Wasserman Schultz

I read all the responses.

Google it Max. I told you who I voted for. Look it up, if your capable.

You called one candidate an "over the hill politician". Then you said you voted for a candidate who is one year younger.

I found that a little funny. No need for you to get bent out of shape.

If it's any consolation, I got the point you were making.

Me too. Everybody did, but only the sane will acknowledge it.

Except you know I would hang myself before I would vote for Trump. So who was trying to be funny?

.... and yet you still managed to get Trump elected. Go figure.

Exalted specimen of perfection. I will do your laundry.

Maybe allowing the Democratic and Republican National Committees to have absolute control over party rules and allowing the individual states to decide who gets to participate in primaries wasn't such a good idea either. Having open primaries in some states but not in others really complicates political strategy. Sort of like allowing the DH in baseball. The 'super delegate' issue in the DNC wouldn't have looked nearly as bad had the Republicans had the same rule in effect. And watching the rise of Trump I'll bet there were senior RNC staffers who wished they had similar oversight by the party establishment.

If the DNC hadn't cheated for Hillary, Trump would not be in office.

This is long. Oh, well

Truth and Criticism Rolls off of Trump
This is the problem: these media outlets refuse to actually empathize with his supporters in the sense of attempting to inhabit their subject positions. The liberal academic response to Trump’s election has been to promote books like Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in the Their Own Land. While this is hardly the fault of Hochschild, the tendency among academics and liberal intellectuals has been to misread her analysis of empathy as an injunction to communicate with Trump supporters, effectively convincing them that they have something like false consciousness. An alternative has been to anoint J. D. Vance, author of the memoir Hillbilly Elegy, as the pope of the rustbelt. But rather than actually trying to empathize with Trump’s base, liberal cosmopolitans — precisely those figures they most detest — read these texts as novelties, exoticizing their subjects and refusing to understand the link between Trump’s populist strategies and his consistent support in large sections of the country.
It is not despite Trump’s lies that his supporters back him; we might go so far as to say it is because of them. What Trump’s campaign has done in a matter of months is remarkable. The discourse of “fake news” emerged following the alleged Russian hacking scandal, in which dubious headlines were widely distributed on social media, frequently originating from Russian sources. This was of course nothing new. Clickbait from the likes of Infowars and Breitbart was an admitted source of information for Trump, whether it was his insistence that Obama was not an American citizen or his claims that Muslims in New York cheered the demolition of the Twin Towers on 9/11. But here’s what’s so remarkable: within weeks of the term “fake news” entering into popular usage, Trump’s camp had already repackaged the term as the deceitful strategy of his adversaries. In other words, if the very concept was devised to describe potential Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, he’s completely transformed its meaning.
Now “fake news” is primarily used to describe any media reports Trump doesn’t like. When Democrats hear his bizarre rants against the media, they dismiss him as an irritable buffoon who isn’t competent to govern. Their critique is largely couched in the framework of a rule-bound formalism tied to the Democrats’ technocratic approach to politics. For the Democrats, the problem isn’t that the DNC is rigid, anti-democratic, and out-of-touch; it’s that Russians may’ve hacked our election. It’s not that Jeff Sessions is a troglodyte racist; it’s that he lied under oath. The official opposition appears more concerned with preserving some degree of decorum, not least of which is a presumed sanctity of the office, than they do with substantive political critiques of the Trumpist project. Indeed, there is nowhere for workers to turn at this point but into the arms of the populist wing of the GOP. Hillary Clinton disdainfully refused to visit union halls in key battleground states, seemingly unworried about the widespread perception that she was closer to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan than the UAW or AFSCME.
Trump knows exactly what he’s doing when he violates decorum, and this is where Democrats and the corporate media miss the point. When NPR interviewed a few Trump supporters following the most recent press conference, a 69 year-old Mississippi resident’s response was representative: “I’m sick of them making up stories. You know, we’re intelligent people. We can make up our own mind on whether they’re telling the truth.” So what’s going on? In the press conference, Trump was quite clear: “The people get it [but] much of the media doesn’t get it.” Note the opposition of “people” to “media.” He continued, “Unfortunately, much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests and for those profiting off a very, very obviously broken system. The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people.”

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Even if Trump is consistently caught fabricating various facts and statistics, his supporters view fact-construction as occurring in a field of power organized between two poles. On the one hand, “the people” are aligned with their representative Trump; on the other, “special interests” associated with major urban centers and most of the corporate media, the Democratic Party, and the establishment corners of the GOP continue to lie to “the people” in order to retain control. Given the mendacious presidencies of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as the apparent insincerity of Democratic candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, this isn’t such a stretch. When a party that purports to represent the American working class spends decades championing unbridled trade liberalization, the charterization of the public school system, and the destruction of the social safety net, it’s no wonder that critics of the status quo don’t look to Democrats for an alternative. Hillary Clinton represented a cosmopolitan, city-dwelling business class seemingly more interested in giving speeches on Wall Street than meeting with unions in key battleground states. Her very comportment screamed elite and aloof, and the Democrats weren’t deceiving anybody.
Who Are “The People?”

Meanwhile, Trump continued to take aim at the media, accusing them of distorting the truth. “But we’re not going to let it happen,” he remarked, “because I’m here again, to take my message straight to the people.” Trump would bypass the established system, interpellating “the people” in the process. This is precisely the project that political theorist Ernesto Laclau described as populism. Populist strategy relies on what he called a “double articulation.” First and foremost, populists construct a discourse around an antagonism between “the people” and what, borrowing from Poulantzas, he called “the power bloc.”[1] As Trump’s team would have it, this group includes Democrats and establishment Republicans, academics and cosmopolitan intellectuals, Wall Street, and the corporate media, all coming together in the figure of “the swamp.” The next day he repeated the refrain, tweeting, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing ‪@nytimes, ‪@NBCNews, ‪@ABC, ‪@CBS, ‪@CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
“The people” isn’t equivalent to the category “voters” or “Americans.” Note Trump’s consistent strategy of denationalizing anybody who might oppose him. Obama is the most notorious example, of course, with his exclusion from “the people” through repeated allegations that his birth certificate was forged. Clinton is excluded by virtue of her presumed criminality. Her use of a private email server was no less secure than Trump’s holding of top secret meetings in the Mar-a-Lago dining room, but by repeatedly asserting that her actions were “crooked” and insisting that we — again, interpellating “the people” — “lock her up,” she too was excluded from this category.
But the move is of course not limited to politicians. Entire categories are expelled from “the people” by rhetorically stripping them of their membership in the nation. This is why nationalism is so essential to Trumpism: the entire enterprise revolves around protecting the rightful space of the “the people,” which is of course an imagined national territory. If “the people” is read as equivalent to the nation, or at least occupying its territorial space, the project of “making America great again” requires expelling “enemies of the people” from this territory. (Despite repeatedly using this phrase, Trump does not appear aware of its historical ties to Stalin.) Muslims are the most obvious example, collectively represented as constituting a monolithic terrorist threat to the domestic sphere. From his campaign promise of a Muslim ban through the travel ban imposed on seven predominately Muslim nationalities, this is an active project of protecting a sanctified private life from imagined violent encroachment. Black crime and Black Lives Matter are likewise assimilated into a uniform figure, represented as an attack on police, who (pace Giuliani & co.) are themselves represented as a key preserve of American national power and as defenders of “the people” against domestic threats. This takes on spatial significance when Trump promises “the people” he will protect “our inner cities,” a phrase he deploys regularly, apparently unaware that city centers have seen a secular decline in violent crime since the turn of the millennium. Latinx are stripped of their membership in the nation, their ethno-racial identities transmuted into (inter)national ones. Trump’s attack on a Latino judge in Chicago made this quite clear: Latinx residents are to be associated with Mexico and Central America; the courtroom is an inviolable national space to be protected from this threat. Likewise, the shop floor must be fortified against the inauspicious encroachment of cheap labor from the South.
And what about queer and trans people? They pose a threat to national vitality on two levels. Most obviously we might understand this homophobia as a pro-natal jingoism, preserving the twin sacred spaces of the bedroom and the bathroom from queer and trans people, respectively. But we might also think of this bigotry as an obsession with American masculinity. If male breadwinners’ dignity and self-perceptions of masculinity were wounded as the rustbelt deindustrialized and as wages stagnated both absolutely and in relation to productivity, revivalist nationalism (“Make America Great Again”) allowed the deliberate articulation of “the people’s” collective feelings of self-worth to household economic fortunes. What Trump did for the people he did for the nation, for both of whom he promises to safeguard the sacred space of the home. In every case, these groups are denigrated not for their inherent inferiority (racism), but for the way they threaten a national space (nationalism), which in turn threatens household interests (class).
Capitalist Anti-Capitalism

This is how Trump has consciously tried to resolve “the people”/power bloc antagonism, and quite successfully, I must add. As his critics continue to wring their hands over his falsehoods, certain that the latest Washington Post exposé will unmask him to his base, his reinscription of “fake news” as an elitist assault on “the people” has only gained him support. But Laclau wrote of populism as a double articulation. If the popular-democratic contradiction is discursively resolved, this is articulated to a second contradiction: class struggle. All political programs, Laclau insists, serve objective class interests. The key right-populist move is to resolve the popular-democratic contradiction without threatening the pockets of capital. And this is precisely what Trump has done. By the end of February, Bank of America stocks were up more than 40 percent from Election Day, with Goldman Sachs up 36 percent and Wells Fargo up 27 percent.
At the mid-February press conference, Trump declared, “We’ve issued a game-changing new rule that says for each one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated. Makes sense. Nobody’s ever seen regulations like we have.” Health, safety, environmental, and other workplace regulations are represented as “job killing” restrictions deviously implemented by representatives of the power bloc. In articulating the populist discourse of “the people” to the immediate interests of big capital, Trump has pulled off what the German historian Arthur Rosenberg called “a manoeuvre notoriously characteristic of populist nationalisms worldwide — namely, instigating a movement that serves the interests of big capital but appears anti-capitalist at public meetings.”[2]
If we might think of a certain collective ire as resulting from both the 2008 crisis and from a more prolonged tendency toward deindustrialization, Trump’s genius has been to redirect it from capital to the state, and more specifically, toward the figure of the professional politician. “I can’t believe I’m saying I’m a politician, but I guess that’s what I am now,” Trump told the press corps. Collectively these politicians comprise “the swamp,” working with their media henchmen against the collective interests of “the people.” He can thus nominate an Exxon CEO for Secretary of State without upsetting his resolution of the popular-democratic contradiction, as he’s defined the problem as emanating from state administrators rather than capital. Tillerson is an “outsider” in this conception. One appointment after another, from Betsy DeVos to the failed nomination of Andrew Puzder, abets big capital, without appearing to threaten the terms of Trump’s populist arrangement.
Given this suturing of “the people” to the interests of big capital, the liberal strategy of simply exposing Trump’s lies, pointing to his preposterously unscripted oratory, and hoping to convey some sort of “truth” as antidote to his base misses the point. For even if we were to win them over on this count — and we won’t, but even if we were — the left has no alternative hegemonic project in which it might incorporate them. From the Clintons through Obama, the interests of workers have been disarticulated from any populist project, with Democrats primarily running in a mode negatively defined: Obama wasn’t W, and Clinton wasn’t a fascist. But what is the positive project of the Democratic Party? The very fact that it remains unclear whether any of the Republican contenders were closer to Wall Street than Clinton, or whether the latest wave of deportations is of Trump’s innovation or is a holdover from Obama’s policies, leaves a vast vacuum gaping from the center-right to the far left.
Indeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to pin some of the most egregious moments of deregulation, trade liberalization, and welfare retrenchment on the Democrats. We can envision populist Republicans demanding that a nominee be immediately ushered into office on behalf of “the people,” but such an utterance from a Democrat would be unthinkable. In shutting down Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Republican politicians represented themselves as a grassroots movement; but when Democrats do likewise, they come off as inept, merely going through the motions. As Christian Parenti put it recently (2016) in a brilliant analysis of Trump’s use of language, “Ultimately, the Democratic establishment brought this loss on themselves. They spurned and tried to sabotage Bernie Sanders and his class message.[3] Trump took the Bernie-style populism, emptied it of real class politics, reduced it to a jumble of affective associations, and used it to beat-up the smug liberals of the professional managerial class. It worked.” Without the Clintonism, there would be no Trumpism; without Corey Booker and Arne Duncan, there would be no Betsy DeVos.
Trumpism as Direct Consequence of Clintonism

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff (2016) gets the matter exactly wrong when he suggests that Democrats simply need to “give up identity politics,” by which he explicitly means “women’s issues, black issues, Latino issues.” These are “human issues,” he insists, taking the #AllLivesMatter line. Of course when he implores Democrats to address “poor whites” in the following sentence, he pretends that this doesn’t constitute precisely the sort of identity politics he had just rejected. Whites in his account constitute universal subjects. Bill Clinton should be the model, Lakoff insists, as he “oozed empathy.” In other words, the content of the politics is irrelevant to his strategy; the idea is to engage in a project of hegemony as deception.[4]
As he proceeds, he calls for Democrats to focus on “values” rather than “facts” and for unions to go on the offensive, pretending to know nothing about sixty years of business unionism, with comprador bureaucrats aligned with a party that has actively undermined working class interests since at least the 1970s. While Lakoff may understand why Trump’s rhetoric is effective, he hasn’t a clue what might be effective in riposte. Trump’s rise isn’t solely attributable to his particular brand of charistmatic authority. Trumpism is the direct consequence of Clintonism, and as such, to conceive of Clintonism as a resurgent strategy for the left at this point is to willfully ignore a quarter century of partisan politics in this county.
When the purportedly left-wing alternative hollows itself out to the point where we can no longer be certain that its chief politicians weren’t key players in bringing about the present crisis, we have nothing left to which we can win Trump supporters over. Even if they were to realize that the guy is a capitalist Judas goat, where else would we send them? To quote the late anthropologist William Roseberry, the point of hegemonic language is not to solidify a shared ideology, but instead to construct “a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination.”[5] There’s nothing in the Democratic program that even approaches this goal, and indeed, the party has actively undermined workers, people of color, queer and trans people, and women since before I was born. Carter brought us Reagan, Clinton brought us W, and Obama brought us Trump. Until Trump’s liberal critics accept this fact, they’ll either continue their righteous denunciations of his indecorous transgressions, or worse, simply repurpose his strategy for a hypothetical left divorced from the working class à la Lakoff.
This piece was originally published in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology

The Democratic party is undermining Bernie Sanders-style candidates
Jamie Peck

Since losing the presidency to a Cheeto-hued reality TV host, the Democratic party’s leadership has made it clear that it would rather keep losing than entertain even the slightest whiff of New Deal style social democracy.

The Bernie Sanders wing might bring grassroots energy and – if the polls are to be believed – popular ideas, but their redistributive policies pose too much of a threat to the party’s big donors to ever be allowed on the agenda.

Even a symbolic victory cedes too much to those youthful, unwashed hordes who believe healthcare and education are human rights and not extravagant luxuries, as we saw when the Democratic establishment recruited Tom Perez to defeat the electorate-backed progressive Keith Ellison for DNC chair.

The Democrats demonstrated this once more this week when, in a special election triggered by Trump’s tapping of Joe Pompeo for CIA director, a Berniecrat named James Thompson came painfully close to winning a Kansas Congressional seat that had been red for over two decades, and his party didn’t even try to help him.

If Thompson’s picture is not on the Wikipedia page for “left-wing populism,” it really should be. Following a difficult upbringing during which he was homeless for a time, he joined the Army and attended college on the GI bill. He went on to graduate from Wichita State University and Washburn University before going into practice as a civil rights lawyer. He owns guns and looks natural in a trucker hat.

In a Reddit AMA, Thompson said he was “inspired to run by Bernie” and talked about “progressive values” like universal healthcare, education, and a $15/hour minimum wage. He also spoke in favor of taxing and legalizing marijuana, regulating Wall Street and overturning Citizens United. It’s no surprise he received the endorsement of Our Revolution, the progressive political action organization spun out of Sanders’ candidacy.

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After beating an establishment Democrat in the primary, Thompson promised to take on Trump and the Republicans, as well as the state’s unpopular Republican governor Sam Brownback and Kansas-headquartered oligarchs the Koch brothers.

In one campaign ad, Thompson shoots an AR-15 rifle at a target before delivering a broad, class-based appeal: “People of all colors, all races, all religions, they want the basic same thing … they want to be able to provide for their family, provide a good education for their kids. We’ve got to get back to this country being about the working class family.”

While his candidacy initially seemed like a long shot in a district that had re-elected Pompeo just last year with 60.7% of the vote, in the weeks before the election, the race grew unexpectedly close.

This led to a sudden infusion of cash from the National Republican Congressional Committee to Thompson’s opponent Ron Estes, who in the end raised $459,000, $130,000 of it from the NRCC. He also received massive donations from representatives of big business and help from such national figures as Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, and the president himself, who tweeted about the race.

Estes spent much of his money on TV attack ads, like the one that claimed Thompson supports using tax dollars to fund late term abortions, as well as abortions performed because parents don’t like the gender of their baby.

Given our current political climate, you’d think the Democrats would have jumped at the chance to take back a Congressional seat and demonstrate opposition to Trump, but you’d be wrong. While Thompson managed to raise $292,000 without his party’s help, 95% of which came from individuals, neither the DNC, DCCC, nor even the Kansas Democratic Party would help him grow that total in any substantial way. His campaign requested $20,000 from the state Democratic Party and was denied.

They later relented and gave him $3,000. (According to the FEC, the Party had about $145,000 on hand.) The national Democratic Party gave him nothing until the day before the election, when it graced him with some live calls and robo-calls. He lost by seven percentage points.

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In an interview with The Washington Post, Perez confirmed the DNC would not be giving Thompson a dime. “We can make progress in Kansas,” he said. “There are thousands of elections every year, though. Can we invest in all of them? That would require a major increase in funds.” Fact check: the DNC has a fund just for Congressional elections, of which there are just ten this year.

Contrast this with what Perez said just a few months earlier when he promised “a 50-state strategy” complete with “rural outreach and organizers in every zip code.” In a post-victory interview with NPR, he specifically name checked Kansas as a place Democrats could win. Wither the sudden about face?

In defending their decision, party mouthpieces have taken the absurd line that giving Thompson money would have actually hurt his chances of winning, because then everyone would have known he’s a Democrat, and Kansans hate Democrats. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate these are the same people who keep saying the party doesn’t need a new direction.)

“You do not get to the single digits in a district like this if you’re a nationalized Democrat,” DCCC communications director Meredith Kelly told The Huffington Post. “End of story. That’s just the way it is. There are just certain races where it is not helpful to be attached to the national D.C. Democrats.” End of story, idiot.

Nobody must have told Kelly that Thompson was already attached to the “national DC Democrats” by virtue of being in their party, a fact Estes was happy to exploit in an attack ad that showed him waist deep in a literal swamp he hoped to drain.

“The liberals are trying to steal this election by supporting a Bernie Sanders backed lawyer, because they know he will vote how Nancy Pelosi tells him to,” he claimed. Seems Thompson got all the bad parts of being a Democrat this time around, and none of the good ones.

One person the party does not think will be hurt by their help is Jon Ossoff, who is running in a similarly red, but much wealthier, district in Georgia. To date, the DNC has raised some $8.3m for him and has committed to sending nine field staffers to organize on-the-ground efforts.

Although he is young, he’s an acolyte of the Democratic establishment, having worked for Representatives John Lewis and Hank Johnson, and he endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary. He went to Georgetown followed by the London School of Economics and speaks fluent French. He has the support of several Hollywood celebrities.

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Democrats think Ossoff is just the guy to bring his affluent suburban district back into the fold. (Clearly, losing a national election was not enough to reverse course on that most doomed of 2016 strategies: trading blue collar whites for wealthy, suburban ones.)

Georgia Democratic Party spokesman Michael Smith said this is the state organization’s chance to “deliver the White House its first electoral defeat.” Liberal bloggers are wetting their pants over this “weather vane” of early Trump backlash. It’s like Thompson’s campaign never even happened.

By refusing to fund the campaigns of anyone but centrist, establishment shills, the Democratic Party aims to make the Berniecrats’ lack of political viability a self-fulfilling prophecy: starve their campaigns of resources so they can’t win, then point to said losses as examples of why they can’t win.

If that means a few more red seats in Congress, so be it. The more they do this, though, the less of Bernie’s “political revolution” will be absorbed by the Democratic Party and the more will go shooting off into third parties and direct action.

Feel free to keep eating your own, Democrats. At this rate, we’ll have a socialist party in no time.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/13/progressive-democratic-candidates-james-thompson-loss

For people with tv's.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-nancy-pelosi-just-got-a-challenger-and-1493224950-htmlstory.html

San Francisco attorney Stephen R. Jaffe is a lifelong Democrat and he intends to do what no Democrat has been able to do so far: make it to a runoff election against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Jaffe, 71, is an employment attorney who became a volunteer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign last year.

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FOR THE RECORD

1:08 p.m.: A previous version of this post misstated Jaffe's age as 72.

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"I was a pretty hard-core Bernie supporter," said Jaffe, who gave money to the campaign and volunteered during the Nevada caucuses. He was one of two attorneys who filed for an injunction on behalf of Sanders supporters in the California primary, requesting "re-votes" and an extension of the voter registration deadline. (The request was denied.)

Jaffe said he was "devastated" by Sanders' loss to Hillary Clinton in the primary season and that Sanders, in part, inspired him to run. He says he supports single-payer healthcare and criticized Pelosi for raising money from corporations and special interests.

Pelosi, the highest-ranking Democrat in the House, has never faced a serious challenger on the left in her liberal San Francisco district. Preston Picus, another Sanders supporter who ran as a no-party-preference candidate, came the closest when he received 19% of the vote in November, according to the California Target Book.

"I know that Ms. Pelosi's strategy has been to essentially ignore anyone who has challenged her, but I anticipate she'll have a more difficult time doing that with my candidacy," Jaffe said in an interview. He thinks if local, progressive activists can propel him to a runoff with Pelosi, he'll have a "quite realistic chance" of winning.

"There's a rumbling, a wave of activism here by people who have really never stepped forward before."

OK, then!

This is the best news I've heard in a long time.

The establishment will likely seek to sandbag him.

Assuredly, but I'm hoping that the growing number of independents and progressives will begin to overcome the establishment. One can hope.