Month: June 2017

Ed Kilgore has some thoughts on Democratic leadership and the need for term-limits (and specifically for Nancy Pelosi):

Ever since Democrats fell short of their 2016 goal of taking back control of the U.S. House, there’s been talk about […] leadership change in the House Democratic Caucus. And after Democrats failed to win any of the four GOP House seats where special elections were held this year, there was renewed talk about Nancy Pelosi stepping down as House Democratic Leader. The negative buzz became particularly loud after the party’s biggest special-election hope, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, suffered a disappointing loss, in the wake of Republicans running many millions of dollars of ads linking the candidate to Pelosi.

[…]

[Pelosi] is a much bigger target for Republicans than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell appears to be for Democrats. Part of the problem may simply be that she happens to represent a jurisdiction with rich negative symbolism (dating back at least to the attacks on “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984 after the Donkey Party held its convention in the City by the Bay) for the conservatives who are mostly the target for anti-Pelosi ads. You cannot quite imagine Democrats running ads mocking Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin or Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky in this manner.

Emphasis added by me because Kilgore completely discounts the most important information in his several paragraphs. The demonization of Pelosi has nothing to do with her having been in the arena for too long, being a woman, coming from San Francisco, or anything else. Those are all useful pegs for the GOP to build their messaging on and around, but they aren’t themselves decisive or even all that interesting. Anyone serving as minority leader will immediately come under sustained and focused attack from the right wing and their stenographers in much of the media. It’s Cokie’s Law: if information, factual or otherwise, is “out there” then it must be discussed uncritically. Thus the media happily carries the GOP messaging machine’s water on Pelosi and anybody else in the cross-hairs that day. There’s just no getting around it, and The Democrat not only doesn’t have anything like this, they aren’t even on the same planet with the scale and coordination of this operation. Unless and until they create a sustained messaging attack on McConnell and Ryan, those two can continue right on doing what they’re doing. Just to focus on McConnell, he’s likely the most destructive force in government today, but most people would be hard pressed to name him, much less know what he’s been up to and why it is dismantling the way our government has, until recently, functioned.
That’s simply not the case for Pelosi, and that has nothing to do with the fact that she’s from San Francisco and everything to do with a sustained, targeted, and years long messaging attack that salts the Earth and leaves useful framing tools for any GOP hopeful to pick up and use, readymade. Democrats try to build the machine from scratch with every individual election, every cycle. How’s that working out for them?

Lastly, if you like the ACA, thank Nancy Pelosi. Period. That doesn’t mean she gets a pass to serve in party leadership forever, but she did that lift more or less with her own political momentum and within the context of the sustained, entirely negative noise machine and well after perceptions about her in the media were set in stone. Think on that as you try to show her the door.

[…] when he found out that I, you know, that there may be tapes out there whether it’s governmental tapes or anything else and who knows, I think his story may have changed.

Donald Trump, openly admitting to witness tampering through his comments on the possibility of taped conversations with Comey. This is fine. Nothing to see here.

The lesson of the special elections around the country is clear: Democratic House candidates can dramatically outperform Clinton in deep red rural areas by running ideological, populist campaigns rooted in progressive areas. Poorer working class voters who pulled the lever for Trump can be swayed back to the left in surprisingly large numbers–perhaps not enough to win in places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina, but certainly in other more welcoming climes. Nor is there a need to subvert Democratic principles of social justice in order to accomplish this: none of the Democrats who overperformed Clinton’s numbers in these districts curried favor with bigots in order to accomplish it.

But candidates like Clinton and Ossoff who try to run inoffensive and anti-ideological campaigns in an attempt to win over supposedly sensible, wealthier, bourgeois suburban David-Brooks-reading Republican Romney voters will find that they lose by surprisingly wide margins. There is no Democrat so seemingly non-partisan that Romney Republicans will be tempted to cross the aisle in enough numbers to make a difference.

The way forward for Democrats lies to the left, and with the working classes. It lies with a firm ideological commitment to progressive values, and in winning back the Obama voters Democrats lost to Trump in 2016 without giving ground on commitments to social justice. It does not lie in the wealthy suburbs that voted for Romney over Obama in 2012, or in ideological self-effacement on core economic concerns.

David Atkins nails it over at the Washington Monthly. I’d only add: yep. Though it’s also worth noting the Democrats are also fighting a messaging machine they can’t hope to match at this point. This is worth noting that in light of the South Carolina over-performance in an essentially forgotten race in a deep red district…

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo.  To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting.  Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past.  I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) –once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016.  In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions.  I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months – three in person and six on the phone.

James Comey, in an excerpt from his opening statement for tomorrow’s Senate hearing. He spoke in private with Obama twice in nearly five years and one of those was a “thanks for all the fish” valedictory. Compared against NINE in four months. And Comey felt compelled to document all interactions with Trump immeidately after their first meeting. Nothing wrong here. This is fine.

Let’s cut the crap about why Hillary Clinton lost

Please read the whole thing, but here’s part of the nut:

So why didn’t she [win]? The answer is pretty simple: despite running a pretty good campaign, she got walloped by things that decidedly don’t come with the territory: Russian interference via the WikiLeaks drip; an indefensible letter released by the FBI director; and a press corps that treated the Comey letter like the OJ trial. She got slammed late in the game, and had no time to recover.

Yep.

Let’s cut the crap about why Hillary Clinton lost