show.

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

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

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

Very Bad News In TX-21

The Intercept was courageous to publish Zaid Jilani's post about TX-21 yesterday, a full day before the Texas runoff about how the DCCC had guessed wrong and backed a former Republican against a grassroots progressive. They must have imagined that Mary Street Wilson was a day away from replicating Kara Eastman's breathtaking victory over DCCC/Blue Dog-backed reactionary Brad Ashford in Omaha last week. But, alas, they miscalculated. Kopser won the primary runoff, looking more like the Lipinski win over progressive challenger Marie Newman:

• Kopser- 14,636 (57.9%)
• Wilson- 10,622 (42.1%)

Kopser, who serves on the board of the corrupt, anti-worker Texas Association of Businesses, identified himself as "the business candidate" and, although, he tries to brush over the differences between himself and normal Democrats, he's a conservative likely to be a truly horrible member of Congress. As of the May 2 FEC reporting deadline, he has raised $1,155,771. Mary had raised $91,105.

For Wilson and her supporters, Kopser’s insistence on maintaining his ties to the business lobby while it sues to force sick workers to show up or lose their jobs is just another example of why the Democratic Party is betting on the wrong horse in this race. National Democrats have coalesced around Kopser and have largely ignored Wilson, a favorite among progressives, who outperformed Kopser in the first round of voting, despite having significantly less resources than he did. (Derrick Crowe, the most left-wing candidate in the race, was eliminated in the first round and immediately endorsed Wilson.)

In December, Kopser earned the endorsement of Congress’s No. 2 Democrat, Maryland’s Rep. Steny Hoyer. He’s backed by the Democratic-leaning Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence, and, having spent over two decades in the U.S. military, he successfully won the backing of Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton’s Serve America PAC. VoteVets is backing him for similar reasons.

Wilson, meanwhile, is supported by a number of national and local progressive organizations, including Justice Democrats, Our Revolution Central Texas, and the Stonewall Democrats of Austin. The Austin Chronicle issued no endorsement in the runoff between the two candidates, with its editorial board split on the issue.

In Kopser’s telling, there is little difference between the candidates on the big issues. “I think in terms of policies, when people look at our websites, you’re going to find out that our policies are very aligned,” he told The Intercept.

But a look at the two candidates’ issues pages elides some significant differences. On health care, Wilson favors a single-payer health care system, under which the government would provide insurance, while Kopser prefers a public option and Medicaid buy-in, where Americans could voluntarily buy into a public insurance program with their own money, rather than automatically being covered by one. (That distinction is also a symbol of how the health care debate has moved. In 2009, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, the public option was the rallying cry of progressive activists; now progressives prefer a single-payer system and establishment Democrats prefer a public option.)

When it comes to college education, Wilson has endorsed the House tuition-free college bill, which would make four-year public colleges and universities free for families earning up to $125,000 annually. Kopser, on the other hand, supports a more modest approach that would give tuition-free college to students whose families make less than the median income in their state and offer partial subsidies to other students.

The national Democratic support for Kopser, who has expressed his admiration for Ronald Reagan, could be explained by the fact that the district leans heavily Republican. In 2016, GOP Rep. Lamar Smith easily carried the district with 57 percent of the vote; his retirement as a longtime incumbent may weaken the party’s chances in the district, but few would describe it as anything other than conservative. Cook Political Report ranks the district as “likely Republican.”

But Wilson proved to be a formidable opponent in the first round of voting in March. Of five candidates, she led the field with 30.93 percent of the vote, to Kopser’s 28.98 percent. She did this despite having only a fraction of Kopser’s resources. Wilson spent around $39,000 to Kopser’s more than $600,000 prior to the first round of voting. That means she spent nearly two and a half bucks for every vote she earned, while Kopser spent over $40 per vote. The surprising strength of Wilson’s campaign may show that the district is becoming more progressive.

Shannon Proctor, an Indivisible activist in the district, described herself as a “Derrick fan girl” to The Intercept, referring to Crowe, the now-defeated candidate. After Wilson’s surprising performance in round one, she quickly aligned herself with the candidate. “I was guilty of having said that Mary didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell because I honestly didn’t think Texas District 21 was ready for a woman or a gay minister,” she admitted. But Wilson’s first-place finish changed Proctor’s mind, and she now believes Wilson is the strongest candidate in the race.

In an interview with The Intercept, Wilson sought to cast the race as the difference between a grassroots candidate and someone supported by Washington, D.C.-based organizations with substantial resources. She pointed to heavy-handed interventions by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in other Texas districts. The DCCC has not formally gotten involved in the 21st District yet, but did call Wilson to learn about her campaign after her surprising performance in the first round of voting on March 6. Wilson has not heard from the committee since, she said.

“I am more concerned, however, with the DCCC handpicking our candidates. The DCCC has completely misread the mood of the electorate. They continue to recruit and push candidates who do not represent voters’ needs or interests,” she said. “That’s why I came in first place in our primary after being outspent 20 to 1 by my opponent. Voters want to support candidates who will give a voice to working-class people, not multimillionaires. This year, voters are standing up and saying ‘our elections can’t be bought.'”

Like many other first-time Democratic candidates, Wilson was inspired to run for office after Donald Trump’s election to the White House, but her politics are more populist than anti-Trump. She has a track record as a social activist who has used her background as a lesbian member of the clergy to push back against the religious right. In 2005, she testified against Texas’s proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. More recently, she has been involved in activism in support of Planned Parenthood and against so-called bathroom bills that would require people to use public restrooms that correspond with the gender listed on their birth certificate.

In early April, Kopser’s campaign dealt with complaints after it field-tested messaging that referred to Wilson’s sexuality. The San Antonio Express-News summarized the poll as so:

Poll respondents were presented with a glittering narrative about Kopser. They were asked if they agreed that it would be important for Democrats to have a candidate who is a 20-year military veteran and has been described by former President Barack Obama as a champion of change.

When it came to Wilson, the poll profiled her as a lesbian minister and asked if Democrats should vote for her in the runoff whether they think she can win in November.

Kopser’s campaign told the paper that it was not seeking to make the poll an attack on Wilson’s campaign. “We have great respect for Mary and wanted to understand the extent to which the electorate finds her profile and message compelling,” the campaign said in a statement.

Prior to the first round of voting, Kopser ran a primary campaign strongly branded around the Democratic Party and progressivism, using mailers and digital ads to tout an award he received from the Obama White House for his private sector work in green energy.

But Wilson’s supporters are skeptical of Kopser’s Democratic credentials, pointing to a 2016 CNN segment in which he is portrayed as a Republican who opposed Trump. “He’s a Republican. I don’t give a shit what anybody says,” Proctor said. “He’s a Republican.”

“At a taco joint in Houston, Kopser shared how the self-described Reagan, Republican, West Point graduate army veteran who served in Iraq turned high-tech entrepreneur sees Trump as a dangerous choice,” CNN correspondent Ed Lavandera narrated.

“If Ronald Reagan and John Lennon had a kid, I’d be their son,” Kopser said in the clip, describing his politics. “Donald Trump is not who he appears to be. Donald Trump is a great entertainer. Donald Trump is a great showman if you will, but Donald Trump doesn’t really represent the views of so many millions of Americans.”

In an interview with The Intercept, Kopser said that the CNN segment misrepresented him. “I wish I had control over how reporters or papers editorialize their summaries,” he said. “He decided for spite or for whatever reason was the purpose of his article that he was going to describe me as a Ronald Reagan Republican. What he failed to do was add that very important prepositional phrase or description: ‘as a kid in the 1980s.'”

Kopser said he comes from a longtime Republican family but that he started to drift away from the party in the late ’80s.

At an event last year, Kopser said he had voted for Democrats in every general election since 1992. For Wilson, Kopser’s political history remains a question mark. “Regarding Joseph Kopser’s voting history, from what I understand, there is no evidence that Joseph has voted in a Democratic primary, and it is unclear to me when he became a Democrat,” she said. State voting records provided by the secretary of state to The Intercept only went back to 2014 and showed Kopser voting in just one primary: his own Democratic race in 2018.

In a November 19, 2016, Medium blog post titled, “On Trump, Reagan was right, ‘Trust but Verify,'” Kopser expressed dismay that Trump had been elected, but rhetorically reached across the aisle to his supporters to ask them to adopt the Gipper’s slogan when it came to the incoming president. He didn’t espouse a strong partisan identity in the post.

“Moderation and conversation will solve this problem as well as people starting to put country over party,” he wrote. “I look forward to working with anyone who wants to work to solve our problems in a moderate, thoughtful way to achieve a compromise we can all live with.”

Kopser cites his military history as the reason for avoiding partisan political activity prior to his announcement that he was running for Congress.

“It has been a tradition in military service going back to the days of George Washington,” not to have strong political affiliations, Kopser said in an interview.

“I made it a point when I was in the military to have never registered with a particular party,” he added. “And so, if given a choice whatever of the nine places I lived in my 20 years in the army, I would either choose nonaffiliated, unregistered, no party-- I forget what the different options were-- or in some cases, if they gave me no option, I put independent just to be my own person, independent not following the current-day independents, whatever the heck that means, that labeling.”

As recently as February, Kopser showcased his sometimes noncommittal approach to partisan political labels. During an event at the Ranchers and Landowners Association of Texas, he explained to the audience that his time in Iraq was part of the reason he wanted to secure the U.S.-Mexican border.

The hawkish remarks took some in the audience by surprise.

A member of the audience called out, “Are you sure you’re on the right ticket?”

He replied, “I’m on the American ticket.”

Now TX-21 voters are stuck with a choice between the lesser of two evils in November. Good luck figuring that out. Nor did any of the other Texas congressional primary runoffs last night have happy endings. The DCCC can congratulate itself for having wrecked Laura Moser's campaign. An anti-union Democrat, Lizzie Fletcher beat her in a very low turnout race, 67.9% to 32.1%. Fletcher will lose miserably to Republican Jon Culberson in November. The DCCC would prefer that than to see Moser take the seat. In the 23rd, Gina Jones beat Rick Trevino 68.1% to 31.9% and in the 32nd, Colin Allred beat Lillian Salerno 69.5% to 30.5%.

Dirty Money, Dirty Politicians... We Need To Rid The System Of BOTH

Since Kirsten Gillibrand first ran for Congress, joined the Blue Dogs, got appointed the the Senate and kept making nice with Wall Street all the way through, she's taken $9,148,338 from the finance sector. Among sitting senators who have not ran for president, only notorious bankster whores Chuck Schumer ($26,775,768), Mitch McConnell ($12,339,704), Rob Portman ($10,861,584) and Pat Toomey ($9,303,550) have solicited and accepted more in bankster bribes than Gillibrand. So far, during the current election cycle Kirsten Gillibrand is #2-- at $1,413,818... and she has a safe coast to reelection in November. (She's raised $16,669,499 to the $507,177 her little known GOP opponent, Chele Farley, finance chair for NYC Republican Party and a former Goldman Sachs bankster, has raised.)

Now that Gillibrand is harboring some delusion that she's running for president, she has sworn off the Wall Street bribes that have taken her so far. In fact she has sworn off all corporate PAC money. So have crooked Democrats Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, both of whom are also hoping to wind up on a 2020 national ticket, as well as Maria Cantwell. (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren don't taken corporate PAC money-- so wannabes like Gillibrand, Booker and Harris jumped on the bandwagon.) "Many Americans, wrote Said Jilani for The Intercept last week, "have grown increasingly distrustful of big business’s influence in politics since the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In fact, Harris cited that case when explaining her decision not to accept cash from corporate PACs on the Breakfast Club, a New York radio show.

“I think that money has had such an outside influence on politics, and especially with the Supreme Court determining Citizens United, which basically means that big corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money influencing our campaigns, right? We’re all supposed to have an equal vote, but money has now really tipped the balance between an individual having equal power in an election to a corporation,” Harris said. “So I’ve actually made a decision, since I had that conversation, that I’m not going to accept corporate PAC checks. I just, I’m not.”

Swearing off corporate PAC money can be one positive step a lawmaker can take towards reducing the corrupting influence of money on politics. But it’s far from enough.

The reason is that money from PACs – corporate or otherwise-- comprises a relatively insignificant portion of these senators’ campaign contributions, raising the question of whether curtailing donations from corporate PACs will really make a difference. Critics think it doesn’t, noting that the bigger threat of influence comes from wealthy donors who don’t funnel their cash through PACs. But for politicians looking to seize on public discontent with the influence of money on politics, the decision makes for an effective messaging ploy.

Michael J. Malbin, a campaign finance researcher at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, pointed out to The Intercept that Harris has received only a small amount of her total campaign funding from PACs. “However, she also received many of her itemized contributions from individuals whose income is derived from their work as corporate executives,” he said.

Benjamin Page, a long-time researcher of political decision-making at Northwestern University, agreed. “Refusing to take corporate PAC money makes a nice symbol, and I suppose we should give it some credit.  But far more money comes from wealthy individuals,” he wrote in an email. “That is much more important, and I believe it tends to corrupt both the Republican and the Democratic party.”

OpenSecrets, a project of the Center for Responsive Politics, tracked and categorized PAC donations between 2013 and 2018. The data reveals that most of the senators who’ve sworn off corporate PAC money received more from large individual donors-- donors giving $200 or more, who can be regular people but also corporate executives and lobbyists-- than from PACs in that time period.

• Cory Booker: 10.37 percent of Booker’s campaign funding has come from PACs, 76.40 percent of which is from business PACs. By contrast, 72.12 percent of Booker’s campaign funding is from large individual donors.
• Maria Cantwell: Just 0.62 percent of Cantwell’s campaign funding has come from PACs of any kind. In contrast, 73.61 percent of her campaign funding has come from large donors.
• Kirsten Gillibrand:  6.95 percent of Gillibrand’s campaign funding has come from PACs. Of this proportion, 65.73 percent is from business PACs. Meanwhile, 62.15 percent of her fundraising has come from large individual donors.
• Kamala Harris: 4.89 percent of Harris’s campaign fundraising has been through PACs; 41.07 percent of this total has been from business PACs. By contrast, 64.99 percent of her campaign funding has come from large donors. (Though the OpenSecrets analysis covered a five-year period, in Harris’s case, it only goes back to 2015, when she first ran for U.S. Senate.)
• Bernie Sanders: 1.73 percent of Sanders’s funding has come from PACs. Of that, 7.27 percent is from business PACs. 17.70 percent of his funding has come from large individual contributors.
• Elizabeth Warren: Just 1.4 percent of Warren’s campaign money has come from PACs. Of that, 12.91 percent is from business PACs. Large individual donors made up 29.72 percent of her campaign funding.

These figures make clear that the senators are giving up relatively little money by swearing off donations from corporate PACs-- it just isn’t a very big portion of their overall campaign funding. Which raises the question: Is it really possible that the system is being corrupted by sums of money this small? If not, then politicians-- and the voters they’re looking to win over-- need to look closer at how big money is corrupting Washington.

University of Massachusetts, Boston professor emeritus Thomas Ferguson is one of America’s leading academics who studies the influence of money in politics; he is the brain behind “the investment theory of party competition,” which says that politicians are essentially driven by donors, their true political base.

He doesn’t think much of senators disavowing corporate PAC money. “It’s an absolutely cheap gesture that means nothing, that’s why they do it,” Ferguson said in an interview. He pointed out that corporations can also run their money through the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and that these senators haven’t disavowed the comittee’s backing.

A close look at Gillibrand’s and Booker’s top donors makes clear just how little it matters when senators swear off corporate PAC money. Gillibrand’s 11th-largest donor is Morgan Stanley, which did not give a penny of its money to Gillibrand through a PAC. Instead, Morgan Stanley employees donated $40,425 to her campaign committee as individuals. Of the $814,463 that she has received from the securities and investment industry, just $70,500 came from PACs.

Gillibrand was one of the Democratic senators who voted down an amendment that would have broken up Wall Street’s largest banks in May 2010. Jeff Connaughton, an aide to then-Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., who co-wrote the amendment, noted dryly in his book that an Obama administration Treasury official later boasted that if the administration had supported the amendment, it would have passed, but because they didn’t, it didn’t. Speaking about the amendment four years later, Warren noted that it “had bipartisan support, and it might have passed, but it ran into powerful opposition from an alliance between Wall Streeters on Wall Street and Wall Streeters who held powerful government jobs. They teamed up and blocked the move to break up the banks.”

...A better path to limiting the influence of big money is for senators to simply develop a small donor base that supplants large donors of any sort, Ferguson said. “Let them say they won’t take money over, you know, a particular limit-- $500, $750, whatever you like,” he suggested.

Page agreed. “What we really need from candidates is reliance on small donations, if possible, as was done by Bernie Sanders and (to a lesser extent) Barack Obama,” he wrote to us.

In that regard, Warren and Sanders deserve an honorable mention, as they are the only senators in this group of six who got the majority of their campaign funding from small individual contributors since 2013. Nobody else comes close.

It’s easy to imagine lawmakers getting swayed by a pool of donors from a big bank or fracking company who give them $2,000 donations; it’s less easy to imagine that if the politicians build a donor base of people throwing in relatively small amounts, that they’d fall under pernicious influence.

(The Onion had an amusing article on this topic in 2016, with the headline: “Bernie Sanders Clearly In Pocket Of High-Rolling Teacher Who Donated $300 To His Campaign.”)

One of the other big problems with campaign spending is that outside groups that are technically independent--meaning they don’t officially support one candidate over another-- don’t always have to disclose where their money is coming from. For instance, 501(c)(4) groups are nonprofits that are not required to disclose donors at all. While these groups are not allowed to directly endorse a candidate, they are free to spend money on issues, and they often use their funds to run campaign attack ads.

Warren pioneered her own solution to this type of outside spending by working with her Republican opponent in 2012, incumbent Scott Brown, to form to a pact in which both sides agreed that if an outside group ran an ad, whatever candidate could conceivably benefit had to pay a penalty by donating to charity. The pledge reduced the influence of outside groups in the election, but it also had limitations-- for instance, some groups simply shifted their spending to mailers, as the pledge only explicitly applied to broadcasting.

Building a small donor base and developing agreements to keep outside groups out of elections are serious ways for individual politicians to limit the influence of big donors on politics, without changing campaign finance law itself.

Simply curtailing corporate PACs, when they don’t play a very large role in campaigns to begin with, isn’t.

Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic congressman from El Paso, swore off corporate PACs years ago and is now running for the U.S. Senate in Texas. His opponent, Ted Cruz, is one of the biggest recipients of dirty money from corporate PACs in the country-- but O'Rourke has been beating him in contributions anyway. And in the Oklahoma City-centered 5th district, Blue America’s progressive champion Tom Guild has raised the third most money of the 9 candidates, 3 Republican and 6 Democrats running for Congress. Tom’s average contribution is $31 and he refuses PAC contributions and money from the corporate elitists. The two candidates who have raised more money than Tom have both take PAC money and are awash in corporate contributions. One of those candidates is Republican incumbent Steve Russell, and the other is an establishment moderate, no labels Democrat, who is also awash in PAC and corporate money./span>