Some People "Would Rather Have 1st Class Seats on the Titanic Than Change the Course of the Ship"

(Click to see original tweet.)

by Gaius Publius

"Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown[.]"

—Paul Craig Roberts, quoted here

Read the quote in the graphic above again. Insider Party consultants made millions off of Jon Ossoff's loss. Would those insiders take an Ossoff win if it meant no money for them? These people, Democratic Party elites, are not your friends and they're not the nation's friends. They are their own friends, period.

This is the other problem the nation faces. This is why the nation can't have nice things, like Medicare for All:

Hillary Clinton: Single-payer health care will 'never, ever' happen

Clinton stressed how difficult it is to stand up to the existing health insurance industry ... "I think it's important to point out that there are a lot of reasons we have the health care system we have today," she said. "I know how much money influences the political decision-making..."

an economy free of predatory monopolies:

Amazon is the shining representative of a new golden age of monopoly that also includes Google and Walmart.... In its pursuit of bigness, Amazon has left a trail of destruction—competitors undercut, suppliers squeezed—some of it necessary, and some of it highly worrisome. And in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette, it has entered a phase of heightened aggression unseen even when it tried to crush Zappos by offering a $5 rebate on all its shoes or when it gave employees phony business cards to avoid paying sales taxes in various states.)

and bankers who got to jail when they steal money ("The Untouchables: How the Obama administration protected Wall Street from prosecutions").

This is a large part of why the worst political party in 100 years — the Republican Party, if you're wondering — holds so much power. The other resistance is against Democratic Party policies like these. Democrats will have a very hard time winning until they change.

Which means, I think, that we'll have to make them change. It should be clear by now that the next revolution must be inside the Democratic Party, unless one wishes to scale the mountain of deliberate, structural impediments to forming a viable, 50-state third party.

No Time Left At All

Moreover, we don't have time for a 30-year project of reform. We have two years, maybe four, at most — après ça, le déluge. Here's why:

a. Climate change won't wait 30 years while we elect sufficient climate-friendly Democrats and build sufficient Democratic political infrastructure to deal with it.​ Mother Nature is on the very verge of shrugging her shoulders at last and sloughing us to the floor of the historical past. Once that moment occurs, once we cross that line, we're doomed to end as a memory, though none will be left to remember us.

b. Nor will all the pissed-off, angry, dying middle class voters wait 30 years, those who live in states where pissed-off dying voters are most concentrated and who chose the worst presidential candidate in modern history, Donald F-ing Trump (yes, that's his middle name), over the "You can't have nice things" Democratic candidate our Establishment elites cleverly offered them.

Those people won't wait at all. They've totally had it. Students drowning in debt have totally had it. The jobless and homeless — and soon-to-be jobless and homeless — they've had it as well. Every independent ("I hate both parties") voter in the country, or most, have had it too, and every study says so.

How many "I hate both parties" voters are there — or would-be voters if someone would just give them something to vote for? This many:

What does "they have had it" look like in practice? It looks like anything that looks like rebellion against a hopeless life, including putting a fool like Trump in office. It also includes horrors like these. (Nicole Sandler and I discussed this very topic, the collapsing social contract, recently. Click here for the interview. Start at 42:00 for that part of the discussion. Or start at 31:15 for the whole interview, where we discuss what's going on with Trump-Russia-Comeygate as well.)

"Tick-tick-tick," says the world-historical clock on the wall. By my count, with the Georgia election Democrats have just blown their fifth chance in a row to make a new first impression — all so that its entrenched politicians, consultants, service-providing infrastructure and media surrogates can make a larger pile of money, grease the skids on their own and their children's careers, and swan about DC like the minor-league queens and kings they think they are.

"We may be on the Titanic," I hear them all say, "but the service in First Class is to die for! Check out the lobster in the Oh It's You, Senator lounge."

Protecting Their First Class Seats on the Titanic

The quote in the title of this piece is from Bernie Sanders, said in a recent interview with David Sirota. Here's just a part (emphasis and paragraphing mine):

Sirota: The Democratic Party leadership has lost the White House, Congress, 1,000 state legislative seats and many governorships. Why is the party still run by the same group of people who delivered that electoral record?

Sanders: Because there are people who, as I often say, would rather have first class seats going down with the Titanic, rather than change the course of the ship. There are people who have spent their entire lives in the Democratic Party, there are people who've invested a whole lot of money into the Democratic Party, they think the Democratic Party belongs to them. You know, they own a home, they may own a boat, they may own the Democratic Party.

I mean, that's just the way people are, and I think there is reluctance on some, not all, by the way — I mean, I ran around this country and I met with the Democratic Party leaders in almost every state in the country. Some of them made it very clear they did not want to open the door to working people, they did not want to open to door to young people. They wanted to maintain the status quo.

On the other hand, I will tell you, there are party leaders around the country that said, “You know what, Bernie? There’s a lot of young people out there who want to get involved. We think that’s a great idea, and we want them involved.”

Those who said "You know what, Bernie? There’s a lot of young people out there who want to get involved. We think that’s a great idea" — they don't run the Party when it comes to its top layers of leadership. Not by a very long shot.

For the Message to Change, the Leadership Must Change

So what's a progressive to do? It should be obvious. The Democratic Party has to change its policy offering, from "You can't have what all of you want" to "If the people want a better life, we will give it to them."

Yet this is not so easily done. For the message to change, the leadership must also change.

Which raises the critical question: How do we depose Chuc​k Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and the rest of their kind and make people like Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley the Party leaders instead?

After all, if someone like Bernie Sanders isn't Senate Majority Leader, if a Sanders-like politician (Ted Lieu perhaps) isn't Speaker of the House, what's the point of electing more back-bench progressives, more "supporting cast" players? ​

If there's no way to do that — and soon, given the ticking clock — we're Sisyphus pushing the same heavy boulder up the same high hill, year after year, decade after decade, till we die or the game is finally truly over. 2018 is around the bend. 2020 is coming. Après ça, le déluge. Not much time to solve this one.

Completely filling the Second Class cabins on the Titanic with our people (that is, populating Congress with progressives who are nevertheless kept from leadership and control) won't change what goes on in the Captain's cabin and on the bridge.

Put more simply, we need to control the Party, or when the clock truly runs out, all this effort will truly have been pointless. I'm not fatalistic. I assume there's a way. So here's my first shot at an answer.

Elected Progressives Must Openly Rebel Against Their "Leaders"

In order for the revolution inside the Democratic Party to work, our elected progressive congressional representatives and senators, must work to depose Pelosi and Schumer (etc.) and take power. More — they must do it visibly, effectively and now, in order to convince the 42% of voters that someone inside the Party is trying to knock these people out of the Captain's chair.

We voters and activists have our own challenges. This is the challenge for the electeds we've already put in place. If our elected progressives don't do this — or won't do this — "tick-tick-tick" says the world-historical clock on the wall. And we can all go down together, steerage and First Class alike.

It's time to step up, elected progressives. It's also time to be seen to step up.  Read the Paul Craig Roberts quote at the top again. If the Party's failed leaders aren't deposed, the revolution will have failed.

It's a moment for real courage, and moments of courage bring moments of great fear. I understand that this kind of open rebellion, open public confrontation, a palace coup in front of the TV cameras, is frightening.

It's also necessary.

My ask: If you agree, write to your favorite elected progressive and say so. No more gravy train for Democratic elites. Meat and potatoes for voters instead. Complete the Sanders revolution by changing House and Senate leadership — now.

I know this puts some very good people on the spot. But maybe that's a feature, yes?

GP
 

Field Notes from the Battle Within the Democratic Party

TYT reporter Nomiki Konst interviews DNC Chair candidate Tom Perez

by Gaius Publius

If you ask mainstream Democrats (not a homogeneous group, but easily identifiable by their Clintonist, Obamist policies), and also their collaborators in the so-called "left media," this question — "What about the battle within the Party?" — they'll ask incredulously back, "What battle? Doesn't everyone want unity?"

Which is, itself, the next phase of the battle within the Party. The old guard, the Clinton and Obama factions, want unity  — so long as they're still in charge. Which sets the twin terms over which the next phase of the battle will be fought: the demand for "Party unity," and the insistence on silence about fundamental, irreconcilable differences.

Here are two small instances to illustrate that battle and its terms, field notes if you will about how the Party split is being handled its leaders. Both are from the above interview by TYT reporter Nomiki Konst with Tom Perez, the Obama wing candidate for DNC Chair.

Keeping the Money Game Alive

Let's begin with an exchange about the interests of big-money consultants and consulting firms in keeping the Party's budget "bloated" (Konst's term) so they could drain into consultant coffers money that could bolster state party organizations instead. (Recall that Party funding and use of money was a key Sanders concern.)

At 3:48, Konst asks Perez about the Party's ties to those high-dollar consultants and firms. His answer is revealing. He starts by saying he believes in "grassroots organizing" instead of just putting money into high-dollar TV advertising. Yet when pressed (at 6:08, which is where I cued the clip) about the role of those consulting firms, which benefit financially from their role in current Party practices, in shaping the future of the Party, he avoids the question completely.

So she tries again. At 7:30 she asks about conflicts of interest between what the consulting class wants and what the Party needs. Her example is the forward-looking "Unity" commission, on which a major Party consultant sits. This, to her, is a clear conflict of interest.

Here's that exchange (my transcript; emphasis in the original conversation):

Konst: Aren't conflicts of interest a concern? If you're going to change the culture on the ground, how do you change it without banning these conflicts of interest who want to keep the party bloated?

Perez: When you say that someone wants to keep the party bloated, I don't know. The people that I talk to want to build a Democratic Party that works for everyone. ... The folks that are running the Unity Commission, there's going to be a lot of different perspectives that are put to bear — that's what we want!

Konst (incredulous): Including consultants?

Perez: We have a big tent in the Democratic Party....

He then pivots to talking about how he would use more "minority contractors" — in other words, he repeats the Democratic Party appeal to "identity" rights and benefits as a way to distract Democratic voters and supporters from how money changes hands in the inner circles.

Shorter Perez: We're a big-tent party. Even the corrupt have a seat. (For a real-life example of what that corruption looks like, scroll or jump down to the end of this piece.)

Where Are Your Sanders Supporters?

The second interview chunk I want to point out is about why his own campaign for DNC Chair contains no high profile Sanders supporters or surrogates. At 9:08, Konst sees she's being given the off-camera signal by a Perez staffer to wrap it up, so she hurries to ask "one last question":

Konst: This is about unity, right? Who in the Bernie Sanders world, of the surrogates, is supporting you? ... Do you have any notable Bernie Sanders supporters? ...

Perez: I think you're asking the wrong questions.

Konst: I mean, you're talking about unity. Every single candidate has both sides. Every single candidate that we've asked has a surrogate from both sides.

Perez: ... Do only celebrities count?

Konst: No it's not celebrities ... union leaders, party chairs ...

Ponder that. For Perez, it seems the only Sanders people of note are "celebrities." And the capper — after Konst says that the future of the Party is "about unity" (a statement I'm not in agreement with, by the way), we hear this:

Perez (emphasizing each word): I think the future of the party is about making sure that we are focused on what we have to do together to take on our existential threat, which is Donald Trump. And when we focus on that existential threat together, that's how we move forward.

Shorter Perez: But ... Trump! That's the unity I'm talking about.

Yes, Donald Trump is certainly an "existential threat" ... to the country. But it sure sounds like for Perez, the existential threat to the Party are those pesky Sanders people and their challenges about money, about who gets it, and about how the consulting class, which feeds on and impoverishes the Party, is protected by Party's leaders, its Obama and Clinton wings.

The Democratic Consulting Class

I'll have more to say in a bit about the Democratic Party consulting class — a group of, I have to say it, predators. But this should get you started if the topic is new to you. From my friend Joe Sudbay via email, we find this article on the subject from 2005. The writer, Amy Sullivan, asks the question, "Why do Democrats continue to hire campaign advisors who lose races?" and then illustrates with examples.

Here's the start of her answer (my emphasis):

Fire the Consultants

Why do Democrats continue to hire campaign advisors who lose races?

If you were a Democrat running as a first-time candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2002, Joe Hansen was most likely a familiar part of your life. As the field director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), Hansen was responsible for recruiting promising candidates, and then for getting the nascent campaigns off to a running start. In the first overwhelming days of your campaign, Joe was a lifeline. He took you out to dinner for pep talks, broke down the fundraising process into something almost manageable, walked you through the selection of campaign staff and consultants, and promised that – if you proved you were a serious candidate by putting together the right team – the DSCC would happily write the checks that might make the difference when things really heated up in the fall. And when it came to choosing just the right firm to design and produce the fliers, postcards, and door hangers that would blanket your state in the closing weeks of the campaign, Joe recommended the very best consultant he knew: Joe Hansen.

In addition to his job at the DSCC, Hansen was also a partner in the direct mail firm of Ambrosino, Muir & Hansen. His sales pitch must have been effective – Democrats in nine of the closest Senate contests in 2002 signed up with Hansen, including Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, Max Cleland in Georgia, and Alex Sanders in South Carolina. The day after the election, only two (Tim Johnson in South Dakota and Mark Pryor in Arkansas) were still standing.

Why do I call them predators? Because the only success they feed, is their own.

Bottom Line

Four points:

• Whatever his other merits, there's no question that Tom Perez is running at the behest of the Obama wing of the party as a counter to Keith Ellison, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

• There's also no question, whatever the organizational merits of any of the DNC Chair candidates, that for medium- to low-information voters this is seen as a proxy battle between the Obama-Clinton wing and the Sanders wing of the Party (search here for the phrase "proxy battle").

• And there's absolutely no question that one of Sanders' big issues in the primary was (a) the role of money in politics, and (b) the role of money in the way the Party does business. Needless to say, that message resonated with a great many supporters who had no interest in seeing the Party's current leadership continue. That was not only true for all Sanders voters in the primary; it was true for many Sanders supporters who failed to turn out in general election as well.

• Which means, finally, that if Perez wins this contest, those medium- to low-information voters may well think the Party hasn't changed much after all, and just stay home again in 2018.

After all, don't you think that if every Sanders supporter had pulled the lever for Clinton, she'd have won in a landslide instead of lost in a squeaker? It's not on the voters to think the Party is attractive, no matter how ugly the Trump regime is. It's on the Party to make its own self attractive enough to prevent another Trump-size disaster.

Or so one would think, unless one had a vested interest in keeping the Party just the way it is. Field notes from the battle within the Democratic Party. Stay tuned.

Scheduling note: My comments here appear regularly on Monday and Thursday, or Tuesday and Thursday if Monday is a holiday.

GP
  

This comma miscue hardly seems worth making a federal case of, but it does make a point about current political rhetoric

From a tweet by Christopher Mendoza (@CMendoz_a), which reads (links onsite): "What a welcome from Rancho HS! Can't believe they made this @HillaryClinton sign. They're excited! #Hillary2016"

everyday adj. (ca. 1623): encountered or used routinely or typically: ORDINARY (~ clothes)

-- Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition

everyday adj. 1. Suitable for ordinary days or routine occasions: an everyday suit. 2. Commonplace; ordinary: everyday worries

--The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition

by Ken

It's not hard to draw me into a comma brawl. I think the comma is one of mankind's great inventions, and it's a shame that it's so often so badly used, abused, or erroneously not used. That said, this seems to me a pretty trivial case of comma confusion. Nevertheless, it does make a point.

The byline of Hunter Schwarz, who according to his biographical note "covers the intersection of politics and pop culture for the Washington Post," has lately been popping up frequently, usually chronicling what Hunter seems to find amusingly inapt sayings and doings in DC political life. Now such things, as we know, aren't hard to find, but I can't say I've been much impressed by his findings. Often when he points at a thing there is some kind of thing to be seen, but he doesn't seem to understand what he's looking at, and has a way of being irritatingly smug about his wrong conclusions.

Last night he posted this on "The Fix," headlined "While making campaign signs, remember to mind your commas":

Students at Rancho High School in Las Vegas made a banner to welcome Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. On it, a quote from her video announcing her presidential candidacy: "Everyday, Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion."

Except, that's not what she said in her video.

According to the subtitles on the video, there's no comma between "everyday" and "Americans." Also, if there was a comma, "every" and "day" would be two separate words instead of one (just for the record).



Clinton uses the phrase to suggest "Average Joe" and "middle-class" Americans, while the students -- actual real-life "everyday Americans" -- didn't interpret that way. For them, Clinton's quote meant that Americans need a champion every single day.

It's yet another reminder that the phrase "everyday Americans" (as opposed to ... someday Americans? 9-to-5 Americans? Weekday-only Americans?) is a made-up phrase used by politicians to try to connect with voters. It's not really a thing.

Hunter certainly seems right about the students' incorrect insertion of the comma and the change in meaning it creates -- and right too that in the students' usage it would have to be "every day," not "everyday." To make a federal case of it, though, it would be nice if the change of meaning were a bit more significant.

And while he's right too that the phrase "everyday Americans" is being "used by politicians to try to connect with voters," I'm pretty sure he's wrong about it being "a made-up phrase" (only pretty sure because I don't know what this means; doesn't every phrase have to be made up in order to become a phrase?), and I'm quite sure he's wrong about its being "not really a thing." It may not be much of a thing, but it has a perfectly clear and understandable meaning -- ordinary Americans. Perhaps he doesn't have access to a dictionary, so I've done this bit of research for him, as reported at the top of this post. (Note that I'm not necessarily recommending these dictionaries. They just happen to be the ones I had closest to hand, and they both have reasonable measures of credibility.)

Still, as I suggested before, when Hunter points his bludgeony finger, there's usually something there, and the fact remains that the students, or whoever was advising them, don't seem to have grasped Hillary C's intended meaning, leading them to substitute a meaning of their own -- very likely because the phrase "everyday Americans," though unquestionably a thing, isn't all that much of a thing.

Actually, I happen to believe that "everyday Americans" are an enormously real thing, that there's an enormously significant, even momentous, difference between "everyday Americans" and, say, the Koch brothers and their fellow billionaire oligarchs, or our millionaire Congress, or for that matter -- as our Gaius Publius was pointing out just today -- Hillary Clinton. Still, the political-consulting class might want to take note of at least this instance of how well, or not so well, the phrase is being heard.

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Why Did The Democrats Do So Badly Last Night? It Goes Beyond Gerrymandering And Obama's Poor Ratings

DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil will reap big rewards for his incredible string of abject failures yesterday

Guy Cecil, is the Executive Director of the DSCC. He wants to run the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. He-- and Harry Reid-- just cost the Democrats Tim Johnson's South Dakota Senate seat. Cecil recruited reactionary Blue Dog Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who South Dakota voters had rejected in 2010. They decided Herseth Sandlin's pleasant Beltway conservatism was exactly what South Dakota needed. They chased Johnson's son, Brendan, out of the race and handed the Democratic nomination to Herseth Sandlin, who was well aware she could never win a Democratic primary battle. But-- and it was a big but-- when Brendan Johnson bowed out, another progressive jumped in. Enter Rick Weiland. Herseth Sandlin stomped off and disappeared and Cecil flipped out. He and Reid decided to get even and refused to back Weiland, even after South Dakota Democrats rallied around him and made him their nominee. They closed the financial faucets and undercut him to a dull, lazy Beltway media, declaring South Dakota unwinnable. Cecil and Reid worked all cycle to make it unwinnable. Chatter is the Cecil, who just presided over the Senate catastrophe that Patty Murray completely avoided in 2012, will have a big position in the Hillary campaign. Makes perfect sense.

Right after the catastrophic 2010 midterms-- aka- The Great Blue Dog Apocalypse-- I worked with half a dozen congressional offices putting together an indictment of the corruption inherent in the way the DCCC does business. You should read it, if you haven't. It's all about the revolving door between the DCCC campaign operatives who get so many millions of dollars grassroots Democrats are suckered into contributing to the DCCC with all those annoying e-mails and the consulting companies they work for and own. At the time, I wasn't aware of Amy Sullivan's epic 2005 article for the Washington Weekly, Fire the Consultants-- Why Do Democrats Promote Campaign Advisors Who Lose Races? Sullivan focused in on the DSCC and I focused on the DCCC but the same disease afflicts both party committees. (Note: I don't care what diseases afflict the Republicans; I just hope whatever it is hurts them as badly as the Democrats are hurt by their consultant problems.)

I urge you to read the Sullivan piece in its entirety. Much of it is about Joe Hansen, a revolving door DSCC operative who is a partner in a very lucrative Beltway consulting firm. They get rich whether Democrats win or lose. Sullivan explains just how it works, although his own case, working for the DSCC and his own firm simultaneously, isn't the way its done anymore. The crooks are in one cycle and then back at their own firms the next and then back at the committee the next.

How does Hansen defend his performance and the seeming conflict between his roles as DSCC representative and private consultant? Not very aggressively. After I made numerous attempts over two weeks to get an interview with Hansen, he replied with a one-paragraph email, in which he listed the three victorious senatorial and three winning gubernatorial races that his company had worked on this fall, and concluded, redundantly, "Our firm has an unmatched record of success that no other firm can match." The email came from Hansen's DSCC account.

It's important to understand that even for experienced politicians--mayors, governors, representatives--a Senate run can be an intimidating challenge. It involves courting an entirely new world of donors by proving to Washington fundraisers and party leaders that you are a serious contender. Jeremy Wright, who served as the political director for Oregon Senate candidate Bill Bradbury's race in the spring and early summer of 2002, says that candidates are almost required to run two parallel campaigns, "one to get voters to vote for you and the other to get D.C. money by putting together the right consultants to show you're for real." For Democratic candidates in the few targeted races every cycle that are actually competitive, winning without the financial support of the DSCC (or its sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) is nearly impossible. While the candidates are grateful for the infusion of cash in the form of committee-sponsored polling, fliers, and commercials, the money comes with strings.

Officially, no favoritism exists. "We don't push one consultant over another," a DSCC spokeswoman told me. "It's more of an informational thing, telling candidates about good people who do a lot of Senate races." But Democrats who have worked on targeted races describe a reality in which they are strongly encouraged-- often with the reminder that precious funds hang in the balance-- to select recommended consultants. "The campaign was pretty paranoid about making sure the DSCC was backing us," explains one veteran of an unsuccessful 2002 Senate race. "We needed the cash. So of course, we were going to go with the consultants they recommended."

No one was in a better position to take advantage of this power relationship than Hansen. As the first man-on-the-ground, his contact with budding campaigns was early and often. "That person has a very large advantage in being able to shape the team," one of Hansen's consulting competitors told me. "You bond with the candidate from the get-go at a pretty stressful time when they're deciding whether to run and how to do it." Another Democrat who has worked with Hansen complains, "Joe is a pretty egregious example of a guy who is sent out as the official representative to help candidates plot their campaign plan, and then when he gets to direct mail, says, 'Oh, by the way, let me switch hats for a second-- I happen to do direct mail.'"

The situation puts candidates-- who are loath to alienate the campaign committee whose financial assistance they desperately need-- in a tricky spot. Even when working with experienced consultants, candidates need to retain some ability to disagree with a proposed idea or strategy. That's hard enough when the consultant is recommended by the party committee. But when the consultant actually is the party committee, the candidate's discretion stays sealed in a tight box. "It was an interesting dynamic, I'll say that," Wright says. "When Joe signed us up, he was on staff for the DSCC. We'd work on DS[CC] stuff during the day, and then he'd take us out to dinner and put on his consultant hat."

This Peters Principle effect of Democratic operatives rising--or muscling their way--up to the level of their incompetence, happens for a simple reason: The consultants are filling a vacuum. After all, someone has to formulate the message that a candidate can use to win the voters' support. Conservatives have spent 30 years and billions of dollars on think tanks and other organizations to develop a set of interlinked policies and language that individual Republican candidates and campaigns can adopt in plug-and-play fashion. Liberals are far behind in this message development game. Indeed, most Democratic elected officials have been running recently on warmed-up leftovers from the Clinton brain trust, ideas which were once innovative but are now far from fresh. With little else to go on, consultants-- many of whom came to prominence during the Clinton years-- have clung to old ideas and strategies like security blankets. "Democratic consultants are being asked to fill a role they're not suited to," says Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network, "to come up with ideas and electoral strategy in addition to media strategy."

Rosenberg hints at a second Democratic deficit: The party has no truly brilliant strategists in positions of power. Such talent is always rare in both parties and tends to come out of the political hinterlands, often as part of a winning presidential campaign team. Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign was waged by a crew of Georgia political operatives with the help of unconventional pollster Pat Caddell. Four years later, Reagan defeated Carter by relying on a California-based gang of professionals. James Carville and Paul Begala were largely unknown before they took Bill Clinton to the White House. And outside the South, the team of Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Mark McKinnon weren't much less obscure when they put together the strategy for George W. Bush's winning 2000 campaign.

Republicans have proven much more adept than Democrats at giving their best talent a national stage. While Democrats have permitted a Washington consultancy class to become comfortably entrenched, Republicans have effectively begun to pension off their own establishment. "The D.C. consultants for the GOP have their list of clients, but they're definitely on the outside looking in," Chuck Todd told me. "The Bush people have been very careful to give them work…but they're not in the inner circle." In 2004, seasoned Washington media strategist Alex Castellanos paid the bills with a handful of safe congressional races and a few unsuccessful primary challengers. Meanwhile, nearly every tight Senate race (North Carolina, Alaska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Florida) was handled by a Tampa-based firm, The Victory Group.

Republicans, of course, don't have any natural monopoly on strategic talent--they just give their best young strategists chances to run the biggest national races. In all likelihood, there is another Karl Rove or James Carville out in the Democratic hinterlands, who ought to be playing essential roles in the most important races. It might be David Axelrod in Chicago, who developed the media strategy for the then-unknown Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) primary campaign; West Coast strategists Paul Goodwin and Amy Simon, who helped Democrats regain the legislature in Washington state; or even unconventional D.C.-based consultants like Anna Bennett, the pollster who engineered Melissa Bean's upset of veteran Rep. Phil Crane (R-Ill.) in November. But any new talent will likely remain on the national margins-- running races for Congress and judgeships-- until someone breaks up the consultant oligarchy.

The electoral system takes care of dead weight when it comes to politicians. The proof is in the political wreckage evident after yet another year of Democratic defeats at the polls. Dick Gephardt--after 10 years at the helm of the Democratic minority in the House--has decided to go back home to Missouri. John Kerry is returning to the Senate instead of stretching out his legs in the Oval Office. The consultants, however, live on. After pocketing a $5-million paycheck following the election, Shrum is back from a vacation in Tuscany and now advising Sen. Jon Corzine's (D-N.J.) gubernatorial race. Mellman, whose advice helped sink Democrats for two consecutive campaign cycles, continues to line up clients. As for Hansen, his connection to Daschle may not help him now that the South Dakotan has vacated the Democratic leader's office. But don't cry for Joe Hansen--he's the consultant for incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

And, as I've pointed out before, other profit-for-staff-driven Democratic-allied organizations-- EMILY's List is the worst-- are just as bad as the DCCC and DSCC... if not worse. Although almost every Democratic woman candidate is petrified to speak publicly about EMILY's List's shenanigans, I've heard from candidate after candidate the same exact details for years. When EMILY's List "suggests" that the candidates they raise money for hire The New Media, Inc., not everyone is aware that that firm's president, Tierney Hunt, is the wife of EMILY's List Campaigns Director Jonathan Parker. The money EMILY's List demands cannot be spent on something useful-- like a field operation-- but must be wasted on a lame Beltway firm which is going to personally enrich an EMILY's List executive. It's how EMILY's List killed the campaigns this year of Alex Sink, Wendy Greuel, Eloise Reyes and several other women they led down the garden path. Several despairing candidates have said to me that they are forced to sit on the phone all day begging for money and that all the money winds up in the pockets of utterly worthless consultants they are forced to hire. And then they lose. We all lose, except the executives at EMILY's List and the crooked consultants they are enriching-- like Parker's wife.

You Know Who ALWAYS Wins In Elections?

Right after the 2010 midterms we tried to explain some of the DCCC's most corrupt practices; you should read it because it will help you understand how, uncorrected, everything has gotten worse and worse. So much worse that the DCCC is essentially ineffective at doing it's core job of reelecting Democratic incumbents and electing Democratic challengers. Last cycle-- with President Obama sweeping up and the DSCC winning every impossible race on the table-- the DCCC failed miserably to win back the House. And this cycle, the corruption guarantees that Steve Israel will go down in history as the worst DCCC chairman ever.

Of course, the DCCC isn't the only center of perverse corruption bringing down the Democratic Party. EMILY's List is at least as bad. Although basically every Democratic woman candidate is petrified to speak publicly about EMILY's List's shenanigans, I've heard from candidate after candidate the same exact details for years. For example, when EMILY's List "suggests" that the candidates they raise money for hire The New Media, Inc., not everyone is aware that that firm's president, Tierney Hunt is the wife of EMILY's List Campaigns Director Jonathan Parker. The money EMILY's List demands cannot be spent on something useful-- like a field operation-- but must be wasted on a lame Beltway firm is going to personally enrich an EMILY's List executive. It's how EMILY's List killed the campaigns this year of Alex Sink, Wendy Greuel and Eloise Reyes. Several despairing candidates have said to me that they are forced to sit on the phone all day begging for money and that all the money winds up in the pockets of utterly worthless consultants they are forced to hire. And then they lose.

Candidates who depend on commercial operations like the DCCC and EMILY's List are putting their careers into the hands of pernicious professional consultants, the bane of American politics. Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth, stripped the bride bare today in the NY Times: You Lose, We Win: Consultants Profit Even When Candidates Underperform. Nyhan asks the rhetorical question if these hired guns will be held accountable for their performance-- or lack of performance-- on Election Day. And then he answers:

The experience of John McLaughlin, the pollster for the former House majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, suggests that the consequences of consultant failure are often minimal. As the Washington Post’s Ben Terris noted, Mr. McLaughlin was “historically wrong” about Mr. Cantor’s defeat in a June primary, missing the final margin by approximately 45 percentage points, but hasn’t lost any clients as a result.

A closer look at the research on political consultants suggests that Mr. McLaughlin’s experience is typical. Firm reputations and client relationships are highly consistent over time and show little responsiveness to results, particularly in terms of the share of the vote that a client receives, a much more informative metric than wins and losses.

Why is the campaign consultant market so inefficient? First, it suffers from what social scientists call an asymmetric information problem. The buyers (candidates) know much less about the service being provided than the sellers (consultants)-- the same reason that consumers have a hard time making informed choices on health care. As a result, consultants are often hired based on their prominence or relationships with party insiders rather on than their past performance or other measures of quality.

Second, there are few good sources of data about firm performance. Consultant client lists are often not broadly publicized, preventing firms from being held accountable for their performance in past campaigns. Though a few high-profile failures like Mr. McLaughlin’s receive substantial attention, many other relationships may not be well known, preventing candidates or other clients from learning about a consultant’s performance.

Instead of reliable information on the performance of these consultants-- almost none of whom are any good-- you get self-interested staffers at the DCCC and EMILY's guiding you into their arms, gently-- unless you resist. If you resist, you are threatened and forced to hire the consultants. This is how one Member of Congress put it: "High-priced DC consultants go to work for the DCCC, and then again become high-priced DC consultants, usually pollsters or media consultants. While at the DCCC, they 'recommend' (i.e., insist) that candidates seeking DCCC support use their old firms, or the firms to which they plan to go. This results in several fundamental problems: (1) The DCCC’s own money is wasted on shoddy work.  (2) The candidates’ money is wasted on shoddy work.  (3) Both kinds of money are spent, overwhelmingly, on work that gains 15% commissions, especially TV ads, rather than non-commissionable fieldwork, voter handouts, 'free media' and community events." She's one of the dozens of Democratic incumbents who have come to the conclusion that the DCCC has to be worked around or just ignored entirely. Challengers don't often have that luxury. Back to Nyhan:

It’s very hard to separate the influence of consultants from other factors affecting campaigns, but given the influence that consultants have over the balance of power in Congress and the dissemination of tactics and issues among candidates, it seems likely that the parties will start demanding results.

We can only hope-- but there are a lot of fortunes and paychecks dependent on this not happening.

Some Real Morons Are Getting Very Rich As Political Consultants

Entitled The Campaign Casino-- Elections Have Become a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme, and the Press Is Missing the Story, Lee Aitken has penned a jaw-dropping report, just released by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Their point is that the media is missing-- perhaps purposely missing ("the U.S. press has been oddly complacent about that fact, continuing a tradition that puts the financial gains of political operatives--who are great sources and valued customers of the big media companies-- off limits")-- one of the most compelling stories behind how campaign finance laws are being used to enrich a whole class of political operatives, something DWT has been harping on for several years.

Aitken reminds us that $6 billion went through the hands of political operatives in the 2012 election cycle. Some of it stayed in those hands. I usually pick on the DCCC when giving examples of bad behavior but that isn't fair-- not when their corrupt practices are common all through the stinking Beltway, and on both sides of the aisle. When EMILY's List, for example, "suggests" that the candidates they raise money for hire The New Media, Inc., not everyone is aware that that firm's president, Tierney Hunt is the wife of EMILY's List Campaigns Director Jonathan Parker. The money EMILY's List demands cannot be spent on something useful-- like a field operation-- but must be wasted on a lame Beltway firm is going to personally enrich an EMILY's List executive. And I'm sure Jonathan and Tierney are lovely people and I certainly bear them no animus or mean to single them out. If they didn't do this they would be among a tiny minority of Beltway operative who don't-- even if EMILY's List has, in the last couple of years, turned into one of the most pernicious of all.

Aitken asks, "who pocketed all the cash?" He estimates that after $5 billion went to media-- of which a hefty percentage goes back to the consultants and operatives-- "which left another one billion at the disposal of the 'campaign industrial complex'-- that standing army of consultants, pollsters, mailers, data gurus and field organizers." He wonders who has become fabulously wealthy from all this campaign money sloshing around inside the Beltway. "Did it create new financial incentives that changed the way the game is played or altered the political discourse? Has it, as some argue, bankrolled the polarization of America?" (Give Steve Israel's latest ex-wife, Marlene Budd, a couple of drinks and ask her and, I guarantee you, you will never donate another nickel to the DCCC.) I can imagine Aitken sneering as he asserts, "The presumption seems to be that these men and women are motivated by ideology and personal loyalty, their payoff, if any, just a happy coincidence and a private matter… The Daily Beast’s John Avlon recently described how Sarah Palin’s SarahPAC had spent most of its money on consultants and only a small fraction on candidates. He called the PAC “a lifestyle play, propping up an expensive ideological entourage,” and was moved to quote the great labor intellectual Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

But this attitude is woefully out of date now that what Bloomberg Businessweek called “a Cayman Islands–style web of nonprofit front groups and shell companies” is being used not only to shield donors but also to obscure the self-enrichment of the political class. When a consultant can earn millions of dollars in a single election cycle by moving nimbly between the campaigns, the independent spending groups and the vendors that get their business, it’s time to revive the Watergate-era mantra, “follow the money.”

…As they now stand, both the FEC and the IRS disclosure rules are weak, lopsided and poorly enforced. For donors, at least, they attempt to track contributions all the way back to the person who writes the check, even if the trail is sometimes lost in a thicket of so-called “dark money”-- that is, transfers among groups that need not identify their donors. On the spending side, however, reporting requirements stop far short of a personal bank account. Rather, they have allowed hundreds of millions of dollars to disappear into quickly set up shell corporations and vaguely named tax-exempt groups with no final accounting of services rendered or profits made.

One of the few legal prosecutions, so far, of a 2012 campaign violation exposed the enormous potential for both self-enrichment and sleights of hand in the current system. The California Fair Political Practices Commission traced $29 million raised to run ads about state ballot measures through a daisy chain of dark money, 501(c)(4) tax-exempt groups. The linchpin for this maneuver was the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR), which a former Capitol Hill aide named Sean Noble [steered nearly $10 million in fees and expenses to his private consulting firms in 2011] operates out of a post office box in Arizona. The organization’s sole function appears to be accepting grants and making grants for a network of conservative nonprofits with ties to the Koch brothers.

In this case, the $29 million from California donors who wanted to remain anonymous was steered to the Virginia-based Americans for Job Security, which passed $24.5 million to CPPR. Noble then made two grants: $18 million to another 501(c)(4) he’d set up in Arizona, Americans for Responsible Leadership (ARL), which passed on $11 million to the Small Business Action Committee (SBAC) in California, and $7 million to Iowa-based American Future Fund, which gave $4 million to the California Future Fund.

California officials called this “money laundering” and eventually levied the state’s largest-ever campaign fine-- $ 1 million-- against CPPR and ARL. They also demanded that SBAC and California Future Fund pay $15 million to the state treasury, although the latter group has already closed up shop… The $1 million fine levied against CPPR and ARL was quickly paid by cashier’s check with no indication where the money came from.

…“Are political consultants immune from external scrutiny simply because their hearts are pure or their candidates hold the right positions on the issues?” Walter Shapiro asked in Salon in 2007, well before the Supreme Court let campaign spending completely off the leash. Similar logic was rejected for organizations such the United Way and the Red Cross after a series of self-enrichment scandals in the early 90s; traditional U.S. charities are now required to itemize salaries, perks and expenses. It’s possible that Noble’s companies gave good value for $10 million in 2011 and $24 million in 2012, but he’d be required to prove it if he’d been at one of those charities.

And if he worked directly for a campaign, there would be some accountability as well. In a candidate’s organization, “at least you have campaign managers and others who keep a handle on spending and fees,” said Mark McKinnon, who was a strategist for George W. Bush in 2000. In the new independent expenditure groups, “you basically have just a few people getting together to check the box on legal structure, and then they basically just divide up the money.” And, he added, “how you track the actual dollars will be very difficult if not impossible. That’s the ugly beauty of the scheme.”

…[In the bad old days] campaign advisors such as Dick Morris were getting rich from the traditional 15 percent commission on ad buys… [and] colleagues wondered whether Morris’s “strategic thinking” was being skewed by “financial self interest." … The unease about who might be getting rich did not rise as dramatically as the spending, however. Rather, it seems to have subsided into an attitude of acceptable inevitability. Because many of the fatter targets, such as Democratic pollster Mark Penn, also had a substantial corporate clientele, the growing wealth of campaign consultants was usually regarded as the by-product of a more professionalized political class. If these consultants had developed a mastery of polling, messaging and data analysis worth millions to business clients, it made sense that campaigns would pay a similar rate.

Traditionally, the consultants doing media buys kept a commission of 5 to 15 percent and returned some of it to the campaign staff who steered them the business. “So you’ll get a congressional campaign manager who on the surface you think is making $50,000–$60,000,” former Rick Perry campaign manager Rick Tyler told Reuters. “The fact is he could be making hundreds of thousands of dollars-- you have no idea because he’s being paid separate from what you’re seeing.” Neither the commissions nor the side deals need to be reported to the FEC. (After working for both Perry and Newt Gingrich in the last presidential race, Tyler became a senior vice president at Strategy Group for Media, the combative Ohio- based firm owned by Rex Elsass, where senior staff drive Bentleys and the boss has a private jet, according to a BuzzFeed profile.)… Tax filings show that Steve Law, the director of Crossroads GPS, earned $538,000 in 2012.

In a 2012 article on campaign ads, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported that a top political consultant now makes about $4 million a year, which is more than most lobbyists. Current practice, according to her sources, is to pay seven percent of the ad buy to the media consultant, two percent to the pollster and one percent to the campaign manager. But it’s also become more common for top consultants to work for a flat fee.

This does not mean that a campaign’s spending reports to the FEC will show any seven-figure checks written to an individual, however. Annual salaries reported in those filings are higher than they were a decade ago but hardly outrageous for these all-consuming jobs-- in the $250,000– $300,000 range. But senior advisors do not usually appear on the payroll; rather, they own an limited liability corporation (LLC) that wraps individual compensation into some larger bill for creative or strategic services. (In 2008 most of Axelrod’s compensation would have come out of the nearly $4 million paid to AKPD Message & Media, the consulting firm he sold when he became White House senior advisor.)

…It’s increasingly common in both parties for political operatives to set up as vendors through so-called “integrated businesses” that provide basic services as well as strategic guidance to the campaign. Again, some of these are well established, and others pop up on demand. For example, Politico reported that shortly after GOP strategist Nick Ryan set up a super PAC for Rick Santorum, called the Red White and Blue PAC, Ryan incorporated a direct mail and telemarketing firm, Global Intermediate, that became one of the new PAC’s biggest vendors. (Ryan also played a role in the California money shuffle, as the go-to guy at American Future Fund, which has paid hefty fees to another of Ryan’s firms, the Concordia Group.)

“Any politician has a retinue of people that over time they build up,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center and owner of McGehee Strategies. Becoming part of the inner circle is “a great business. You can make a good living growing all the different services to the candidate or to the super PAC.” In those situations, said Republican strategist Michael Murphy, who has advised many national candidates, the campaign must be a “savvy consumer,” and negotiate contracts that include full disclosure of the vendor’s costs and commissions. Otherwise it will see “dumb money rush out the door.”

This perfectly legal self-dealing was particularly noteworthy in the Romney campaign, where nine vendors with ties to staff received more than $160 million. Romney’s digital director, Zac Moffatt, for example, steered an eye-popping $95 million to Targeted Victory, a company he co- founded in 2009 with Michael Beach. Moffatt was officially on leave from the firm in 2012, collecting a $300,000 campaign salary. Senior advisor Myers said that, like American Rambler, Targeted Victory served as the general contractor for digital work, farming out tasks to numerous smaller shops.

As a private partnership, Targeted Victory has no duty to disclose how much it paid to other companies or how much was spent on online advertising, for which industry pros say 10 to 15 percent is the standard commission. Nor must it disclose the terms under which Moffatt resumed his partnership in the company, which had a banner year in 2012.

…One particular suite of offices in Alexandria, Virginia, epitomizes this tangled web of electioneering and self-dealing. In the prominent conservative blog Red State, Erick Erickson charged that the fifth floor of 66 Canal Center Plaza is “where the seeds of Mitt Romney’s ruin and the RNC’s Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort collapsed-- bled to death by charlatan consultants making millions off the party, its donors and the grassroots.”

Suite 555 housed no fewer than 10 separate organizations, both profit and non-profit, working for the Romney campaign, the Romney super PAC, the Republican National Committee, American Crossroads and assorted smaller entities. The tangle of personnel connections and money transfers among these groups is so complex that The New York Times attempted to represent it in a graphic. The ringmaster was Carl Forti, a legendary operative who was political director of Romney’s 2008 campaign and then became a strategic advisor to his 2012 super PAC, Restore Our Future, while also serving as political director of Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and running a consulting firm, the Black Rock Group, in partnership with Michael Dubke.

As complex as it appears to be, the Times’ graphic oversimplified the actual situation on the fifth floor. It overlooked at least one tenant that figured prominently in the California money shuffle, Americans for Job Security. AJS, the 501(c)(6) founded by veteran GOP consultant Dave Carney, sent $24.5 million from California donors to Sean Noble’s CPPR after taking its $1.5 million cut. (According to the depositions, a 15 percent commission on the California money was split between the fundraisers and the groups that transferred the cash.)

Forti’s partner Michael Dubke is a former president of AJS, which is now officially headed by Stephen DeMaura, while Dubke and Carney have moved on to run Crossroads Media LLC. But, according to a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity, “Historically, Carney has tapped others to run the group [AJS] on a full-time basis while he works in the background, drumming up business.” That report describes how, in the 2010 election cycle, DeMaura and Carney, with Carney doing the talking, approached several candidates with the same proposition that later snagged the California fundraisers: Steer your big donors to us and we can spend the money to support your cause without revealing their identities. AJS subsequently paid $20,000 to settle a dark money complaint lodged with state authorities in Alaska, without admitting any wrongdoing, and was also named in an FEC complaint about dark money in a Colorado senate race.

Be Careful When You Give Political Contributions-- You May Be Making Some Crooks Very, Very Wealthy

Early this morning, Anonymous Operative posted about the corruption inherent in our electoral system. It's no better on either side of the aisle and it has a tendency to keep quality people out of politics so that we wind out with criminal sociopaths like Steve Israel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Michael Grimm, John Boehner, Rahm Emanuel, Tom DeLay, Steve Stockman, Eric Cantor and Joe Crowley.

But its key to remember that to Beltway operatives winning or losing isn't always what's uppermost in minds fixed on self-enrichment, This morning Roll Call san a story about how people running PACs and consulting firms have become very very wealthy raising money that purports to be for causes and candidates their targets believe in. They work the same way the DCCC and the NRCC work, separating the suckers from their cash and pocketing a chunk for their allies. "Recently released tax forms," reports Eliza Carney, "shed light on the big salaries that an elite corps of political organizers earned during the 2012 elections-- and those who made the most often boasted the fewest wins."

The new filings show that liberal groups, which in many cases outperformed their conservative counterparts, typically paid their executives less money. Liberal super PAC, nonprofit and labor salaries tend to land in the $250,000 to the (at most) $600,000 range, while many conservative organizers are pulling in at least a half-million, and several make into the millions over an election cycle. Findings from the new IRS 990 forms include:

Steven Law, the president of the American Crossroads super PAC and its tax-exempt affiliate, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, made $1.1 million during the election cycle. That includes $602,935 from Crossroads GPS in 2011 and $637,562 in 2012. Together the super PAC and the nonprofit spent more than $325 million on the election but had an underwhelming return on investment. According to the Sunlight Foundation, 1.3 percent of the super PAC’s money supported candidates who won and opposed candidates who lost in the general election. The Crossroads GPS return on investment was 14.4 percent.

Stephanie Schriock, the president of EMILY’s List, a political organization that supports female Democrats who back abortion rights, received a $263,194 salary for the entire 2012 cycle, according to Political MoneyLine data derived from FEC reports. The EMILY’s List super PAC Women Vote spent $7.7 million in the 2012 elections and had an 80 percent return on investment, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas Donohue pulled in $5.5 million in 2012, making him one of the top-paid association executives in the nation that year. For the entire election cycle, Donohue made $10.4 million, according to the chamber’s 990s from 2011 and 2012. Said chamber spokeswoman Blair Latoff Holmes: “Tom Donohue leads the largest, most active and most influential trade organization in the world and our board compensates him accordingly.”

Rebecca Burkett, a little-known campaign consultant from Georgia, made more running Winning Our Future, the super PAC that backed losing GOP presidential nominee and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, than many of the nation’s leading labor union presidents make in a year. Burkett earned more than $500,000 during her tenure as the Gingrich super PAC’s chief organizer, according to Political MoneyLine. By comparison, Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which spent $23 million on the election, made $288,303 during the 2012 calendar year.

…The top GOP super PAC backing Mitt Romney, Restore Our Future, listed no salary lines or payroll recipients by name on its FEC public disclosures. This drew fire from watchdogs who complained that the super PAC shared vendors and even consultants with Romney, violating rules that bar coordination between candidates and the outside groups that back them.

At the center of those complaints was GOP fundraiser Steve Roche, who ran a fundraising firm called Podium Capital Group. As the super PAC’s top vendor, that firm was paid $7.3 million by Restore Our Future, according to the CRP. But how much of a cut went to Roche-- whether 2 percent or 12 percent, both within industry standards-- remains unanswered. Roche did not return a message seeking comment.

Moreover, Restore Our Future had no single executive in charge. It was run by a trio of consultants that included GOP election lawyer Charles Spies, its treasurer. His firm, Clark Hill, took in $746,425 from Restore Our Future, data from the CRP show. But Spies said that amount was paid to the firm as a whole, not to him individually.

As if things weren't bad enough, 4 of the worst-- worst as in voting all the time with Republicans against Democratic values-- House Democrats joined the dying Blue Dog Caucus this week. I guess the Wall Street-owned and operated New Dems just wasn't far right enough for Sinema and Barber. All 4 of these make a habit, a very consistent habit, of giving Boehner and Cantor the excuse to call their anti-working family bills "bipartisan." Here they are, from bad to worse, with their ProgressivePunch crucial vote scores for this cycle.

• Nick Rahall (WV)- 45.52
• Cheri Bustos (IL)- 44.62
• Kyrsten Sinema (AZ)- 33.33
• Ron Barber (AZ)- 25.20

If you contribute any money to the DCCC, whatever is left after they line the pockets of their consultant cronies, goes to characters like these four.

Now, what about Blue America, the PAC Digby, John Amato and I run. Digby's salary and expenses came to zero dollars; Amato's salary and expenses came to zero dollars; my salary and expenses came to zero dollars. The money contributed-- all of it-- goes to elect our candidates. None of us all at Blue America to profit from it. These are our House candidates so far this cycle and these are our Senate candidates. When you contributor to your favorite candidates, you have the option of also contributing to our PAC. When you do, that is money we use to buy TV, radio and newsprint ads as well as billboards and other means of getting out the word about our candidates.

Exposé From A Longtime Beltway Operative

I've known him for many years, through many campaigns and he would lose his job-- and his ability to get jobs-- if he were to use his real name. So this guest post, a message to grassroots candidates, is by "Anonymous Operative." I didn't change a word, although we've tackled this topic in the past.

It’s A Sad, Pathetic Racket
By Anonymous Operative

It’s a shame that so many Democratic donors are quick to contribute their hard earned money to the wrong cause. Cycle after cycle I hear donors tell strong progressive candidates “you sound like a great Democrat, but we just give our money to the DCCC and trust them to use it to win back the House.”

I continually wish that I-- not the candidate-- was the recipient of this cop out because I would offer the simple response: “well how’s that going for you?”

The DCCC and organizations of the like operate under a model similar to the vile financial corporations that single handedly destroyed our economy. While basic macro economic principles promote national economic growth to ensure a nation’s long run economic success, Wall Street is allowed to destroy our national economy to benefit short-run business interests.

So, what is the actual operating model of the DCCC if it is not to actually win back-- or in the oddest of times-- protect a majority? That question could be answered by the Wall Street villains because it is the same concept as they operate under: as long as the organization can continually raise/earn incredible amounts of money and keep share holders-- or in the case of political operations, consultants-- happy, the cycle is a success.

One needs only to look at the DCCC’s payroll/operating expenditures over the course of multiple election cycles to understand the racket that is being run. In one cycle, a slew of names fill positions referred to as “regional service director,” or “regional finance director.” It is the job of these individuals to strategically set up candidates’ campaigns across the country to enhance their ability to win.

Part of this operation entails placing consultants (mail vendors, polling firms, and media buyers who are retained on campaign budgets) who theoretically offer advice that has been proven to win House races. On the surface this sounds great, which is why candidates willingly offer to raise thousands upon thousands of dollars to pay these firms. However, as one continues to analyze the DCCC expenditures over the course of multiple cycles, an interesting trend emerges.

The individuals-- often the sons and daughters of high dollar DCCC donors-- who one cycle are the “regional directors” in charge of hiring consultants miraculously change form the following cycle and become consultants on House race budgets.

Meanwhile many individuals who cycles earlier were the consultants, are now the regional director hiring consultants. If we, as Democrats, won, I suppose we could credit this model. However we don’t win. We lose year, after year, after year. Meanwhile, the DCCC and similar organizations continue to raise millions of dollars and the individual consultants get richer and richer.

This is in deed a well-hidden racket. The average donor watches the Sunday political talk show on a weekly basis and listens to commentary from folks who are referred to as Democratic strategists. These donors assume that their $1,000, $10,000, or $50,000 DCCC contribution goes to paying these specialists for robust strategy that can be implemented to achieve our goals.

This thought process is akin to saying Larry Summers will fix our economy because he has been proven to understand economic behavior. We all know what a bad joke that is…

So for candidates out there who wonder why the DCCC and similar organizations continually maneuver in ways that seem detrimental to winning, I offer the simple question:

If your campaign has limited money [as most do] and you want to do one activity but the DCCC says “no, just stay back in the office and keep raising money,” why do you think that is?

You, the candidate, are not the important chess piece. Your budget is. As long as you continue to raise money to pay the consultants, your campaign will be deemed a success and you will in deed waste a year to two years of your time. But maybe, you will be recruited to run the next cycle…

From today's Washington Post-- and believe me, there's a connection

UPDATE: A Word From Danny Goldberg On Research

Danny and I were in the music business together. Like Beltway politics, there was a tendency to allow consultants to take over, or to at least get very, very wealthy. And like with Beltway politics, there was absolutely no correlation between money spent on these crooks and records sold. In 2008, Danny wrote a brilliant post on the topic for DWT. I recommend you read or re-read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

Wherever the winds of political conventional wisdom blow, the word “research” is sure to be in the air. As someone, like Howie, who has made my living in the music business, I am very familiar with the value-- and the limitations-- of focus groups, polling and other forms of research. A friend of mine who has done focus groups for dozens of rock radio stations as well as for two network news divisions put it succinctly “looking at research is like looking in the rear view mirror.”

Pollsters will always caution clients that their work product is just a tool. However, for many politicians, public interest group leaders and funders, the security blanket of "data” is processed as "reality." Good research can indeed provide valuable insight into the attitudes of one particular group at one particular time generated with one methodology but treating research as the complete truth about public opinion is just as silly as ignoring it altogether.

To use research for every single political problem as akin to using antibiotics for every health problem. Polling is much better at measuring past views than future ones. Focus groups cannot replicate every kind of environment in which people are exposed to.

What does this have to do with politics?

Well,although no one wants to admit it publicly, it is widely known that many Democrats were inclined to vote against the Iraq War resolution in 2003 but were persuaded to vote for it by “pragmatists” sporting “research.” John Kerry might be President today if he had resisted, and Hillary Clinton certainly would be the presumptive nominee if she had.

After the 2004 election there was widely published pseudo research showing that Bush was re-elected primarily because of the “moral issue.” In this wake, “pragmatists,” convinced most Democrats not to argue vigorously with Republicans about the absurd Terry Schiavo legislation, depriving Democrats of a strong identification with opposition to the Republican bill, of what turned out to be 80% of Americans.

In 2006 a lot of activists had an intuitive sense that Joe Lieberman was vulnerable. Professional politicians and their funders did polling that made it seem like Lieberman was unbeatable. I am sure than many of them looked at Ned Lamont’s primary victory wishing that they had taken the plunge. And when Lamont proved unable to compete with the savvy Lieberman in a general election, many of us wished a more experienced progressive had run. How different the Senate would have been the last year and a half if someone like Rep. Rosa De Lauro had been in the Senate instead of Lieberman!

Looking through a rear view mirror and determined to avoid negatives, many research driven consultants told Democratic congressional candidates in 2006 to avoid talking about the war. Two who appeared to be influenced by such “pragmatic” advice, Lois Murphy in Pennsylvania and Francine Busby who ran for Duke Cunningham’s seat in San Diego narrowly lost. Others who defied the conventional wisdom and campaigned as anti-war candidates, Patrick Murphy and Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, Jerry McNerney in California, John Hall in New York, Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire, and Bruce Braley in Iowa were among the winners who gave the Democrats their first majority in a decade. Obviously each race had unique characteristics but these examples are a cautionary tale on the real life limits of the conventional wisdom.