The Dems Must Define Themselves As A Party Fighting For Justice... Or Just A Lesser Evil Than Trump

Want more liberal policies? Elect more progressives-- an idea of Joe Manchin's illustrated by Nancy Ohanian

Democrats are delusion and sleepwalking into a gigantic catastrophe. They purposefully suck so bad as a party that they deserve it-- but do the rest of us deserve the alternative? After Obama turned the party machinery into a Biden election tool during the primaries, I warned over and over that Biden would be the second worse president in contemporary history. I haven't changed my mind. Let's face it, Biden is playing checkers, and the GOP is kickboxing. I hope the disaster in Virginia on Tuesday will wake them up... but I know it won't and I know they will continue down the path to electoral obliteration in 2022.

Do you know who Sean Patrick Maloney is? Well, he's a lot of things but the two I want to point out is that he's a political coward with a low "F" from ProgressivePunch. There are just 7 corrupt conservative DINOs with more reactionary voting records than Maloney (Henry Cuellar, Jim Costa, Jared Golden, Josh Gottheimer, Abigail Spanberger, Scott Peters and Stephanie Murphy) but they made him head of the DCCC anyway. The good news is that he's going to resign next week, so he can focus all his energies on running against Zephyr Teachout for New York Attorney General.

Pete Aguilar, high

So that's good, right? Well... yes and no. It's certainly good that he will be gone from the DCCC. It's terrible that they managed to find someone even worse to replace him with, a corrupt, drunken, coke head-- and a Republican with a "D" next to his name. He also scored an "F" from ProgressivePunch. Pete Aguilar is unfit to lead, so the Democratic Party is about to give him a top leadership position; he's already vice chair of the party caucus or something like that. It's almost as though they want to lose!

Yesterday a member of Congress called me to vent about what a shitty campaign McAuliffe is running-- all negative about Trump-- and how badly it seems to be backfiring on him now. I asked him about how bad a choice he thinks Aguilar will be and all he said was that the chair of the DCCC gets to spend-- in conjunction with Pelosi-- a quarter billion in the cycle so they will never give the job to a progressive. That got him going: "For 150 years now, there has been a coherent political platform called populism, progressivism, liberalism, socialism-- whatever you want to call it. Basically, income/wealth redistribution, dissolving concentrations of money and power, social equality, and Enlightenment approaches to analyzing and ameliorating social problems. Maybe if these jackasses had the courage of those convictions, and bothered to explain them on a regular basis, we wouldn’t have these problems. As to Trump, it just shows how utterly feckless they are that they haven’t flushed the whole GOP down the toilet because of him, already. The Access Hollywood recording was the worst thing that ever happened to a presidential candidate, it happened 32 days before the election when he was running against a woman, and they still couldn’t beat him. The Dumbocratic Party-- always up for a fight... with itself."

On Friday I spoke with a different member and she was pissed off about how the Build Back Better Act had been shrinking into nothing. She was particularly fuming about paid family and medical leave and predicted that just losing that alone would cost the Democrats at least a dozen seats. She said Biden promised the caucus he would keep trying to pass it... and he didn't persuade her he would ever accomplish it-- nor robust action against the Climate Crisis or lower prescription drug prices, not to mention expanding Medicare too include dental insurance or fair taxation. She told me that the DCCC is going to walk into the midterms with lots of money to waste on messaging about boogey man Trump and a fascist takeover. I'm not saying the portrayal is inaccurate but she worries it won't be enough to hold the House majority. She told me everyone she knows shudders at the thought of a sycophant like McCarthy being speaker.

Yesterday Blue Tent's David Callahan wrote in his newsletter that "there's

been no sign of complacency among Democratic donors, including small donors. Quite the contrary. Beyond all the money flowing into the party committees, other evidence that donors remain on high alert has come recently from California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom raised more than $70 million to fight a recall effort, and from Virginia, where Terry McAuliffe has raised at least $45 million for his gubernatorial race. In both contests, Democrats have offered up a gusher of donations in the face of the possibility that a Trumpist candidate could win power in a key state. I don’t find this giving surprising. People are deeply scared of an authoritarian GOP and growing threats to our democracy. As long as this fear remains, I expect a historic river of cash to keep flowing to Democratic electoral groups and progressive nonprofits. This money won’t lift the morale of key voting groups in the Democratic coalition-- that’s up to Biden and Congress-- but it will at least ensure that the left has the resources it needs to compete for power."

Let's see how that gets discussed starting Wednesday as people start analyzing what went wrong in Virginia.