Does Something As Amorphous As "The Democratic Party" Stand For Something?

"Conservative Democrats" are careerist politicians, not actual grassroots voters

I guess that depends on how you define it. Who is the Democratic Party? I would say anyone who has registered as a Democrat. Fair enough? Who is not the Democratic Party? The elected party officials, who try to define it by looking in the mirror. Their positions are transitory and their careerism is the most deadly weapon wielded against the party and what it is supposed to stand for. I would define the modern Democratic Party as part of the vision espoused by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. If he was still alive, Roosevelt would still be president of the United States. Bill Clinton made a concerted and somewhat successful effort to turn the Democratic Party away from its working family roots and towards the interests of his own corporate donors. It's been a lot of bad news for the party since then. A little reminder:

• 1932- FDR- 57.4% (472 electoral votes)
• 1936- FDR- 60.8% (523 electoral votes)
• 1940- FDR- 54.7% (449 electoral votes)
• 1944- FDR- 53.4% (432 electoral votes)

• 1992- Clinton- 43.0% (370 electoral votes)
• 1996- Clinton- 49.2% (379 electoral votes)

You can have capitalism or you can have a planet-- but you can't have both. Or... depending on the definition of "unfettered," you can have unfettered capitalism or you can have a planet-- but you can't have both.

Friday, Richard Rodriguez, a board member of Our Revolution from Illinois, wrote an essay for The Hill, DCCC is out of step with Democratic values. "The latest shakeup over a lack of diversity in senior leadership at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee," he wrote, "shows that House Democrats’ campaign arm remains out of touch with the values of its grassroots Democratic voters." Not just out of touch-- antithetical to the values of the grassroots of the party. Illinois Blue Dog and ultimate careerist Cheri Bustos, the new DCCC chair, is a perfect symbol of what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party. 

This first became evident in March when DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos announced a “blacklist” policy, which sought to stifle the people-powered democratic process by requiring political consultants to sign a loyalty pledge to incumbent Democrats. Recent comments from black and Latino lawmakers about a lack of diversity in senior leadership, as well as complaints about a tone-deaf approach to issues relating to race, show that the DCCC continues to refuse to evolve and change. Instead, there seems to be an implicit policy of silencing new voices and sidelining historically marginalized communities in order to protect the power of the status quo.

At a time when President Trump is openly voicing racist rhetoric and seeking to divide us, the Democratic Party has to be a model of the America we are proud to be-- an America that welcomes new voices, embraces diversity and opens the doors of power wide.

This spring, Our Revolution met with Rep. Bustos after holding rallies outside her office and delivering more than 30,000 petitions opposing the blacklist policy. After promising to follow up with us, Rep. Bustos has remained silent-- and the blacklist policy has remained in place. The recent staff shakeup is another symptom of the same problem.

  Our nation is a diverse melting pot of hard-working Americans. Sadly, not all politicians are doing their best to serve all their constituents. Not all Democrats are created equally, and some are not aligned to the principles and morals of their congressional district.

Congressman Daniel William Lipinski of Illinois’ third congressional district is one of the Democratic Party’s more conservative members. Lipinski voted against the landmark Affordable Care Act in 2010 and is anti-abortion. In 2018, he survived a close primary against author and small businesswoman Marie Newman. On April 16, Newman officially announced that she will challenge Lipinski in a rematch for the spring 2020 primary.

Even though the party doesn’t need to fear losing a seat in this solidly Democratic area, the DCCC is trying to handpick its preferred candidate, rather than let Chicago-area voters decide which candidate is best for them without outside interference.

Democrats are a diverse coalition of voters seeking real change and a return to the ideals of shared prosperity with racial, gender, climate, social and economic equality for all. Democratic congressional candidates in Mississippi and California may not agree on everything, but voters deserve the right to choose an alternative if the current representative is not reflecting their values and morals or fulfilling their needs.

No congressional district is the same, and a one-size-fits-all candidate is not good for the Democratic Party. Banning vendors and consultants who help Democratic primary challengers is wrong. The blacklist policy deters all future leaders looking to make a difference.

At Our Revolution, we are committed to fighting for the political change that is so desperately needed in American politics. We need an economy that works for everyone. We need health care for all. We need a political system that works for the people, not the deep-pocketed special interests. In 2020 and beyond, we need candidates on the ballot who make these issues their top concerns. We need candidates who are responsive to the people, who have said over and over again that the issues that they care about are affordable health care, fighting climate change, high-quality public education and so much more.

Rodriguez is talking more about the manifestations of the problem with the party-- the take over by the careerist congressional wing-- than about the underlying problems. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are not the heads of the party-- not by any stretch of the imagination. She leads the House Democrats-- poorly-- and he leads the Senate Democrats-- even more poorly. The interests of their two caucuses are often at odds with the interests of the working class/the party grassroots. Primaries of shitbags like Joe Crowley-- who Pelosi and her team had already picked as her successor-- are extremely important and absolutely necessary for many reasons, including as a wake-up call that these people do not own their transitory positions.

Strong challenges to incumbents remind the members of Congress who they work for, who is the boss. Defeating incumbents and replacing them with progressives is as important as replacing Republicans at a time when the Democratic majority is growing in the House-- not because of the inept DCCC, but because of the inept Donald Trump. This cycle, targeting reactionary, out-of-touch incumbents like Lipinski-- as well as Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA), Stephen Lynch (New Dem-MA), Bill Foster (New Dem-IL), Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY), Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ), Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY) and David Scott (Blue Dog-GA)-- is the way to keep the congressional wing of the party on its toes. Hopefully there will be many more serious challenges this cycle. It's a shame the challenges to Pelosi, Hoyer and Bustos are well-meaning but scattered, unfocused and weak. (Click on that Blue America 2020 primaries thermometer above and give what you can to the candidates who can actually win some of these races.)

Last month, Pelosi-- using GOP talking points-- told the DCCC that Bernie is unpopular in the suburbs and that if he wins the nomination it could be a threat to the Democratic House majority. She's lost her mind. Members of Congress have told me that she has threatened them with repercussions if they endorse Bernie. That should tell you a lot about who she works for and how she's changed... and what she deserves.

How do we transmit values (GOOD values, that is)? E. J. Dionne Jr. provides a case in point

"If you stand for something, you will always make enemies. That is part of the price of being principled. What you should avoid are entirely unnecessary fights that advance no cause but create bitter feelings."

-- Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr., in a tribute
this week to his "second father," "Unearned blessings"

by Ken

Probably it's too facile to say that right-wingers don't acknowledge their roots, the human sources that nourished them into the people they became. After all, Paul Ryan acknowledges the inspiration he drew from that great thinker Ayn Rand, or at least he used to before he started getting embarrassing questions from people who actually knew that pathetic loop de loop actually believed, including her deep hostility to religion, which after all is one of PRyan's chiefest pretend-virtues. And right-wing economists do often pay tribute to Friedrich Hayek, and some of them may actually have read his stuff.

But in the matter of how real human values are developed and transmitted from one generation to the next, a subject you would think would be of paramount interest to people who pretend to be "conservatives," the discussion usually starts and ends with religion, which for modern right-wingers is pretty much confined to religion, usually in its most authoritarian and almost always in its crackpottiest form. (Note the built-in conflict with the Ayn Rand Wing of America's Looniest.)

In part I think (and this may be overthinking for the case of people who have basically sworn to eradicate actual thought) Righties' problem with acknowledging where they came from is that they've been trained to believe that everything they do they do on their own (except maybe for God, or a doodified version of Jesus that would make the real Jesus weep).

So it's not surprising, by contrast, to find E. J. Dionne Jr. paying moving tribute this week -- in a column called "Unearned blessings" -- to a man he had, he says, the great good luck ("that ineffable thing we call luck") to have in his life, shaping his outlook in crucial ways.

I usually think of E.J. as a shining if rare example of a person of faith whose faith has inspired him to a life as a striver for social justice. Catholics in search of a usable role model don't have a lot of options out there. E.J. has long been a shining exception. I don't know if it's ironic or a matter of course that the man E.J. celebrated this week as "one of the best human beings I will ever know," who died Monday, was Jewish.

Bert Yaffe, 93, was a businessman and a decorated Marine combat veteran -- he was a tank commander in Guam, Bougainville and Iwo Jima -- who carried shrapnel in his body to his last day. He was also a citizen-politician who ran for Congress in 1970 because, having fought proudly in a war he considered absolutely necessary, he came to oppose a war in Vietnam that he saw as a terrible mistake.

A native of Sparta, Ga., who never lost the soft Southern inflection in his speech, he moved to my home town of Fall River, Mass., after he left the service. He had married his beloved Erna and taken over a family business. He lost her to cancer in 1977, and her death deepened his engagement with the cause of health-care reform and disease prevention. This passion was an integral part of his commitment to civil rights, social justice and peace.

I got to know Bert when I was 16, shortly after my father died. I was already fortunate because he had been a very loving father, and I also had a godfather and uncles looking out for me. Bert was a life-changing bonus.

He had been the local organizer for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 ­anti-war campaign and was a prime force behind what became the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium protests. We met when I interviewed him for a high school project on the reform movement in the Democratic Party, and it happened almost instantly: He decided to take me on as an extra son -- and, bless them, his own children, Eric, Cheryl and Rob, welcomed me as part of the family.

"Bert's was the only Jewish family in Sparta," E.J. writes.

A popular kid, he joined the Epworth League, the Methodist youth group, because he wanted to go out with a Methodist girl. While remaining loyally Jewish, he proceeded to get elected president of Sparta's branch of the league. Only in America.

Later he wanted to date a Baptist girl, and he encountered a form of resistance that may be understandable only to those from traditional Southern towns. "They didn't care that I was Jewish," Bert would laugh. "What they couldn't stand is that I had been president of the Epworth League."

Here's one lesson E.J. says he learned from Bert:

Our view of expertise should never be limited to how many academic degrees somebody has. On health care, he always asked what Sarah Stokes would think.

A public health nurse he got to know as a teenager in the 1930s, Stokes worked, Bert once said, "on the red clay back roads, through the cotton fields and among the broken-down shacks and contaminated wells of Hancock County" in Georgia, which was 80 percent African American. The love Stokes showed toward those she served taught Bert to hate injustice.

Another lesson: "Make no gratuitous enemies," with the accent on gratuitous.

Faced in the early 1970s with a highly personal feud among some of our political friends, he sought to mediate rather than take sides. . . .

If you stand for something, you will always make enemies. That is part of the price of being principled. What you should avoid are entirely unnecessary fights that advance no cause but create bitter feelings. I'll always think of it as a singularly important piece of political wisdom.

Another lesson: Bert, "a devoted liberal," "always looked across ideological barricades for unexpected friends." As "a passionate believer in individual and community responsibility for promoting better health," he "was struck that at least some of his ideas overlapped with those of Newt Gingrich."

But what matters most, E.J. says, is:

The guy who befriended a 16-year-old kid showed me that you can marry a very hardheaded approach to the problems of life and politics with a joyous, spontaneous sense of love. Would that everyone could be lucky enough to have such a second father.

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