Mediaboss Marketing

Dionne, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and Washington Post columnist, tells a story about American politics that I find clarifying. In the past, thorny policy debates typically took place between the two parties. Examples include the best way to expand health insurance (through the private sector or government), control pollution (through taxes or regulations) and reduce the deficit (through spending cuts or tax increases).

Today the Republican Party has become so radicalized that it opposes almost any government action to solve problems. Its domestic agenda consists largely of cutting taxes for the rich and freeing companies from oversight. The substantive part of many policy debates now happens within the Democratic Party which means that tensions are only natural.

And yet progressives and moderate Democrats still agree on far more than they disagree. Each side would be more effective if it were open to learning from the other, Dionne writes, rather than lapsing into an unseemly moralism that feeds political superiority complexes.

Progressives are right that over the past half century Democratic moderates have often allowed conservatives to dictate the terms of political conversation, on economic growth, criminal justice, family values and more. Id add that moderates have also spent too much time designing technocratically elegant policies (like tax credits) rather than creating easily understandable, popular programs.

Moderates, for their part, are right that every great progressive victory in American history abolition, womens suffrage, the income tax, labor rights, Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, marriage equality and more has required compromise in the service of persuading allies who disagree with progressives on other issues. Its not enough to state your case purely and wait for a silent progressive majority to emerge as never before.

In the long run, each side is likely to accomplish much more if it can recognize that the other isnt the enemy. In the short run, obviously, there is an inescapable dilemma: The party can nominate only one person.

Before that choice is made while both sides are fighting hard for their preferred nominees, as they should they should pause to reflect on the strengths of the other side. For progressives, that means recognizing that moderate congressional candidates really did fare better in swing districts in 2018. It also means celebrating (quietly, for now, I realize) the progressivism of, say, Buttigiegs agenda.

Original post:
The Question All Democrats Need to Ask Themselves - The New York Times

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - For the past year, Democratic voters have been anxious to settle on a savior capable of defeating President Donald Trump.

The first week of primary balloting was supposed to speed the winnowing of an outsized field of candidates and showcase Democrats readiness to take back the White House in November. But an embarrassing meltdown in the Iowa caucus vote count, and a dismal showing by Joe Biden, once seen as the safest choice to unseat the Republican incumbent, have only heightened fears among some Democrats that their party isnt up to the task.

The early strength of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the liberal stalwart who has vowed to upend American healthcare and go after corporations and the wealthy, has some voters worried that Democrats will blow their chance to unseat an unpopular president if the party veers too far to the left.

Tuesdays New Hampshire primary may do littleto dispel the collective unease or help bridge the deep ideological split between the partys liberal and moderate wings. Several recent polls showed the top two vote-getters in Iowa - Sanders and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg - as the favorites in New Hampshire.

While the primary season is young, voters such as Millie LaFontaine are already feeling a touch of panic. Interviewed Saturday at a Biden rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, the 69-year-old said she wants to back the candidate best-positioned to knock off Trump, but she isnt sure who that might be.

Id like to vote strategically, but we Democrats are in disarray and I dont know what strategic is, she said. I am afraid.

Adding to the partys jitters, last week was one of the brightest in Trumps three years in office. His impeachment trial ended in acquittal. The economy continued churning out jobs. A Gallup poll showed 49% of all registered voters surveyed approve of his performance, the highest mark of his presidency including an overwhelming 94% of Republicans.

Meanwhile, results in Iowa showed that Democratic voters appear far from a consensus.

After leading in the polls for virtually the entire campaign pre-season, the 77-year-old Biden limped to a fourth-place finish in the caucus. It was a blow to Democratic traditionalists who consider the avuncular former vice president the surest bet to unite the fractious party and defeat Trump.

The strong performance of Buttigieg, the youngest candidate at 38, has boosted his profile as a centrist alternative to Biden. He is projected to have won 14 delegates, two more than Sanders. But polls show he has not attracted much support from black voters, a cornerstone of the diverse Democratic coalition. And some worry America isnt ready to elect an openly gay president.

Adding to the uncertainty is an ascendant Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York who has positioned himself as a moderate who can win independents and Republicans. Bloomberg is skipping the four early voting states in February but is competing from March 3, known as Super Tuesday, when nearly a third of delegates will be awarded from 14 states, including Texas and California.

After spending more than a quarter-billion dollars nationwide on advertising since November, Bloomberg has surged to third place behind Biden and Sanders, according to a Reuters/Ipsos national poll conducted Jan. 29-30.

Sanders, 78, won the most votes in Iowas complicated caucus system. The independent senator boasts a large grassroots network that is passionate about his calls for transformational change. But his candidacy terrifies many moderates, who believe a self-described democratic socialist stands no chance in a general election.

Trump already has seized upon the label, saying during last weeks State of the Union address that America will never be a socialist country.

Sanders backers contend he is the only candidate capable of bringing out young people and others who normally wouldnt vote. While there is evidence that Sanders did pull in more young voters in Iowa, overall turnout was significantly below record numbers posted in 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama rode a wave of enthusiasm to the White House. That casts doubt on Sanders argument that his brand of left-wing populism can inspire enough new voters to defeat Trump, said Rahm Emanuel, Obamas former chief of staff and the ex-mayor of Chicago.

There wasnt this magic army that materialized in Iowa, Emanuel said. The cavalry wasnt coming.

The Democrats rough week began with a debacle in the Iowa vote count, caused in part by the failure of a ballot-tabulating phone app. Days of delays in announcing the totals drew mockery from Trump and, ultimately, a call from Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to re-canvass all the precinct results.

Were a party in chaos, Rep. Marcia Fudge, a Democratic congresswoman from Ohio, told Politico.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell called the bungled count a fiasco.

We dont look very good when one of our biggest arguments against Donald Trump is that hes incompetent, and every day something happens where we screw something up, Rendell, a Biden supporter and former DNC chair, told Reuters.

Others worry the party will fail to capitalize on Republican vulnerabilities on issues such as healthcare if the eventual nominee backs solutions perceived as too radical by middle-of-the-road voters.

Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren favor Medicare for All, a universal government system that would eventually replace private health insurance. Biden, Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar want to improve the existing system and add a public option for those who want it.

Voter Chris Kane is weighing his options. The 65-year-old ecologist from Concord, New Hampshire likes Klobuchar, but hes open to backing Warren, the choice of his wife Eve Oyer. The couple attended a Warren event at a middle school over the weekend, while their son Ben Kane, 32, came up from New York to canvass for Sanders.

Whats the right decision?, said the elder Kane on Sunday. Its complicated.

Sanders backers point to their candidates momentum, both in votes and fundraising, as evidence his proposals are catching fire. The campaign said it raised $25 million in January, most of it small donations from 648,000 people.

New Hampshire resident Anne Lichtener views Sanders anti-establishment credentials as an advantage in winning back blue-collar voters who defected to Trump in 2016.

Bernie probably appeals to the working class more than any other candidate, said the 28-year-old lab manager, who lives in Enfield.

The Buttigieg camp, meanwhile, is looking to pick off Biden donors following the former vice presidents flop in Iowa, according to a Buttigieg fundraiser who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

People who were for Biden were for him because they thought he could win. Thats no longer the case, the person said.

On Sunday, in a jam-packed hotel ballroom along the New Hampshire seacoast, Biden told supporters to keep the faith.

No matter what happens in this state...Im going to keep moving, Biden said, predicting he will perform well in states with a greater number of African-Americans and other voters of color.

Like Iowa, New Hampshire is overwhelmingly white. Nevada, which has a large Latino population, and South Carolina, with a heavy concentration of black voters, are next on the primary calendar this month.

With the prospect that several viable candidates will roll on into the spring, the race could remain undecided for months perhaps even to the opening of the nominating convention in July in Milwaukee.

Democratic voters are buckling in for what some fear will be a rough ride.

Barry Nestor, a Biden supporter in Milford, New Hampshire, said he is particularly worried about Trumps socialists tag sticking to the partys liberal candidates.

Trump is going to go after them, Nestor said. Its just not going to be good.

Reporting by Joseph Ax, Trevor Hunnicutt, Simon Lewis, Michael Martina, James Oliphant and Jarrett Renshaw; Writing by Joe Tanfani; Editing by Marla Dickerson

See the original post:
Democrats in disarray in New Hampshire as Sanders surges and Trump provokes - Reuters

Twenty-four years ago, I published an essay titled Liberals, I Do Despise in the Village Voice, which Common Dreams reprinted as an enduring oldie in 2009. The title was a play on an old doggerel, in this case rendering it:

Liberals and flies, I do despise The more I see liberals, the more I like flies.

I wrote the essay in disgust after Bill Clinton concluded his and other New Democrats deal with the devil by signing the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Actwelfare reformthat ended the federal governments sixty-year commitment to direct income provision for the indigent. That emphatically punctuated Clintons bulldozing of the left in Democratic politics and ushered in the bipartisan neoliberal regime under which weve lived ever since. Welfare deform, as many characterized it at the time, was a culmination of the year that began with Clinton using his State of the Union address to declare that The era of big government is over. As New Labour neoliberal Tony Blair was, by her own account, Margaret Thatchers greatest achievement, Bill Clinton consolidated Reaganism as hegemonic in American politics, defined the neoliberal regime of upward redistribution and repression of the poor as the unchallengeable horizon of political aspiration. The essay comes to mind at this moment because so many liberal Democrats now in their dismissals and attacks regarding Bernie Sanders campaign for the partys presidential nomination seem to be rehearsing the kind of smug, self-righteous, and backward arguments they made then about why it was necessary to sacrifice poor peopleultimately variants of a contention that commitment to egalitarian principles is nave.

In the mid-1990s I reflected on how often it is liberals who enable, even abet, the rise of reactionary forces by accommodating them and treating them as legitimate, looking the other way at the dangerous aspects and implications of their agendas. Mass disfranchisement of black Americans in the South at the end of the nineteenth century was on its face in clear violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Southern Democrats used gossamer thin subterfugelike the eight-box rule that required ballots to be deposited into as many different boxes; literacy tests, which could be waived if the registrar vouched for the registrants character or if the applicant had a grandfather who was eligible to vote before 1867 (found unconstitutional in 1915); and poll taxesthat enabled northern Republicans to take the violations of African Americans basic citizenship rights in stride with a wink and nod because those exclusions werent based explicitly on race. Or at least most of them; the white primary required a little more active denial.

Later in our history, proto-fascistic Cold War anticommunism got a sanitizing boost from liberals who, while wringing their hands, wrinkling their brows and privately tut-tutting about supposedly extraordinary excesses, validated persecution with their embrace of the notion that the dangers of subversion could necessitate denial of victims civil liberties, criminalization of ideas, and witch-hunting. Americans for Democratic Action, long the avatar of Democratic liberalism, was founded specifically as an engine of Cold War attack on the left, and high-minded liberal institutions like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the ACLU, as well as most prominent liberal intellectuals, capitulated to and rationalized anticommunist witch-hunting, most of all by accepting the premise that a shadowy subversion threatened the republic, which then justified persecution of those held to endorse it. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and nominal end of the Cold War, and especially in the post-9/11 world, subversion has been recast as terrorism, and liberals concerns with process and appearance of judicious orderliness shifted accordingly, to parse such issues as how to occupy a country humanely, at what point aggressive interrogation becomes torture, under what conditions killing civilians is acceptable, etc.

Liberal complicity stands out especially in its unwavering support for American imperialism and denial of other nations sovereigntymost dramatically in the form of military interventionnotwithstanding a sleight of hand that can make support for war-making seem like opposition to it. Even before the genocidal Vietnam War, American liberals supported and rationalized U.S. interference and perpetration of coups in other nations across the globe, from Iran to Guatemala and elsewhere, well before regime change became a coinage. [For a more general compendium, see here and here.] Indeed, liberals played a central role in crafting the idea of humanitarian intervention, which, perversely, represents bombing people as somehow for their own good.

"This history is important for understanding the seriousness of the political moment that confronts us between now and November and beyond."

Mainstream liberals main criterion for assessing a military intervention is whether or not it can attain U.S. objectives neatly and with limited American casualties. Under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, theyve supported and rationalized military adventurism and extrajudicial killing of non-combatants, among other horrors, in the Middle East and elsewhere. Closer to home, Democratic liberals in the post-9/11 period have colluded in fictions that U.S.-backed coups and coup attempts in Honduras and Venezuela were the product of popular uprisings, and that the constitutional coupswhen reactionary plotters seized power through claiming bogus constitutional authority and levying bogus charges of corruptionin Brazil and Bolivia were also expressions of popular will. Liberals have embraced and rehearsed obviously false golpista narratives and accusations against legitimately elected leftist governments without hesitation or shame.

This history of liberal support for authoritarianism and dictatorship is especially significant at this moment as a tide of authoritarian neoliberalism has been rising all over the world. Orbn in Hungary, Erdoan in Turkey, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Salvini in Italy, Poroshenko in Ukraine, and for that matter Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom demonstrate that the neoliberal program of regressive transfer does not require popular democracy. Popular oversight instead has been a hindrance to regimes of neoliberalization since Reagan and Thatcher, and those pursuing such agendas have commonly sought to insulate their programs from popular democratic processes, behind special commissions and other unelected bodies.

Watching Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi proudly applauding and then standing for a photo-op with Venezuelan fraud and third-rate coup-plotter Juan Guaid during and after Trumps 2020 State of the Union message and recalling her and other liberal Democrats collusion in the boldfaced lie that duly elected President Nicols Maduro is a ruthless dictator and their propagation of the preposterous fiction that Guaid, though all but unknown in Venezuela, is somehow the countrys legitimate interim president (a title more recently claimed also by religio-fascist usurper Jeanine ez Chvez in Bolivia) underscores the lack of regard, even contempt, these Democratic neoliberals have for popular democracy. Theyve shown it before, of course.

Many of them remain livid to this day about what they perceive as Ralph Naders irresponsible third-party challenge 2000, when the Democrats put forth a Republican-in-all-but-name ticket of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. Not only did Nader not cost Gore the election: the Vice-President would not fight for Florida because he didnt want to be identified with the militant groups urging him to do so; even so, if hed won Tennesseehis home stateFlorida wouldnt have mattered. Most telling about the Democrats outrage at Nader, though, is the astounding, profoundly anti-democratic sense of entitlement on which it rested, the idea that Democrats in effect own every left-of-center vote without having to do anything to earn them. Their outrage was very much of the Who does he think he is to try to take our vote variety, never acknowledging that the partys having put forward the most conservative Democratic ticket since Woodrow Wilson may have influenced Naders decision to run. By that point in time, Democratic elites were already fully committed to their course of dismissing working people and their concerns only to say in effect, as a close comrade put it at the time: Dont worry; well come back for you after we take care of the investor class; besides, what else can you do? Look at how terrible the other guy is! Hillary Clinton and her confederates at the Democratic National Committee showed the same contemptuous, anti-democratic sense of entitlement in 2016.

SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

Get our best delivered to your inbox.

This history is important for understanding the seriousness of the political moment that confronts us between now and November and beyond. In the past several weeks the level of hysteria in the nonstop corporate media and Democratic Party elite effort to dismiss or discredit Bernie Sanders campaign for the partys presidential nomination has ratcheted up. This isnt really a surprise, or it shouldnt be. Since 2016, it has become ever clearer that much of the Democratic establishment and its propaganda organsMSNBC first among themare more worried about a victory of the left than about Trumps re-election. As the Sanders campaign and the political movement propelling it continue to make headway, those forces have become more shrill and over-the-top, with many openly calling for coalescence around a need to stop Sanders from becoming the partys nominee as the central Democratic objective for 2020. Corporate Democrat hacks and retainers like Chris Matthews, Chuck Todd, et al. have begun hysterically evoking paranoid Birchite fantasies, like Matthews recent assertion that Medicare for All will ensue in mass executions in Central Park. Second-string hack Maria Teresa Kumar put her finger on the neoliberal Democrats dilemma when she insisted that attacking the billionaire class will backfire on the party if it follows the Sanders line because theres not an American that wakes up every single morning and doesnt say Im going to get up in the morning so that I someday either can be rich or my kid can be rich.

"Since 2016, it has become ever clearer that much of the Democratic establishment and its propaganda organsMSNBC first among themare more worried about a victory of the left than about Trump's re-election."

The problem for Kumar, Todd, et al. and the interests they serve is that no one is saying that any moreif many grown people ever didbecause hegemonic neoliberalism has lost the confidence of masses of working-class people. As a moral economy, after forty years of false promises, scapegoating, and subterfuge, it has largely run out of steam. It delivers for fewer and fewer people, which after all was always the point, and the bromides of its free-market utopian ideology ring increasingly hollow. It doesnt take long to recognize that what has been sold as skys-the-limit/you-can-be-as-rich-as-you-want-to-be flexible entrepreneurialism in the new gig economy is in reality precarious employment with no rights or benefits, or that promises to improve the quality of public goods and services from education to water and sanitation by introducing choice into vital public institutions means turning them into profit centers for private interests at the expense of the public good. People notice a health care system geared far more to profit-taking by insurance and pharmaceutical companies than to their own health and wellbeing.

We may be rapidly approaching a point at which there are only two credible roads forward electorally. Both authoritarian neoliberalism and the populist leftism represented by the Pink Tide in Latin America, Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. have emerged and gained momentum as alternative responses to the bankruptcy of the familiar neoliberal regime as both rhetoric and practice. It is understandable that corporate Democrats and investor class liberals will fight to preserve the current order with its shibboleths and flimflam, supported by the fictions of groupist identity politics, that present individual upward mobility as the equivalent of collective security. Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate, to be sure, but Trumps victory, along with the advances made by authoritarian neoliberals elsewhere, points to something else as well, something far more sinister.

Just after the 2016 election, I reflected on the late labor leader Anthony Mazzocchis warning more than two decades prior that Democratic neoliberals would have nothing to offer those people who have been or fear being ground up by the decades of relentless capitalist attack on living and working conditions. He warned that if the left and the labor movement didnt find ways to connect with that growing population of those hurting and to offer credible explanations of the sources of their condition and plausible strategies for fighting back, other, nasty and dangerous tendencies would. Here we are. Trump and Trumpism are committed to galvanizing the most reactionary and dangerous elements in the society and must be defeated. If not, things could become very ugly in this country.

I have no doubt that the Democratic liberals who fear that Sanders is unelectable are genuine in their belief. They also want and need for him to be unelectable because for them the really significant divisions in the society must not be those between economic classes. As Kumar puts it, Theres plenty of billionaires that are actually aligned with this whole proposal of what America should look like, by which she meant a country in which any one individual can become rich without regard to identity-group status. Todd picked up the baton to suggest that opposition to the billionaire class hurts Democrats with voters of color in particular, who in his mind aspire to be rich. (Neoliberal Democrats propensity for ventriloquizing black people is amazing, and often amazingly ridiculous.) From the standpoint of those liberals tied to investor-class interests, a Trump victory in 2020, even if it were to raise a serious threat of authoritarianism, could be less disturbing than a Sanders-led, left-tacking political realignment. And, much as the Clinton administrations liberal architects of welfare reform dismissed their left critics as tendentious and naveuntil those critics were proven rightliberals insistence that Sanders cant win preempts, at least for now, questions about what they would do if he were to win the nomination. Would they support him? Would they follow Bloomberg, or someone else, on a third-party ticket?

"From the standpoint of those liberals tied to investor-class interests, a Trump victory in 2020, even if it were to raise a serious threat of authoritarianism, could be less disturbing than a Sanders-led, left-tacking political realignment."

We dont know the answers to those questions, but I have my suspicions. I suspect that theres a decent likelihood that some neoliberal Democratic elites would try to bring Sanders candidacy down while blaming him for forcing them to do so by standing for a clear working-class agenda, which they know cant win. Contrary to that view, my sense is that Sanders is the Democrat with the best chance to defeat Trump in November, not least because we know that in 2016 millions of Trump voters had previously voted for Sanders in the primaries and for Obamano doubt under the same sort of mistaken identity from which they voted for Trumpat least once. And they voted for Sanders as a clear and uncompromising voice for working peoples concerns.

Heres what it comes down to: to what extent are liberal Democrats commitments to democracy and democratic institutions greater than their commitments to current forms of capitalist hierarchy? Thats what well determine between now and November, and the answer might have everything to say about the future of American politics and of the left within it. This may be a political moment when one or the other commitment must take precedence. Liberals characteristically embrace high-minded ideals of constitutionalism, due process, tolerance and rule of law, which theyve been chattering about quite a bit lately.

We know as well, however, that, when theyve perceived their classs interests to be threatened, theyve also found ways to justify suspension of the rule of law and due process and to tolerate death squads. I suppose well just see.

Here is the original post:
Here They Come Again: The Kind of Neoliberal Democrats Who Prefer Trump to Sanders - Common Dreams

To the Editor:

Re How Buttigieg Became Surprise of the Caucuses (front page, Feb. 8):

A political party that has serious problems with addressing people in small towns and Middle America is behaving foolishly. Pete Buttigieg can and should argue that he has faced the issues troubling a great swath of this country. The other candidates should not play down the experience he has had being the mayor of a small Midwest city. That is where the problems are most acute: unemployment, opioids, suicides, struggling farmers and systemic racism.

Listen to Mr. Buttigieg. At least dont make fun of his work with Americans who are largely forgotten. He is not part of the coastal elite nor a Washington insider. Do not make fun of that experience.

William ElwellRochester, N.Y.

To the Editor:

I read The Donald Trump Theory of Bernie Sanders, by Frank Bruni (column, Feb. 9), and wondered how we could avoid a replay of Jeremy Corbyns whopping defeat by Boris Johnson in Britain. Imagine if starting now, the Bernie Bros changed the script and pledged to make 2020 a different election than 2016 by committing to put all their force behind whichever candidate fairly wins the nomination.

And heres a radical idea! Imagine if Bernie wins the nomination and leads his troops in coming forward to acknowledge the mistakes they made in villainizing Hillary Clinton. Imagine if Bernie then transformed our fractured party into one inclusive big tent? A tent full of passionate voters who could decisively beat President Trump.

Jill DearmanBrooklyn

To the Editor:

Re The Harrowing Chaos of the Democratic Primary (column, Feb. 8):

Michelle Goldberg says she envies those who are exhilarated, rather than terrified, that the fate of American democracy could soon be Bernie or bust. I share her sense of terror. I do not think the vast majority of voters will embrace Bernie. I believe that this is President Trumps dream scenario. We cant afford the risk.

But there is one candidate who is gaining traction and could well be a viable alternative: Amy Klobuchar. She had a stellar debate performance Friday night. She has been endorsed by this newspaper (with Elizabeth Warren), as well as by three large daily New Hampshire newspapers. This isnt a Buttigieg-Sanders fight. Ms. Klobuchar is a serious contender, and its time she received the attention she deserves.

Anne L. FingerTeaneck, N.J.

To the Editor:

Michelle Goldberg blames Joe Biden for the chaos? President Trump clearly went after Mr. Biden because he knows the former vice president is the candidate best positioned to beat him. The question is, why do Democrats and the liberal media also attack him, at best damning him with faint praise?

We need to choose a candidate who cant be immediately dismissed by many as a socialist, or inexperienced, or buying himself an election, or perhaps even, I am very sorry to say in 2020, a woman. That candidate, who has, as Ms. Goldberg concedes, an unmatched biography and name recognition, is Joe Biden.

Cut the chaos, fellow Democrats, or well have no one to blame but ourselves for Mr. Trump and the Republicans continuing destruction of our Constitution and our democracy.

Ann Dorton BellMalvern, Pa.

To the Editor:

Re Buttigieg, Not Sanders, Emerges as a Problem for Warrens Candidacy (news article, Feb. 8):

Your article on Elizabeth Warrens problem with former Mayor Pete Buttigieg ignores her biggest problem national skepticism over her wealth tax proposal. But it is easily solved: Rename it the patriot tax.

Jonathan GerardDurham, N.C.

To the Editor:

The Iowa Democratic caucuses appear to have been designed to imitate the Caucus-race from Alices Adventures in Wonderland. The Caucus-race was designed by the Dodo: Everyone started when they wanted to, and left off when they liked. It was not easy to see when the race was over, until the Dodo shouted that it was. When asked who had won, the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, but eventually replied, Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.

For the sake of democracy and the Democratic Party, the Iowa caucuses should be allowed to suffer the same fate as befell the actual dodo bird.

John Gordon RoyNew Fairfield, Conn.

The rest is here:
As Democrats Try to Move On From the Caucus Chaos - The New York Times

James Carville is scared to death of the November 2020 election.

In a rant on MSNBC that went viral on Tuesday evening, the longtime Democratic strategist vented his concerns about the partys prospects for beating Donald Trump, taking particular aim at the partys leftward lurch.

Eighteen percent of the population controls 52 Senate seats, Carville said. Weve got to be a majoritarian party. The urban core is not gonna get it done. What we need is power! Do you understand? Thats what this is about.

His diatribe took place against the backdrop of an Iowa caucus that had fallen into chaos and amid a rancorous ongoing debate among Democrats over the partys direction. He took particular aim at Sen. Bernie Sanders, who he fears could lead the party to defeat in November.

Carvilles lament distills a concern among the Democratic Partys establishment: Will ideological purity and playing to the base cost the Democrats victory in November? For Carville, at least, We have one moral imperative, and thats to beat Donald Trump. That his comments went viral speaks to the sense of urgency among Democrats, even as it only fuels the debate over the direction of the party.

I spoke with Carville this week by phone. We discussed where he thinks the Democrats went wrong, what it will take to build a majoritarian party in this climate, and why he doesnt have a lot of confidence in the current field of candidates.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Why are you scared to death about the 2020 election?

Look, the turnout in the Iowa caucus was below what we expected, what we wanted. Trumps approval rating is probably as high as its been. This is very bad. And now it appears the party cant even count votes. What the hell am I supposed to think?

Ill just say it this way: The fate of the world depends on the Democrats getting their shit together and winning in November. We have to beat Trump. And so far, I dont like what I see. And a lot of people I talk to feel the same way.

Whats gone wrong? Whos responsible?

I dont know. We just had an election in 2018. We did great. We talked about everything we needed to talk about, and we won. And now its like were losing our damn minds. Someones got to step their game up here.

What does that mean?

In 2018, Democrats recruited really strong candidates, really qualified candidates. And the party said, This is what were going to talk about and were going to keep talking about it. And you know what happened? We fucking won. We didnt get distracted, we didnt get deflected.

Give me an example of what you mean by distractions.

We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. Theyre talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. Youve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesnt matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments talking about that is not how you win a national election. Its not how you become a majoritarian party.

For fucks sake, weve got Trump at Davos talking about cutting Medicare and no one in the party has the sense to plaster a picture of him up there sucking up to the global elites, talking about cutting taxes for them while hes talking about cutting Medicare back home. Jesus, this is so obvious and so easy and I dont see any of the candidates taking advantage of it.

The Republicans have destroyed their party and turned it into a personality cult, but if anyone thinks they cant win, theyre out of their damn minds.

I wouldnt endorse everything every Democrat is doing or saying, but are they really destroying the party? What does that even mean?

Look, Bernie Sanders isnt a Democrat. Hes never been a Democrat. Hes an ideologue. And Ive been clear about this: If Bernie is the nominee, Ill vote for him. No question. Ill take an ideological fanatic over a career criminal any day. But hes not a Democrat.

You know people are going to read this and say, Carville backed Clinton in 2016. So did the Democratic establishment. They blew it in 2016. Why should I care what any of them think now?

People will say anything. And first of all, Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million. And secondly, the Russians put Jill Stein in front of Clintons campaign to depress votes. And thirdly, the New York Times a week before an election, assured its readers that the Russians were not even trying to help Trump. And then they wrote 15,000 stories about Hillarys emails.

But back to Sanders what Im saying is the Democratic Party isnt Bernie Sanders, whatever you think about Sanders.

A lot of threads there. First, a lot of people dont trust the Democratic Party, dont believe in the party, for reasons youve already mentioned, and so they just dont care about that. They want change. And I guess the other thing Id say is, 2016 scrambled our understanding of whats possible in American politics.

Are we really sure Sanders cant win?

Who the hell knows? But heres what I do know: Sanders might get 280 electoral votes and win the presidency and maybe we keep the House. But theres no chance in hell well ever win the Senate with Sanders at the top of the party defining it for the public. Eighteen percent of the country elects more than half of our senators. Thats the deal, fair or not.

So long as [Mitch] McConnell runs the Senate, its game over. Theres no chance well change the courts, and nothing will happen, and hell just be sitting up there screaming in the microphone about the revolution.

The purpose of a political party is to acquire power. All right? Without power, nothing matters.

Whats the answer?

By framing, repeating, and delivering a coherent, meaningful message that is relevant to peoples lives and having the political skill not to be sucked into every rabbit hole that somebody puts in front of you.

The Democratic Party is the party of African Americans. Its becoming a party of educated suburbanites, particularly women. Its the party of Latinos. Were a party of immigrants. Most of the people arent into all this distracting shit about open borders and letting prisoners vote. They dont care. They have lives to lead. They have kids. They have parents that are sick. Thats what we have to talk about. Thats all we should talk about.

Its not that this stuff doesnt matter. And its not that we shouldnt talk about race. We have to talk about race. Its about how you deliver and frame the message. I thought Cory Bookers baby bonds plan was great and the kind of thing the party could connect to peoples actual lives.

We have one moral imperative here, and thats beating Trump. Nothing else matters.

So your complaint is basically that the party has tacked too far to the left?

Theyve tacked off the damn radar screen. And look, I dont consider myself a moderate or a centrist. Im a liberal. But not everything has to be on the left-right continuum. I love Warrens day care plan just like I love Bookers baby bonds. Thats the kind of stuff our candidates should explain and define clearly and repeatedly for voters and not get diverted by whatever the hell is in the air that day.

Heres another stupid thing: Democrats talking about free college tuition or debt forgiveness. Im not here to debate the idea. What I can tell you is that people all over this country worked their way through school, sent their kids to school, paid off student loans. They dont want to hear this shit. And you saw Warren confronted by an angry voter over this. Its just not a winning message.

The real argument here is that some people think theres a real yearning for a left-wing revolution in this country, and if we just appeal to the people who feel that, well grow and excite them and well win. But theres a word a lot of people hate that I love: politics. It means building coalitions to win elections. It means sometimes having to sit back and listen to what people think and framing your message accordingly.

Thats all I care about. Right now the most important thing is getting this career criminal whos stealing everything that isnt nailed down out of the White House. We cant do anything for anyone if we dont start there and then acquire more power.

Can I say one more thing about the cultural disconnect?

Sure.

I want to give you an example of the problem here. A few weeks ago, Binyamin Appelbaum, an economics writer for the New York Times, posted a snarky tweet about how LSU canceled classes for the National Championship game. And then he said, do the Warren/Sanders free public college proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?

You know how fucking patronizing that is to people in the South or in the middle of the country? First, LSU has an unusually high graduation rate, but thats not the point. Its the goddamn smugness. This is from a guy who lives in New York and serves on the Times editorial board and theres not a single person he knows that doesnt pat him on the back for that kind of tweet. Hes so fucking smart.

Appelbaum doesnt speak for the Democratic Party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset. We cant win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesnt give off vapors that were smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.

A lot of Democratic candidates dont talk like that. Warren doesnt talk like that. Sanders doesnt talk like that. Buttigieg doesnt talk like that. Cory Booker never talked like that.

Warren knows her stuff, and Im particularly hard on her, because she was the star pupil, the one who was smart, had a good story. But I think she gets distracted and loses her core anti-corruption message, which resonates. With a lot of these candidates, their consultants are telling them, If you doubt it, just go left. We got to get the nomination.

And then Biden gets in and blocks out good candidates like Cory Booker or Michael Bennet or Steve Bullock by occupying this mainstream lane. There just isnt enough oxygen and they couldnt get any traction. But these are serious people, professional people, and they couldve delivered a winning message.

Are you confident that any of the remaining candidates can beat Trump?

I dont know, I just dont know. Im hoping that someone gets knocked off their horse on the road to Damascus.

Buttigieg seems to model the sort of candidate you think can win.

Mayor Pete has to demonstrate over the course of a campaign that he can excite and motivate arguably the most important constituents in the Democratic Party: African Americans. These voters are a hell of a lot more important than a bunch of 25-year-olds shouting everyone down on Twitter.

I take all your points about power and the Senate and the need to be a majoritarian party. I just wonder where the limits are, especially in this media ecosystem where even the best Democratic messaging gets deformed and bastardized in right-wing media and thus never reaches the people Democrats need to reach, or at least doesnt reach enough of them.

I think the other side wants us to think there are no swing voters, that were doomed and it doesnt even matter if you have a message because you cant reach anyone. I think thats bullshit. I think thats a wholly incorrect view of American politics. But look, if no ones persuadable, then lets just have the revolution.

Falling into despair wont help anyone, though. I mean, you can curse the darkness or you can light a candle. Im getting a fucking welding torch. Okay?

Sign up for the Sentences newsletter. No shouting. No alerts. No BS. Get the news that matters, in one email at the end of the day.

Get our newsletter in your inbox Monday through Friday.

Link:
James Carville is scared to death about whether Sanders and others can beat Trump - Vox.com