Democratic (Party) Direction

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

here is another thing that guy says

What I think will replace discourse, at least, is a greater recognition of the limits of human agency. People will lose faith in their ability, as individuals, to manipulate political outcomes at a significant scale. The psychosocial impulse to do so will be generally understood as a form of anxiety, and people will cope with it by embracing various forms of quietism. Liberals will be remembered for wildly overestimating their ability to influence others and change the course of history, and variously judged as controlling egomaniacs, laudably ambitious, or simply unenlightened.

it's too bad we don't listen to guys like him and Freddie more often

holy shit this is the literal dumbest thing i have ever read. https://t.co/weLLopmg73 pic.twitter.com/CGSiudZrtI

— sean. (@SeanMcElwee) July 5, 2017

holy shit I was sure that "have you seen the other guy?" thing had to be a hoax?!

DCCC: great at reasons and sign-making

that is a swamp that needs very much drainage, yes

Make the Democrats Great Again

I want to read more about Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns. Based on the agenda-blog piece and David Remnick's Obama biography it feels like they were an early attempt to reorient a fracturing Dem coalition. But I don't know any more about them than that.

rainbow coalition baby

Also Shirley Chisholm's campaigns

"The Republican Party appears to exist for the sole purpose of acquiring power in order to shower rewards on those who support the party, especially those who support it financially."

~ but ~

"What ultimately won the day for the right was its long-term focus. The left seems to me to be totally focused on the short-term — stopping whatever the Republicans are doing today. They’ll worry about building institutions and developing a positive agenda when the crisis is past. But tomorrow is another crisis and no Republican idea ever stays dead no matter how badly it was defeated; it will arise again like a phoenix the next time an opportunity presents itself. This puts Democrats permanently on defense. But as my old boss Jack Kemp, a former pro football player, always told me, 'You don’t win games on defense.'

"Another strength of the right that the left could learn is its self-confidence and aggressiveness. Turn on cable news at any hour and you will hear a right-winger expounding with bravado on some subject they have no clue about. If there is a liberal on for 'balance,' he or she will waste all their air time futilely trying to explain why what their opponent said was complete nonsense. As a consequence, progressives never get their points across and appear feckless. I often joke that a Democrat is someone who won’t take their own side in a debate."

http://billmoyers.com/story/im-not-democrat/

I fundamentally don't get anybody who is looking at what the right has turned into and goes 'let's do that'. They got trumped and now they can't even pass central parts of their agenda. And that's without getting into the lies and the racism and the misogyny and the moral bankruptcy.

I want the moral bankruptcy without the racism and misogyny

But what do you think keeps those things out?

Btw, as much as I have problems with Bernie Sanders, what Bill Moyers is asking for is someone like Bernie Sanders, and he is already there. So... why don't he join and begin the intellectual groundwork to enact single payer?

Help us, Third Eye Blind, you're our only hope.

Wait, it's not Bill Moyers who wrote that, right? Åh fugl it.

it's not bill moyers -- it's bruce bartlett, rightwing apostate ~

"As much as I hate what the conservative movement has become, it rose to power through some strategies that are easily duplicable by progressives. One is putting as much effort into marketing ideas as originating them. Another is coordinating efforts among disparate groups on the right — you support my cause and in return I’ll support yours. And all these efforts are continuously repeated throughout the right-wing echo chamber.

"It took decades for conservatives to set up the institutional infrastructure that supports and nourishes the GOP today. And fundraising was a big part of it. One thing conservatives learned is to share donors with each other through groups such as the Council for National Policy. I don’t know of any similar group on the left.

"Progressives always complain about a lack of funds, but clearly there is plenty of money available. Hillary Clinton did not lose because she had less money than Trump; she had considerably more. The congressional race Georgia’s 6th District attracted tens of millions of dollars for the Democratic candidate. He lost, but not because he was underfunded."

hooooo boy

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/opinion/center-democrats-identity-politics.html

these clueless motherfuckers are really going to blow it in 2020 again aren't they

these days Mark Penn doesn't even get cable news slots.