Rahm Emanuel Proving A Crook Knows How Best To Nail A Crook? Inadvertently Makes The Case For Impeachment And For A Bernie Presidency

Rahm knows from first hand experience how Democratic Party leaders have driven it to hell in a hand basket

I think we can all agree that the source of The Atlantic piece, It’s Time to Hold American Elites Accountable for Their Abuses, is suspect, to say the least, but when Rahm Emanuel wrote that "if Democrats want to address simmering middle-class anger, they need to deliver justice," he struck a nerve. The scandal didn't begin with Felicity Huffman-- nor even with Donald Trump and his crooked family in the mid-1960s-- but Emanuel, a political fixer turned crooked congressman and ineffective Chicago mayor, made a good point when he wrote that "normally, a scandal centered on how rich parents used bribes to win their children’s admittance into elite colleges wouldn’t play so heavily in the national news. No one much cared when Donald Trump promised large donations as his children enrolled at Penn. But the outrage over the Varsity Blues investigation perfectly illustrates what may be the most important, least understood, and underappreciated political dynamic of our era: a full-on middle-class revolt against the elites and the privileges they hoard. For all the focus on inequality and social justice, this middle-class revolt is the most important barrier standing between Democrats and the White House. They can’t afford to ignore it."

Emanuel was also a cheerleader for the Iraq war and a crooked bankster but asks he asked, however incongruously, his readers to "think of what’s happened over the past decade and a half. America endured a war sold on false premises, a bailout of bankers issuing entirely toxic debt, and a massive public effort to prop up auto executives who were building cars that weren’t selling. Is it any wonder so many middle-class taxpayers resent the elites? They’ve been forced to bail them out from their own mistakes time and time again-- and yet the beneficiaries of that goodwill haven’t apologized, let alone taken responsibility. America’s middle class is Cinderella, and the nation’s elites are her evil stepsisters-- only now it’s the stepsisters who get to marry the prince. It’s infuriating."

Ever since the disaster of the 2016 election, Democrats have engaged in (an often pointless) debate about whether President Trump’s supporters were drawn to him on account of economic or cultural grievances. Yes, Hillary Clinton drew more votes, but she was 1,000 times as qualified, and 10,000 times as personally appealing. She should have demolished him-- but something drew many voters to Trump instead.

I’m not denying that racism (against President Barack Obama) and sexism (against Secretary Clinton) played their roles. Nostalgia surely played another. But beneath all of that was the American middle class’s belief that the Lori Loughlins and Felicity Huffmans of the world, let alone the Don Rumsfelds and Dick Fulds, aren’t asked to play by the same set of rules. The elite get all the breaks and are shown all the shortcuts. In the meantime, ordinary people are forced to pay full freight. And that’s the point. No matter how noxious he was personally-- and despite the irony that he was a perfect example of elite privilege-- Trump embodied the country’s desire to hit back. Justice was a long time coming.

Maybe the clearest early manifestation was the Iraq War. After 9/11, the Washington elite claimed that the country needed to neutralize Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Congress and the media largely went along for the ride. But $1 trillion and 5,000 lives and 16 years later, the public had been told that those WMDs had not existed after all. Yet as clear as that became, no one ever took it on the chin. No one from the Bush administration ever took responsibility. Middle-class families paid in both blood and treasure, but the people who had made the worst foreign-policy decision in U.S. history never owned their failure.

The same thing happened during the Great Recession. The nation’s banking elite had lent billions to home buyers without any realistic hope of making good on their debts. Their irresponsible lending not only precipitated a global financial meltdown, but also necessitated a bailout from the nation’s financially stressed middle-class taxpayers. Yet even after being bailed out, the nation’s banking executives never faced any real consequences. No one went to jail. They never had to repay the personal fortunes they’d made by passing out those bad loans. Once again, the middle class was called to bail out the elites who were responsible for the mess while the elites got off scot-free.

And it was the same story arc with the auto bailout. For decades, executives in Detroit had made indefensible decisions. They’d been selling less reliable cars. They’d never found a way to compete effectively with their foreign competition. They’d continually lost market share. But when the bottom fell out and they were forced to ask middle-class taxpayers for a bailout, they never took responsibility. Most of the top brass kept their jobs. And once they’d recovered, they returned to business as usual. The middle class was once again expected to foot the bailout while the execs kept on like it had never happened.

Washington wasn’t wrong to prevent a global financial meltdown. Obama was certainly right to save the domestic auto industry. But those decisions came at a real cost. After the Recovery Act had passed and the auto bailout was rolling, we had a fierce debate inside the White House about how to sequence our pushes for health care, climate change, and financial reform. As the White House chief of staff, I argued, unsuccessfully, that the American people needed the catharsis of seeing that the bankers who had gotten the country into this mess were being forced to take responsibility-- that faith in government would plummet if we failed to deliver some “Old Testament justice.” Others feared that attacking Wall Street would undermine the recovery, and they won the day. Perhaps they were right on the economics. But the political implications were significant, and we’re still living with them today. The middle class believes even now that elites have license to make irresponsible decisions without paying a price.

Consider the issues the Trump White House has chosen to highlight at a moment when many of the nation’s schools are in dire need of resources and health-care costs are on the rise. Trump is focused on tariffs because there’s a widespread belief that existing trade agreements have been crafted to benefit the rich. The White House picks fights on immigration because the issue paints Democrats as champions of constituencies that aren’t following the rules. And both issues add fuel to a middle-class revolt that’s been simmering, largely unnoticed, for the better part of a decade.

Democrats have become increasingly cognizant of the anger, but too often they’ve drawn the wrong conclusions. The answer certainly isn’t socialism. Middle-class voters currently presume that elites already control the government-- so why would they want to give the bureaucracy any more power? Rather, Democrats need to become the party of justice. They need to demand accountability from bad actors-- and point out where Republicans would give them a pass. They don’t need to castigate entire industries, as some might recommend. But when people make decisions that affect innocent bystanders-- beating the drums for an ill-conceived war, making complicated financial instruments-- they should be the party standing up for middle-class interests and values.

Every time Democrats look at a problem, they think of a program. And while those programs often point the way forward, they need to focus their energy on convincing the middle class that they share their values more than just their economic interests. There is more to voters than their wallets. To do that, Democrats need to prove to them that they know the difference between right and wrong, and that begins with owning the terms accountability and responsibility. No matter how privileged, Democrats need to be the ones demanding that those who fall short be made to answer for their own decisions. Every one of us should have to live by the same moral and ethical codes. The nation’s elite shouldn’t have any special license to take the easy way out.

Does Señor Trumpanzee Look Down On His Own Working Class Supporters? Looks That Way

I first heard about the Politico Jeff Sessions story that included a bit about how Trump hates Sessions' southern accent, on Wednesday evening on either Maddow's show or The Last Word. I instantly understood what that meant, what was behind it. This could be a lot bigger than all the previous things everyone thought would "bring Trump down." First a little background. On Thursday, one of the Cook Report analysts reported that "according to 2016 exit polls, Trump carried white, college-educated voters with 48% of the vote. Today, his approval rating among these voters is just 37%. More ominously, after voting narrowly for Trump in 2016, these voters overwhelmingly prefer a Democrat for Congress over a Republican (54% to 39%)." Keep that in the back of your mind.

Buried in the Politico report: "Seized by paroxysms of anger, Trump has intermittently pushed to fire his attorney general since March 2017, when Sessions announced his recusal from the Russia investigation. If Sessions’ recusal was his original sin, Trump has come to resent him for other reasons, griping to aides and lawmakers that the attorney general doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree the president prefers, that he can’t stand his Southern accent and that Sessions isn’t a capable defender of the president on television-- in part because he 'talks like he has marbles in his mouth,' the president has told aides.

In the safe space of "his" White House, Trump imagined he could jump out of character without any consequences. This is what I snarkily tweeted while it was blaring out of MSNBC in the other room:

Then the next morning I noticed that Jonathan Chait had picked up on it as well-- Trump Is a Snob Who Secretly Despises His Own Supporters. BOOM! I hope that seeps down into the dregs of Trumpist support.

Conservatives have spent decades depicting liberals as coastal snobs. Entire campaigns were built from this theme, from Michael Dukakis’s “Harvard Yard boutique” to various Democrats failing to display the requisite enthusiasm for Nascar. Every image of Barack Obama in the right-wing media cast him gazing downward imperiously, a pose that conservatives seemed to think captured his contempt for the good people of the heartland.

Given the attention they have lavished on such picayune details as John Kerry’s failure to properly order cheesesteak properly, it’s not even possible to imagine what they would do with direct evidence of a president disdaining his attorney general’s University of Alabama law degree and regional accent. Imagine one of those scenes from a ’90s action movie where the bad guys are wearing night-vision goggles in the dark, and then suddenly faced with blinding light.

But as is so often the case, the accusation that was made falsely against Democrats turns out to be true of Trump. For all his vaunted populism, he is filled with contempt for average people in general and his own supporters in particular.

Trump has touted the mindless loyalty of his base, and when he marveled that he would not lose any support if he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, he was not complimenting the discernment of his supporters. He has tried to turn that into a positive-- “I love the poorly educated!”-- but the association with low socioeconomic strata has grated on him. Trump is the ultimate snob. He has no sense that working-class people may have equal latent talent that they have been denied the chance to develop. He considers wealthy and successful people a genetic aristocracy, frequently attributing his own success to good genes.

Attempting to explain his penchant for appointing plutocrats to his Cabinet, Trump has said, “I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?” It makes sense if you assume a person’s wealth perfectly reflects their innate intelligence. Trump has repeatedly boasted about his Ivy League pedigree and that of his relatives, which he believes reflects well on his own genetic stock. He has fixated on the Ivy League pedigree of his Supreme Court appointments, even rejecting the credentials of the lower Ivys as too proletarian.

Trump has built a brand on attracting working-class strivers. But the relationship he cultivates is unidirectional admiration. Trump gives his supporters a lifestyle they can enjoy vicariously. He views them as suckers. The Trump University scam was premised directly on exploiting the misplaced trust of his fan base. The internal guidance for salespeople trying to drain the savings accounts of their targets explained, “Don’t ask people what they think about something you’ve said. Instead, always ask them how they feel about it. People buy emotionally and justify it logically.”

The declassé image of his fan base has rubbed off on Trump, to his evident frustration. He regularly proclaims that his supporters are the true elite, but his unconvincing attempts to make the case usually devolve into boasts that Trump himself is the elite. Here is a typical passage, from a rally in West Virginia:

We’re the smart ones, remember. I say it all the time. You hear the elite. They’re not elite, we’re elite. You’re smarter than they are, you have more money than they do, you have better jobs than they do, you’re the elite. So let them have the word elite. You’re the super elite. That’s what it is.

I always hate-- I always hate when they say, well the elite decided not to go to something I’m doing, right, the elite. I said, “Well, I have a lot more money than they do. I have a much better education than they have. I’m smarter than they are. I have many much more beautiful homes than they do. I have a better apartment at the top of Fifth Avenue.” Why the hell are they the elite? Tell me.

Obviously, the most elemental feature of populist politics is to associate one’s opponents with “elite.” But Trump is unable to maintain the pose because he cannot stand the stink of the people upon him.

Trump's "southern strategy" is greasier that Nixon's-- and, like everything Trump-related, more personal and self-centered... more about him. If Chait's narrative takes hold and doesn't get dismissed in Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle as "fake news," 2020 will see Bernie running up big majorities across the Solid South-- except in the gated golf communities, Trump's actual natural constituency.

Is The Democratic Party A Party Of Working People Or A Party Of Its Own Elites And Careerists?

Thomas Edsell's OpEd in the NYTimes yesterday, Has the Democratic Party Gotten Too Rich for Its Own Good?, came just as Blue America posted the above video by Mike Lux on our main 2018 congressional contribution page. Edsall began by pointing out that "During his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist, lived up to the grand Democratic tradition of favoring the underdog at the expense of the rich. He proposed hammering the affluent by raising taxes in the amount of $15.3 trillion over ten years. New revenues would finance about half the cost of a $33.3 trillion boost in social spending. The Sanders tax-and-spending plan throws into sharp relief the problem that the changing demographic makeup of the Democratic coalition creates for party leaders. Trouble brews when a deeply held commitment to the underdog comes into conflict with the self-interested pocketbook and lifestyle concerns of the upper middle class." Edsall, though, isn't celebrating.

In rhetoric reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Sanders declared:

We must send a message to the billionaire class: “you can’t have it all.” You can’t get huge tax breaks while children in this country go hungry.

But Sanders spoke to the Democratic Party of 2016, not the Democratic Party of the Great Depression.

In days past, a proposal to slam the rich to reward the working and middle classes meant hitting Republicans to benefit Democrats.

Even as recently as 1976, according to data from American National Election Studies, the most affluent voters, the top 5 percent, were solidly in the Republican camp, 77-23. Those in the bottom third of the income distribution were solidly Democratic, 64-36.

In other words, 41 years ago, the year Jimmy Carter won the presidency, the Sanders proposal would have made political sense. But what about now?

In the 2016 election, the economic elite was essentially half Democratic, according to exit polls: Those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution voted 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Trump. Half the voters Sanders would hit hardest are members of the party from which he sought the nomination.

The problem for the Democratic Party is that “them” has become “us.”

In the past, Democrats could support progressive, redistributive policies knowing that the costs would fall largely on Republicans. That is no longer the case. Now supporting these policies requires the party to depend on the altruistic idealism of millions of supporters who, despite being relatively well off, often feel financially pressed themselves.

This problem applies not only to tax policy, but even more to social policies concerning education and housing.

Richard V. Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, highlights the contradictions of modern Democratic liberalism in his new book, Dream Hoarders: How the Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust.

Reeves argues that those in the top 20 percent of the income distribution have become an increasingly isolated class; if the country is to restore the American tradition of upward mobility, this elite will have to pay for it.

“The upper middle class has been having it pretty good. It is about time those of us in the favored fifth recognized our privileged position,” Reeves writes. As members of this class protect their status and economic gains for themselves and their children, Reeves contends, they have capitalized on a host of less visible forces — exclusionary zoning, the clustering of elites, legacy college admissions, disproportionate political influence — to build a protective wall, keeping those in the lower quintiles of the income distribution from breaking in.

As Reeves points out,

it is a stubborn mathematical fact that, at any given time, the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population. Relative intergenerational mobility is a zero sum game. For someone to move up the ladder, someone else must move down.

Or, as he put it in a 2013 essay in The Times,

Even the most liberal parents are unlikely to be comfortable with the idea that their own children should fall down the scale in the name of making room for a smarter kid from a poorer home.

His proposals calling on the upper middle class to abandon unfair “opportunity hoarding” raise a basic political question. Can the Democratic Party, as it is currently constructed, maintain its commitment to a redistributive agenda? Put another way, can a political party impose costs on its own constituents, especially those voters who make up the most influential faction of the party: the affluent and well educated?

The preliminary evidence from actual events is that demanding sacrifice poses major risks. Asking people to think of themselves as compassionate and to pay higher taxes is one thing-- many Democrats have made that leap-- but ask them to live in a mixed income neighborhood or ask them to have their kid give up her spot at Princeton, and you get a different response.

Reeves himself points to the Democratic uproar when President Obama proposed a relatively modest change in a tax-based mechanism to help pay college costs. The change in what are called 529 College Savings Plans was designed to make the program more advantageous to people with moderate incomes and less so for those with high incomes. An estimated 70 percent of the tax benefits of 529 plans currently go to families with incomes above $200,000.

The moment Obama suggested the reform, prominent Democrats from both the House and Senate were inundated with angry complaints from affluent constituents. They pressured Obama to drop the proposal. In less than a week, he did.

“The idea was sensible, simple, and progressive,” Reeves writes. “The episode was a brutal reminder that sensible policy is not always easy politics.” Reeves noted that two of the leading Democratic opponents of the 529 reform, Nancy Pelosi and Chris Van Hollen, who was elected Maryland’s junior senator in November but was a congressman when Obama proposed it, represented districts where “almost half their constituents are in households with six-figure incomes.”

Perhaps the most problematic issue for affluent Democrats are proposals calling for expanded construction of affordable housing in middle-to-upper-middle class neighborhoods.

When local officials and the courts pressed for construction of relatively small numbers of moderate income housing units in such upscale liberal bastions as San Francisco (Clinton 84.5 percent, Trump 9.2 percent) and neighboring Marin County, Calif. (Clinton 77.3 percent, Trump 15.5 percent), the groundswell of opposition was loud and clear.

...In an effort to further explore this question, I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, two questions:

As the share of Democrats who are well-educated and upper middle class grows, how can the party continue to advocate redistributive policies? Can a party survive that calls on its own members to pay the costs of policies designed to help those on the bottom rungs?

Hacker replied:

The evidence is clear that even relatively affluent Democrats are more supportive of redistribution than a typical Republican-- at least in opinion surveys. This general support, however, doesn’t always translate into support for pro-opportunity policies at the local level.

Affordable housing, Hacker wrote, “is far and away the best example.” Opposition to zoning allowing denser and more affordable housing “comes not just from well-off residents but also from landlords who get monopoly rents.” The inherent zero-sum thinking underlying not-in-my-backyard approaches

prevents positive-sum solutions that could reduce the economic conflict between poorer members of the Democratic coalition and the more affluent segments.

Hacker concluded his email on an upbeat note, contending that “demography is not destiny” and that Democratic leaders

could work more aggressively to identify and create positive-sum solutions-- pro-growth policies that both lift up the least advantaged and attenuate class-based cleavages within its own coalition.

Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, less optimistically put his finger on the core problem for Democrats:

The Democratic Party is evolving in multiple ways that separate it from the living conditions of large numbers of working-class Americans.

The result, Lupia wrote, is that

many Democrats now know less, and appear to care less, about the day-to-day struggles of many working class Americans. Hillary Clinton is an example of a Democrat who struggled to be seen by many such Americans as having a sincere and credible grasp of their concerns.

Hacker and Lupia, while differing in outlook, together raise a basic concern about the contemporary Democratic Party: the casual, if not negligent, willingness of the party elite to adopt policies and positions, however worthy, without regard to the costs such policies impose on others.

The characteristics of the Democratic elite are best reflected in studies of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. For years, CBS surveyed these delegates but stopped doing so in 2008. Still, even without data from 2012 and 2016, the CBS surveys show a consistent pattern. Delegates are drawn overwhelmingly from the liberal upper middle class. In 2008, 70 percent of the delegates reported earning $75,000 or more per year, compared to 27 percent of Democratic voters at that time.

The Democratic delegates were well to the left of Democratic voters, a trend that continues. Seven out of ten delegates said that abortion should be generally available and 20 percent said abortion should be available under “stricter limits”; 43 percent of Democratic voters supported generally available abortion and 39 percent said under “stricter limits.”

More than 8 out of 10 Democratic delegates in 2008 agreed that “government should do more to solve national problems,” while 54 percent of Democratic voters shared that view, according to American National Election Studies. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic coalition clearly reflected the same priorities.

As the Democratic elite and the Democratic electorate as a whole become increasingly well educated and affluent, the party faces a crucial question. Can it maintain its crucial role as the representative of the least powerful, the marginalized, the most oppressed, many of whom belong to disadvantaged racial and ethnic minority groups-- those on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder?

This will be no easy task. In 2016, for the first time in the party’s history, a majority of voters (54.2 percent) who cast Democratic ballots for president had college degrees. Clinton won all 15 of the states with the highest percentage of college graduates [Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland, Conneticut, New Jersey, Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Minnesota, Washington, Illinois, Rhode Island, California and Oregon].

The steady loss of Democratic support in the white working class, culminating in Trump’s Electoral College victory on the backs of these white voters, must inevitably send a loud and clear signal to the Democratic elite: The more the party abandons the moral imperative to represent the interests of the less well off of all races and ethnicities, the more it risks a repetition of the electoral disaster of 2016 in 2018, 2020 and beyond.

Paul Clements is the Kalamazoo progressive who ran against reactionary Republican Fred Upton in 2014 and 2016. We're hoping he runs again in 2018 and he told me he's considering doing so but hasn't made up his mind yet. He's speaking to folks on the ground and figuring out if another run is the best way to defeat Upton. After watching Mile's video up top, he told me that "As Americans see and live the results of Trump's government of billionaires and generals allied with Ryan's free market fundamentalists, Democrats need to give a vision of government for the people. Medicare for all, breaking up big banks, and clean energy, not to mention getting rid of for profit prisons, raising the minimum wage, and re-investing in public education."

Jenny Marshall, who's running for the North Carolina seat held by right-wing knee jerk crackpot Virginia Foxx, is exactly the kind of progressive Democrat who feels in her bones exactly what Lux is talking about. "We want someone who will stand up for our values, our way of life and our families," she told me after watching the clip-- although it's exactly the kind of stiff she's been talking about ever since I met her. "We want a champion that will fight for us. Democrats need to be willing to go to the mat for people and stop caving in when the GOP refuses to compromise. We can no longer negotiate away our schools, our health, our livelihoods and our future. We cannot continue to follow the Republicans as they lead us further to the right. We must stand up for what we believe in. I am standing up for the people of the 5th district. It is time we had a real leader in Washington who won't back down from a challenge."

Last year Tom Wakely ran for the Austin-San Antonio corridor seat occupied by crackpot science denier Lamar Smith. He's running again this year. He found Mike's video spot on and without knowing about Edsall's OpEd, addressed some of the questions he raised in it:

As candidates, we need to be bold. We need to tell people that having Medicare For All is a good thing. We need to tell them having the EPA around is a good thing. Unfortunately, too many in the Democratic Party still think that being a centrist is the only way to win elections. Here in Texas, we are fond of saying the only thing that is in the middle of the road is a dead armadillo and it stinks to high heavens.

When I ran against 30-yr. Republican incumbent Lamar Smith in 2016, I ran on a progressive agenda and while I lost that race, we managed to do something no one else has been able to do in over 30 years-- we managed to drop Smith's percentage vote total to 56.9%, the lowest of his career. Our campaign accomplished this not by running a centrist political campaign but by running a progressive community organizing campaign. And Lamar Smith took note of this. For the first time in nearly two decades, Smith actually started campaigning. He also dumped over $1.7 million into his campaign, spending over $8.00 a vote. We only raised $70,000, which came to a little less than .55 cents per vote. Imagine what our campaign could have done with a  little more money.

As I take a look at the Democrat Party today, I don't see the party of FDR, of Kennedy, of LBJ. I see a party wed to Wall Street, to the Big Banks. A party more interested in helping line the pockets of consultants with cash than with helping line the pockets of ordinary, working class citizens of this country. We need to make voting a hell of lot easier and that is why I support a national program to vote by mail. A lot needs to be done in the Democrat Party if it is ever to be able to proudly raise it's head once again and say, "I stand for the working people of this country." It's a marathon and not a sprint.

I am 64 years old and I don't think I have that many years left in me to take on the Democratic Party Establishment and Wall Street and win. But there are so many young, enthusiastic activists out there I have hope that one day we will see a return to the party of FDR and LBJ. But until that day comes all I can do, all I will do, is continue to tell everyone that will listen, that I am a Progressive. I  will shout from the rooftops that I stand with the working people of this country against Wall Street and the Big Banks, against those who would destroy the EPA and against those who believe that making a profit off of sick and dying people is okay.

More On The Republican Wing Of The Democratic Party

Executive Vice President sounds so much better than "lobbyist sleaze bag"

At the very end of February, we ran an exhaustive piece on the dangers of electing Kathleen Matthews, Chris Matthews lobbyist wife, chair of the state Democratic Party. Short version: the Democratic Party needs fewer vile millionaire elitists running the party, not more. A few days later the vile millionaire elitist was selected to be interim party chair. She's already running for a full 4 year term, which will be voted on in a couple of months. She admits that party bosses Steny Hoyer, Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin asked her to run.

Her appointment was criticized by former Montgomery County Council member Valerie Ervin (D), who said the process smacked of insiderism. The state party “missed an opportunity to open up the space for a new and different kind of leadership,” said Ervin, who is the first African American woman to be elected to the council.

Yesterday Robert Woodruff, in posting a Hal Ginsberg piece at ProgressiveMaryland.org, wrote about "Democrats slip-sliding back in the centrist, old-boy direction that has brought us Larry Hogan [and asks] where will progressives go instead?" Ginsberg:

Appearances to the contrary, Maryland’s Progressive Democrats have little to cheer about. While over 60% of Marylanders are registered Democrats, Republican Governor Larry Hogan is enjoying “sky-high popularity.” Despite Maryland’s high cost of living, the intransigence of some Democratic legislators and executives has stymied efforts in Baltimore City, Montgomery County, and Prince George’s County to raise the minimum wage to $15. Maryland’s traditionally excellent public schools are struggling to accommodate influxes of immigrants and increasing numbers of students from poor families.

The latest blow to progressives came March 1 courtesy of the Maryland Democratic Party’s eight-member Executive Committee when it elected Kathleen Matthews to be interim chair... The State Central Committee will decide in May whether to elect Matthews, who says she will run, to a full term as Chairperson. She is also promising an open and transparent process. Nevertheless, by installing Matthews as interim chair two months before the election, rather than appointing a current member of the Executive Committee, top party officials have made clear that she is their choice to lead the party over the next four years.

Matthews is a consummate Washington insider. Her duties at Marriott, where her annual salary comfortably exceeded $1 million, included overseeing “a political action committee that contributed over $1 million to House and Senate candidates.” She counts as friends and allies many establishment politicos from both parties who were generous financers of her unsuccessful Congressional bid.

...The Matthews pick exposes the obliviousness of Maryland’s top Democrats to the winds of change buffeting the party both nationally and at home. In the Presidential primaries, self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders inspired millions of young people and independents and nearly upset overwhelming favorite Hillary Clinton. When Sanders withdrew from the race, much of the excitement on the Democratic side left too.

In 2014, Maryland’s Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown ran a singularly uninspiring race and lost. He had campaigned as a reasonable centrist standing between Marylanders and the allegedly right-wing Larry Hogan. Two years later, Jamie Raskin beat Matthews with an unabashedly progressive message and Bernie Sanders’ endorsement.

...As the state struggles with sky-high housing costs, stagnant wages, and overcrowded public schools, Maryland progressives must look beyond the Democrats for political leadership. A party that values so highly a multi-millionaire news personality and corporate lobbyist with no commitment to progressive economic populism does not share our values.

Boo! This isn't a Maryland problem. There are power-mongering elitists like Hoyer and Van Hollen everywhere in America, incongruously, embedded in the Democratic Party. Just look at Charles Peters' new book, We Do Our Part-- Toward A Fairer And More Equal America. A Washington Monthly Peters protege, Paul Glastris, the magazine's editor-in-chief, wrote an appreciation of the book, Recapturing the Soul of the Democratic Party. "We Do Our Part," he wrote, "is a history of how American political culture evolved from the communitarian patriotic liberalism of Peters’s New Deal youth to a get-mine conservatism in which someone like Donald Trump could be elected president."

In the standard telling, the decline of big government liberalism begins sometime around the Tet Offensive and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Peters fixes the date much earlier: 1946. That’s the year a number of senior advisers to the recently deceased FDR, people like Thurman Arnold and Abe Fortas, decided to become lobbyists. Few New Dealers had done this before, so the connections and insider knowledge these men possessed were rare and valuable. Arnold and Fortas grew rich and powerful-- the advance guard of what would become a vast Washington industry.

Peters’s concern isn’t just with how lobbying corrupted the political process, though it certainly did that-- Fortas, for instance, was denied the job of chief justice of the Supreme Court thanks to shady payments from a client-connected foundation-- but more broadly with how it corrupted the incentives and worldview of those who came to Washington. Men like Fortas, a brilliant Yale Law School grad from a modest background who owned multiple homes and Rolls-Royces, set a new lifestyle standard in Washington. As more staffers and ex-congressmen followed the lobbying path, those still in government began to see their salaries, which they once considered comfortable, as penurious. (Eventually they became so, as all the high incomes bid up real estate prices and the local cost of living.)

This acquisitiveness was connected to another rising sin: snobbery, specifically the practice of signaling superiority to the hoi polloi through one’s purchases and discriminating tastes in food, drink, and culture. JFK himself, despite his war heroism and inspiring call to service, embodied the trend by marrying the high-born, fashionable Jacqueline Bouvier and surrounding himself with celebrities.

The twin viruses of greed and snobbery are not, to say the least, conducive to a focused and sympathetic concern for average Americans. But Peters reminds us that these behaviors were not widespread among educated people in Washington or throughout America in the 1950s and ’60s. The postwar prosperity and compression of incomes continued, the draft was still nearly universal-- even baseball greats served their two years-- and the federal government continued to deliver impressive new national projects, from interstate highways to Medicare, that the vast majority of Americans appreciated.

...The viruses of snobbery and selfishness spread wildly over the course of the 1970s and ’80s. Graduates from top colleges flocked to high-paying jobs at law firms and investment banks rather than to public service, and the caliber of the civil service accordingly declined. Magazines that catered to consumer chic and cultural signaling, like New York, Vanity Fair, and Washingtonian, grew fat with advertisers and subscribers. On PBS, the TV home of the educated elite, Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street Week became the number one show.

“Money had become a major and open interest of the meritocratic class,” writes Peters, in a way it simply hadn’t been from the 1930s through the ’60s. As a consequence, “the cause of lower taxes and of conservatism in general flourished, as shown by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.” Even elites who didn’t support Reagan were sympathetic to the growing idea that the market should deliver more “shareholder value.” So they didn’t protest (some even cheered) when corporations closed plants, busted unions, and spent their cash on stock buyback schemes rather than on new products and services. To the extent that they expressed their public spiritedness, it was by supporting causes-- gay rights, the environment-- that weren’t the central concerns of most middle- and working-class voters, whose incomes were stagnating while the meritocrats’ were soaring.

The result was greater and greater resentment of the educated elite. The Rush Limbaughs and Roger Aileses of the world fed off that resentment to boost their ratings and advance a conservative movement that didn’t, in the end, improve their audiences’ economic situation-- a fact that Trump exploited by running against establishment conservatives as well as liberal elites.

Peters credits Bill Clinton with being the only Democratic president or candidate in decades who managed, through his policies and gift for empathy, to bridge the gap between the meritocrats and the white middle and working classes. And he sees evidence that Democrats have awakened to the problems of greed, snobbery, and elite detachment, including “the radical increase in awareness of income inequality” and “some meritocrats overcoming their snobbery to make a serious effort to understand the Trump vote.” He also sees signs “that people are beginning to question their relentless pursuit of money, or at least some of the reasons why they think they have to make a lot of money.”

More concretely, he is heartened by examples of elites returning to government service. These include the investment banker Steve Rattner, who joined the Obama administration and helped save the auto industry, and the top Silicon Valley talent Obama personally recruited to the new U.S. Digital Service after the disastrous rollout of the health care exchange website. Peters makes a plea for more Americans, especially liberals, to run for office at the local, state, and national levels-- something that, in the months since his book went to press, actually seems to be happening.

If anything, I think Peters underestimates the degree to which Americans are hungry to serve. What confounds his call for more of the best and brightest to join government is a lack of opportunity. The problem is political. There are eight applicants for every slot in AmeriCorps, the national service program founded by Bill Clinton. But Democrats’ attempts to expand the program have been consistently checked by Republicans. Trump’s budget office has drawn up plans to eliminate it altogether. More broadly, the federal workforce, at 2.8 million employees, is the same size it was in the 1960s when Peters was part of it, even though the U.S. population since then has more than doubled and the federal budget has quadrupled in real terms. Lawmakers control the federal head count and don’t want to be seen as “growing the bureaucracy.” The most Democrats in Congress have been willing to do is beat back repeated Republican efforts to further decimate the federal workforce.

To make up for the inadequate number of staff, the government increasingly relies on contractors. Peters bemoans this trend, citing numerous examples of how it has hurt government’s performance. He’s right. But he doesn’t call for the obvious solution: boost the number of federal employees so more of the work can be done in house. This would require hiring a million new federal workers, according to University of Pennsylvania political science professor John DiIulio, and boosting their pay as well.

That is also the key to curbing the power of lobbyists, which won’t happen merely by inveighing against their greed. Lobbyists’ power comes mainly from their control of information-- about the industries they represent, about the ways government programs work-- that congressional staffers, many of them young and inexperienced, often lack. The way to neutralize that power is to strengthen government’s capacity to get that information independently, by hiring more staffers and researchers and paying them more so they can make a decent living without having to join the private sector.

Of course, a politician who called for hiring a million more federal workers, and raising their salaries, might appear suicidal in the current political climate. But if Peters is correct-- and I think he is-- that a key to bridging the class gap is for more Americans, especially the elite, to serve in government, a political way has to be found. The same bilious anti-government fever that gave America Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich has now given us Trump. Peters reminds us that government service was once a broadly shared and elite experience and value. To cure the fever, today’s liberals must figure out how to make it so again.

I hope you see Kathleen (and Chris) Matthews in this description. And Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, (alas) Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer... the New Dems, the Republicans like Charlie Crist, Tom O'Hallaran and others being recruited into the House Democratic caucus (where they invariably vote with their old comrades across the aisle). Next time you hear some shit-eating New Dem scum bag, whining about the evils of political "purity," kick him in the balls and drop me a note so I can salute you.

Election Notes

The Clintons help Trump celebrate his wedding to Melania. Will they laugh like this again? Of course, but not where you can see them, for a while at least.

by Gaius Publius

A couple of election notes from Corey Robin, plus a bonus note from me:

Blaming the Left

This is something we all anticipate:

1.
As the polls tighten, there’s a lot of left-blaming and left-fretting among Clinton supporters. That fits with a long-standing psycho-political syndrome among liberals of attacking the left—a syndrome in which the left often plays its own not so healthy part.

But there’s little basis for that syndrome in reality, at least in this election. Not that this particular reality has much impact on the self-styled reality-based community. But it’s important to register that reality nonetheless[.]

Robin then quotes Matt Grossman (via the Vox link above):

“The problems Hillary Clinton is having do not have to do with the left,” says Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, in an interview…. ”There is not much of any evidence of a drop-off in support for her from the left-wing of the ideological spectrum.”….Like Jill Stein or not, the drag she has been on Clinton basically amounts to a rounding error.

Will that stop them? Unlikely. Old dogs, old tricks and all.

"It's your fault if she loses. You. Personally."

 This next one is a variant of the first, but a little nastier:

2.
A story Jacob Levy reported on Facebook today leaves me with this embittered thought.

Liberals in the media, academia, political circles, and on social media who support Clinton act as if your one vote — out of the more than 100 million cast — determines the fate of the republic. If you vote for Stein (whether in a safe state or not), you are personally responsible for Trump’s inauguration.

These voices are often the very same people who, when challenged about Clinton’s voting record in the Senate or Obama’s policies, will say: Clinton was only one voice in a Senate, out of…a hundred voices. Obama was one lonely man arrayed against…three veto points.

That kind of reprimand ("it's your fault if she loses") sounds way too close to "You're insufficiently loyal, soldier," but maybe that's just me.

Robin continues to ponder the discrepancy between society's lack of forgiveness for us "littles" and its automatic forgiveness of the bigs:

Somewhere in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith has a passage about how we identify with the trials and travails of a king, giving him all of our sympathy and understanding, yet are so repelled by the tribulations of the lowly that we can scarce understand what they’re going through.

The difficulties and challenges of the most elite sectors of the political class are acutely felt by liberal journalists and commentators. And the calculations and concerns of the lowly citizen? Fuhgettaboutit.

Those two paragraphs remind me of the horror people always feel when they consider the French Revolution in its bloody early days ... without once seeing the centuries of misery, blood and death, by thousands upon thousands of humans, generation after generation, in Paris and in France, endured by the class of people who eventually rose up and fought back against it.

People, watching Marie Antoinette beheaded, call the Revolution a disgrace without once considering the nameless many who lived lives worse than hers, and died every day as a result — the "unhonored dead" who "gave to misery" all they had, and died not forgotten, but never even known.

Republicans and the Latin@ Vote

Robin spends much of the piece pondering the Latin@vote. One of his points is this:

4.
...I’ve been hearing this line of bullshit for years: once the Republicans start appealing to Latin@s, all will be well. People forget the ballyhoo around the fact that George W. Bush could say hello in Spanish. That was going to change everything forever....

There are two reasons Latin@s haven’t become a reliable part of the Republican coalition.

The first, of course, is the racism and revanchism of a considerable part of the GOP base. Just look how they took to Bush’s compassionate conservatism. ...

The second reason, though, is this: what GOP fantasists imagine creating is a multicultural, identity-friendly party of capital. The problem is we already have such a party. Who needs two?

That last paragraph (did you catch what he said?) sets the next part up nicely.

"Regimes tend to collapse of their own weight"

A much more general point, even more general than Robin himself makes of it:

7.
I once asked Steve Skowronek—who’s probably one of the four or five most fertile minds of the last quarter-century’s political science—what kind of role opposition parties play in toppling partisan/presidential regimes. What role did the 1932 Democrats play in overthrowing the Gilded Age regime? What role did the 1980 Republicans playing in overthrowing the New Deal regime?

Not much, he said, rather bleakly.

Regimes tend to collapse of their own weight, driven to destruction by the long-term consequences of the actions of their own elites and activists. While they ultimately need an opposition to topple them, the only reason the opposition can do that is that these regimes are already tipping over on their own [emphasis mine].

There's a lot to consider here. I think Robin errs in applying this to Republicans only instead of to the whole regime. After all, we made the same point recently, echoing Matt Taibbi. Here's Taibbi's version of this idea (emphasis mine):

The first symptom of a degraded aristocracy is a lack of capable candidates for the throne. After years of indulgence, ruling families become frail, inbred and isolated, with no one but mystics, impotents and children to put forward as kings. Think of Nikolai Romanov reading fortunes as his troops starved at the front. Weak princes lead to popular uprisings

And again, this point doesn't just apply to the Republican and their clown car of "impotents and children." This year we chose between of the two most unpopular candidates in modern history for president.

Bonus: How Early Will the Press Call the Presidential Race Over?

Near the end of the Democratic primary, in a apparent attempt to finish off the Sanders campaign, the AP called the contest over even before the California primary was held — before, in other words, all pledged delegates were decided. How early will the press call this contest decided?

• 1. After Clinton wins either Florida, North Carolina or Ohio, all Eastern time zone states, leaving Trump no path to victory?

• 2. Or after the polls close in Nevada, a Western time zone state, so as not to mess with what should be a heavy Democratic turnout and a possible tipping-point win in the race to control the Senate?

I know what Harry Reid would choose, but to wait three hours to be the first to name the new president ... that's a heavy ask. Torn between two lovers, what will the media do?

Be sure to read the rest of Corey Robin's piece, especially points 9 and 10 about what the strong Latin@ vote means for the rest of us going forward, and how, via the Culinary Workers Union in a right to work state, they've gotten where they are.

GP
 

"What in hell does [Bloomberg right-hand man Dan Doctoroff] know about life in working class Queens?" (Mitch Waxman)

If you find yourself in the neighborhood -- Sheepshead Bay, that is -- follow Mitch's recommendation of the roast beef "au jus" sandwich, and be sure to have them pile on the (free) onions and extra gravy.


"Something happened during the Bloomberg era, however. 'Gubmint' jobs suddenly accrued a new status and the suits from corporate America began to talk about 'service.' They took the pay cut, accepted a position at this agency or that, and began applying the rules of business to government policy. . . .

"Thing is, most of these 'Gubmint' people aren't from 'here,' and they seem to regard New York City with a thinly veiled disgust. For example - remember when Dan Doctoroff described the Sunnyside Yards as 'a scar' he saw from his office window in Manhattan a couple of years ago? . . . [W]hat in hell does Dan Doctoroff know about life in working class Queens?"

-- Mitch Waxman, in his Newtown
Pentacle blogpost today, "leaden jars"

by Ken

In a July Newtown Pentacle post, "tinkling flames," Mitch finished up his tale of an excursion to Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay by sharing his discovery that a cherished haunt of his Canarsie youth "is still there, at the corner of Emmons and East 29th, just where I left it . . . And inside of RnR, nothing has changed since the 1980’s, except for the prices."

As I've said here a number of times, Mitch Waxman's Newtown Pentacle blog is the one blog I follow rigorously, reading every damned post, Monday through Friday. I don't know anybody who gets more mileage out of the basic blog tools of words and pictures -- a resource set, he has pointed out to me, that he has been using dating back to his former life as a creator of comic books. Keeping up with The Newtown Pentacle is made easier and more rewarding by the fact that you never know what's going to set Mitch off on any given day.

For example, in the July post "tinkling flames" Mitch finished up his account of an excursion from his current home base, Astoria, Queens, to Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay by sharing the delighted discovery that a cherished haunt of his Canarsie youth --

is still there, at the corner of Emmons and East 29th, just where I left it. And inside of RnR, nothing has changed since the 1980’s, except for the prices.

Don't think for a moment that that didn't burrow deep into my brain. And sure enough, the next time I found myself within striking distance of the shrine -- one day in September when I'd journeyed out beyond Sheepshead Bay to Plumb (or "Plum"; the point is hotly contested) Beach to participate in a beach cleanup organized by NYC H2O and one or two other environmental groups in conjunction with the National Parks Service -- I had it in mind all day that the distance from Plumb (or Plum) Beach to Roll n Roaster should be eminently walkable. And when the time came, rather than continuing to await the delayed arrival of our promised lunch (tacos, wasn't it?), you better believe I struck out for the hallowed corner of Emmons Ave. and E. 29th St. And when I got there, I remembered Mitch's report, in picture (click to enlarge) and words --

"I went with the lemonade, and the roast beef 'as jus' sandwich. If you have the opportunity, get the above. If it’s wintertime, get the cheese fries as well. Fried potatoes just don’t go with the summer heat, IMHO."

I passed on the lemonade -- and the cheese fries (it was only late September, after all) -- but indeed went for the roast beef sandwich, and while I was devouring it, by studying the changing menu video screens I discovered that at no extra charge I could have had both onions and extra gravy. I've stored that information away for the next time I'm in the vicinity, and by "vicinity" I mean to draw fairly wide boundary lines.


MOST OFTEN, OF COURSE, MITCH CAN BE FOUND
AMBLING ABOUT HIS BELOVED NEWTOWN CREEK

On land or water, camera in hand, with varying amounts of camera gear in stowed in the bag he's schlepping. I've reported frequently on Mitch's wanderings, and you can sample those reports as well as the photographs that accompanied them by hitting the tag below.

Which brings us to today's post, "leaden jars," in which we encounter Mitch in his "outer borough" voice -- a Brooklyn lad now transplanted to western Queens, which is now undergoing rapid transformation at the hands of moneyed Manhattan-based elites who don't know or care anything about it except that it's one of the city's current best places to enrich their kind beyond most of our wildest imaginings, without any concern for the people who live there now -- or how the rich people being deposited there are going to live without any serious infrastructure investment to make life there livable.

The story is told so elegantly and powerfully that I wouldn't dare presume to paraphrase or edit it.

Failure is often the only option, in today's post.


- photo by Mitch Waxman [click to enlarge -- Ed.]

One has been on a holy tear of late on the real estate development and gentrification situation here in Western Queens. I've been pissing off a bunch of people I know in government by doing so, and have received the usual "who do you think you are?" accusations and chides. My standard response is "I'm a citizen, and how dare you act like some sort of landed gentry towards me when ultimately all you've got is a government job." It was common sense when I was growing up that taking a government job (as opposed to working for a corporation) was all about the security and pension benefits. What you didn't get in terms of annual salary today, you'd get back in the long term during retirement. In my neighborhood - DSNY was considered a good career bet, as well as becoming a teacher, as they had the strongest Unions with the best "bennys." My pal "Special Ed"'s dad told us all that we should seriously consider becoming court bailiffs.

Of course, that's my "working class" outlook at work, and back then the gub'mint wasn't the pathway one took in pursuance of eventually securing a high paid corporate consultancy job.


- photo by Mitch Waxman [click to enlarge -- Ed.]

Something happened during the Bloomberg era, however. "Gubmint" jobs suddenly accrued a new status and the suits from corporate America began to talk about "service." They took the pay cut, accepted a position at this agency or that, and began applying the rules of business to government policy. Now, don't get me wrong, these are pretty clever folks and the amount of brain (and Rolodex) power they brought with them to lower Manhattan is impressive. Problem being, they have an inherently profit based modus operandi due to their experiences in the "real world." The "Gubmint" ain't supposed to turn a profit.

Thing is, most of these "Gubmint" people aren't from "here," and they seem to regard New York City with a thinly veiled disgust.

For example - remember when Dan Doctoroff described the Sunnyside Yards as "a scar" he saw from his office window in Manhattan a couple of years ago? Mr. Doctoroff was born in Newark, but grew up in Birmingham, Michigan and then attended Harvard University. A suburb of Detroit, the demographics of Birmingham are 96% Caucasian (according to the 2000 census), and a mere 1.6% of the population of Birmingham lives below the poverty line. The median income for a household in that city in 2000 was $80,861, and the median income for a family was $110,627. Not exactly East New York, or the South Bronx, or Astoria. Mr. Doctoroff is famously Michael Bloomberg's right hand man and the fellow who ran Bloomberg LLC while his boss was Mayor, and is accordingly quite affluent. He's the very definition of the "one percent" and a leading member of the "elite." I don't imagine Mr. Doctoroff goes fishing in his penny jar for bagel money when it's the Thursday before payday, has never had to "borrow from Peter to pay Paul," or lived in financial fear that the City DOB might impoverish him with an unexpected order to repair or replace his concrete sidewalk.

In other words, what in hell does Dan Doctoroff know about life in working class Queens?

Doctoroff and his cohorts created the term "affordable housing" which the current Mayor has made his own. The question often asked is "affordable by who"? The Citizens Budget Commission boiled that down in this post from last year. The upshot of it is that in order to create this so called "affordable" apartment stock, which is unaffordable to the low income people it's meant to serve, the rent on "market" rate apartments actually has to go up to cover the cost. This redistribution of wealth hits the middle and working class on two fronts - higher monthly rents, and the application of their tax dollars to subsidize the real estate development which reluctantly includes the so called "affordable" units.


- photo by Mitch Waxman [click to enlarge -- Ed.]

Personal experience from having actually grown up in NYC suggests that whomever the politicians and planners set out to "help" end up getting hurt.

Having grown up in what would be considered a "low income" family under modern terms, we members of the Waxman clan migrated to the outer edges of the City (Brooklyn's Canarsie section) where housing was found that we could afford. That's where relative affluence and dire poverty comingled, and created a culture. This was possible due to a preexisting infrastructure of subways and highways that allowed egress to and from the commercial center in Manhattan, but there were still plenty of jobs to be had locally. Manufacturing, commercial, shops. If you played your cards right, you could earn a living and never once have to go into the City. That's changed, and the ongoing loss of this manufacturing and commercial side of the working class economy is excaberated by this affordable housing craze which perceives any large footprint lot as being a potential development site.

If a building went up in the 1970's or 80's, which included low income housing, that had a separate entrance or "poor door" there would have been bloody riots.

The reason for that is the City planners and "Gubmint" officialdom were mostly native New Yorkers who lived in and were loyal to the neighborhoods they oversaw, and who understood that "it's not all about Manhattan." Doctoroff and his acolytes see the City as the solution and not the problem. The looming infrastructure crisis this rapid development is causing will impoverish the City. A century ago, when the newly consolidated City of Greater New York was being similarly developed - the politicians built the subways and sewers first, then they sold off or awarded the adjoining properties at bargain prices to their cronies like Cord Meyer and Fred Trump.

The infrastructure investments made between 1898 and 1940 allowed NYC to grow beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Unfortunately, these days we are doing the opposite, and allowing the buildings to be erected first. The bill for all of the municipal machinery will come after the population loading is finished.

I GNASH MY TEETH WHEN SUPPOSEDLY SERIOUS
PUNDITS SUGGEST THAT THE BILLION-DOLLAR LOSER . . .

. . . has staked out a serious position with his stunning insight that our system is broken. The system is broken, of course, but nobody has done more to break it or to profit from the breakage. Oh, he might have in mind some shifting of the exact cast of 1-percent characters destined to pillage and plunder the economy in a Trump administration. But is there anything in his grotesque lifetime's worth of words or deeds to suggest that he has any interest in un-breaking the system, or in fact doing anything but exploit the gullibility of actual victims of the breakage in order to further service his seemingly limitless greed and boundless ego?

#

Our Enemies Are The Elites, Not Each Other

Republican elites and Democratic elites have more in common with each other than they have with the kinds of people who support Trump (or, for that matter, who supported Bernie). Bernie has the non-racist, non-misogynistic, non-xenophobic version of the Trump supporters... and a lot smarter and considerably younger. But just as fed up and angry at a rigged system that works to keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful and keep thiose without agency or wealth without agency or wealth. So, while we have Hillary's highly professional campaign team cutting Señor Trumpanzee up into little bite sized cubes and feeding him to the sharks by the hour, Republicans, like 1987-89 Reagan White House Political Director Frank Lavin, are joining the long and growing list of conservatives endorsing the more conservative of the two presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton. "Trump," wrote Lavin in an OpEd, "falls short in terms of the character and behavior needed to perform as president. This defect is crippling and ensures he would fail in office. Trump is a bigot, a bully, and devoid of grace or magnanimity. His thin-skinned belligerence toward every challenge, rebuke, or criticism would promise the nation a series of a high-voltage quarrels. His casual dishonesty, his policy laziness, and his lack of self-awareness would mean four years of a careening pin-ball journey that would ricochet from missteps to crisis to misunderstandings to clarifications to retractions... There are many issues on which Hillary Clinton and I are not in agreement. However on the core foreign policy issues our country faces-- alliance relationships, security commitments, and international engagement-- she comes closer to Republican views than does Trump. And Donald Trump makes me cringe. I am voting for Hillary. And I vote in Ohio."

Team Trumpanzee sent Mike Pence to Arizona to talk to his old comrade in arms, Jeff Flake, hopeful that Pence could persuade him to support the ticket. Flake told a Face the Nation audience yesterday that Pence failed. Even the penultimate senatorial woos, Susan Collins (R-ME), is starting to prepare to abandon the SS Trumpanzee if it looks like it's going to go down in a big way. After Trumps' ugly, race-baiting foray into Portland Thursday-- designed solely to stir up paranoia and ethnic hatreds between Somalis and white Mainers-- Collins finally spoke up about the candidate she refuses to cut loose. "Mr Trump[anzee]’s statements disparaging immigrants who have come to this country legally are particularly unhelpful. Maine has benefited from people from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and, increasingly, Africa-- including our friends from Somalia."

Writing in yesterday's NY Times, Nick Confessore delved into how tough it is for Team Trumpanzee to persuade reliable Republican Party contributors and supporters to get behind Trump (and the rabble that backs him, a problem Confessore didn't address). "The goal," he wrote, "is to persuade thousands of the party’s most reliable patrons to overcome their lingering objections to the candidate most of them never wanted, and to help defeat a Democrat most of them want even less." Today Trumpy-the-Clown flew Trump Force One to Detroit "to unveil a set of detailed economic policy prescriptions... [to] remind wavering Republican donors of the stark contrast that he offers to Hillary Clinton on issues like taxes and regulation."

It is a dizzying turnaround for everyone involved, several donors said in interviews. Aides and fund-raisers for Mr. Trump, a self-described billionaire who has spent months proclaiming his independence from the party’s traditional financial interests, now concede that they need mainline Republican donors to swing behind Mr. Trump so that he will have enough financial firepower to compete with Mrs. Clinton in the air and on the ground.

...Some Trump backers argue that despite his criticisms of Washington, Mr. Trump is likely to lean heavily on conservative think tanks and Republican-leaning trade associations to stock his administration. Others are urging their fellow donors to face the hard truth that Mr. Trump thumped the donor class’s preferred candidates and earned the favor of Republican voters. Now, they say, it is time for the donors to respect the voters’ wishes.

...There are plenty of vocal and visible holdouts. Paul E. Singer, the prominent New York investor who raised more than $3 million for Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, told Republican officials he would not donate a dollar more to the Republican National Committee as long as Mr. Trump was the party’s nominee.

Other prominent donors spoke out last week after Mr. Trump’s belittling of the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, who died in a car bombing in Iraq in 2004 while serving in the Army.

Seth Klarman, a Boston financier who has given more than $4 million to Republican candidates and groups over the years, has decided to back Mrs. Clinton. So has Meg Whitman, the Hewlett-Packard executive who was a leading fund-raiser for Mr. Romney’s campaign, and who said last week that Mr. Trump was a “dishonest demagogue.”

In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Klarman said that Mr. Trump’s “words and actions over the last several days are so shockingly unacceptable in our diverse and democratic society that it is simply unthinkable that Donald Trump could become our president.”

Mr. Trump has also been abandoned by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who oversee a vast network of conservative political and philanthropic groups. Many of their allied donors traveled to a luxury lakeside resort in Colorado Springs last weekend for the summer edition of the network’s biannual “seminars.”

OK, so what about the Bernie supporters? Do they still have a beef. Yes, but the overwhelming majority are following the clothespin strategy and going along, however reluctantly, for Clinton. (Not me, though.) But just over a month ago Ben Spielberg warned that Bernie supporters had reason to loathe the way the Democratic establishment stole the primary process for Clinton and denied the nomination to Bernie. That's not supposed to be part of history.

Journalists have been cautioning Bernie Sanders against “suggesting the entire political process is unfair,” insisting that doing so could have “negative and destabilizing consequences.” They contend that he must “argue to his supporters that the outcome of the [Democratic primary] process was legitimate” so that he can convince them to vote for Hillary Clinton.  According to several recent articles, this argument should be easy to make because “The Democratic Primary Wasn’t Rigged” and “Bernie Sanders lost this thing fair and square.”

The problem, however, is that the Democratic primary was anything but “fair and square.”  It may not have been “rigged” in the narrow sense in which some of these writers have interpreted that word (to mean that there were illegal efforts to mess with vote counts), but it certainly wasn’t democratic. That’s why only 31 percent of Democrats express “a great deal of confidence” that the Democratic primary process is fair and is likely why the election conspiracy theories these journalists decry have gained traction.

Defenders of the Democratic primary results make several legitimate points. Clinton secured more votes and more pledged delegates than Sanders. When voting rules were less restrictive, she still won a greater number of open primaries than he did. Caucuses, which are very undemocratic, likely benefited Sanders. There isn’t evidence that the Clinton campaign coordinated efforts to purge voters from the rolls, inaccurately tabulate votes, or mislead Sanders’ California supporters into registering for the American Independent Party. While “the American election system is a disaster” and “should be reformed,” it’s not clear that the numerous and alarming voting rights issues that surfaced during the primary (from Arizona to New York to Puerto Rico) systematically disadvantaged Sanders. And discrepancies between exit polls and final voting results can happen for a number of reasons; they aren’t necessarily indicative of foul play.

Yet at the same time, these points skirt the very real ways in which the primary process was “rigged;” as Matt Yglesias and Jeff Stein have acknowledged, “the media, the party, and other elected officials [were] virtually uniformly… loaded against” Sanders from the get-go. The thumbs on the scale from these groups mattered a lot, more even than Yglesias and Stein surmise.

To quickly recap what those thumbs looked like, the Democratic party threw so much institutional support behind Clinton so long before she even declared her candidacy that political scientist David Karol asserted, in December of 2014, that “Hillary has basically almost been nominated.” The Democratic National Committee’s debate schedule was “obviously intended” to insulate Clinton from challengers and scrutiny. The DNC, in response to inappropriate behavior from a Sanders staffer who DNC staff had recommended and the campaign had already fired, suspended Sanders’ access to important voter data in violation of its contract with his campaign. While Clinton was dinging Sanders on his ostensible disregard for party fundraising, the “so-called joint fundraising committee comprised of Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee and 32 state party committees” was exploiting loopholes in campaign finance laws to funnel the bulk of its resources to Clinton and Clinton alone. Even into late May, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was leaning heavily into biased, anti-Sanders messaging, and leaked emails confirm that she and other DNC leaders actively sought to undermine the Sanders campaign. In addition, leaders of numerous groups traditionally affiliated with the Democratic party-- unions and organizations generally more aligned with Sanders than Clinton on campaign issues-- endorsed Clinton without polling their members (the groups that did open the endorsement process up to members typically endorsed Sanders).

Mainstream pundits and analysts were hardly any better than the Democratic party. From the moment Sanders entered the race, the media insisted-- when they covered him at all, which was not very often-- that he had “no chance of winning.” They continued to write off the possibility of a Sanders victory even as his popularity skyrocketed and he took an early lead in the popular vote, inappropriately including superdelegates in their reporting to make it look like Clinton was winning big. They asserted that the hundreds of policy wonks in support of Sanders’ ideas didn’t exist, subjecting Sanders’ proposals to far more scrutiny than Clinton’s, getting their analysis of some of Sanders’ plans flat-out wrong, and attempting to “boot anyone not preaching from the incrementalist gospel out of the serious club.” They began to pressure Sanders to drop out well before even half of all primaries and caucuses had been completed. They helped advance the false narrative that angry, sexist, illiberal White men fueled Sanders’ rise when his supporters were typically more power-balancing than Clinton’s and he was actually most popular among young women, young people of color, and poor Americans. They also helped the Clinton campaign propagate numerous misleading and/or untrue attacks on Sanders.

In general, as often happens when political and media establishments are threatened, they progressed from “polite condescension” towards the Sanders campaign to “innuendos” to “right-wing attacks” to “grave and hysterical warnings” to something close to a “[f]ull-scale and unrestrained meltdown.” It’s not clear exactly how much of that progression was coordinated, but it takes minimal effort to dismantle the claim that the Democratic party and mainstream media outlets were mostly neutral. Whether Clinton surrogates were praising her on TV without disclosing their ties to her campaign or technically unaffiliated newspaper outlets were blasting Sanders in headlines and post-publication edits to their articles, media sources consistently parroted misleading Clinton campaign talking points. Evidence indicates that the DNC was along for the ride.

Democratic Party goats and sheep can bleat all they want about Naderism, but, truth be told, anyone who votes for Clinton is voting for an untenable and corrupt system that needs to be smashed to bits, not coddled or preserved. It's why, no matter how much I detest a dangerous clown like Señor Trumpanzee, I will never, under any circumstance, vote for Hillary. I may even buy a Ralph Nader tee-shirt, since I did cast a ballot-- albeit with a clothespin on my nose-- for Gore/Lieberman in 2000. Yes, I was bamboozled into voting for Joe Lieberman. That's never going to happen again.