Well, I agree. In hindsight it's easy to say LBJ did a lot of great stuff. I'm glad he was POTUS even though he was a total ******* (maybe I'm not glad after thinking about Vietnam). If I have the choice up front though I'll vote for who I think is a good person who I generally agree with. And also policy is more important. Kasich may be a great guy and not corrupt (or maybe he is, I don't know), but I 'm still not voting for him over Clinton or Schumer. But, character still counts for something.

In the event there's someone who has already done a lot of great stuff, but shows some fault, then no I don't want to join the crowd with pitchforks. Is Schumer that guy? I don't really follow closely enough to say off hand.

This is encouraging on that front.

I get where you are coming from but any plan which requires a fundamental change to human nature is not a plan.

Sure, and that's fair, but it's also sort of the point. We would stomach, maybe even welcome Schumer sharing the same air as the Kochs and Ivanka if we got **** done -- if Democrats actually got anything out of it. Not worth dwelling on LBJ too much but he actually used his connections to big oil money and made unsavory deals to deliver stuff for Democrats. Back then voters had a quaint notion their public servants were meant to do stuff they wanted, and politicians took the threat and the incentive seriously. LBJ was probably ruthless and franly a little bit corrupt partly because of his personality but definitely because he was ambitious and wanted to succeed, and he bent the rules to deliver things to his voters. He networked with big money people because he saw it as a form of self-preservation but then saw part of the obligation of his role to deliver.

We don't seem to get any of that, but Schumer appears to be having fun. That's the infuriating thing: we're not getting things we want.

This is beyond an obvious point, but the reason Schumer can't get anything done isn't just that he lacks some sort of killer instinct, it's because the electorate gave him a GOP controlled Congress and White House to work with. There's a vicious cycle lurking in the background if you refuse to vote for Democratic politician's because They're All The Same and then you conclude that They're All The Same because they can't enact Democratic policies when the GOP controls everything.

It seems that Chuck Schumer is the winee and dinee in this situation. Kochs are in the LBJ position, even down to them both being oil money.

The Kochs were also guests, the host was a Washington Post editor. Democracy dies in darkness, indeed.

But the bolded is not really my point and Chuck Schumer's role as an important Democratic leader pre-dates 2016. Obviously *now* he's practically hamstrung.

My point hearkening back in history to Lincoln and LBJ is politicians politicians actually, for quite a long time, saw patronage and networking and leveraging their connections to elites as a mechanism to build the practical support to eventually deliver things back to their voters. Perhaps it's an overly romantic view, it surely didn't always play out in practice, but the point is that networking and socializing wasn't inherently parasitical. It was a symbiotic feedback loop -- politicians deeply feared being seen as ineffective, and so politicians gave concessions to the wealthy but then guys like LBJ leveraged their networks and connections to elites to hammer their opponents with it. LBJ built a political machine for a lot of reasons, surely self aggrandizement and ambition but the context and environment meant that he felt democratic support rested on delivering for his constituents and the people who voted for him. He build a political machine that included a lot of big business elites and admittedly corrupt and cutthroat realpolitik type deals but often to an eye toward advancing Democratic goals. Whether he did it out of the goodness of his heart (as I said, he seems to have been a genuine believer in the Social Gospel and had in him a certain sincere populism common among people who came of age during the Depression) or did it because of blind ambition -- who cares? He achieved a lot of good things! ldo he was responsible for many bad things too but you catch my drift. The point is Democrats shouldn't be *overly* concerned with the networking and fraternizing nor anyone's moral character above a certain baseline but instead simply stubbornly insist on having our agenda met.

Getting back to the contemporary era, then: it's really hard to draw a straight line between Democrats networking and partying with elites and any sort of political machinery that should be accompanying that. Well, frankly, the evidence is sort of the opposite, that Democrats leadership almost reflexively pivots to the center and grasps for bipartisanship, and seems to have almost disdain for its base -- it seems part and parcel of a political machinery meant to diminish the political power of its base. The variable that changed isn't "politicians are socializing and networking with elites," that's been true forever. It's that Democrats jumped ship to do the bidding of the elites.

So as I said, my problem isn't with Schumer rubbing shoulders with the rich and the greedy, it's that Schumer hasn't leveraged that those connections into any practical political things that I want to achieve.

That would be hilarious.

no

The GOP is definitely trying to do this but I don't think their success is guaranteed.

need a third party

1st party is right wing extremists
2nd party is the group above you describe
3rd party is progressives

Going to have a stupid internet disagreement and say it's LBJ and AINEC

Vietnam was awful. Obama's failing in Syria and failure to handle the Russian interference in any remotely decent way (combined with the Ukraine ****) will I think have the potential to be just as awful. Too early to tell for now, but we will see.

Still, the Civil Rights Act/VRA are so monumentally important (much more so than the ACA) that I think even considering Vietnam LBJ was more successful. Can you imagine trying to do anything on that grand of a scale today? Impossible.

This, and I also agree with everything DVaut1 has said on the topic.

chart from WaPo, re: Kennedy retiring, pretty interesting



The Marshall to Thomas jump makes me want to vomit. ****ing travesty.

It's a different version of Barry's 600k Wall Street speech. Just a really bad ****ing look.

Right. And to my point mostly borrowed from Robert Caro's 3 volume biography: Johnson was largely corrupt, a very unscrupulous political dealer, and totally and completely in bed with big oil. He became Master of the Senate with antics like almost putting the Federal Power Commission (the precursor to FERC) in front of a HUAC committee because he tried to regulate the gas industry. In short, he wasn't a nice guy.

But once he had a goal like getting the CRA/VRA passed, he set those same skills and his big political network to work on achieving it. And we can all look back and compare to Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and see how durable and critical that work was. Who was the better President after all? A morally repugnant big oil sycophant, or the incorruptible Harvard educated University of Chicago law school professor?

In the end, *both* spent plenty of time rubbing shoulders with and fellating elites. That's politics, it's how it goes sometimes. Good governing means building a coalition and sometimes having unflattering allies, even rich bozos. The critical distinction seems to be that LBJ saw it as part of his job to build a coalition of interests to dismantle and disarm his political opposition. The other side, like Barack Obama and modern Democrats, pay lip service to common-sense wisdom about the dangers of getting in bed with elites but quietly ran a party that does little meaningfully to stop it. And seems entirely servile to elite interests, rather than extracting any form of compromise. That's the thing that should upset us; not merely that they fraternize.

Unsurprisingly or not, the shameless ambitious self-dealer stood over some of the largest progressive legislative victories of the century. The other, largely considered quite virtuous, left behind a political system Donald Trump was able to inherit.

I'm not asking anyone to fully abandon their principles and surely both legacies have much more to examine. But what I'm asking is that we instead see politicians for what they are: stop trying to imbue them with our moral goals and virtues, and instead simply insistent they are effective achieving the things we want.

Th perception his voters were mercilessly self-interested is what led LBJ to be driven to maniacal tendencies to destroy his political opponents and see his will done -- he feared and respected the people that voted for him, and he thought he needed them to be powerful. *We* need to be the kind of people Chuck Schumer fears and respects. Sharing the same social space as pampered rich elites doesn't necessarily mean our goals are co-opted. They might be, but that fact alone isn't dispositive. It's easier to see Chuck Schumer as ineffectual because Democrats are going to struggle to achieve majority in the Senate in 2018; that 2010-2016 saw general erosion of our power there. That even when we had total control over power from 2008-2010, we weren't able to do much. That is the galling thing about Schumer, not how he spends his weekends.

I appreciate Barack Obama, don't get me wrong, but we should think critically about this. At the very least what a lot of the lip service and optics about not getting in bed with elites got us, truthfully. The idea isn't to do the opposite and build a coalition with finance and the extraction industry but simply to say Democrats can be entirely too focused on optics and virtues to the exclusion of a focus on practical matters.

I've been an Obama critic for taking health care industry money in the wake of his Presidency and I stand by that. These elite parties have much the same air. But by the same token, the problem here remains as much about practicalities as optics: Democrats are failing to beat back regressive right-wing control, and so charitable interpretations of Democratic behavior ring hollow anyway. Even if Chuck Schumer is just playing the game, he's losing anyway. At least when LBJ dealt with Texas oil money millionaires, he accumulated political power he used to push through the CRA and VRA and other Great Society programs. Chuck Schumer backslaps elites and does what with his influence, exactly?

100% agree.

Trump has horrible approval ratings and his own supporters say his tweets are one of his largest weaknesses

Keep covering the tweets; they are driving down his popularity

100% agree.

if there's one thing 2016 could teach us, it's that people hate hearing about politicians. The more people hear about trump, the less popular he is.

Disappointed would be a better way of putting it.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg apparently was quite friendly with Antonin Scalia. By all accounts, they had a much closer relationship than whatever relationship Schumer has with Ivanka and Jared or the Koch brothers. Do posters on this board believe that she compromised her ability to disagree with Scalia by socializing with him?

I assume not.

I don't remember if I posted these here, but I saw some of his global approval numbers the other day lol.

22% Worldwide average
39% US
53% Russia

Just another Russian coincidence concocted by the liberals to make Trump look bad I'm sure.

**** YOU 2016!

A long read about the Democratic candidates from the 1960s to the 1980s. The thread running through it is that what drove the white working class away from Democrats was its turn towards cultural liberalism with the embrace of civil rights. Candidates, like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, would win the white working class when they played down cultural liberalism regardless if they pushed economic populism or not. The exemplar of the failure of full throated liberalism economic and cultural being Jesse Jackson who failed to win over the white working class in spite of them being a keystone in his political rhetoric via economic populism and instead winning upper class whites.

https://agenda-blog.com/2017/07/03/p...working-class/

Haha nice! Go get 'em Meathead!

https://twitter.com/robreiner/status/881746971718856704