I have been saying for well over a decade that the D party is absolutely tone-deaf to the average American. My experience as a Democrat has been that of disappointment and cynicism.
Perhaps average people who are still clinging to the memory of the D party that we were raised with can now be heard? I know as an average person who completely fits the HRC demographic that I had no pull to vote for the Dem nominee other than an anti-T vote. That is not good enough. It is not about winning. It is about winning and being effective. It is about winning and doing the right thing not the expedient, corporate ass-licking that has become the trademark of both parties. T won because he is not kissing butt. He grabs it (yes, he disgusts me).
So, read this article by Robert Reich because maybe some name dropping will get somebody’s attention. http://www.newsweek.com/robert-reich-democratic-party-needs-clean-house-519704
We need a people’s party—a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican Party, which is about to take over all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a New Democratic Party that will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.
Clearly, the arrogant, star struck, pay to play (Ambassadorships) DNC leadership (Brazile, Wasserman-Schultz = gak), do not hear a God damn thing.
I find myself shrinking away from the term “clean house.” I’m in more of a mood to put a hug around everybody.
But essentially Reich is correct. What the party needs, top to bottom, is a move away from big money. It wasn’t that long ago — OK maybe it was, I’m a bit in denial about my age — that $25 would get you into a Congressional fundraiser. Now you’d be lucky to get into a State Senate fundraiser for less than a hundred.
Campaigns cost more and take longer. At every setback, such as Citizens United, we just adapt under the slogan “No unilateral disarmament, we’ll have anonymous SuperPACs too.”
And what happens? We lose anyway. I have yet to verify this, but I’ve been told that the Vermont legislature is now Republican. Vermont!
They raise money, but they also recruit candidates, even some pretty fringe-y people. We need to recruit more local candidates, and help them run. And that means resisting money at higher levels. I have mixed feelings about public financing, but it would help, and it might be time to talk about that.
The ends ARE the means. When we depend on big money, we aren’t comforting the afflicted because we’re wary of afflicting the comfortable.
The new Vermont governor is a moderate anti-Trump Republican but the legislature is still very much Dem-controlled. They actually expanded their margin a bit in the Senate (23 of 30) and maintained in the House (around 60% when including the VT Progressive party members). VT is not that dissimilar to MA in recent decades. The state is very blue but they like Republican governors, especially after a few terms of a Democratic governor. The new Lt. Gov., which is a separate position in VT, is also not really a Dem although he ran as a Dem. Instead he’s a member of VT Progressive Party. He’s awesome too, btw. David Zuckerman, look him up. Working farmer. Given the age of the two VT senators, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start hearing a lot more about him in a few years.
n/t
…there are still plenty of low-dollar and free meet and greets at just about every level, and often the donations listed are “suggested”.
Some Democrats still do not get it. They turn a blind eye to the big money donors, the speaking fees, and the special treatment that wealthy Democrats receive in our own party functions. Their explanation is that the money HAS to come from somewhere.
They are correct, to a point. The weaker the candidate, the more money is needed to draw attention to that candidate. So their solution seems to be, continue with the weak candidates we have and raise more money. To quote a favorite line in “Fight Club”, so how’s that working out for you, being clever?
If we depend on big money, then we ARE big money and we have no right in denigrating those who vote against us as bigots, misogynists, and racists, when they are only voting against big money.
If you practice, promote, or knowingly ignore bigotry, misogyny, and racism, then you ARE bigoted, misogynist, and racist — whatever your attitude towards big money.
Telling us that those who threaten black students are “only voting against big money” is flagrantly racist.
Let’s stipulate, as you apparently assert, that “big money” is BAAAAD. So bad that we must reject it, and spend months attacking those who object. Let’s also stipulate that we can somehow find strong candidates — candidates, apparently, strong enough that they don’t need money at all.
Donald Trump was just elected and takes office on January 20, 2017. The GOP controls both the Senate and the House. Citizens United is the law of the land.
I think it is safe to assume that the GOP will have big money behind it for the foreseeable future. The Supreme Court is likely to be more, not less, conservative. The odds of overturning Citizens United got vanishingly small on November 8, 2016.
One thing we agree on is that wealth concentration is already at historic levels. On January 20, 2017, it will almost certainly accelerate. The 99% will almost certainly have even less money during the 2018 mid-term campaign than it had during this campaign.
Has it occurred to you that some of why “long-tail” small donors were not as significant in the 2016 campaign as they were in the 2008 campaign is because they had less money? The one percent is sucking the rest of us dry.
Now that you’ve rejected big money, where do you propose to get whatever small money the stipulated strong candidates will need? How do those strong candidates get their message out when they can’t afford ad buys, mailings, or local campaign offices?
And creating a PAC for downballot races with a self imposed limit of $1,200 per individual is another way to use the existing campaign structure to raise funds while limiting the influence of big money donors. Trump had next to know money and defeated the most well funded campaign of all time. You’d be hard pressed to argue big money was anything other than a liability for our last nominee. All the time wasted on the Vineyard and Hamptons in August that could’ve been spent campaigning in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
I think there are lessons to learn from Trump’s reliance on free media and his use of funds strategically to get more bang for the buck. This is something a compelling presidential candidate could do, and something downballot candidates could learn from. You gotta imagine that many celebrities and outsider business leaders on our side of the fence got to be thinking-if that moron can do it, why not me?
…if the media are willing to give it, which they were in spades for Trump. Part of the reason they did is they were hoping and assuming he would say some things that most self-respecting human being, let alone presidential candidate, would never say. I certainly hope the lesson we take is not let’s see how outrageous we can be so we can get air time.
I don’t see how citing the strategy of either Mr. Sanders or Ms. Clinton advances the game, they both lost.
I remind us that the right-wing spent several hundreds of millions of dollars ( at least!) ensuring the hostility toward Ms. Clinton that ultimately defeated her. Fox News, the overwhelming single provider of self-identified GOP voters, was itself born in the immediate aftermath of Bill Clinton’s crushing 1996 defeat of Robert Dole and the GOP.
Since progressives are correctly reluctant to lie, distort, and pander, it is very difficult for us to compete against the likes of sexual predator Roger Ailes. We should not forget that Mr. Ailes was instrumental in launching Rush Limbaugh and was close to right-wing extremists like Joseph Coors.
I agree that there are lessons to learn from Donald Trump’s use of the media and social networks. I’m not sure that any of them are positive.
There might be one or two — Mr. Ailes offered this sage media advice that in my view perfectly describes today’s media environment (p 935, bottom):
I suggest that in Donald Trump’s post-Citizens United America, rejecting big-money donors is choosing to bring a pop-gun to nuclear exchange.
And polls indicated overwhelmingly that she was distrusted as the preferred candidate of Wall Street. Obama also beat Clinton and McCain largely using small donors. Rebuild the base of the party in working communities and you will see its fortunes improve. I want more time in Michigan listening and understanding it’s voters and less time hobnobbing with the connected in California, New York, and our islands.
He lost due to lack of exposure to people of color. I think Keith Ellison is such a wise choice since he bridges the divide between the Bernie wing and people of color. That alliance will be critical to the resistance effort to Trump and the reformation of the party as we expel the money changers from the ranks of the DNC.
Hillary Clinton was ultimately defeated by the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in trashing her.
Her margins were not close in the rust-belt. White America spoke loud and clear, and Hillary Clinton would have lost the rust belt if she had been there full time.
The small donors who helped Barack Obama win in 2008 and 2012 have SIGNIFICANTLY less money today than they did then. The media had not been trashing Barack Obama for decades before he ran. Barack Obama was male, and America at least thought it was far more ready for a black male than a woman of any race.
I suggest that the election of Barack Obama was a swift kick to the hornet’s nest of white America. The resulting swarm is what defeated Hillary Clinton, and I firmly believe that there is absolutely nothing she could have done that would have changed anything enough to matter.
I suggest that no woman will have a viable shot at the White House for decades. I sincerely doubt that a non-white candidate will be viable any time sooner.
I suggest that America has tried “diversity” in the White House, and has decided it sucks. I think that same America will think about economic fairness for non-whites and women only AFTER white man have been comfortably safe and secure for a decade or so. In effect, NEVER.
I think the one percent have already won. I think the question is whether and how the rest of us take back their wealth. I think that campaign trips to the rust belt will have little or no role in that, if it ever happens at all.
It’s certainly an explanation and a possibility. I don’t think any of us expected a result like the one we saw, and I’ve definitely seen a lot of my peers moving from apathetic to active. I’ve encouraged about fifteen female friends and friends of color to run for office and that I will give them my time, my money, and my advice to help them win.
I’m encouraged at least two of my fellow class of 06′ graduates are thinking of running for Cambridge City Council or School Committee. A Muslim and Latina respectively. I encouraged Lydia Edwards to run again. I have a friend in the Navy who’s a big Hillary supporter who just met with Seth Moulton and his staff at my suggestion, she’s from an R+2 district in the Hudson Valley and could credibly run in four years.
My generation is the most diverse in history and we just lost any excuse to wait on others to fight for our rights and for the country we feel we deserve. I’m committed to being a full time teacher and will take a two year sabbatical for my sanity (and my young marriage) from full time campaign management, while I transition to teaching and my wife and I settle back here together. But I’ll be active in my future union, on the Raise Up Amendment, and hopefully running some women and people of color for local office.
In the lemonade-from-lemons department, one advantage of all this is that pretty much ALL the targets of right-wing lies and attacks are now out of office.
I don’t see Chelsea Clinton running any time soon. Hillary and Bill Clinton are done. Barack Obama is done. There have been rumors about Michelle Obama, and so far those have been squashed by the principals. The GOP holds more power at state and local levels than it has since before FDR.
Whether we wanted to or not, it will almost surely be at least decades before it will be possible to run another Democrat with the “negatives” of Hillary Clinton. Perhaps we should therefore stop worrying about it as a strategic question — that is yesterday’s battle.
ANY Democratic candidates that we run, for any office, are pretty much guaranteed to be official “fresh faces”, by construction.
I join the growing number of people who would like to see we Democrats offering female candidates, especially of color, who have NOT come into the public eye by being married to, or the daughter of, a successful male.
Your remarks are astute, passionate and spot-on. The Clinton era was done with the election of Barack Obama. D’uh! How D leadership could have been so blind to their own rear view mirror gazing is baffling to me. Forward.
Look at how quickly the right has vilified Senator Warren. Make no mistake, the smear machine hones in on whichever Democrat is powerful at the time. Could be Tim Kaine, Tammy Baldwin, Gary Peters, or Tammy Duckworth, or anyone else. Whomever emerges will get all that mud aimed in their direction, and will be described as all the worst characteristics of Nancy Pelosi, the Clinton clan, John Kerry, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Mike Dukakis, Michele and Barack Obama, Joe Biden, etc.
And who’s our Senate leader? The most pro-Wall Street Democrat I can name who isn’t Cory Booker. Yuck.
…that big money is Republican? The market tanked be a useful Hillary WASN’T elected.
Big money cares about big money far more than politics. The market knows that the policies promised by Donald Trump are disastrous pretty much across the board.
When Donald Trump betrays our NATO allies, torpedoes the Iran deal, launches a hot war with North Korea, deports tens of millions of workers who do jobs Americans won’t do, and a host of other disasters, the market know that the result is bad for business.
The result of years of Trumpism is likely to include the following:
– China will dominate the world’s markets
– The international standard currency is likely to be the Renminbi. In the best scenarios, it might be the Euro
– China will be the dominant player in Central America (China is investing there while Donald Trump’s America is building walls).
– The EU and Japan will be nuclear powers
– Russia will again be a dominant world power, regaining much of the territory it lost in the collapse of the Soviet Union
– Global climate change will be out of control. By 2030, the rest of the world may be united against the US as we continue to blast unrestrained coal emissions into the atmosphere, tens of millions of people are dying world-wide from our own denial, and trillions of dollars of property damage (because that’s all Trumpists care about) are being racked up from climate change along our coasts. Climate change is REAL. Donald Trump has famously called it a “hoax”. As events prove otherwise, Donald Trump will be viewed as murderer. He will be personally blamed (incorrectly, but who cares), and those who supported him will be tarred with the same brush. “America” will be a world-wide synonym for “climate change criminal”.
It appears to me that you are so blinded by decades of Clinton Derangement Syndrome that you are unable to confront what your party has just done to America and the world — never mind Wall Street.
THAT is why the market tanked.
Pelosi has lost three elections in a row, time for new faces to move up. Schumer is likely looking forward to gutting the Iran Deal and Dodd Frank in exchange for some bridges in Brooklyn. We gotta be vigilant about reforming our own side and the leaders we’ve had don’t cut it.