This is exactly how I feel. Every penny from them in donations is a penny less spent on R&D, lobbying or worse, GOP candidates.

Pretty short term grift though, won't work for long.

And the DemE is not glad-handing the FF industry and winking at us. It's the other way around.

lol @ thinking the DemE is grifting the fossil fuel companies

http://theweek.com/articles/790183/t...medium=twitter

burn it all down

Just support the candidates you like, not the party itself. Republicans that donate to the RNC are essentially seeing their donations go towards Trump's legal defense - not sure I'd be cool with that if I were a Republican and expected those donations to trickle down to vulnerable Republicans.

Pulling the financial breast from the DNC's mouth will teach a lesson in time.

Had Keith Ellison been DNC chair, we'd currently be dealing with someone credibly accused of spousal domestic abuse trying to lead opposition to a president credibly abused of sexual assault.

Oh well that's alright, then, lol.

Throwback to less than a year ago when some people still weren't sure why Perez stepping in over Ellison was anything other than an establishment rat ****ing.

I mean that is in fact the most important thing, but that's the most obvious false dichotomy ever.

There's a very subtle sort of political strategy question implicit there. I think the easiest heuristic would be to explain why we thought Hillary Clinton lost. Was it that Hillary Clinton actively offended people by being viewed as co-opted by corporate/military interests, seen as part of the establishment, seen as too interested in power and ambitious and unprincipled, and as such, literally drove sympathetic voters away? Or was the problem that Hillary Clinton was kind of milquetoast and too centrist and too much of a blank slate and she and the Democrats simply failed to inspire voters? You could take the more right-winger tact and say that Hillary was too much of a feminist or too engrossed in identity politics or moved too far to the left and again drove potentially sympathetic centrists to Trump.

That's subtly but kind of critically two different things, and you sometimes hear even the left kind of mix it up and interchangeably argue both (and of course, they could both be true that Hillary both actively offended some potential voters and failed to inspire others). But how the Democrats then proceed from there matters greatly and reading the electorate seems important.

If Hillary Clinton style politics actively offended people, AND the Democrats remain seen as too co-opted, too power hungry, too unprincipled or not aligned with the passions of the public writ large -- then it might be unwise to be more than anti-Trump. That's a critical 'AND' because HRC isn't on a ballot but perhaps she was emblematic of a deep Democratic brand problem that is not yet fixed.

If OTOH we think Hillary simply failed to inspire sympathetic voters who chose to stay home due to the Democrats failing to present any coherent alternative vision to Trumpism, then being a generic blank slate party that defines itself simply as opposition might be a bad idea.

I think the a compelling conclusion MIGHT be that the Democrats remain too divided, too co-opted, lack a clear vision, are juggling too diverse a coalition AND therefore a sort of blank-slate, blank-canvas, generic anti-Trump position might be the best option. Put simply, using simple examples: if we're angry Democrats remain the party that happily and cheerily votes for 800 billion dollar military spending authorizations and we think the public is looking for something else, what are we really trying to sell people on? Moving beyond blank-slate anti-Trumpism might be disastrous if we think the public dislikes Trump but might like mealy-mouthed milquetoast Third Way centrism even less, and professional Democrats can't move beyond that era of politics.

I'm on board that the Democrats need to embrace vibrant, clear leftist vision to inspire voters to build durable and lasting and systemic political changes, BUT if we can't build that consensus among the universe of people who we might be able to unify against Trump, then being generically anti-Trump and not much more could be effective. It's obviously nothing but a temporary kluge, it's kind of like going all-in on Russia conspiracies in that it's a super self-limiting strategy. But if we can't pull off something better, "be a generic anti-Trump vehicle" might be the least-worst play.

Well, speaking of false dichotomies, I think you might be setting one up there. I'm not sure there's much of a distinction between being seen as too establishment and failing to inspire people. If you look at the cohorts of voters Democrats need, it's the people who voted Obama and then Trump and it's the people who didn't vote at all. These people typically don't really have political philosophies and it's a mistake to call them "centrists" because it's a mistake to put them on the left-right political spectrum at all. Anyone with a coherent political worldview either voted Clinton last election or is never, ever voting Democrat. So anyway, a "business as usual, America is already great" message and candidate is toxic to these groups the Dems need, 2016 proved that.

Last election the Democrats lacked both an inspiring candidate and an inspiring message. I think correcting either one of them will be enough, but I will be nervous as hell if they go into the next campaign without either again.

This is probably selling the Democrats holistic problems a little short. If, as you write, the Democrats are dependent on a bunch of people who might not be coherent or consistent political actors (Obama --> Trump voters, or people who didn't vote last time) to build margins that can propel them to victory, then "just inspire them" is easier said than done. Inspire them with what, exactly? You have to know a lot or be pretty adept at reading the electorate to pull that off.

Personally, I acknowledge some of what you write: the Obama coalition (plus other non-voters who didn't vote for Obama either) are a diverse mosaic of people without a coherent worldview that you can easily activate, politically. It's sort of why I think Bernie and the left writ large have it correct: Democrats are paying for a generation or two of Third Way softcore right-wingerism politics in which voters they might otherwise win are just hopelessly confused. It's a long term debt we've been piling up. There's no simple, easy-to-understand ideological project for them to latch onto right now. We need to build and sustain that.

But OK, if you can't build a consensus to move in that direction by this November -- if the forces of professional technocrat/elite Democrats is too strong, the centrist Third Way Clinton style still too entrenched for instance. Or if the forces of social justice politics moving too quickly, causing anxious older and white Midwesterners to de-camp for Trump, for instance -- AND we think that style offended a critical mass of Obama --> Trump voters...

...then what to do but simply be anti-Trump?

In other words, if you don't know the mental state of the electorate, and we agree there's a lot of frothy confusion out there, what to do but simply stand generically opposed to the things we know they don't like that much (e.g., Trump, Congressional Republicans).

So I maintain it's not much of a false dichotomy. Although I acknowledge there's no formal distinction between being seen as too establishment and failing to inspire people. The point is that Democrats are either too dysfunctional or remain too co-opted, or perhaps voters are simply too incoherent to be easily inspired.

If anyone of those assumptions are true, then offer "inspiring candidate(s) and an inspiring message" is too difficult to effectively pull-off, we should (for now) defer to simply being generic anti-Trumpists.

I want to be clear about my personal politics:

1. I agree Democrats need to embrace vibrant, clear leftist vision to inspire voters to build durable and lasting and systemic political changes
but
2. I am a little skeptical the 2018 Democratic Party is prepared to do this

Put differently yet still, electoral political victories are downstream from movement building. The left hasn't built a fully functioning movement yet to effectively drive and control the Democratic Party, and so an effective temporary work-around might be to be a blank-slate empty-canvas No Trump Party until the left rebuilds a mass-movement political machine. I'm not so sure I buy it, but others have argued for a sort of politics where we obstruct for a few years while we run out the clock on old white baby boomers and they die off, leaving the electorate on much friendly terms for Democrats in years down the road. I think this a mistake, but I think it at least acknowledges if only haphazardly that the Democrats suffer from a somewhat difficult problem (namely that voters we might capture are confused and disinterested or behaving incoherently, and political movement building to direct their political behavior is long and costly) and so "inspire people to victory" remains a ways off, and we can only obstruct and stand-opposed to the right. For now.

I guess instead of "inspiring candidate" I should just have written "likeable candidate". Someone with some personality and appeal who voters can relate to, not another robotic establishment bureaucrat or flat out unlikable person. That is, I think a mostly anti-Trump message would get the job done in the hands of Obama or Biden, but maybe not in the hands of John Kerry. Also, and I'm guessing you agree with this, the anti-Trump message needs to be that he's a rich blowhard con-artist who is selling out the working class, not RussiaRussiaRussia or abolish ICE or other things that animate Democrats but have no impact on people's day to day lives.

Man it wasn't that long ago people on the left were bum rushing town halls all over America after Republicans threatened to take away their health care. Figuring out how to motivate casual voters isn't hard.

The Democrats need to hire their version of Frank Luntz. Or pay him more than the Republicans do. I swear their wording on everything is suboptimal.

This x1000.

Their wording and their branding... and they also struggle to use the best arguments at their disposal on a lot of issues.

They don't want to win. Keep in mind that they benefit from GOP policies too.

lol

Again, conservatives assuming no one has principles because they don't have principles.

No, he's right. A large number of centrist dems would rather lose with moderation than win with egalitarianism.

Cory Booker:

--supports charter schools which are siphoning away taxpayer dollars to private schools
--has worked very closely with the private health industry
--spoiler alert: he WON'T support single payer or a significant raise in the minimum wage if he ever actually has the power to do these things.

In a 1v1 against Trump, yes. For the primary, hell no.

Of course I don't expect the Democratic Party to support a strike of ENSLAVED prison workers in the United States. But I would expect any party that actually supports human rights to do so.

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