Democratic (Party) Direction

I live in the suburbs. Please be nice to me. :-)

How's the racism out there

Everyone here realizes all kinds of people live in the suburbs.

In my outer ring NYC suburb it's just me and 750,000 clones of me

All kinds of people are evangelicals too, but 80% voted for Trump. So even though 16% voted for Clinton, people just say evangelicals went for Trump. It's how people talk about voting blocs, in generalizations.

That sounds like literal hell, Treesh.

Nah it's chill

nobody like me lives in the suburbs

because I don't have a driver's license

Commie.

can we now divest ourselves from the notion that blind obedience to party above all else is exclusively a feature of the right?

yeah, probably not, you're right

some things worth remembering

I’m going to give you millstones around the Democratic Party neck that are milestones.

The first big one was in 1979. Tony Coelho, who was a congressman from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money, corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money. Why leave it up to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area?

And they did. And I could see the difference almost immediately. First of all, they lost the election to Reagan. And then they started getting weaker in the Congress. At that time, 1980, some of our big allies were defeated in the so-called Reagan landslide against Carter, we lost Senator [Gaylord] Nelson, Senator [Warren] Magnuson, Senator [Frank] Church. We had more trouble getting congressional hearings investigating corporate malfeasance by the Democrat [congressional committee] chairs. When the Democrats regained the White House [in 1992] you could see the difference in appointments to regulatory agencies, the difficulty in getting them to upgrade health and safety regulations.

The second millstone is that they didn’t know how to deal with Reagan. And the Republicans took note. That means a soft tone, smiling … You can say terrible things and do terrible things as long as you have [that] type of presentation....

Increasingly they began to judge their challenge to Republicans by how much money they raised. You talk to [Marcy] Kaptur from Cleveland, she says, we go into the Democratic caucus in the House, we go in talking money, we stay talking money, and we go out with our quotas for money. …

As a result they took the economic issues off the table that used to win again and again in the thirties and forties for the Democrats. The labor issues, the living wage issues, the health insurance issue, pension issues. And that of course was a huge bonanza for the Republican Party because the Republican Party could not contend on economic issues. They contended on racial issues, on bigotry issues, and that’s how they began to take control of the solid Democratic South after the civil rights laws were passed.

Raising money from Wall Street, from the drug companies, from health insurance companies, the energy companies, kept [Democrats] from their main contrasting advantage over the Republicans, which is, in FDR’s parlance, “The Democratic Party is the party of working families, Republicans are the party of the rich.” That flipped it completely and left the Democrats extremely vulnerable.

As a result they drew back geographically, to the east coast, west coast and so on.

And that created another millstone: You don’t run a 50-state [presidential] campaign. If you don’t run a 50-state campaign, number one you’re strengthening the opposing party in those states you’ve abandoned, so they can take those states for granted and concentrate on the states that are in the grey area. That was flub number one.

Flub number two is what Ben Barnes, the politically-savvy guy in Texas, told me. He said, when you don’t contest the presidential race in Texas, it rots the whole party down … all the way to mayors and city council. So it replicates this decadence and powerlessness for future years.

When they abandoned the red states, they abandoned five states in the Rocky Mountain area, and started out with a handicap of nine or ten senators....

[Another] millstone is they could never contrast themselves with the Republicans on military foreign policy – because they were like them. They never question the military budget, they never question the militarized foreign policy, like Hillary the hawk on Libya, who scared the generals and ran over [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates who opposed her going to the White House to [push for] toppling the regime, metastasizing violence in seven or eight African countries to this day.

So they knocked out foreign and military policy, because they were getting money from Lockheed and Boeing and General Dynamics and Raytheon and so on. Even Elizabeth Warren when she had a chance started talking about maintaining those contracts with Raytheon. Here’s the left wing of the party talking about Raytheon, which is the biggest corporate welfare boondoggle east of the Pecos.

[Another] millstone is: Nobody gets fired. They have defeat after defeat, and they can’t replace their defeated compadres with new, vigorous, energetic people. Labor unions, the same thing. They [stay in positions] into their eighties no matter how screwed up the union is. You don’t get fired no matter how big the loss is, unlike in the business community, where you get fired....

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/25/ralph-nader-the-democrats-are-unable-to-defend-the-u-s-from-the-most-vicious-republican-party-in-history/

I'm sure everyone will discuss Nader and his positions v reasonably here

that's why i left his name out of it

seems otm to me tbph

in case it wasn't clear enough that dem platform language on health care is bullshit

Dems control every major office in America's largest state -- and used their power to do this. These are indisputable facts. https://t.co/VcZLqBnDGH

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 27, 2017

400 billion dollars is twice the California state budget, and there was no funding included in the bill. 'Details', I know.

Also, since for once I can use this line, as someone who used to live in California, shut up about something you clearly can't know anything about, you dirty foreigner!!!

(You are a foreigner, right Simon? Or am I confusing you with someone else?)

However, the report estimated that the other $200 billion could be funded by moving state payroll taxes up to 15 percent , a levy the report said “would be offset to a large degree by reduced spending on health care coverage by employers and employees.”

plus no one dies or goes bankrupt from the costs of care. sounds fine to me.

poor phrasing there but you get the point.

But significantly that tax increase wasn't then included in the bill, because it would take two thirds of the senate to vote for it, which would mean all 27 Dem senators, and a tax hike of that magnitude wasn't likely to pass.

hey if he doesn't tank a revised bill I'd be happy to be wrong

Rendon probably shelved the bill because the senate wasn't going to pass it anyway, and he feared it was more about setting the assembly members up for a vote that could then be used against them during primary season. He then took the heat. And #RecallRendon started trending on twitter.

I think single payer as an ideal is a non-brainer, btw, but it comes with trade-offs, tradeoffs that are absolutely worth it to make. So... Just include all the tradeoffs in the bill from the start, and work to get it passed 🤷 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I unfortunately fear that there won't be a revised bill, because the senate doesn't want it.

Reagan won in 1980 because Democrats took corporate PAC money in 1979?

Not exactly how I remember it but ok

yeah that's exactly what RN said

strawmanning forevah

The first big one was in 1979. Tony Coelho, who was a congressman from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money, corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money. Why leave it up to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area?

And they did. And I could see the difference almost immediately. First of all, they lost the election to Reagan.

i don't see how it's possible to interpret that in any way other than "Reagan won in 1980 because Democrats took corporate PAC money in 1979"

"The second millstone is that they didn’t know how to deal with Reagan..."

I think you can make a better argument that the Democrats were so humiliated after Carter and Mondale that the idea of taking corporate money seemed perfectly fine - any port in a storm! - and when Clinton won in 1992 it was seen as a justification of that change in approach, and the DCCC, DLC (rip), DNC etc haven't been the same ever since.

Now there might be a chance to pivot away from courting banks and tech firms for everything but first we'd need a convincing victory by an unorthodox campaign

Come on, mark zuckerberg, you're our only hope

I'd rather they take money from Raytheon

I can't believe I just posted that

I'd prefer nuclear holocaust and letting the cockroaches take over to President Zuck (D - CA).

How about Vs trump

I dug this:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/lectureporn-the-vulgar-art-of-liberal-narcissism.html

...Now, let’s go back to that part about thinking reasonableness makes ready the path to power. The lethality of lectureporn to political thought and participation is its misapprehension of what political power actually is. Regardless of whatever we think or feel about the GOP’s platform and its coterie of alleged rapists, bigots, and unfuckable sneers, they actually get what it means to gain, maintain, and wield power. In 2011, when the Republicans shutdown the government, everyone wondered why Obama couldn’t have his “LBJ moment” where he grabbed Boehner by the lapels and said, “And by the way, you son of a bitch…” and brought him around with sheer rhetorical force.

But even LBJ didn’t have an “LBJ moment,” as his biographer, Robert A. Caro reminds us. Johnson’s real power on Capitol Hill came from his access to a money pool that could make or break political careers. These grab-them-by-the-lapels moments known as The Johnson Treatment were, as Caro writes, “only tassels on the bludgeon of power.” Obama had no such reservoir of financial power. While he tried to grand bargain and concede his way to victory, the Republicans banded together to deadlock Obama’s regime through dirty tricks, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and intercine parliamentary rules. That’s political power—even if it’s corrupt political power.

follow the money as Hal Holbrook/William Goldman said

This gives me a little hope: https://www.thenation.com/article/a-progressive-electoral-wave-is-sweeping-the-country/

so did penney scour caro for quotes that reinforced his predetermined prejudices, or did he actually read him?

this is a great essay on the WWC shift away from progressive dems - starting way before Coelho:

https://agenda-blog.com/2017/07/03/primary-colors-on-democratic-presidential-politics-neoliberalism-and-the-white-working-class/

just one snippet I thought was telling - but do go read the whole thing:

But by this point, the Democratic Party’s white working class voters had proven more and more willing to defect to right-leaning candidates even with highly-viable progressive alternatives available to them. It’s not clear, given George Wallace’s surprising success in the demographic in 1968 and 1972 and Carter’s own victory in 1976, that another less damaged progressive candidate would have performed better. Part of the problem was that the influence of labor unions on their increasingly individualistic members continued to wane.

“We’re middle-class people now, not working–class people the way we used to be,” a Peoria union leader told Cokie and Steven Roberts of the New York Times ahead of Illinois’ primaries. “Our members pay more than their share of the tax burden. When someone says the Federal Government should throw money at problems, we realize most of that money is coming out of our pockets.’”

LGM linked to it today, and, yeah, it's a terrific read.

I wonder what % of Americans currently consider themselves to be "middle-class"

99 percent.

accurate

"middle class" is a sign for "im a normal person who does normal things"

yep

"I eat at Arby's on Saturday afternoons."

"i watch football on a tv that i own in my living quarters and have access to some of the spoils of capitalism due to earning a wage therefore i'm not poor"

surprised this hasn't been posted in here yet

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DD_zDQQXkAERxnx.jpg

Related:

http://www.carlbeijer.com/2017/07/why-is-cap-pushing-center-right.html

related to what