Though Donald Trump has been a gift that keeps on giving to millionaires and billionaires, the Globe has an article on how billionaire Seth Klarman is now giving money to Democrats. Klarman’s reasoning is…
“The Republicans in Congress have failed to hold the president accountable and have abandoned their historic beliefs and values,” Klarman said in a prepared statement to the Globe, opening up for the first time about the reasons behind his change in political giving. “For the good of the country, the Democrats must take back one or both houses of Congress.”
I’ll agree with Klarman that Democrats must take back both houses of Congress. But neither Sen. McConnell nor Speaker Paul Ryan have abandoned historic values of the Republicans–they have consistently used their power to redistribute wealth to the few at the top (like Klarman, Trump, Sen. Corker) which is EXACTLY what Republicans like Nixon, Reagan, and Bushes did. Trump has disrespected U.S. agreements with other nations just like Bush did with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. So let’s not forget what Republicans really stand for has never been in the interests of the majority. Now some might argue that to take back the House and Senate, in the short term, it’s better that Democrats get Klarman’s money than Republicans do.
But in the long term, Klarman’s donations and influence will weaken the Democratic Party. Klarman’s business practices (buying debt with shell corporations) have harmed the people of Puerto Rico, where 200 plus schools have been closed, reducing the number of children who can get a decent lunch in addition to a free education. Because the Democratic Party welcomes people of all backgrounds (not so the other side), the people of Puerto Rico are important voters in our coalition whose well-being and rights Democrats must protect. If Democrats take Klarman’s money, it casts a shadow on our commitment to our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico.
Moreover, Klarman used $3 million of dark money to fund Question 2 in 2016, which would have harmed the public schools of Massachusetts. Question 2’s funding implications would have led to more public schools closing, and wealthy people like Klarman (and the Walton Family Foundation with its Wal-Mart money) still push this agenda. This agenda is bad for Americans and the Democratic party. The scholar Sally Nuamah studied how Chicago (under Mayor Rahm–who is not a good Democrat) closed schools in African American neighborhoods. She found that…
support among the African American community for the Democratic Party, specifically in areas where closures occurred, it decreased support in a really substantial way. People initially participate… they initially participate, and then they stop participating.In the election following the closures, which is 2015, people came out, but then you don’t see them come to the local elections after the general elections. [emphasis added]
Because public schools are civic institutions that provide a center to communities in addition to merely imparting knowledge, closing public schools decreased the participation of the voters there. This is a bad, regrettable outcome. As historian Jack Schneider has commented:
when you are closing a neighborhood school down are yougiving people a negative interaction with a public institution, but you are also then disempowering them in some way.You are failing to bring them into the fold, and in so doing you are ensuring that anunrepresentative form of government continues, which just makes it even more likelythat future policy decisions will be made that do not align with community interests.You can see this feeding back on itself over time, where people don’t feel attached topublic institutions and public life, are less represented, and as a consequence, end up being less attached to public institutions and public life.
Democrats have to protect public education (K-12 and college) and expand early education if we want to keep up the voter participation we need to win, to stave off the damage Republicans will do.
We call ourselves the Democratic Party for a reason: our mission is to represent the people, not the powerful few. If Democrats start to rely on money from Klarman and let just one person’s opinion outweigh the interests of millions of non-rich voters, we will stray from principle, and leave our voters and our country worse off. It happened in Chicago, and it can happen here.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Louis Brandeis
Well said Joel. I would be remiss to remind BMGers that the worst aspects of this presidency are the parts where Trump is governing like a totally normal Republican. He promised fewer nation building wars overseas and we are starting to see even more. He promised to tear up trade agreements that hurt American workers that he is now supporting. He promised a workers party that raised real wages for workers and he only cut taxes for the wealthiest few. He promised infrastructure funding, aid to opioid afflicted communities, and a health care system better than Obamacare. We got none of that. He promised more jobs, but the unemployment rate is actually rising for the communities left behind by our global economy.
It is tempting to view the last election as a fight between a closed and open society and make common cause with the cosmopolitan conservatives outraged by Trump’s corruption, vulgarity, and bigotry. Yet this party is for the many, not the few. The sooner we recover our own common cause the sooner we will retake state houses, Congress, and yes the White House. We will not do that by being the socially acceptable party for disgusted Republicans, we will do that by once again being the party fighting hard for common people.
I continue to not see Trump as an aberration of the GOP. I think he’s just a more baldy corrupt, incompetent, and rude iteration of GOP that has been developing since the Reagan era. Treating him as unique and distinct from the rest of the GOP may have some short term political benefits but I think it is the wrong fight to have. The policies of the GOP over the past 40 years are too dangerous to entertain, and I agree with you that our electoral chances should be be based around trying to appeal to disgusted Republicans.
Amen.
Donald Trump is this season’s harvest of the seeds the GOP has been carefully nurturing for decades.
Paul Krugman has been saying this more eloquently than me for some time now. The entire GOP is intellectually bankrupt. The party sold its soul and betrayed any sense of morality or decency decades ago. Donald Trump is just the first fruits — it will only get worse after him.
This is why I agree with Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter) and others who argue that this is not a time to seek “bipartisan” accommodation. We need to instead utterly crush the GOP, so that that they are relegated to footnotes in the history books of the next century:
Krugman recently wrote about how the GOP’s last best legitimate idea was a mandate and subsidy driven market-based healthcare system – Romneycare and what became the ACA.
All the other GOP ideas are empirically proven to fail at any of their stated goals but the GOP keeps pushing them because they hurt poor people and help the wealthy. They are all cruel. There are no good Republicans now. That should not be a controversial statement. Charlie Baker is included in that.
I hate to give Romney credit for the Massachusetts healthcare reform when he vetoed parts of it after the Mass Dems in the legislature did all the heavy lifting to put it together.
Totally, but it does go back to a Heritage Foundation idea from the 90s, which is also why it’s annoying that some Democrats embrace the ACA as the best possible version of healthcare and punch left on those who would push for more.
What’s the current big GOP idea on healthcare? Let everyone fend for themselves but make health savings accounts really tax advantageous?
The ACA is a gift to the private sector and denies health care as a citizen’s right. It’s an improvement on private sector control of health care delivery but it it still private sector control of health care delivery which anyone ought to know is expensive and delivers less than good results for the nation’s citizens.
To paraphrase an old joke (from 2008 or so), the current big GOP idea on healthcare is … wait for it ….
Don’t get sick
HI, doubleman, like you, I once thought the Heritage plan (offered in opposition to President Clinton’s universal healthcare plan) was the basis for the ACA. But I know now the Heritage Plan was NOT the basis for the ACA. Heritage wanted to gut Medicare and Medicaid–the ACA saved the first and expanded the second to millions more. Let’s not give conservatives credit they don’t deserve. The ACA had progressive minds behind it, and now we need to make more progress. Forget Heritage and their spin.
Thanks for the comment and the link. I didn’t mean to imply that the ACA or Romneycare is the Heritage plan. I should have been more clear. They are very different and the federal and MA plans are much better (although I think very much a start and not an end). They do in part rely on the market-based individual insurance mandate which I believe started with Heritage in the late 80s, before the other plan that came out as an alternative to Clinton’s. They of course wanted a much crueler and lightly regulated iteration. I know they never liked the employer mandate, but I think the Republican idea of an individual mandate to get to near universal coverage does go back more to the GOP than the Democrats. Since they now hate any version of a mandate or universal coverage, they should pay the political price for that. It’s been about 30 years since they had any support for an idea that might even approach tackling a problem in a good way. So, it’s been a generation since there was any semblance of the GOP being reasonable. I know I don’t have to say it here, but we can absolutely do away with any overtures to that party having any worthy traditions. It’s why I get so frustrated at some liberals celebrating Republicans (even freaking Bill Kristol!) as being good because they say that Trump is ruining their traditions. He ain’t, he’s fulfilling them.
This is why Trumpism, with or without Trump, will remain a potent force in America.
This is not good for the country, let alone the party. Without a small-d democratic party, Trumpism will become normalized.
I won’t say that this is why we won’t take back Congress. But it is probably why we won’t keep it, won’t forge a durable governing coalition on the order of the New Deal.
I believe in the noble act of biting the hand that feeds you, and in accepting money from any legal source.
I’d like to see some of that hand biting, Christopher. But 25 years in, it is only a theoretical possibility. People stay bought.
Related: Among MA Dem pols, Klarman has given $7,900 to Joe Kennedy and $1,000 to Dan Koh.
I think critics of distressed sovereign debt investors (or “vultures” if you like) are basically wrong. Buying debt on the secondary market, after it was issued to someone else, didn’t cause the PR financial crisis . And it provides a socially valuable service to other investors (e.g. pension funds or mutual funds, or in other words you and me) who find they can’t bear the risk.
True, Klarman has more “staying power” than others and may therefore drive a harder bargain in negotiations for a resolution than the prior investors would have. But it hardly seems right to blame him for being better at asserting the rights of the debt holders than others. Your real beef is with the law about government debt, not Klarman. Or so it seems to me.
The political beef I see with Klarman is that these cosmopolitan conservatives are going to have strings attached to their donations that weaken our party’s historic commitment to fighting for working families. How he made is money is not nearly as problematic to me as how he intends to use it politically. Steyer and Soros also made their money problematically, but they use their funds to steer the party to the left on critical issues. Klarman will use it to steer the party to the right, certainly on economic issues.
Okay, that’s a fair perspective. I was responding in particular to this:
Tedf, here’s more on my perspective: Debt is not just a financial thing, it is also a social thing. When people with security (like a billionaire) start asserting that these debts have to be paid even as people in Puerto Rico go hungry, have their educations interrupted, have to live without proper water and electricity, doesn’t that make the debtholder (and his collectors) look like jerks, like enemies?
It would have been a great issue for Democrats in Congress to propose a major infusion, let’s say 100 billion dollars, to permanently upgrade Puerto Rico’s broken infrastructure. Just the possibility that a major debt holder, like klarman might also be a major democratic contributor raises questions about why Congressional Democrats we’re so timid.
Sure, but you have to ask what is the alternative to distressed debt investors. The buyers of the original debt—say the teachers’ pension fund, or whatever, suffers the loss. Would it be wrong for the teacher’s pension fund to demand repayment? In any event, the main point is that “vultures” only will pay for the debt of defaulters if they think they can get more than they pay. If you don’t want them, you have to be willing to say the loss should be borne by the original investors—the teacher’s pension fund or whomever. I’m not sure that’s any more socially progressive. .
Exactly. That’s why they should be pursuing it in the courts. But once they were major donor, the situation changes.
How do you know that?
Good post. Sure, campaigns are costly and the weaker the candidate, the weaker the message, the more it costs to win in an election. Let’s learn from the mistakes of 2016 where our candidate outspent her opponent by a wide margin but still lost.
2016 is a horrible election to analyze in terms of campaign expenditures. Trump got tons of invaluable free media so he didn’t have to spend what most candidates would have to get the same exposure.
John doesn’t miss any opportunity to bash Ms. Clinton.
This comment has nothing to do with campaign finance.
I don’t view John’s comment as being about Ms. Clinton, but about us. Will we learn anything or not?
The comment presupposes that we had a weak candidate with a weak message. It ignores the millions (or tens of millions) of dollars of free advertising Mr. Trump got from Fox News and, for that matter, the mainstream media.
We won the popular election. We lost the EC because of two groups of voters in three states (MI, WI, and PA). The behavior of these two groups — white voters who stayed home for Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney and turned out for Mr. Trump, and urban minority voters who turned out for Mr. Obama in 2008 and 2012 and stayed home in 2016 — would not have been changed even a little bit by a different candidate or message (unless that candidate had been a Barack Obama for a third term). There is no evidence at all that those urban minority voters in MI, WI and PA would have behaved differently if any other of the Democratic primary candidates had won the nomination. There is a great deal of evidence that the other Democratic candidates would have fared much worse than our nominee in the general election. Ms. Clinton DID win the popular vote in the general election, and absolutely crushed the other candidates in the several primary elections.
The outcome of the primary process was never in question — Ms. Clinton was far and away the strongest primary candidate.
Our party chose the strongest nominee of the candidates that entered the primary. In my view, that’s about as good as any national political organization can do.
There are many things we might learn from the 2016. At the top of my list is that it is very hard for Democrats to win elections when virtually the entire nation is “red” at the precinct, city/town, county, and state level.
We have rehashed these same arguments about “weak candidate” and “weak message” countless times since 2016. The arguments were not persuasive in November of 2016, and they are even less so today (because we know more today about what actually happened).
I suggest that another learning might be that we are stronger when we celebrate, focus, and build on our areas of agreement than when we relentlessly criticize and attack each other and our areas of disagreement.
I think it may be time to acknowledge that, while HRC was by far and away the most qualified person to be POTUS, she was a very weak candidate. The reasons for this are not always just or fair, but they exist, and pretending they don’t exist is to depart from the world of reality. That she was able to crush her only competitor in the primary suggests that there isn’t a lot of talent on the bench. Joe Biden as the present front-runner for simply confirms that there is a pretty big problem.
For some reason, Democrats don’t easily adapt to new political reality. Great Society liberalism had its heyday in the 60s, and then lost its credibility with the electorate. Reagan didn’t just sprout from the forehead of Satan, but Democrats didn’t really react, but rather climbed into a bunker. It took Clinton’s 1992 campaign AGAINST the left to return the party from death at the national level. But the moment has changed again, and Democrats have climbed into the bunker to hang onto 1990s Clintonism.
25+ years ago, Clinton brought liberalism back from the dead, and enabled it to continue to exist. And so it does, and has more energy and support today than it has at any point during my life. Maybe let’s thank them for that, and move on by embracing the political reality of 2018.
To a very large degree, nearly all of the Democratic national leadership is more focused on the battles of 1984-1994, which they won, rather than the battles of 2018. Unless that changes very soon, I think I agree that November might produce a narrow, powerless, and short-lived Democratic majority.
I enthusiastically share your reaction to the current primacy of Joe Biden. I admire him. I wish he had been our nominee in 1988 instead of Mike Dukakis, and again in 2004 instead of John Kerry.
I see the current wave of Democratic leadership on the tail end of our maturity curve. We know the strengths and weaknesses of Joe Biden and his peers. We know what battles they fought and won, and we know what battles they ducked or lost.
I’d rather focus our national attention on the next generation of candidates. Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamalla Harris, Corey Booker are newcomers I’d like hear more about. Martin O’Malley may be stronger in 2020 than he was in 2016.
Whatever was left of the foundation of the GOP has utterly collapsed. The urgent and immediate need for effective leadership in solving the crisis in economic inequality offers a firm and long-lived driver to advance the values and priorities our party has always fought for.
We are in a very strong position to dominate our American culture and economy for generations to come. Our biggest challenge is to say “yes”, to mean it, and then to act on it.
Six 6’s for the above commentary. I think if this blog carries forward with that spirirt, there is a great opportunity for us to come together on local and statewide issues in 2018 and 2020 that help our country come together for progress once again.
I am particularly excited about the opportunity Massachusetts voters will have to force much needed revenues into state coffers to fund transit, education, and jobs. I am also excited about the push for a living wage, progressive primary challengers for statewide, Congressional, DA and statehouse races, and contesting long time Republican office holders as well. I will be working actively with Ranked Choice Massachusetts and their board to bring that critical electoral reform to our state in 2020.
For two people that claim to hate relitigating the 2016 primary, we often find ourselves doing just that. I believe it is because I have yet to see any empirical data to back up these assertions you continue to make about white voters who failed to show up for Romney showing up for Trump, when objective political scientists from Nate Silver, to Tom Edsall, Nate Cohn, Larry Bartels, Lee Drutman and the Clintons own 1992 in house pollster Stanley Greenberg have argued extensively that it was 8 million Obama-Trump voters that made the difference in those three critical Rust Belt swing states. I have provided links to their evidence in the past. Trumps share of the popular vote was actually 3% lower than Mitt Romney’s.
Additionally, those voters provided the threshol for Conor Lambs upset victory which indicates that they are in fact, able to come back for other Democrats after they rejected Hillary Clinton. Doug Jones exceeded both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s totals with African American voters in Alabama despite it being an off year special election. So simply arguing that black voters only turnout for black nominees will not cut it. This is an especially hypocritical argument to make when Clinton suppoters always point out their crushing dominance with black voters in the primary against Sanders.
I wholeheartedly agree with your comment below that we need new leaders and new ideas. I am delighted to see Cory Booker evolve in a bolder direction on economic issues including a new push for a gauranteed jobs program. I am ecstatic that Kirsten Gillibrand took on powerful men and their enablers in her own party. I continue to be wowed by Kamala Harris. Those three are strong contenders. Unlike many Sanders supporters and even our editors, I actually think Joe Biden is a strong progressive and a strong candidate and welcome him to the race. So we will see.
The first female President will be forever indebted to Hillary Clinton for her two historic races. I will also resoundingly agree with the notion that the Electoral College robbed the majority of this country of two good Presidents and saddled us with two disastrous ones. Getting rid of it should be a top priority. My commentary is aligned with CMD, I respect the Clintons for what they did, I respect Sanders for the role he played in the last election moving Hillary to the left and moving the 2020 field to the left. I am very excited for what the next crop of candidates has to say, and believe that the Jones and Lamb elections show us that Democrats can win anywhere anytime on a strong message of fighting economic inequality.