DREAM Act Day

Today Harry Reid is calling a cloture vote against the Republican filibuster aimed at blocking the Defense budget because of rightwing antipathy towards Latinos and their opposition to abolishing Don't Ask Don't Tell. This is more pre-election Republican Party politics of divisiveness, another play to turn ordinary American people against each other for the benefit of the 5% of wealthiest Americans who actually benefit from GOP policies and their agenda of reactionary anti-working family policies. In the past a dozen Republican senators have voted for the DREAM Act, which is supported by Colin Powell and virtually all of the country's military brass:

Bob Bennett (UT)
Sam Brownback (KS)
Norm Coleman (MN)
Susan Collins (ME)
Larry Craig (ID)
Chuck Hagel (NE)
Orrin Hatch (UT)
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX)
Trent Lott (MS)
Richard Lugar (IN)
Mel Martinez (FL)
Olympia Snowe (ME)

The best source of updates on the DREAM Act I've found is at America's Voice; they've got everything you need to know, including ringing endosements from papers across the ideological spectrum, from the NY Daily News and L.A. Times to the Salt Lake Tribune and Frank Sharry's powerful nonpartisan endorsement at yesterday Hill:

Passing the DREAM Act should be a no-brainer. It’s a Mom-and-apple-pie measure that enables high-achieving young immigrants to go to college, join our military and earn citizenship.

It enjoys bipartisan support, and is backed by leaders in education, the military, and business, as well as by religious communities such as the Evangelical movement, the Jewish community and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

So, why is the measure controversial?

For one, these young people are in the U.S. illegally, and issues related to illegal immigration tend to generate more heat than light. But let’s be clear: these kids came with their parents and can hardly be held responsible for decisions made when they were still in diapers. They then proceeded to grow up in America and do all that was asked of them-- learn English, finish high school with good grades, and aspire to great things. Do we really want to pursue the alternative to the DREAM Act, which is to deport these valedictorians and ROTC members to countries they don’t even remember?

Evidently, some do. Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) took to the Senate floor this week to strongly oppose the bill. He started up the right-wing sound-bite machine, claiming that DREAM was an “amnesty measure” that would “reward bad behavior.” But Vitter, who knows something about bad behavior (and should know even more about glass houses), has the DREAM Act all wrong.

The bill details a rigorous process by which those eligible have to meet stringent age, character, and educational and military service requirements to earn legal status. This isn’t about amnesty, it’s about accountability. The bill sets out a well-designed obstacle course that will produce fine young citizens out of those who make it through.

The second reason the Senate vote has become controversial is that the DREAM Act will be considered as an amendment to the defense bill. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called the DREAM amendment “extraneous” and said it has “nothing to do” with the military. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who up until this Congress was a longstanding co-sponsor of the DREAM Act, argued that DREAM was “totally unrelated to national defense.”

Wrong again. The FY2010-12 Strategic Plan for the Department of Defense’s Office of the Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness recommends passage of the DREAM Act, in order to help the military “shape and maintain a mission-ready All Volunteer Force.” According to Louis Caldera, former Secretary of the Army, “The DREAM Act will materially expand the pool of individuals qualified, ready and willing to serve their country in uniform… I have no doubt many of these enlistees will be among the best soldiers in our Army.“

According to Margaret Stock, (Ret.) Lieutenant Colonel in the Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve, “Passage of the DREAM Act would directly benefit American national defense by enlarging the pool of highly qualified, US-educated ‘green card’ recruits for the US Armed Forces.”

In fact, the DREAM Act has traditionally been a bipartisan effort. Its lead sponsors in the Senate are Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), and the House bill was authored by Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), and Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL). In the 108th Congress, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 16-3 in favor of the DREAM Act with support from current Republican Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) (who helped draft the legislation), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and John Cornyn (R-TX). The DREAM Act was also included in comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2006, as an amendment from Senator Graham in the Judiciary Committee, and ultimately 23 Republican Senators voted for that bill.

But this is Washington, and these days the pursuit of power trumps common sense and good policy. Republicans in the Senate are under continuing and intense pressure to block any and all progress on any and all fronts. And so members who in the past have supported the DREAM Act are road-testing excuses. It’s about procedures. It’s about timing. It’s about the vehicle. It’s about politics. But what it really seems to be about is getting to “no” for cynical political reasons.

Okay, so let’s talk politics, and bluntly. Republicans, this may be your last chance with Latino voters for some time. If you can’t find a way to support this limited measure to help young immigrant children attend college and serve in our military, most of whom are Latino, you will be telling Latino immigrants to go to hell. You will make it nearly impossible for your 2012 Presidential nominee to win the 40 percent of Latino votes he or she will need to win back the White House. And you will accelerate your “success” at turning socially conservative Latinos into lifelong Democrats.

Wouldn’t it be better to make the dreams of 800,000 young people come true?

Everyone I know thinks so... except one person. Bob Lord is a friend in Phoenix ran for Congress in 2008 against John Shadegg, one of the most despicable Republicans in the entire House. In a very red district, Bob ran as a progressive, rejecting the DLC/Blue Dog Republican light approach. Although he ultimately fell short, Bob gave Shadegg quite a scare, pulling ahead in the polls three weeks prior to the election. He forced the Republicans to spend over three million dollars defending what was assumed to be a safe seat. Bob think's its a bad idea:

So far, I’m the only progressive I know who thinks the DREAM Act will prove to be an unmitigated disaster. No, I didn’t wake up this morning as a xenophobic Republican. My concern with the DREAM Act has nothing to do with whether the kids who would be eligible for legal status are deserving of it. Of course they are. In fact, they should be granted legal status right away, without having to jump through any hoops.

My concern actually goes back to my campaign. I was asked with surprising frequency my position on the DREAM Act. The first time, I’m embarrassed to say, I needed to be told what the DREAM Act was. My immediate reaction was that I supported the goal of the legislation, but I thought it needed to be broadened. To me, if college and the military were the only options available for immigrant kids to achieve legal status, it would meant that any kid who wasn’t college material would practically be forced into military service. So, I thought that there should be other options, like service in AmeriCorps, or on federal road building projects, or whatever else could be created. The idea of coercing hundreds of thousands of kids to serve in the military just didn’t sit right with me.

The current push for passage of the DREAM Act takes my concern to a new level. Watching Rep. Luis Gutierrez (for whom I have a lot of respect) on one of the MSNBC shows talking about how great this will be for our military, with over one million immigrants being incented to serve, was chilling. Our military adventurism is already way out of control. We waste precious resources on senseless wars, and young, mostly poor or lower middle class, men and women are sent to slaughter. The DREAM Act is virtually guaranteed to take this sick situation and make it unthinkably worse, for two reasons.

First, and foremost, there is a huge disconnect between those who decide to go to war and those who bear the burden of the sacrifice. Right now we have a system where a bunch of rich guys decide whether to send the poor and lower middle class kids to war. Those rich guys can send the troops to war with little worry that their kids, nieces, or nephews, or even the kids, nieces or nephews of any of their friends will share in the sacrifice. And the parents of the poor and middle class kids don’t make
campaign contributions, so their lives mean little to the decision makers. Now, consider what happens to this dynamic if the DREAM Act passes. Instead of rich guys deciding to send poor and middle class kids to war, we’ll have rich guys deciding to send immigrant kids to war. Immigrant kids whose parents largely are non-citizens. Their parents don’t vote. Their parents are too afraid to come out of the shadows to protest. Heck, in the eyes of elitists like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Arizona’s Jon Kyl, the highest and best use of these kids would be sacrificing their lives for the benefit of “real Americans.”

Second, our all volunteer military is limited in terms of the scope of military adventurism it can handle. Recall that at the height of the Iraq war, the military was stretched perilously thin. Prior to the recession, we had severe difficulty maintaining the desired troop levels and had to resort to unsustainable tactics (lowered recruiting standards, the back-door draft, excessive use of reserves) in order to avoid a collapse of the current system. So, a Vietnam type adventure would not be possible. Not without the DREAM Act of course. I’m concerned that those million immigrant recruits Rep. Gutierrez speaks of with such enthusiasm represent the cannon fodder the next George Bush will use when he invades Iran, or Pakistan, or the entire Muslim world for that matter. The DREAM Act may be the thing that makes another debacle on the scale of Vietnam possible. Just think how profitable that will be for the defense industry.

I came of political age during the Vietnam War. My first political work was stuffing envelopes for George McGovern. So I tend to look at things through that lens. In that regard, the resistance to the Vietnam War actually started with the African American community. Because most of the white kids were getting college deferments early on, the burden of sacrifice was falling on the black kids. But they and their families at least were citizens, so they could go to the streets and protest, which they happened to be doing already for other good reasons. How worse would Vietnam have been if the great majority of kids losing their lives were immigrants, whose family members are all non-citizens, possibly no longer living in the country, but in any case afraid to come out of the shadows? If those kids were being used as cannon fodder, there wouldn’t be anyone to stand up for them, and the rich, mostly white, guys making the decision to put them in the line of fire would have no compunction against doing so. There would be no political price for them to pay.

If you don’t think another Vietnam or larger scale war is possible, take a look at World Net Daily, which John Shadegg, Trent Franks, and other Republican wack jobs read on a regular basis. During my campaign, Shadegg was encouraging anyone who would listen to read anti-Muslim screeds like Knowing the Enemy and America Alone. We have Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin whipping their followers into a frenzy over plans to build a Muslim community center. All while the rumblings about stopping Iran from making a bomb continue and the economy sputters. Fact is, the combination of the DREAM Act, a right wing President and Congress, and continued economic malaise has huge potential to result in a major war fought on the backs of immigrants. And how unfortunate would that be if it were progressives that made it all possible by pushing for passage of the DREAM Act.

If you’re still reading, thanks for doing so. And if by chance I’m no longer still the only progressive opposed to the DREAM Act, please, please speak up. It’s not uncommon that well intended legislation has unintended consequences. I really believe that is the case here. But the consequences, while unintended, are totally foreseeable. It would be nice if we could avoid this disaster.

Bob introduced me to another friend in Arizona, Doug Kahn, who writes regularly-- albeit not regularly enough-- on this blog. Doug is helping to finance the defense of several DREAM Act supporters who were arrested in Washington. He doesn't agree with Bob's perspective... not at all. He sent me this last night:

There it is, right in headline Bob Lord wrote for his piece on the Dream Act. It’s what’s known as the Ignoratio Elenchi, the irrelevant conclusion, a logical fallacy commonly used in rational argumentation. Commonly, it’s a red herring, typically used to confuse, to lead away from what is really at stake. We’re not having a debate over “Good Progressive” legislation; we’re talking about whether we should support making it legal, finally, for hundreds of thousands of young people to plan out how they’re going to scrape up money to buy their next meal, and a roof over their heads.

I had lunch with Bob last week, and among other political talk I told him what I was up to, most of which had to do with the Blue America effort to elect progressives as well as our upcoming campaign to get rid of an Arizona Blue Dog, Gabrielle Giffords.

I’ve also been helping Dream Students in their effort to get the DREAM Act brought up in the U.S. Senate. They can’t legally hold a job, so when I was asked to help pay for an Arizona group to travel to Washington DC in July, I pitched in. You might have read that Erika Andiola was arrested after lobbying at Senator Reid’s office, then refusing to leave, and Dulce Matuz did the same at Senator McCain’s office. Dreamers have also staged a sit-in at McCain’s office in Arizona. And as of yesterday, several of them were still camped outside his office in Phoenix, protesting their inability to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces.

I’m having a difficult time understanding what Bob wrote. Not his opinions, but why now? He surely wasn’t thinking about it before we had lunch, and I’m not aware that he’s written anything opposing SB1070 or the other racist crapola going on here in Arizona this year. That really, really bugs me, because Bob isn’t like the other spineless Democrats in this state, the ones who prattle on about the border and drug lords and kidnappings and crime, trying to prove they’re as stupid as the Republicans who run the place.

Yes, I support the Dreamers. They don’t need help planning their next move, and they don’t need gratuitous advice from me or any other documented U.S. citizen. What they need is the right to apply for a job. The ones who have already been jailed, and are in the middle of the deportation process, they need their freedom. (Homeland Security refuses to tell us who they’ve got locked up, and who and how many young people they’re leaning on to sign voluntary deportation agreements.) The families of high school kids need assurance that at least the kids will be able to become citizens someday.

This entire campaign has been theirs from beginning to end. For a long time most immigration reform advocates fought them, saying they had to wait, that the Dream Act was popular so it had to be held back to “sweeten” Comprehensive Immigration Reform. (This should be considered as shameful abuse of innocent young people.) The Dream Act is on the agenda in the Senate for only one reason: these people risked their freedom, risked deportation by taking direct action. They networked, campaigned, and this summer, went and invaded the personal space of John McCain and Harry Reid and the U.S. Senate. This wasn’t on the Democratic agenda in Washington; in fact, until last Monday the House Hispanic Caucus was still refusing to endorse a stand-alone Dream Act.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had people tell me (a lot of this happened at Netroots Nation) that the Dream Students are naive, they don’t understand politics, the overall progressive agenda is the most important thing, and so forth and so on. Just keep that shit to yourselves, if you don’t mind. They’re not naive, they’re desperate. They’ve understood something about life’s priorities that I, at least, needed reminding of; when something is very important, you have to act, not just talk.

Anyway, I’m traveling with Erika and Dulce to Washington next week, because they go on trial October 1st. My assumption is that their charges weren’t dropped because they refused to sign a statement promising to stay away from Capitol Hill. I don’t know what their strategy is, and I don’t need to know. What they’ve been doing so far has worked, and they deserve my support, whatever they decide to do.

UPDATE: DREAM Act and Ending Of DADT Go Down To A Lockstep GOP Filibuster

Every single Republican voted to continue Miss McConnell's ironic filibuster of a Defense Budget that would have enacted the "bipartisan" DREAM Act and ended DADT. It's ironic because Miss McConnell himself was bounced out of the army after just 10 days when he was caught fondling a private's privates. Two putative Democrats, soon-to-be lobbyist Blanche Lincoln and Mark "2-digit-IQ" Pryor, both of Arkansas, voted with the Republicans.

Say It Ain’t So, Nate

-by Doug Kahn

Nate Silver wrote this on December 23rd (2009's Most Valuable Democrat Is...): “What makes a congressman valuable to his party? One fairly intuitive answer is that it’s someone who votes with his party on key pieces of legislation more often than a typical congressman from his district would.”

I have, therefore, compiled roll call votes on ten key pieces of legislation -- in my opinion, the ten most important pieces of legislation -- that came before the House of Representatives this year. What I then did was to run a logistic regression for each vote, comparing each representative's vote to his predicted vote based on his district's PVI. For example, a congressman in a district with a PVI of R+6 had a .37 likelihood (37% chance) of voting for the stimulus package. A congressman from such a district who voted for the stimulus package would be rated positively for his vote: specifically he'd receive a score of 1 less .37, or +.63. If the congressman voted against the stimulus package, on the other hand, he'd receive a score of -.37. I then added up each representative's score across all 10 votes.

 
Nate is describing a fantasy situation. The premise is wrong in so many ways that it would take a book length essay to explain why. This seems intuitive to him? Then Nate doesn’t understand what it means to be a Democrat, especially a progressive Democrat.
 
There’s no such thing as a typical congressperson, in the way there might be a typical baseball player. There’s no such thing as a typical district. A district’s PVI is not a real measure of how politically progressive a district is. ‘Key legislation’ itself is an arguable concept. And the Democratic Party exists for principled reasons, not to rack up ‘wins’ on pieces of legislation.
 
Nate is using an inside baseball analysis; how well does a particular player perform compared to the presumed performance of that player’s generic replacement. That’s useful in baseball, which is a business based upon judging and then hiring people who will help your business succeed, that is, help your team win, therefore fill seats, make your ‘brand’ more valuable.
 
Nate Silver is, arguably, the person most responsible for reforming the analysis of baseball prospects. You could say he helped make the business of baseball more scientific, using statistics and statistical analysis in innovative ways in order to better judge the relative ‘value’ of young baseball players.
 
His methods have changed the game of baseball. (That is, the way it’s played.) Winning the World Series is an accomplishment built upon discrete steps: to win games you have to score runs and prevent the scoring of runs. Baseball is a fantastically complex team sport; but what if you could properly judge each player’s individual contribution to a run scored or prevented, and then to a game won or lost? Then you’ve created a model for young players to emulate, and fundamentally changed the game. Nate did that.
 
Nate’s intelligence and success make him an influence on the opinions of many people. That could make his analytical tool worse than useless, it could make it anti-progressive. (Nate is not a progressive, of course, not by his own description.)
 
If Nate continues to publish this particular analysis, it may have a pernicious effect on Democratic politics. Nate’s ‘picks’ for most valuable Democrat will be quoting him in their efforts to raise money and get reelected, and that should make him be more circumspect in tossing off a mathematically compromised analysis like this. Look at it this way: if even I can figure out how bad it is, it must lack competence.
 
Nate’s analysis is limited to one year, but more important it’s limited to only ten votes. It’s limited to votes that Nate says are the most important ones. It’s limited to final votes (except in the case of Stupak), when often it’s a vote on the rules governing House debate that is the crucial factor, similar to a cloture vote in the Senate.
 
But besides that, there are many ways to manipulate the statistics involved here, and you can come up with any number of mutually contradictory results. This analysis has been done before, and done better, by people who are themselves progressives. It’s called ProgressivePunch, and they come up with rankings which contradict Nate.

This is pretty simple, really. Note that the method does not account directly for a congressman’s party. This is deliberate. It's not proper, for instance, to compare Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, the moderate congresswoman from South Dakota, to a typical Democrat, or even a typical Democrat in a conservative district, because if she were to retire, we can't take for granted that a Democrat would replace her. In fact, in South Dakota, she would probably be replaced by a Republican. Is Herseth-Sandlin -- even though she breaks with her party somewhat frequently -- more valuable to the Democrats than a typical congressman from South Dakota would be? That's what we're trying to get at.

Not really. What we’re trying to get at, we progressives that is, is how valuable to the cause of equality, social equity, humanity is a particular Congressperson. In baseball each win is as valuable as any other win. In politics, in governance, each issue is unique, not comparable to any other. Politics is not a game. Human lives are at stake.
 
When someone like Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin is in the pocket of corporations, and actively campaigns to drag the Democratic Party to the right, she deserves to be defeated. I think she has to go.

Nate’s most valuable Democrat is Bart Gordon of Tennessee. 12 of the 25 most valuable, according to Nate, are Blue Dogs, including Frank Kratovil (MD-1). I won’t bore you with an exposition of the essential uselessness of these two. ProgressivePunch scores Frank as 248th out of 258 Democratic House members.

Although 12 of the 25 most valuable Democrats are Blue Dogs, so are 8 of the 21 least valuable ones. It’s short-sighted to lump the Blue Dogs together; they disagree on as much as they agree, and although some of them are among the most counterproductive Democrats, others are among the most worthwhile.

So Nate would say that I’m short-sighted because I ‘lump the Blue Dogs together.’ I don’t lump the Blue Dogs together, Nate, they do that themselves. Go look at their website. They join a caucus that espouses regressive views on social issues, and posit ‘fiscal discipline’ (which is so overbroad and undefined it means exactly nothing) as an ethical and moral compass, while supporting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
 
What we really need to do is to deliberately defeat some Blue Dogs in November. So long as Democrats retain a majority in the House, this makes the caucus more progressive, and more important, it helps get more progressive legislation out of committee. The Blue Dogs think they control the Democratic agenda in the House. They need to be taught a lesson, one that all their members will think about when real Democrats propose legislation.
 
You Could Look It Up
 
A crucial point: Nate is scoring people who have ‘fixed the game’. The Blue Dog Caucus developed and publicized its own strategy on how to come up with a Health Care bill, and it included voting in a bloc in Henry Waxman’s committee to prevent the inclusion of a strong public option. They won, and the bill that came out was a shadow of what it could have and should have been. So what if they then voted ‘aye’.
 
Let’s strip down Nate’s analysis to its simplest iteration, one crucial vote and one Senator. The most important vote in the Senate last year was on Health Care. Nebraska, PVI -14, is the most Republican state with a Democratic Senator. Ergo: Ben Nelson is the most valuable Democrat in the Senate.
 
Nate: He’s not.
 
In the 2006 book called Baseball: Between the Numbers, Nate wrote a chapter that mathematically analyzed this question: was Babe Ruth the most valuable baseball player ever? It’s a mind-numbing statistical analysis. Utilizing math similar to his analysis here, Nate proved that the most valuable baseball player of all time was Barry Bonds. The numbers lie.

How Do I Get Myself Into These Things?

Note: Doug Kahn is an occasional contributor to DWT and he's working on the Blue America Bad Dogs initiative (please take a look on that link). He ran for Congress as the Democratic candidate against one of the House's most entrenched far right extremists, Carlos Moorhead, back in the early 90s. He's an indefatigable activist who's putting together an interesting plan to help get rid of some Blue Dogs and he is looking for some input from readers.

-by Doug Kahn

I’m not going all cosmic on you; I don’t mean Why Are We Here? This is how it went.
 
I made a couple of special trips to Washington, the first one in 2006. From Union Station it’s a short walk down to DCCC headquarters, several blocks south of the Longworth House Office Building. My thinking was it’d be a good idea to have a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, Henry Waxman as the Chair of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Barney Frank as Chair of Financial Services. I sat in a conference room and talked about Democratic challengers in swing districts, but not the top tier DCCC targets. I wanted the second tier, really long-shot candidates, people who’d have trouble raising dough. In a Democratic year, some of them would win, as long as they had money to get in touch with voters. I contributed the absolute personal maximum permitted by law. That was the election that returned the House to a Democratic majority.
 
I ended up at the January 2007 dinner honoring the new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in a big-top on Embassy Row. I’m trying to remember who I sat with. Tony Podesta to my right. On my left, General Wesley Clark and his wife. Why am I blanking out on the rest of the table? Anyway, Pelosi’s speech was good. I missed most of incoming DCCC Chair Van Hollen’s, because I was still a smoking fiend then, and was taking a long break out on the grass. An excellent singer named Anthony Benedetto entertained. Said hi to Rahm, who to me looked ticked off about something, but maybe that’s just his usual look. (The only time I’ve seen him in person. When he’s being photographed or filmed he poses as Robert Kennedy.) Candidate Obama worked the room, shook everyone’s hand, told me to call him Barack. He seemed to mean it.
 
I had the same DCCC conference in 2008. We elected even more Democrats, lost some tough progressive races (like Bob Lord's, John Laesch's and Darcy Burner's). Then, something happened to progressive change on the way to the Oval Office. The dog ate my agenda.
 
Dogs, plural. Blue Dogs. I helped elect some problem Democrats to the House of Representatives. You can look up the specifics at fec.gov or opensecrets.org, or just take my word for it. $60,000 directly to the DCCC. $80,000+ to Jason Altmire, Judith Baker, Melissa Bean, Charles Brown, Darcy Burner, Joe Courtney, Steve Driehaus, Jay Fawcett, Paul Hodes, Ann Kirkpatrick, Christine Jennings, Ron Klein, Alice Kryzan, Bob Lord, Tim Mahoney, Jerry McNerney, Harry Mitchell, Chris Murphy, Lois Murphy, Patrick Murphy, Angie Paccione, Adam Schiff, Dan Seals, Joe Sestak, Heath Shuler, Ellen Simon, Zach Space, Dina Titus, Tim Walz.
 
Some of them made it, some didn’t. There are good people in there, and some of the really bad ones, like Tim Mahoney, are already gone. It looks like Dan Seals, one of the better ones who lost, might make it this November. But honestly, one extra good guy won’t be enough.
 
I’m going to put up $100,000 to help clean up the DCCC mess.
 
10 days before Howie first made space for me on Down With Tyranny, I sent the following email to McJoan on DailyKos:

Philadelphia, August 4 2009
 
Can you help put me together with people who think it might be a good idea to defeat a few current Blue Dogs, even if it means turning the seats back to the Republicans? I've been thinking it's a good idea, and if it really isn't, then maybe you can help convince me not to do it. I believe a relatively small independent expenditure [general, not primary] in certain Blue Dogs' House races could deny them reelection. 
 
I'm a substantial contributor to House campaigns and the DCCC, and as a result helped elect some of the people who are opposing what I consider to be absolutely essential progressive legislation. That is, the things that prompted me to contribute over $100,000 (not sure of the exact amount) over the past 3 years. I'm not happy about having helped elect people like Harry Mitchell, but I lacked the foresight to understand where that might lead.
 
I've already turned down requests for my usual maximum contribution to the DCCC, and told leadership the reason: they'll use it to defend Blue Dog members, and try to elect new ones. I've been talking to other substantial contributors (individuals) who agree with me on this.
 
I've been looking around the Internet for commentators who are tuned into to what I'm talking about here; you seem to be one of them. [I look at DailyKos every day, but until recently didn't pay any notice to the individual authors.] Of course I'll only support progressive candidates in House primaries. I assume most will be uphill battles, which is okay with me. I almost always give legal maximum contributions, and I will certainly try to raise money from other Democrats with money. I assume you folks will be doing a good job of keeping me informed about who I can support in various House races.
 
I plan to make it very clear to the House members who run the DCCC that their strategy needs to change, or I'll be spending the maximum against their candidates, instead of for them. I believe the election of Obama has fundamentally changed the political landscape, and key people like Patrick Murphy haven't realized that yet. I myself have changed, I guess because I see the possibility of getting back to work on action items that became politically impractical about 35 years ago. My intensity has come back. I'm not very good at explaining myself; I hope you get the picture.
 
My thinking is that the Blue Dog group has gotten big enough that it has attracted 10 or 20 'hangers-on', members who just use it as cover. I'm talking about people who have come to believe that their own reelection is much more important than passing the progressive parts of the Democratic agenda [which they may agree with, in contrast to other Blue Dogs]. The legislative behavior of these people ends up being 'controlled' by independents and moderate Republicans, instead of by the Democratic base vote. 
 
I've decided that deliberately defeating one or two Blue Dogs by driving progressive voters away from voting for them in a general election would have the effect of causing the rest of the Blue Dogs to pay attention to the Democratic base. It makes sense to me that this sub-group of relatively unprincipled Blue Dogs, since they are all about getting reelected, can only be moved by credible threats to their reelection. I believe the threat is only credible if it can be demonstrated. Of course this would have to be the overt and public purpose of the independent expenditure, so it would be certain to anger a lot of Democrats, not least because it would reduce the Democratic majority in the House. However, it would tend to help the progressive agenda in the Democratic caucus.
 
I would ask that you not publicize this, but please pass my thinking along to people who are interested in talking to me about getting it done. I guess if you need confirmation that I'm a serious person, and a progressive, you can get in touch with Bob Lord [ran against John Shadegg]. I live in Florida but I'm in Arizona half the time.

I never heard back. I’m not saying I should have expected to. I could see that most progressives online were spending all their time and influence leaning on Senators and Representatives, trying to get the best Health Care legislation possible. They might have been thinking about ditching a few Blue Dogs, but it’s easy to lose influence in DC by being negative. The people there are used to the rest of us Democrats being nice to them, and disapproval gives them the collywobbles. You see what the displays of disapproval from the wingnuts accomplished; it really moved the lawmakers.
 
Of course, that’s why I kept pushing people to get behind a mass demonstration in DC last fall, basically with zero takers. I promise you that’s going to happen before the elections this November. At this point, you really have to admit that Congress needs us leaning on them. We have to get in their space. But that’s another day, another post.
 
You’ve noticed that Howie, Digby and John Amato are all about political reality. Political reality is a messy, scary concept for a lot of political people; they need it to be dressed up respectably, they need to pretend it has manners and rules. Forget about it. Politics exists because we all want to be in charge of making decisions, and sometimes preventing decisions. However you practice it the result is a who, not a what. Who is in charge; who do you put in charge. Nobody who’s really involved in this thing defers voluntarily to the other guy. You don’t give the other side their turn, they have to take it.
 
Progressives have to take the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives, take it from the Blue Dogs, who own it right now. Progressives have to take control of the Democratic caucus in each committee, so that legislation that really helps people advances to the floor of the House. It would be really great to elect a lot more progressives, but we already have enough progressives in the House to get the job done.
 
The problem is the DCCC, Chris Van Hollen, Patrick Murphy, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rahm Emanuel. They help Blue Dogs get elected, defend them once they’re in office, and with the assistance of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, give these people the best committee assignments. Nobody ever gets thrown off a committee, so there’s only one solution. We have to throw a couple of Dogs out of the House, and scare the rest of them.
 
That’s the theory, here’s the reality. I spend money on politics. I’m going to personally spend $100,000 before election day 2010 in the districts of 2 Blue Dogs, telling Democratic voters just how badly they’re being represented. That’s a promise.
 
Just who these Lucky Dogs are going to be isn’t clear yet, but it won’t be a secret. We just have to wait and see who’s vulnerable after Labor Day. Some of the Blue Dogs are going to lose, and lose badly; polling will tell us who they are. There isn’t any point in piling on in these races, and making someone lose worse. We’ll be picking districts that are clearly in play, spending the money where we’ll be going up against the DCCC. Maybe Frank Kratovil (MD-1).
 
And it’s Blue Dogs only. Any Dog who wants to avoid the attention has options: publicly resign the Blue Dog Caucus by Labor Day, become a Republican, retire from the House, or be losing badly in September.
 
Negative is cheaper than positive, but even so, $100,000 may not be enough. I’ll be asking for your help. We’ll be doing something no one else wants to do, but it just has to get done.

Casual Lunch, Bring Guests

-by Douglas Kahn

 I'm going to plan lunch, and I want you to come by. I'll let you know, but my thought is November 11th on the National Mall in Washington. That would make it one year exactly since everything changed. I'm going to explain why we need to get together, so please keep reading. [Forgive me for going on and on; I'm trying to learn how to make it snappy.] 

If someone rings your doorbell, and you knew it's a candidate for Congress, do you want to open the door? I always came away from a day of precinct walking thinking that most of the people I talked to were annoyed at first. Early on I made a point of trying to read faces, and I saw mild aggravation. But people don't keep that up.
 
Imagine yourself at home, doing your own thing: 

1. Your day never has more than 24 hours in it. You never think "I have more than enough time for my own interests, my family, and my friends, so I need to give my time to people I don't know."

2. Your doorbell rings; someone is demanding your time, and you're annoyed.  

3. You recognize your annoyed reaction as an immediate feeling, not a reasoned analysis. You aren't particularly proud of it, but perceive it would be incredibly difficult to become the person who is happy to get unsolicited visitors.  

4. Opening the door, you recognize I'm a human being, very much like you. [That's what people think, or they suspend their skepticism, anyway.]  

5. I say "Hi. My name is Doug Kahn, and I'm running for Congress. I'd like to find out what you think about some important issues, if you have the time. If you don't, can I give you this brochure that explains what I'm trying to do?"  

6. You, like most people, find that you actually do have the time to talk for a while, and sometimes for a long, long while.
 
7. We shake hands and I leave. You're not thinking of any specific reason for it, but you're glad you got up and came to the door. You know it's really unlikely, but it's possible that you, I, everyone may end up benefitting from the two of us conversing. You've done your bit.
 
8. Later you think, "He has to know it's annoying to get solicitors. He was wrong on certain issues, but at least he showed up."
 
I showed up. You don't know me, but you have a grudging respect. The word 'grudging' is appropriate. Your respect is valuable and has to be earned; a five minute visit from a candidate shouldn't do it. Almost in spite of yourself, you end up with a positive attitude about my effort, you'd like to help out, probably just by voting. If the other guy shows up, you might rethink things. But no matter how many tv spots or political mailers oppose me, they won't reduce the weight of the personal visit. 

I visited a lot of people, but only a tiny percentage of the 95,000 voters I needed to win the House seat. [84,000 was as many votes as I ever got.] Figuring 5 minutes per visit, I'd need 475,000 minutes, or 990 8-hour days, almost 3 solid years, to reach that many people personally. And I'd have to convince every single person to go to the polls, and to vote my way. Precinct walking is a statement of conviction, and it motivates a lot of people to show up too, to volunteer, make phone calls, distribute literature. 

Barack Obama didn't ring my doorbell, or yours either. But the '50 State Strategy' wasn't just a strategy, it was also a statement. It said that no matter what state I lived in, he wanted to ring my doorbell and talk to me, and although he didn't have the time for that, just to show me he meant business he was going to spend millions of dollars on media and organizing in my state, even if he had virtually no chance of winning the electoral votes.
 
In Florida, a must-win state where I live now, we saw a full-blown Obama campaign: offices and paid staffers and so many tv ads that I had them memorized. The 50 state strategy meant Obama thought that our neighbors, Alabamians, were important people too, and I liked that. I also spend time in Arizona. Obama wasn't going to win McCain's state, but he thought we were worth the effort anyway, and I liked that too. Obama showed up. 

I went out and voted. But I've gotten too relaxed since then. During the 2008 campaign I agreed we'd have to figure out how to get health care for everyone in this country. Is there anyone out there who isn't paying attention to Obama and Congress disputing this thing? I find myself thinking, "we elected these people to do the job, so what's the deal, why aren't they doing it?" I (and tens of thousands of other people) have made phone calls and written emails and contributed to progressive politicians (and against the Blue Dog Democrats gumming up the works). Now I've started to examine myself a bit—it wasn't Yes You (Obama) Can or Yes They (Congress) Can. I signed on to Yes We Can.

Well, We have a problem. Do you (like me) resent the fact that the anti-reform screamers get so much attention? The thing is, they show up. And no matter how right we are, no matter how convincing our arguments are, no matter how many phone calls we make or how much mouse-click money we contribute to progressives, it can't erase this fact: they – show – up.  

Sure, if you look at the numbers, there's only a few of them and a lot of us. But many members of Congress perceive that the wingnuts, corporate flunkies and the people they've manipulated with lies exist in real space, and we exist in virtual space. Congress exists in Washington, and I say we have to show up.
 
It wasn't just Barack Obama who promised 45 million people that he could get them affordable health care. Or who promised that he could discipline the bean counters at United Health Care (and the other insurance monsters). We did. Yes, we can do it, was what we said.
 
We said it because we believe it's our responsibility to watch out for tens of millions of people, many tens of millions, who don't have the juice to move the levers of power in this country. I think we said we would do whatever it takes to for chrissakes at least get them and their kids adequate health care. 

And we are going to do that, aren't we?