Is The DNC Worthless? Or Much Worse Than Worthless? And Is It Salvageable?

Jamie Harrison wasted $147,669,875 running for Senate in 2020. losing by double digits

A corrupt and less than useless DNC leadership is all in on nominating Biden again— and hostile to the idea of anyone challenging him. And yet, most Democrats don’t want to see Biden as their candidate again. This morning AP reported that “A majority of Democrats now think one term is plenty for President Joe Biden, despite his insistence that he plans to seek reelection in 2024. That’s according to a new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that shows just 37% of Democrats say they want him to seek a second term, down from 52% in the weeks before last year’s midterm elections… Follow-up interviews with poll respondents suggest that many believe the 80-year-old’s age is a liability, with people focused on his coughing, his gait, his gaffes and the possibility that the world’s most stressful job would be better suited for someone younger.

And a poll from ABC News and the Washington Post shows that 41% of “Americans say they've gotten worse off financially since Joe Biden became president, the most… dating back 37 years. Few people want a Biden-Trump rematch. Worse yet, polling is now consistently showing Trump narrowly beating him in a rematch.

Last week, Democratic Party king-maker Jim Clyburn warned other Democrats to not dare run against Biden (who he exercises a great deal of control over). “The history is very clear on what happens when you challenge a sitting president like this,” Clyburn told CBS News. DNC Chair Jamie Harrison, a lobbyist, is a creature of Clyburn’s who has firmly positioned himself against progress and reform. “Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer said Friday that progressives won't stop working to stem the flow of untraceable cash into national primary contests after the DNC Resolutions Committee blocked a vote on her proposed dark money ban for the second time.”

Whitmer sponsored the proposed dark money ban alongside fellow DNC member James Zogby, who previously served as chair of the resolutions panel. If approved, the resolution would have prohibited dark money donations in Democratic primary contests and established guidelines for investigating any violations of the ban.

On Thursday, members of the DNC Resolutions Committee— who likely faced pressure from DNC leadership— stayed quiet when the proposed ban was put up for consideration, so the measure did not receive a vote. Had the committee approved the proposal, which was backed by dozens of DNC members, it would have gone to the full DNC for a vote this weekend. (The DNC doesn't publicize membership lists for its standing committees.)

…Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden, have repeatedly railed against the scourge of dark money, decried its corrupting influence, and pledged to rein it in— only to balk at pressure for substantive action.

The party's platform, adopted in 2020, states that "we will bring an end to 'dark money' by requiring full disclosure of contributors to any group that advocates for or against candidates."

Yet as the DNC leadership, headed by Chair Jaime Harrison, refuses to act on its rhetoric— and as congressional Republicans block broader legislative efforts to curtail dark money— Democratic incumbents continue to benefit from untraceable donations, which are frequently used to undercut progressive challengers.

Last year, the newly formed dark money group Opportunity for All Action Fund spent around $600,000 to bolster Reps. Donald Payne Jr. (D-NJ), Dina Titus (D-NV), and Danny Davis (D–IL).

All three went on to defeat their progressive primary opponents and win reelection. That pattern played out across the country, though some candidates— including Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), who was aggressively targeted by AIPAC's super PAC— were able to overcome torrents of opposition spending and prevail in November.

…While Democrats in Congress continue to push legislation to curb dark money across the board in federal elections, progress will be virtually impossible with a closely divided Senate and a Republican-controlled House, leaving internal party rule changes one of the only viable paths toward genuine campaign finance reform in the near future.

Larry Cohen, a DNC member and the board chair of Our Revolution, wrote in an email Friday that the DNC and state-level Democratic parties "have extensive rules relating to the nominating process, which provide many opportunities to block dark and dirty money."

"What happens inside the Democratic Party and inside party caucuses of elected Democrats is frequently ignored by progressives, who are generally more comfortable protesting and working solely outside the party. Of course, protest is essential, and new party-building is fine," Cohen wrote. "But for those of us who believe we must fight in every possible way to advance progressive issues and win real power, we ignore party reform at our peril, even as we demand broader electoral reforms, such as fusion and ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, and more."

The core difference between conservatives and progressives

Yesterday Alex Seitz-Wald, reporting from the DNC meeting in Philly for NBC News, noted that on Friday the gathered Democratic power brokers were all in on Biden, regardless of what the party grassroots base wants. What a completely bankrupt operation! “Despite lackluster approval ratings, an ongoing classified documents scandal and polls showing most voters would like the 80-year-old to retire, Biden faces zero meaningful opposition to his leadership of the Democratic Party and an unobstructed path to renomination next year, even before he has officially declared his intention to seek it. During the three-day gathering of elected officials, activists, union leaders, operatives and donors this weekend, serious dissent or discontentment with Biden was almost impossible to find.”

Not exactly unconnected: the vile vote last week in the House on the Republicans’ “We hate socialism” resolution, Maria Salazar’s “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.” It passed 328-86, every Republican plus 109 Democrats voted for it. 14 Dems voted “present” and 86 voted against it. Democrats who went along with the Republicans can be split into two camps— the Wall Street-owned true believers (basically, the New Dems, who admit they agree with the Republicans) and the normal Dems who claimed they were just offering support to the front line freshmen who were in an awkward political position.

Luke Savage noted that “Some Democrats apparently thought voting for the GOP’s ludicrous anti-socialism resolution would keep them safe from Republican attacks. They’ll find out soon enough how wrong they were. For decades now, the Right has rallied around more or less the same reductive and Manichean narrative of American politics. In one corner— or so successive generations of reactionaries from Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump have insisted — stand the forces of freedom and liberty; in the other, adherents to a creeping, tyrannical, and godless ideology bent on strangling the American way of life. In defining and identifying the latter, the right has never been especially discriminating. ‘Socialism,’ at least in the hands of your average Republican politician, can in fact be applied to almost anything if partisan conservatives are opposed to it.

House Democrats who opted to side with the GOP’s absurd resolution— progressive, centrist, and conservative alike— effectively endorsed the long-standing right-wing narrative of American politics. In doing so, they not only undermined their own positions— you can bet that GOP lawmakers will continue to brand everything even an inch to the left of Attila the Hun as Stalinist, notwithstanding who voted Yea on a resolution that will be forgotten a week from now— but engaged in the most basic kind of political error. Accepting your opponent’s premise or conceding their rhetorical frame is a more or less guaranteed way to lose any debate.

There are, of course, plenty of good and noninstrumental reasons to embrace rather than run away from the socialist label. If nothing else, two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns that vastly outperformed conventional expectations are as good a sign as any that ordinary people are in fact much less scared of it than some would like us to believe. In any case, Democrats who voted Yea this week failed to grasp a very basic reality of politics concisely summed up by Khanna’s colleague Pramila Jayapal: “However you vote on this bill, they’re going to use it against you, so it doesn’t really matter.”

Me? I didn’t consider voting for Biden in 2022-- not in the primary, not in the general-- and I sure have no intention of voting for him or any other conservatives for any office in 2024. Lesser evils don’t do it for me. So... what about Marianne Williamson? Is she going to make the jump? I;'m sure of it. And last night I asked her. This is what she told me:

Over 60 per cent of Democrats want to see someone other than Joe Biden running for the Democratic nomination. It shows great disrespect to our base of voters to so blatantly disregard that fact.

Voters want a choice, they want to hear different ideas and to know they have various options. That’s the Democratic process, and the Democratic Party should not be limiting those options by re-engineering the primary schedule.

The idea that the party gets to decide that the nominee will be Biden and everyone should just fall in line with that, is an insult to the voters of New Hampshire and an insult to democracy. This isn’t a time in American history for anyone to think that the same old same old is an adequate mode of problem-solving given the challenges that lie before us now. We need to make some serious changes - not simply incremental tweaks, but fundamental economic reforms - or very dangerous threats already on the horizon will be at our door. And they will make their way in.

Twenty per cent of Americans are doing pretty good in this country, but they're living on an island surrounded by a sea of economic despair.

If no one else is willing to stand up and say that, I will.