Biden's Campaign Is Confusing Name Recognition With Electability-- Don't Take The Bait

Remember what Chris Hayes said about looking at the 2020 candidates as the cycle kicked off? I saved the video to remind you. Let's use it as a quick lens to look at Status Quo Joe. Who will he fight for? What will he fight for? Well, who has he always fought for? His own career, his family, his family's lobbying clients, Big Banks, Wall Street, corporate America, the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about. Can he be trusted to do what he says? According to PolitiFact, 84% of Trump's checked statement have been lies. No one can compete with that... but Biden comes closer than any other politician. PolitiFact finds 60% of his checked statement to be lies. Trump is worse but, that bar is too low and it doesn't excuse the fact that most of what Biden says is a lie, some of it said to mislead and some of it said because his brain no longer functions adequately. So, no, Joe Biden's conflicting promises to various groups cannot be-- should not be-- trusted.

Grace Panetta, writing for Business Insider over the weekend, warned that it would be a mistake to buy into the hype that Biden is the most electable of the 2020 candidates. It's the narrative his creaky campaign is pushing, but he isn't the most electable at all. His big poll numbers come from name recognition among voters who are least likely to be following the primary carefully and from two important cohorts of Democratic primary voters that prioritize defeating Trump above all else: African American voters and voters in their 70s and 80s, much of the same coalition that decided Hillary was the most electable candidate.

When his wife tried to make a case for him last week, she didn't claim his pathetic healthcare plan was any good on the merits-- it isn't-- she just said issues don't matter and we should defeat Trump. In effect: just sign on the dotted line and we'll work out the details later. In general, that approach appeals to people whose educations didn't go beyond high school more than it does people who went to college. Like many rich people, Biden doesn't understand Medicare and doesn't understand Medicare-For-All. He opposes Medicare-For-All and has offered to compromise away Medicare benefits in order to lower budget deficits. If he is-- God forbid-- elected president, that is exactly what he will do.

Biden's wife, reported Panetta, "acknowledged that even if Biden's plan isn't the best one and voters don't like it, they should hold their noses and vote for him anyway." Addressing Elizabeth Warren and Bernie supporters, Mrs Biden said, "Your candidate might be better on healthcare than Joe is, but you have to look at who is going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say 'I personally like so-and-so better,' but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.'" That's all they got... but is it enough?

Nope. His policy stances across the board are basically nothing but tepid, conservative, ineffective and incrementalist approaches to healthcare, Climate Change, immigration, Wall Street, criminal justice, wealth inequality and everything else. And his putrid record will haunt the primary campaign and if he wins, will give Trump all the weapons he needs to defeat him.

The electability argument has always been bogus. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were seen as the least electable when they first ran. Jeb Bush, then Scott Walker and Marco Rubio-- and then Hillary Clinton-- were seen as the most electable in 2016. Panetta: "As political scientist Seth Masket pointed out, hypothetical Quinnipiac University general election polls from February 2016 showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton handily defeating Trump by five percentage points, tied with Sen. Ted Cruz, and losing to Sen. Marco Rubio by seven percentage points. But Republicans nominated Trump anyway, and won."

In her argument for why Democratic primary voters should pick Biden over other candidates, Jill Biden cited the head-to-polling showing Biden leading Trump as the main reason undecided primary voters should back him over other candidates.

"You've got to look at the polls... and if they're consistent and they're consistently saying the same thing, I think you can't dismiss that... if your goal is to beat Donald Trump, we have to have someone who can beat him," she said.

Most recent poll-- last week-- for the first primary (New Hampshire) shows Biden trailing Bernie by a wide margin

Not only has the conventional wisdom on electability been wrong many times before, but hypothetical general election polls, like the ones Biden's camp is relying on, haven't historically been a very good predictor of who actually wins elections, as FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out in June.

At this point in the 2016 election-- late August 2015-- head-to-head matchups showed, on average, Clinton beating Trump 50% to 39%, a margin of victory of 11 percentage points. In the end, Clinton defeated Trump 48% to 46% in the popular vote and lost the electoral college.

In 2016, FiveThirtyEight also conducted a broader analysis of general election matchup polls from every presidential election from 1944 to 2012. They found head-to-head matchup polls conducted a year before presidential elections were, on average, 11 percentage points off the final result.

For example, former President Bill Clinton hardly seemed electable in the later months of 1991 when he was 21 percentage points behind George H.W. Bush in the polls, but ended up beating Bush by 5.6% in the popular vote after the US went into a recession.

Brand new polling from Colorado shows Bernie ahead of Biden and this graph shows them doing equally well against Trump

As one Hillary mouthpiece admitted: "Aside from the logic, telling us to settle now is way too early. There is no need to settle." And remember, Biden inspires no one. "Much like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden’s Democratic primary campaign has thus far cloaked itself in an aura of inevitability," wrote Bhaskar Sunkara Friday. "You might not like Joe Biden. He might say racist or sexist stuff from time to time. His gaffes might be occurring at an alarming rate. He might have uninspiring policy ideas. But he’s going to win the primary anyway, so you better get used to him." That's how many interpret his wife's case for voting for him.

The states that matter most in 2020 are not red Biden bastions like South Carolina; they are in the industrial Midwest, where Bernie is shown to consistently beat Trump by around 10 points

Sunkara reminds his readers that "Biden’s fundraising picture also looks less rosy than it did back in May. He’s still the preferred choice of big party donors, but grassroots enthusiasm is receding. After raising an impressive $4.6m online on this first day of his campaign in April, things have slowed to a trickle. As Politico reports, Biden’s median online daily fundraising by the end of June was just $67,000 a day, considerably below Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is an especially important benchmark for Biden. They seem to be competing over much the same base-- working class, diverse, not college educated-- and either would benefit from the other’s downfall. Despite a narrative earlier this summer of campaign dysfunction and imminent collapse, recent polls have showed that the Vermont senator in a steady position within striking distance of Biden. Sanders has a rabid base of volunteers, superior online fundraising infrastructure, and his existing support may even be undercounted by most polls.

Yet the media narrative continues to paint Sanders as a fringe pariah and Biden as the inevitable 2020 candidate. It’s reminiscent of the 2016 Republican primaries, in which Donald Trump was considered an unserious candidate whose support was continually underestimated. The serious commentators kept waiting for an establishment wave of moderate Republicans to make first Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, and then even Ted Cruz happen.

The case for Biden’s invincibility is especially baffling-- he’s been running for the Democratic nomination (and losing) since the 1980s. It simply boils down to Obama coalition supporters (particularly black and brown voters) going with the most familiar face to rid of Trump era upheavals.

But electability is just one element of what voters are looking for, and Biden is running on nothing else. He has failed to adequately address his past positions in favor of Medicare and Social Security cuts, his engineering of loathed free trade deals, or his opposition to important desegregation measures.

While other candidates are galvanizing people around Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and calls to redistribute wealth and power from the 1% to working Americans, Biden is offering nothing. Poke one hole in his electability bubble and his campaign looks ready to implode.

This early in the race things are constantly changing-- many people are still undecided and won’t start paying attention until much later on-- so we would do ourselves a lot of good not to live and die with every poll. However, if there is one lesson from the 2016 general election worth remembering it’s this: most people might have not liked Donald Trump, but he gave those who did a real reason to turn out on Election Day. He was a candidate with very obvious convictions running against someone who seemed to focus group and triangulate her every position.

Joe Biden is Hillary Clinton 2.0. Perhaps Trump’s time in office has been enough of a disaster that idea-avoidance will work this time. But if voters want to be inspired, they’ll turn elsewhere or just stay at home again.

One more thing on Biden this evening: his toxic brand of bipartisanship has always meant one thing: the Right winning... every.single.time. Branko Marcetic, noting that "if worship of the U.S. Constitution is an American civic religion, with the Founders as prophets and Capitol Hill as a place of worship, then bipartisanship is its holy sacrament," reminded us that "For Biden and his generation of Democratic lawmakers, bipartisanship has long been hailed as a worthy end in its own right, no matter the result. He has pledged that a new day will dawn once Trump is removed from the White House. 'This nation cannot function without generating consensus,' Biden said in May. 'You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.' But as moderator Chuck Todd told Biden at the first Democratic debate, 'It does sound as if you haven’t seen what’s been happening in the United States Senate over the last 12 years.'"

An increasingly far-right GOP has ruthlessly obstructed Democrats while dangling cooperation to lure them rightward. The outcome has been a disaster for progressives. The parties have cooperated to water down or kill left-leaning measures and advance a right-wing agenda, from shredding the New Deal to ramping up deportation, turning the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama into graveyards of progressive policies. Democrats increasingly understand that, if they want to generate consensus, they’ll have to do it some other way than meeting a right-moving GOP in the “middle.”

... Joe Biden's political career is an exemplar of the price the Democratic Party paid as the Right slid into the dark reaches of the political spectrum.

As overt racism faded in polite society after the 1960s, those committed to beating back the advance of civil rights found proxy issues to dog whistle a racist tune: crime, drugs, welfare and busing. They found a willing partner in a 30-year-old freshman senator: Biden.

Biden hailed from Delaware, whose culture and borders straddled the Mason-Dixon line and whose political and economic life was dominated for decades by the Du Pont family that had helped jumpstart the rebellion against the New Deal. (As Biden would later assure a Republican Rotary Club in South Carolina in advance of his 2008 presidential run, Delaware, a slave state, had only “fought beside the North... because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South.”)

As conflict over court-ordered busing roiled his home state, Biden led a crusade against the civil rights measure, later boasting that he made it politically acceptable for other liberals to oppose it. He built alliances with Republican racists like Sen. Jesse Helms (NC) and Sen. Strom Thurmond (SC), the record-holder for longest filibuster in history, a 24-hour attempt to stall the Civil Rights Act of 1957. During the Reagan administration, Biden, Helms and Thurmond would help usher in an era of mass incarceration, working together to establish racist crack cocaine sentencing guidelines and harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences.

Biden also led the way on budget-slashing: In 1984, with Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley (IA) and Nancy Kassebaum (KS), Biden put forward a budget “freeze” that cut deficits by $100 billion more than Reagan proposed and eliminated scheduled increases to Social Security and Medicare. Biden also ranked among the sizable number of Democrats who gave their stamp of approval to signature Reagan victories like increased military spending, privatization and lower taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was cutting his teeth in this same punishing era. In 1980, Clinton lost his bid for reelection as governor of Arkansas after raising car license fees to fund highway repairs and trying to rein in the timber industry. The loss taught Clinton to eschew challenging corporate power and, instead, embrace what Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg termed “the politics of ultraconsensus.”

While Clinton’s presidency is remembered as a time of partisan warfare, bipartisan consensus was a quiet fixture throughout. Clinton brought in his own personal Rasputin in the form of political operative Dick Morris, who laid his strategy out in a memo: “fast-forward the Gingrich agenda” to make “Republican issues less appealing” and take the wind out of their sails. Unbeknownst to Clinton, Morris also created a back channel to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS), a former client, whom he giddily told: “We’ll pass everything.”

“Everything” meant measures like welfare reform, a balanced budget, cuts to Medicare and an immigration overhaul that helped create the deportation state currently operated by Trump.

Biden was an important player in these bipartisan deals. As Senate Judiciary Chair under Clinton, Biden led the passage of the infamous 1994 Crime Bill and worked to make sure Clinton would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” With Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (PA), Biden lamented “the polarizing partisanship and presidential politics that have permeated the issue” and insisted that a “tough, bipartisan welfare reform bill is easily within reach.” In 1996, the Senate passed welfare reform (what Lott described as “the Holy Grail of [the GOP’s] legislative master plan”) thanks to the votes of 51 Republicans and 23 Democrats.

“These were great monuments to consensus in Washington,” says Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? “They were just downstream of racism.”

Bipartisanship reached its apogee after September 11, when Biden swiftly became one of the most prominent Democrats to hitch himself to President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The terrorist attacks created a stunning uniformity of opinion, and Biden, up for reelection in 2002, would soon be heavily criticized in the Delaware press for a speech that appeared dovish. Biden told reporters they should count him “in the 90%” of voters who backed Bush. He stacked a hearing on Iraq with pro-war voices and made regular TV appearances parroting the administration’s talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And, like 28 other Democratic senators, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

In 2008, Vice President Biden found a home with “postpartisan” Obama, who, Perlstein says, “was wedded to the myths of consensus in a way that a lot of his supporters hadn’t realized at the time.”

Obama had risen to stardom with his 2004 convention speech denying the existence of a “red” and “blue” America, a feeling that suffused Democratic politics. Nary a 2008 primary debate went by without Sen. Hillary Clinton (NY), for example, pledging something or other of a bipartisan nature: a “bipartisan process” to tackle Social Security, a “bipartisan way” on immigration reform, even “bipartisan diplomacy” headed by “bipartisan emissaries.”

But once president, “Republicans used Obama’s own longing for consensus and bipartisanship against him,” says Frank.

Obama ran aground upon a decidedly partisan opposition that took advantage of racist sentiments against him. He tried for months to secure minimal Republican buy-in on Obamacare so he could slap a “bipartisan” label on it, only for “moderate” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) to use it as leverage to endlessly delay and erode the bill. Obama ramped up deportations as a bipartisan gesture, and the GOP continued to obstruct immigration reform.

Nothing spoke more to Obama’s futile attempt to reach common ground with Republicans than his 2011 attempt at a “grand bargain” on cutting the deficit. Biden was dispatched to negotiate with a radically anti-tax, anti-government GOP. He capitulated to every Republican demand, including cuts to food stamps, Medicare and Social Security, while agreeing to rule out new taxes. Ironically, it was only thanks to the Tea Partiers’ obstinacy that the deal did not pass.

The public was not so lucky in 2010, when Biden made a deal with Sen. McConnell to extend unemployment insurance in exchange for extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the estate tax. The deal was so lopsided that it outraged even conservative Democrats like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and prompted an eight-hour filibuster by Bernie Sanders. Two months later, in the midst of affectionately paying tribute to McConnell at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center (named for the senator), Biden pointed to the deal as “the only truly bipartisan event that occurred in the first two years of our administration.”

“We both got beat up, but we knew we were doing the right thing,” Biden said. “The process worked.”

He explained to the audience that, whether they were liberals, conservatives, Tea Partiers or Blue Dogs, little actually divided members of Congress.

“We basically all agree on the nature of the problems we face,” Biden said, as McConnell, leading a historically radical campaign of obstructionism against the Obama administration, looked on.

A continuing faith in compromise may well be the last gasp of a dying era.

“A lot of the things that made bipartisanship sound attractive are now vestigial,” Perlstein says. “Like a lot of neuroses, it was a response that was useful for dealing with trauma that was present and important at the time, but has outlasted its usefulness.”

Or, as Robin says, bipartisanship is “a mourning for a neoliberal accord between Democratic and Republican party elites.”

Today’s Democrats increasingly recognize the folly of seeking progressive change by partnering with a GOP that’s fundamentally opposed to it. A new generation of Democratic lawmakers is taking a combative, unflinchingly progressive approach reminiscent of the 1979 class of freshmen GOP legislators that included Gingrich.

As Ocasio-Cortez told journalist Ryan Grim, “The older members really cling to the idea that things are going to go ‘back to normal’ [after Trump]. For us, it’s never been normal, and before that, the bipartisanship was shitty anyway and gave us the War on Drugs, [the Defense of Marriage Act] and stripping the leg[islative] branch of everything.”

These young progressives are backed by social movements whose adherents have no desire to cooperate with nativists and corporatists. Together, they are seeking to remake the existing governing consensus in their image, just as Reagan managed to do four decades prior. The irony is, they’d be following the Right’s own road to success.

“The rise of the Right is the closest thing we have to an example of a political success story in our time in America, and it was largely achieved by smashing consensus,” Frank says.

But MacLean warns it would be a mistake to believe that obstructionism alone is a path to victory. “The radical Right is winning now because its chief architects played a very sophisticated, well-funded, integrated long game and built a vast infrastructure that is well-aligned to achieve their agenda,” MacLean says.

For inspiration, today’s progressives might look back to the anti-slavery movement, which went from a relatively small band of uncompromising, “radical” activists to controlling the presidency and Congress.

“Abolitionists were never anywhere near a majority in the North or anywhere else,” says Eric Foner, professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. “They were a vanguard.”

Abolitionists worked at both the grassroots and official levels to enact change, whether through legislation and court decisions or direct action and education. They made pioneering use of cutting-edge technology such as the printing press, the railroad and the telegram to spread their message. Their efforts helped lead Abraham Lincoln to drastically shift his thinking, jettisoning ideas like gradual emancipation and instead embracing black citizenship.

“Abolitionists and radicals were able to shift the pendulum to the left, and were able to make moderates inhabit radical ground,” says Sinha. “In the end, it wasn’t the abolitionists who abolished slavery,” Foner says. “It was more moderate people like Abraham Lincoln. But without the abolitionists, there’s no Lincoln. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Political shifts require years of movement building, but change ultimately happens suddenly. Thirty years after the abolitionist movement took off, there were nearly 2 million more slaves in the United States. Three years later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

“The abolitionist movement lasted for a long, long time, and for a long time failed abysmally,” Foner says. “Radicals have to not give up.”

The time is looking ripe for another hegemonic shift. The Trump administration has sparked a wave of political activism and organizing by Americans previously disengaged from politics. A bevy of socialist intellectual organs and figures have risen to newfound prominence, their arguments cited by mainstream news outlets and shared quickly and easily over the internet, much like the cheap, ephemeral books and magazines passed around by conservatives in the mid-20th Century. Workers are showing a renewed militancy, from the teachers who went on strike in red states across the country to the flight attendants who helped end the government shutdown in January.

Polls suggest the public has moved left, supporting everything from Medicare for All and the Green New Deal to a much higher minimum wage. Even as Trump stokes a racist anti-immigrant campaign, polling shows a public more pro-immigrant than ever.

Republicans will demonize these movements. The Democratic establishment will try to ignore them. But as the ranks of today’s radicals grow, and the more a concerted movement to remake the country expands, the harder it will be for even the most committed centrists to hew to their vision of consensus. As Biden told the audience at the McConnell Center eight years ago: “Reality has a way of intruding on one’s tightly held view.”

On Sleeping With The Enemy

One of the things I always liked about Ted Lieu and Pramila Jayapal was that while they were state senators, he in California and she in Washington, they became experts at working across the aisle to get real things accomplished. And they did it without ever abandoning their progressive and Democratic values. Marqus Cole is running for an open seat in the suburbs northwest of Atlanta. After the “compromise” that Pelosi and Hoyer gave to McConnell for nothing, he wrote me a note that emphasized that “it’s important to remember context and what actually happened here— Senate Democrats sold out our party’s values for a ‘bipartisan’ deal. House Democrats DID vote for and pass a version of the humanitarian aid bill that dealt with the problems of the immigration camps and put parameters on the administration. Once that bill made it to the Senate, Mitch, the grim reaper, never brought it up for vote. Senate Democrats had a choice. Fight for our values and a bill that passed the house or jam a ‘compromise’ bill down the throats of the House Democrats at the last minute. The only thing compromised about that bill was it’s values. Senate Dems should have fought for an up or down vote on the house’s bill; including slowing down the Senate if necessary. Or tried to go to conference in the alternative. I would have voted for the first House bill. I too would have protested what happened, that wasn’t democracy.”

What sickens me is seeing conservative shills within the Democratic Party— Josh Gottheimer comes right to mind as an example— who think bipartisanship means giving up and embracing the Republican position. That’s what the Problem Solver’s Caucus and the Blue Dogs are all about. It’s also what Status Quo Joe is all about.

Right after the debate, SiriusXM radio interviewed Bernie who responded to a question about working across the aisle by explaining how he and Biden differ on that. "Well, look, all that I can tell you is, my views are a little bit different. I do work with Republicans when I can. For example, I'm very proud of the fact that for the first time in 45 years, we used the War Powers Act to get a majority vote in the Senate to end the horrible war in Yemen led by Saudi Arabia. So, you work with Republicans when you can. But I think everybody understands that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans today have evolved into an extreme right wing party. They are intimidated by Donald Trump. They are controlled by big money, and the only way we beat them is by creating an unprecedented grassroots movement of young people and working people and people who believe in justice."

Biden, clueless as ever, had boasted how he had engineered a disastrous “compromise” with McConnell that extended the Bush tax cuts forever, while slightly, and very temporarily, raising the income tax rate for wealthy Americans. Biden foolishly babbled that “we needed to be able to keep the government from shutting down and going bankrupt; I got Mitch McConnell to raise taxes $600 billion by raising the top rate.”

Unfortunately for Biden, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, a solidly conservative Democrat, was very aware of how those negotiations went. “The deal,” he said, “that he talked about with Mitch McConnell was a complete victory for the Tea Party. That was a great deal for Mitch McConnell. It was a terrible deal for Americans.”

I was waiting for Biden to start bragging how he had negotiated a deal that included cutting Social Security and Medicare, but I assume his staff drilled it into his head to not mention that during the primaries. In fact, as far back as 1995, Biden has been advocating Social Security and Medicare cuts. This is the only thing you can be sure he will do if he is— God forbid— elected president. Watch the flaming asshole on the senate floor. This is absolutely classic Biden— his essence as a piece of crap in suit and tie:




Biden— always already up on a high horse that he never has to get up on—insisted that cutting programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits… is the only way to ensure their continued existence— an old conservative and Republican Party ruse that they have been using for a century. Obama appointed Biden to lead the negotiations for the [thankfully failed] 2011 Grand Bargain. Biden eagerly offered to cut Social Security benefits as part of the deal. And it was just a bit over a year ago that he cluelessly shouted how “Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code. What’s the first thing he decided we needed to go after? Social Security and Medicare.” And that’s exactly what Biden will go after if he ever gets the chance. Ironic when you consider the only firm support he has is from voters over 65 who are absolutely petrified of any change, especially to Medicare and Social Security.

Andrew Cuomo thinks pols are either talkers or doers -- guess which he thinks he is

The New Yorker caption for this picture is: "At close range, the Governor is a formidable presence. His speech comes in aggressive, self-confident bursts, especially when he's sizing up the state of political play, and he is relentless." I thought this was kind of funny, because just looking at the picture, I thought of some tacky horror-movie villain.

by Ken

It's about as old an argument as there is in the field of government: compromising to get stuff done vs. holding out for getting the right thing(s) done. Of course it's kind of a fake dichotomy. I think most people understand that at points in the political process, it's necessary to make compromises, and you can't just talk about "getting stuff done" without facing up to hard questions about what stuff needs to be done, and how much bad stuff you can allow to get done in order to get better stuff done.

Nevertheless, I think NYS Gov. Andrew Cuomo has made no secret of the fact that he's a "getting stuff done" kind of guy. And as much as he revered his late father, onetime three-term Gov. Mario Cuomo, and as intimately involved as he was in his father's political career, which after all blossomed pretty late for a pol, as an offshoot of his law practice and community involvement, Andrew's idea of being governor is by no means the same as his father's.

You see --


ANDREW'S MODEL FOR POLITICAL "DOING"
ISN'T HIS FATHER -- IT'S BILL CLINTON

Over the last several months, it turns out, The New Yorker's esteemed legal correspondent, Jeffrey Toobin, has been working on a profile of Andrew, which appears now in the February 16 issue, as "The Albany Chronicles: How Andrew Cuomo gets his way."

It is, as you would expect of a New Yorker profile, a very long piece. And I don't propose to get very far or deep into it. But at the start, we get some pretty sharp defining of political terms. And I thought it would be interesting just to isolate some of this.

Starting with Andrew's view of himself as a pol vs. his father.

Mario Cuomo defined his three terms as governor with oratory; Andrew Cuomo has sought to build his reputation in a different way. He made clear that his primary inspiration when it came to dealing with legislators was Bill Clinton, not his father. During Clinton’s second term, Cuomo served in his Cabinet, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. “I was watching, and they were impeaching the guy, and he was still there every day, asking them how they were doing, trying to make deals,” Cuomo recalled, his voice bearing the hard consonants of Queens, where he grew up. “My job is to get to yes,” he said. “If I don’t make a deal, I get nothing done. If I get nothing done, I am a failure. If the objective is to make a nice speech, it means nothing.”

IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN THE POINT,
ANDREW BELIEVES IN DOING, NOT TALKING

Interestingly, Andrew thinks of Barack Obama as a talker, not a doer!

For better and for worse, Cuomo views his work as a series of transactions. He disdains rhetoric; he prizes results. He has had several accomplishments in his first four years. Against heavy odds, he pushed through a marriage-equality bill in the Legislature; he banned fracking; he tightened the state’s gun-control laws; he closed thirteen prisons; he started construction on the first major bridge in the state in fifty years, a replacement for the Tappan Zee, across the Hudson; and he passed four balanced budgets in a row, all on time. Deeds, not words—that might as well be the motto of Cuomo’s administration. In nearly every speech, and in many conversations, Cuomo dismisses the importance of political talk. As if adopting a typical voter’s view of President Obama, Cuomo told me, “Beautiful rhetoric, beautiful vision—I’m sold on the vision—and what happens? There was no product. There was no actualization of the vision. Now I’m more disillusioned than I was when we started. You brought me up with that beautiful language, and you got me excited and I thought it was possible and then it wasn’t.”

LET'S LOOK, FOR EXAMPLE, AT THE CORRUPTION
INQUIRY ANDREW STARTED, THEN SHUT DOWN

Jeffrey T provides us with background:

In the summer of 2013, Cuomo created what became known as the Moreland Commission, a bipartisan group of leading citizens, who were to spend up to eighteen months investigating public corruption in the state. The commission’s inquiries focussed in particular on whether the outside business activities of state legislators should be subject to tighter regulation. By early 2014, [Assembly Speaker Sheldon[ Silver and his colleagues had come to loathe the commission, and went to court to thwart its inquiries. Around the same time, Cuomo was seeking to pass his annual budget, and he hoped to do that on schedule. So, just nine months after Cuomo created the commission, he abruptly shut it down. Silver passed Cuomo’s budget; Cuomo rid Silver of the meddlesome commission.

ANDREW TELLS JEFFREY THAT HE
THINKS HE GOT THE THING JUST RIGHT

On the day after [Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver’s arrest, I met with Cuomo in his New York City office, on Third Avenue. I asked him about the widespread contention that the charges against Silver showed that Cuomo should have let the Moreland investigation run its course.

“They’re exactly wrong,” Cuomo said. “What happened on the Moreland Commission is they subpoenaed the outside info of the Senate and the Assembly, in a fairly aggressive way. The Senate and the Assembly join together, the Republicans and the Democrats, in a motion to quash the subpoenas. And they are successful in the lower court. And we’re stuck for, like, four months.”

Closing down Moreland, in Cuomo’s view, broke the logjam. After the shutdown, the Legislature passed modest ethics reform, which increased penalties for bribery and established a pilot program for public financing in the next state comptroller’s race. Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney in Manhattan, demanded the Moreland files and used them to make the case against Silver and, perhaps, others. “We get the legislation I wanted in the first place,” Cuomo told me. “Moreland takes the same cases and the same subpoenas and hands them to local D.A.s and to Preet.” Cuomo disclaims any responsibility for Silver’s possible misdeeds. “If Anthony Weiner shows his private parts, do you blame Obama? These are criminal acts of individual legislators. What would you have me do?”

AND YET ON THE OTHER HAND --

Each step in Cuomo’s analysis makes a kind of tactical sense. But he shut down the investigation even though the Legislature failed to make significant political reforms. Bharara and the other prosecutors obtained the commission’s files only because Bharara publicly expressed his outrage at Cuomo’s action. * Cuomo’s explanation ignored the symbolism: How could there ever be a legitimate reason, in a state long beset with corruption in its Legislature, for the governor to short-circuit his own marquee attempt to clean it up?

I DON'T MEAN TO COME TO ANY GRAND CONCLUSION

I just thought these very old issues of governance are framed pretty interestingly here.

#

Who Gets Fucked When DC Republicrats Decide To Compromise? Not The Koch Brothers, Wall Street Or The Adelsons

Well, the regular working families are the ones who take it in the neck, of course. Republicans grudgingly prepared to not shut down the government by bragging to their extremist fringe that they would still enforce plenty of pain on the poor people their party is perpetually at war with. As John Nichols wrote last week for The Nation, "the problem with bipartisanship as it is currently understood is that, for the most part, cooperation in Congress serves the elites that already are living large thanks to federal tax policies that redistribute wealth upward."

As we pointed out, a handful of House progressives were among the 46 congressmen to vote against the GOP Tax Extenders bill, hailed as a glorious compromise, December 3. Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Keith Ellison (D-MN) and CPC First Vice Chairman Mark Pocan was two of them. Ellison says the bill "gives away too much to big business, while doing little to help working families make ends meet... The bill is full of deficit-financed corporate giveaways that won't stimulate the economy or help working Americans. The bill retroactively restores the bonus depreciation tax break, which doesn't increase economic growth because it helps companies pay for equipment they've already purchased. It also costs $1.49 billion. The active financing exemption allows companies to keep a huge amount of profits overseas and costs $5 billion. The bill also provides tax breaks for motorsports tracks such as NASCAR ($33 million) and racehorses ($45 million)."

Compromise-prone Democrats tried to argue that they had to back the measure because it extended some programs that benefit working Americans. However, Pocan explains, "almost all of the significant tax extenders were going to corporations, not to working people. And they were retroactive. You couldn't even argue that they would create jobs-- except in the last two weeks of the year."

Ellison's assessment was that "the bad clearly outweighs the good in this bill."

"The bill passed [December 3] does little for working families, but lots for corporations already booking big profits," added Ellison. "Too many Americans are working in jobs that don't sustain their families. Nearly 75% of the tax breaks in the package will make their struggle to attain the American Dream even tougher."

And that takes us to the bill Boehner and McCarthy are shepherding through Congress this week to keep funding the government. They hope to cause as much pain as they can for working families without making it impossible for enough Democrats to back it so that it passes despite Ted Cruz and the absolutists who want nothing less than a complete shutdown of the government (and impeachment of Barack Obama and a unicorn for every wing-nut).

Congress prepared on Monday to scale back Michelle Obama's school-lunch nutrition mandates and curtail some clean water regulations in a $1 trillion spending bill that would avert a government shutdown this week but extract a policy price from Democrats.

Continued fighting over such policy changes threatened to delay a huge spending agreement that lawmakers hope to pass to keep the government funded past Thursday. The measure would keep domestic spending at current levels while increasing funding to fight crises abroad, from the war against the Islamic State in the Middle East to the threat of Ebola in West Africa.

But in keeping with the broader theme of this 113th Congress, even reaching the finish line was proving harder than expected. Since Republicans took control of the House after the elections in 2010, the government has largely been funded by a series of short-term spending laws that held down overall government spending without shifting money to reflect Republican priorities.

With the spending bill now in the works, Republican leaders hope to leave their imprint more firmly-- and signal the direction they will try to take the federal government starting next month, when Congress is in their complete control.

Under the plan drafted by House and Senate Appropriations Committees, President Obama would get $5.4 billion in emergency funds to battle Ebola, Democratic and Republican aides say.

More than half of the overall package-- about $554 billion-- would go to military spending. The deal would also allocate roughly $948 million to handle the surge of unaccompanied minor children who began pouring across the southern border this summer.

...Policy prescriptions, including those to ease standards on school lunch content and the Environmental Protection Agency's jurisdiction over some bodies of water, have been more contentious than the negotiations over money. Cultural conservatives in the House and Senate were also pressing to include a "conscience clause" for employers who say funding contraception violates their religious beliefs.

...Conservative groups like Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, were pressuring Republicans to vote against the measure, saying it did too little to combat Mr. Obama's increasingly bold use of executive authority. That, in turn, strengthened the Democrats' hands, since with Republican defections it will take Democratic votes to secure a majority to pass the bill.

"I remain cautiously optimistic that there will be sufficient votes," said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania, who added that his preference would have been to pass a broad spending bill to fund all of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, through the current fiscal year. "Maybe in the new year we add some policy riders, but at the end of the day we're going to pass the Homeland Security bill, so why not do it now rather than wait."

Speaker John A. Boehner may need several dozen Democratic votes to push the legislation through the Republican-controlled House, and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, has signaled that she will provide the necessary votes only if Democrats and Republicans can find "common ground" on the policy provisions.

UPDATE: More Self-Serving Crap The Politicians Are Sneaking Into The Omnibus

Public Citizen just announced that they caught the transpartisan crooked politicians we just elected sneaking further institutionalization of corruption into the "must pass" omnibus bill. They've included provisions in the spending bill that authorize individuals to give $97,200 per donor per year to each of three separate committees set up by the national parties-- "to fund the national conventions, to pay for the building funds and to pay for recounts and other legal proceedings, in addition to the current $32,400 maximum a donor can currently give per year to each party. This includes giving separately to each of the three separate committees the parties set up. Depending how the Federal Election Commission interprets this change, a federal officeholder may be able to solicit, and an individual donor would be able to give, $777,600 per year to a national party or $1,555,200 per election cycle. A couple could give $3,110,400 to a national party in a two-year election cycle."

The deal that was struck as a part of the omnibus appropriations bill filed yesterday is a clear-cut step in the wrong direction for our democracy. Using the funding bill to increase party limits is a move back toward the days of corrupting soft-money contributions. Increasing these limits would only enable more dollars to pour into a system already flooded with cash and would encourage higher independent expenditures in the money arms race to counter them.

This embarrassing deal sacrifices the interests of everyday Americans who want clean elections while elevating the concerns of politicians who want to raise more money.

The answer to out-of-control and unlimited outside spending by the super-rich and giant corporations isn’t to enable virtually unlimited contributions to parties-- and, inevitably, candidates-- but to get outside spending under control. To do this, we need to begin by putting an end to dark money with full disclosure.

Bipartisan! Compromise! Beltway! Yayyyy!

Will Harry Reid's Sell Out Of The Middle Class Help Solidify An Open Rebellion Caucus?

Trouble for America

John Nichols post-election piece for The Nation, Democrats: The Party of Pablum, is pretty harsh... but completely on track, a track the geriatric, sclerotic Democratic congressional leadership is now utterly incapable of dealing with.

When Bernie Sanders gets to griping about the Democratic Party, which happens frequently, he asks, “What does it stand for?” The independent senator argues that, after years of sellouts and compromises on issues ranging from trade policy to banking regulation, and especially after letting campaign donors and consultants define its messaging, the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman has become an ill-defined and distant political machine that most Americans do not relate to or get excited about. His point has always been well-taken, but it was confirmed on November 4. How else can we explain voters who chose Mitch McConnell senators and Elizabeth Warren policies?

...While voter suppression and low turnout are huge concerns that must be addressed, voters who came to the polls on November 4 were sufficiently progressive and populist to support minimum-wage hikes, paid sick leave, crackdowns on corporate abuses of the environment, expansion of healthcare and radical reform of a money-drenched campaign-finance system. They just didn’t elect Democrats. Of course, personalities, dark-money interventions and plenty of other factors were at play. But the consistent pattern of progressive policy votes in combination with Republican wins provide the starkest evidence of the extent to which the Democratic Party was an incoherent force in 2014.

Sanders and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus tried to get Democrats on message throughout the year. Warren wowed the crowd at Netroots Nation in July, where she outlined a platform centered on economic populism but also including progressive social, environmental and political reforms. But the memo never got to most candidates, consultants, party chairs and leaders. And the results were devastating-- not just at the federal level but in the states, where Republicans grabbed governorships and eleven new legislative chambers. Midterms are usually rough for the party of the sitting president, but the 2014 defeats ran deeper, and in many cases will be harder to reverse.

At the root of the problem is a delinking of politics from policy. Increasingly, Democratic candidates in major contests run as “brands” carefully constrained to make a lowest-common-denominator appeal that is satisfying to campaign donors and insiders in Washington but that makes little sense to voters. While GOP candidates rage cynically against “elites” and “crony capitalism,” Democrats peddle pablum. As such, they don’t excite even their own base. What excited activists were those initiative and referendum campaigns; indeed, some of the biggest rallies I witnessed during the 2014 campaign were organized by backers of minimum-wage hikes and “Move to Amend” campaigners for an end to corporate influence on politics and policy. They were right to be excited: they were on their way to big and meaningful victories because they were fighting for big and meaningful-- as well as popular-- proposals. That’s a lesson Democrats should ponder, because as Stephanie Taylor of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee reminds us: “When elections are about nothing, Democrats lose.”

Yesterday Igor Volsky reported at ThinkProgress that Harry Reid "compromised" with the Republicans that will allow them to eliminate tax breaks for the middle class, provide massive corporate tax breaks, end breaks for green energy companies while continuing to subsidize Big Oil and Gas. Sounds more like caving in than compromising, no?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has reached a compromise with House Republicans on a package of tax breaks that would permanently extend relief for big multinational corporations without providing breaks for middle or lower-income families, individuals with knowledge of the deal tell ThinkProgress.

Under the terms of the $444 billion agreement, lawmakers would phase out all tax breaks for clean energy and wind energy but would maintain fossil fuel subsidies. Expanded eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit would also end in 2017, even though the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that allowing the provisions to expire would push “16 million people in low-income working families, including 8 million children into-- or deeper into-- poverty.” The proposal would help students pay for college by making permanent the American Permanent Opportunity Tax Credit, a Democratic priority.

...The costs of the package will not be offset... On Monday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew also blasted the emerging agreement as “fiscally irresponsible” and doing “very little for working families.” He said, “Any deal on tax extenders must ensure that the economic benefits are broadly shared. We are committed to working with Congress to address the issue in a manner that is fiscally responsible and extends critical tax benefits for working families.”

The "Democratic-controlled" Senate will be voting on this nightmare package-- a lovely gift for the Republican donors who bought the GOP their big victories Nov. 4-- next week. If you haven't read Gaius Publius' post a Senate Open Rebellion Caucus now is the time to do so. It should be interesting to watch which Democrats stand with Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Sherrod Brown and Brian Schatz and which will stand with Reid and the Republicans. House Democrats are scratching their heads and wondering why Reid is trying to give away the store. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, is opposing the Reid deal with the Republicans. "The overall package is simply unacceptable and adds more than $400 billion to the debt. Unless our economy works for every American, it isn't working." And, then, of course... will we see a veto of this attack against the middle class and against a cohesive, forward-looking energy policy?

Progressives in the House, like CPC co-chairs Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison, didn't beat around the bush. They oppose the Reid-McConnell deal and in a joint statement, they explained that "The tax extension package will once again be a boon for corporate profits while largely leaving out middle-class and low-income families who are struggling just to get by. If we can find hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to make corporate tax breaks permanent, we should be able to help those struggling to find work. We should be making permanent those tax breaks that help working families without adding restrictions that exclude children in need. This deal is a permanent step backwards for those who think we have a system that is rigged in favor of the wealthy."

Guest Post By Michael Bart-- An Immutable Law Of Physics

Michael is one of my oldest friends. He and I went to college together, spent time in Amsterdam, Finland and San Francisco and, in recent years, have been sharing vacation rentals in places from Bali to Tuscany. He shared some ideas this morning about the midterm elections, from the perspective of someone who isn't as all-consumed by politics as the regular DWT team.

Moment of (Political) Inertia
by Michael Bart

The 2014 midterm election results are in, and America has become even more unbalanced than it’d been Monday. It reminds me of an essay I began a year ago after noticing a correlation between our dysfunctional government and a principle of physics known as Moment of Inertia.

It’s become nearly impossible for today’s Members of Congress to negotiate compromise solutions due to the extreme polarization of political positions. This polarization arises from several factors, including obligations to radical donors, intransigence on hot-button issues and the lack of personal relationships between the members themselves.

Because many now spend more time in their home districts campaigning and fund raising than they do in Washington, DC, it has become easier for Members of Congress to demonize one another. Whether or not the lack of personal relationships is the primary reason for the polarization, our representatives have clearly gravitated away from the political center or, while maintaining their personal positions, the ability to negotiate mainstream compromises.

So what has this got to do with physics? The Moment of Inertia is a measure of how an object resists changes in its rotational motion. Imagine a broomstick that is uniform in thickness so that it balances exactly on the center point along its length. Now, imagine hanging a five-pound weight at each end of the broomstick. The broomstick still balances at its central point but if you try to spin it on the balance point, the weight at either end will make it more difficult to start the stick spinning and more difficult to stop it from spinning once it gets going. That’s inertia at work. As you move the weights closer towards the center, the broomstick still weighs the same but becomes easier to start and stop.

This principle seems relevant to our current political situation. As our political center migrates to the fringes, the Moment of Inertia makes government a very unwieldy tool for addressing problems that arise quickly and require equally quick responses. In fact, it has now become nearly impossible to begin any movement at all, to the point where we see a Congress that is standing virtually paralyzed even in the face of issues that threaten our national future.

At the risk of seeming naïve, it’s time to restore balance to the political process. The time for adjusting the political Moment of Inertia is now, before permanent inertia sets in. This is not to say that issues don’t matter or that we should compromise our principles, but hardening our stances will inevitably lead to total stasis.

Rather than allowing ourselves to be manipulated into voting for simplistically framed narrow self-interests, we should be committed to electing a thoughtful and balanced Congress that will act as an effective tool to address the moving targets that challenge us. However, that requires a thoughtful and mentally balanced electorate. What we have today is a population with near-zero political literacy that whipsaws between hope and rage. The immutable laws of physics will soon put an end to us if we don’t act now.

Kerith Strano Taylor Wants To Work For Us-- And There's No Doubt She Would Do A Better Job Than Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA)

As you probably know, Alan Grayson, a congressman who never sells out or bargains away the legitimate rights of working families, has been the most successful Member of Congress in terms of bringing both parties together in moving sensible, bipartisan legislation. Friday I spoke with a progressive candidate in a pretty red Pennsylvania district, Kerith Strano Taylor and her approach to working across party lines reminded me of the way Grayson does it. She won the Democratic primary for PA-05, a district currently represented by a garden variety, lockstep backbencher with no influence or impact, Glenn Thompson. He does what he's told and never strays from the party line and he hasn't accomplished a thing since being first elected in 2008, other than to keep his head down and hope no one notices him.

Kerith Taylor would make a very different kind of congressmember-- an impressive one. She's running in a tough, rural district that covers 24% of the state-- and she's covering all of it on her motorcycle the way no other Democrat ever has. She has some inspiring qualities and I believe she has more of a shot than most of the conservative candidates Steve Israel has dug up around the country. Republicans take PA-05 for granted because the PVI is R+8 but last cycle Senator Bob Casey won the 2 biggest counties in the district, Center and Erie and President Obama also won Erie and fought Romney to a 49-49% tie in Center.

Take a minute to read Kerith's guest blog post, where she examines the failures of Congress and discusses her perspective on one of the basic problems-- the failure to negotiate, compromise, and put away party and political interests. In recent years, EMILY's List has trivialized the whole idea of why we really need more women in Congress and what qualities women can bring to the table. Washington insiders, including the DCCC and the careerists who run EMILY's List, can learn from Kerith, and Congress would be better with her in it. She has been endorsed by the National Organization for Women (NOW) and by the Women's Campaign Fund (WCF).



Congress Is Broken-- A Woman's Touch Could Be Just The Thing
-by Kerith Strano Taylor

The requirements to be a member of the United States Congress are few. One must be 25 years old, have resided in the United States for at least 7 years, and be a resident of the district where elected. That is it. With such minimal standards, perhaps we should not be surprised by the massive dysfunction we see in Washington, D.C.

Imagine what could happen if those who served in Congress were adept at the very thing we need them to do: negotiate, compromise, and promote the best interests of their districts and their nation. But, we don’t require this, and instead get a body of legislators that is incapable of negotiation, demonizes the art of compromise, and puts their self interests over our interests.

Negotiation is critical to solving the challenges that we face as a nation, and yet our elected representatives can’t do it. Climate change is threatening our safety and security, yet Congress won’t touch the issue with a 10 foot poll. Our minimum wage has remained stagnant since 2009, yet our Representatives can’t be bothered to talk about poverty and income. They cannot even muster the will to have a discussion about crisis on our Southern border. I could give example after example, but suffice to say that reason and negotiation has been tossed aside in favor of affect and soundbites, and compromise has been thrown out the window.

Simply put: Congress is broken.

Of course, negotiation is hard work. Many attorneys-- people who, like our Representatives, are hired to solve problems-- view negotiation with trepidation. This is especially true in family law and custody cases. Emotions rarely run higher than when parents are fighting to keep their children. The rejection and pain of a separation rarely stand aside when meetings begin to determine where children will live and who will parent them on a daily basis. Often, the parents forget or ignore the fact that their children did not choose the fate that has befallen them, and instead of discussion, we get argument-- and heated argument at that.

I am well aware of these circumstances, both professionally and personally. I have practiced custody law since 2001 when my husband and I opened our law firm in my hometown of Brookville, Pennsylvania. In 2008, divorce came knocking on my door. I was hurt and angry, but I knew exactly what I did not want my divorce to look like. I was not going to allow my children to become collateral damage to the choices their parents were making. I was not going to absolve myself of all connection to their father. Together, we brought our children into this world, and together, we had the responsibility to raise them. Instead of acting out in anger, spite, and malice, I chose to negotiate, to compromise, and to put my children’s interests ahead of my immediate self-interests.

That approach worked. Almost 7 years later, my ex-husband and I are still a parenting team, and we still work together in our law firm. In fact, his support and willingness to help with work and family afforded me the space to run for Congress. But imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t negotiated, compromised, and prioritized our mutual interests.

I know personally the benefits of negotiation and compromise, and I bring this to knowledge to my law practice every day. Custody cases go through three stages-- a conciliation conference, a mediation, and finally a hearing before the judge. In each stage, the court system’s desired outcome is settlement. In 2013, the office providing legal services to low-income families closed due to a lack of State funding. Our court system became flooded with pro se custody litigants. Unrepresented parents came to the Courthouse and were expected to sit together in a room and negotiate their custody agreement. Needless to say, these expectations were not met. Most parents stood in the hallway and screamed at each other, continuing the fight that prompted the separation in the first place. The custody conference was not working, and as a result, our mediation program was backlogged by three months.

This system was broken.

My Judge believed I could fix it.

I said, “Yes.”

Specifically, I was asked to conduct custody conciliation conferences, to work with both parents and help them reach a compromise that would allow both to be part of their children’s lives. This was as close to pro bono work as an attorney can get, paying a small hourly wage and foreclosing the possibility of all litigants ever becoming paying clients.

I began running conciliation conferences in July 2013. I quickly realized that every parent was walking into the room ready to tell me all of the reasons they could not and would not agree to anything. They had been wronged. They no longer recognized the person across the table from them. They almost all said, “We are NOT going to agree!” Allowing parents to begin negotiations with a “No” would stymie the process. So instead, I begin with something to which all can agree. I ask them a simple question: “Do you love your children more than you hate your ex?” Some parents are ready to hear the question; most initially respond with vitriol. But, they invariably answer, often in unison, “Yes. Yes, I love my children more than I hate my ex.” This strategy of has enabled me to help families reach a sustainable custody settlement in over 85% of my cases.

The custody system was broken. I helped fix it by cultivating negotiation and compromise among angry, hurt, and fearful parents, and empowering them to put the interests of their children over their own.

In 2006, Supreme Court Justice Max Baer convened a three tiered system of Roundtables to identify challenges, propose solutions, and fix problems in our foster care system. As Guardian ad Litem, I was asked to serve on our County Roundtable. I soon was invited to sit on the regional Leadership Roundtable, and shortly thereafter, on the newly created State Children’s Roundtable. The first meeting of the State Roundtable was spent extolling the virtues of our system. No one was ready to suffer the political blows of acknowledging that we had over 22,000 children in foster care with little hope of finding a forever family.

But soon, every person sitting around the Statewide Children’s Roundtable agreed to one central premise, “We care more about the fate of the children in our foster care system than about the surrounding politics.” Once we found this common ground, we were able to talk about the problems, and just a few years later, after numerous rounds of discussion and negotiation over action plans, we have reduced the number of foster children by over 6,000 by taking greater advantage of kinship care and using deliberative conferences like Family Group Decision Making, which empowers families to be a part of the solution to the challenges they face.

Our dependency system was broken. I am helping to fix it by cultivating negotiation and compromise amidst potential political firestorms.

Since putting my name on the ballot for Congress, the people I have met unanimously agree on one thing: they love their Country more than they hate… anything. They talk with me about their disgust with a Congress that can’t or won’t agree with this basic principle.

I doubt that any sitting member of Congress would actually say “No” to the question, “Do you love your country more than you despise the other party?” But, actions speak louder than words. That said, I might be wrong; the members of the 113th Congress sure seem pretty eager to say “No.” No to discussion. No to negotiation. No to compromise.

Our representatives have abdicated their responsibility to govern. Our Congress is broken. I want to help fix it. Together, we can get this Congress back to work.

I am running for U.S. Congress in Pennsylvania’s 5th District to be a part of the solution, not the problem. I am an advocate for children and families, public education, and healthy communities. I am a believer in the power of democracy and its ability to serve the needs of all Americans. And, I am a negotiator, a person who believes in compromise, and someone who will put the needs of the 5th District and the nation first.