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Democrats Taunt Republicans With 'Hey, Hey, Hey, Goodbye' During Health Vote New York Times When it became clear on Thursday that Democrats in the United States House of Representatives could not defeat a bill to repeal and replace major parts of the Affordable Care Act, they turned to a time-honored American tradition: taunting the other side. House Democrats Sing 'Na Na, Hey Hey, Good-bye'New York Magazine House Democrats sing 'na na na na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye' after GOP health plan passesThe Boston Globe Democrats' bizarre response to passing of ObamaCare repealNew York Post U.S. News & World Report -Washington Post -CNN -Talking Points Memo all 60 news articles »

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Democrats Taunt Republicans With 'Hey, Hey, Hey, Goodbye' During Health Vote - New York Times

In his heroically doomed 48-year campaign to promote the Washington Monthly, Charles Peters hit upon one especially apt (if un-catchy) slogan: If youre not afraid of being right too soon.

Peters founded his little magazine in 1969. From the start, he needled mainstream liberals about issues that werent getting enough attention at the time: income inequality, entrepreneurship, Wall Streets money culture, gay rights, the downside of meritocracy, the importance of reforming and supporting the military. Peters made a career of being annoyingly prescient.

Now, as the Democratic Party struggles to remake itself after a catastrophic loss to Donald Trump, I hope Peters again serves as a leading indicator. In a new book summarizing his once-iconoclastic ideas, he weaves a synthesis of mainstream and progressive, centrist and populist thought that would re-anchor the Democratic Party, both in its own traditions and in outreach to the restless, angry swath of the country that elected President Trump.

The fact that Peters is from West Virginia helps him get the big thing right: He knows that Democrats win when they embrace the aspirations of what country singer Jason Aldean calls the fly over states. They lose when they become seen as the party of the coastal elites and special-interest groups.

I should confess here that Peters has been my mentor, guilty conscience and friend for 45 years. I was one of several dozen journalists who were lucky enough to hear sermons from his political gospel and get raindanced as he edited my articles for his magazine. In a journalism world made up mostly of unmemorable characters, Peters is an American original.

Peters titled his book We Do Our Part, choosing the slogan of Franklin Roosevelts National Recovery Administration. His core argument is that the Democrats are doomed unless they seek to rebuild the United States as a fairer country, less obsessed with money and status but still respecting the wealth-creating power of our entrepreneurial capitalist economy.

Peters is blunt in describing how the Democrats let FDRs New Deal coalition and his legacy of fairness slip away. The unraveling started during Lyndon Johnsons presidency, in a shift that Peters characterizes in one chapter as From Doing Good to Doing Well. It accelerated with the Vietnam War, which Peters saw as creating class cleavages between those who fought and those who didnt. A classic Washington Monthly piece on this theme was Let Those Hillbillies Go Get Shot by Suzannah Lessard.

What Peters saw earlier than any commentator I know was that meritocracys rise would create a United States more unequal in its division of income and nastier in its class and status divides. You could be indignant about not being born a Roosevelt or a Rockefeller, but it was harder to complain about not getting high enough SAT scores for the Ivy League.

Peterss chapters about The Snob Factor and The Price of Glamour are devastating, and no less powerful for his own mild status obsession and name-dropping. (The reader will discover that our Huck Finn was pals with Allen Ginsberg, Katharine Graham, Warren Buffett, Jay Rockefeller and other luminaries.)

The saddest figure in this story of the implosion of the old Democratic Party is former president Bill Clinton. On his way to the White House, Clinton was passionate about politics, in touch with his Arkansas roots and, as Peters says, among the first to detect where the Democratic Party was going wrong in the 1970s. He created a new political center stitched with ideas from Peterss canon of neoliberalism that would keep faith with working people even as it built a bridge to the future by modernizing the economy and helping workers find their place in it.

But the Clintons, after leaving the White House, came to represent the loss of the Democrats connection with the ordinary American. As Peters writes, they entered a world where it seemed natural that Chelseas apartment in New York would cost $10million and that Hillary would be paid $225,000 for a speech to Goldman Sachs executives.

Peters applauded President Barack Obama in principle but saw him as more comfortable with Wall Street than with the working-class voters of FDRs coalition.

Its grotesque that the aspirations of working-class Americans came to be represented by a braggart billionaire from New York who masks his shameless elitism with rhetoric about making the country great again.

But as Peters illustrates, the Democrats loss of connection with the country is largely their own fault. The interdependence that was captured by FDRs slogan We Do Our Part got lost along the way. Peterss book explains where to find it again.

Read more from David Ignatiuss archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

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How Democrats lost their way and how they can find it again - Washington Post

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn't hold back in her critique of President Trump and the 2016 election she lost to him, while speaking at Women for Women International event on May 2. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

Intheaftermathofanelectionloss,itismoreimportantthanevertokeepShakespeares admonition in mind to thine own self be true. Butso far, theDemocrats appear tohave rejected aself-aware, detached point of view.They cant seem to respect the legitimacy of their defeat.

Their denialcrescendoedyesterday when Hillary Clinton blamed her defeat on FBI Director JamesComeyand emails leaked fromWikiLeaks.Iwont belabor the point, but Clinton lost because she had no economic message at a time of great economic anxiety. And, 2016 was a change election and she was the opposite of change. Her candidacy embodied thestatus quo and celebrated more of the same.

Now she wants to bea leader of the so-called resistance? Yawn.

And,ohby the way,theDemocratsdefeat in November continues one of the most gruesome politicalslaughtersany Americanpoliticalparty has ever experienced. Specifically, since 2008, Democrats have lost62House seats, nine Senate seats, 12 governorships and959state legislativeseats.Anautopsy of theDemocratsperformancethrough theObama years reveals the deepproblems that thelefthaswithwhite voters. Relative to the 2012 election, Slate notes that Clintonlost nearly 1 million white votes in the Rust Belt statesof Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.And per aPoliticoreport, Clinton lost rural Americaby a 3-to-1 margin in 2016. But Democrats dont want to hear it.Rather than ask how they can win back the voters theyve lost, the left seems to be saying goodriddanceto white, working-class Americans.

Meanwhile, themost popular Democrat in the United States is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a socialist outsider who isnt even a true Democrat. He doesnt embrace the Democratic Party as thevehicle for his political movement but has nevertheless been welcomed by the intransigent new-left as its leader. And for members of the Democratic establishment, latching onto Sanders is their only hope for maintaining some semblance of party unity even if their change agent isnt a committed Democrat.

While Republicans stagger around legislatively andfitfullybuild an administration, the Democrats are stuck carping and pursuing conspiracies of their own. Even though we are six months out from the election and no evidence suggests collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, the left is still hopelessly looking for a silver email to strike and bring down this president. Their pursuit of a smoking gun is simply dishonest and distracting.

In Washington, it is hard being in the minority. You have competing agendas, jealousies and multiple leaders who are probing the possibility of running for president themselves.It is hard to have a spokesperson that others defer to, and it is hard to make your message heard when the majority party in the White House has superior resources at its disposal. To stand a fighting chance, the minority party must launch a forceful effort, presented by nimble and sharp, made-for-TV personalities. And above all else, a coherent agenda and party unity are required. So far,theDemocrats have none of these.

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The Democrats haven't learned from their defeats - Washington Post (blog)

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The Congressional Progressive Caucus is not an organization that gets a lot of press attention. With the Democrats out of power, they've been ignored as powerless fringe figures, with a scant 75 members in the House and one in the Senate to their name.

Yet there are plenty of reasons to start paying closer attention to them especially this week, as they've just released their yearly budget plan. There is a strong chance in the future that the CPC budget will be the basic policy framework for the Democratic Party, which has a solid chance to retake power within the next few years.

A good place to start is by comparison with House Republicans. For the past several years, the policy views of this group have received close attention in the press. The party's ultra-conservative wing, the "Freedom Caucus," got special attention due to their outsize influence and radicalism. So with the GOP in control of the House since 2011, and the Senate since 2015, watching them closely made good sense.

However, many observers, myself included, drastically underestimated the difficulty that Republicans would have in passing their own agenda. When Obama was president, Republicans passed dozens of repeals of ObamaCare. In this the ultras were the main driver, yowling constantly about how the policy was the death knell of freedom. I therefore thought that with Trump as president, they would simply repeat some version of that process, smashing whatever legislative barriers stood in their way. By the second week or so of the Trump administration, ObamaCare and most of Medicaid would be dead.

But when time came to actually enact some legislation, Republicans ran headlong into two things: First, that their health-care policy ideas are brutally horrible; second, that they had been constantly lying about them for years, to the public and to themselves. Even many Republicans in bright red districts looked down the barrel of voting to destroy the insurance of tens of thousands of their own constituents, after having promised that any ObamaCare replacement would cover more people for cheaper, and got cold feet. Meanwhile, the ultras balked at leaving too many people insured, and so the first effort failed.

Now, a potential repeal of ObamaCare is still very much in the cards. But it turns out that trying to pass policy which will kill thousands of people is a tough political lift, even for a party as diseased and morally bankrupt as the GOP.

By comparison, the CPC is much better politically situated to actually enact their proposals, should Democrats win power. Perhaps most importantly, they are not lying about what's in them. It's all laid out, clearly and honestly, with realistic assumptions and funding mechanisms. As laid out by the Economic Policy Institute, it would run a large short-term fiscal stimulus to reach true full employment. Additionally, it would boost food stamps, unemployment spending, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. It would also spend $2 trillion on infrastructure over 10 years.

It would partially pay for all this stuff with modest cuts in defense spending and a reduction in health-care price growth, as well as new progressive taxes (putting the budget deficit on a sustainable path, but only after full employment was reached). This would reduce inequality, push money down the income ladder, and a new financial transactions tax would also soak Wall Street a bit while improving financial services for everyone else.

More importantly, the CPC budget is by far the most realistic and serious proposal on offer to deal with the problems in the American economy. Obama's stimulus package was not nearly big enough, and the proportion of prime working-age Americans with a job is still lower today than it was at the bottom of the previous recessions (despite much improvement since 2009). Despite fairly low unemployment, the economy is still deeply structurally weak we have quite simply been crying out for something like this since at least 2010. Indeed, as Dean Baker points out, that enormous-sounding infrastructure package is only 1 percent of GDP, and merely brings the figure up to par with historical averages.

The moderate wing of the Democratic Party is, of course, resistant to this sort of spending, because it would horn in on their fundraising and post-officeholding buckraking. But their political position is much weaker than it appears. Half-measure policies like ObamaCare are not good enough, irritating and only popular insofar as they're better than nothing. Against such left-wing arguments, elite centrist Democrats posed electability it's simply the best we can do, sorry! But then their great avatar and leader, Hillary Clinton, lost to the most unpopular opponent in the history of presidential polling.

So in the future, the CPC has an enormously convincing argument, which has only started to take hold: Democrats might as well shoot for the moon and run on actually good policy, instead of fiddly little tax credits. The party has little left to lose.

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The Democrats are getting ready to govern again - The Week Magazine

But his election brought about one of the most significant but ignored progressive policy victories in years: He expanded Medicaid. With the stroke of a pen, Edwards brought one of the poorest states into the fold of the largest expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s, extending access to basic health care to almost 400,000 people.

No other state in the South, besides Arkansas, has done the same. He also ran his campaign on establishing a state minimum wage and reducing incarceration rates, in a state with an abiding love of prisons. He is an unapologetic friend to the teachers unions, in a state that has embraced charter schools and vouchers.

Edwards is by no means a lefty, but neither does he fit with the Ivy League, corporate-friendly Dems who dominate the partys center. Hes not Bernie Sanders, but neither is he Cory Booker. Hes something else someone whose biography and public profile is suited to the politics of Louisiana.

Before Edwards, Louisiana Democrats were at a historic low point. They completely lost control of state government in 2010, after which Governor Bobby Jindal ruined the states finances. In 2014, Mary Landrieu, the last Democratic senator from the Deep South, lost her seat. Columnist Michael Tomasky told Democrats it was time to write off the South and forget about the whole fetid place, in the same way some national Democrats now speak about the Midwest.

So when Republican Senator David Vitter ran for governor, he was at first thought to be a shoo-in, despite his high-profile involvement in the D.C. Madam scandal. The race pitted three Republicans against Edwards in Louisianas unusual jungle primary system. When Edwards and Vitter ended up in the runoff, Republicans defected to Edwards, because they respected him and found him broadly palatable. In polls, he has significant bipartisan approval.

In the aftermath of Trumps election, many Democrats want to rebuild the party at the local level. This is admirable and right. But many who strongly advocate this view have a very specific idea of what a Democrat should look like, and what positions they should hold.

If the goal is a truly national party, capable of achieving meaningful policy gains for a significant portion of the population, figures like Edwards have important roles to play.

Too often, Democratic candidates come from somewhere in the mushy none of the above camp. They might be technocrats, or they might just be people with impeccable rsums and a lot of money. These people sometimes win elections, but theyre limited in their ability to authentically appeal to citizens. Most candidates need a message beyond competence.

The GOP used to be the party of the big tent, but now it has a simpler platform: white nationalism. How much regional and ideological variation should the Democrats accept in order to fight it? Thats a difficult conversation for a party that has never been more geographically concentrated. But if Democrats are serious about fighting for the well-being of working people everywhere, its one that needs to happen.

This article appears in the April 2017 issue of the Texas Observer. Read more from the issue or become a member now to see our reporting before its published online.

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What Democrats Can Learn from Louisiana (No, Really) - The Texas Observer