Donna Brazile Shows How The Democratic Party Establishment Has No Respect For Democracy

Much has been written accurately demonstrating the authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump, but a consequence of our two-party system is that far too many people ignore a similar lack of respect for democracy by leaders of the Democratic Party. Donna Brazile showed how the Democratic Party rigged the nomination for Hillary Clinton in a book last fall. In recent statements she inadvertently adds additional evidence of the lack of respect for democracy among the Democratic leadership.

The Democratic Party recently voted to reduce the power of superdelegates by not allowing them to vote on the first ballot as long as the nomination was contested. The real benefit of this is that it it will probably eliminate the tendency of the news media to include superdelegates in their counts early in the nomination process. In 2016 this helped Clinton tremendously, when added to the other mechanisms used by the party to essentially rig the nomination for her, by having counts showing her substantially ahead of Sanders. This played into her strategy of making her nomination appear to be inevitable. Superdelegates will still be able to vote on other matters, such as convention rules, enabling them to play a major role should there be a contested convention even prior to a hypothetical second ballot.

Donna Brazile reminded us that the Democratic Party leadership has many other ways of getting the results they want when she tweeted: “Democrats voted to removed automatic delegates from the first round of voting. But we still have seats at the table. We are still in the room and very much capable of setting the menu.” It is rather shocking that she had no reluctance to admit this, countering the desires of Tom Perez to at least give the illusion that the Democratic Party’s nomination process is fair and honest.

Of course Brazile is correct, with the party using methods as such front-loading southern states, along with superdelegates, to increase the chances that a more moderate, ideally southern, candidate would be chosen. The party greatly increased their actions to hand Clinton the nomination in 2016 with tactics including limiting debates, the deal described in Brazile’s book to essentially give Clinton control of the party, changing fund raising rules during the campaign to help Clinton, making it harder for Sanders supporters to vote in some states, and Harry Reid’s games in Nevada. The party establishment will continue to be able to limit democracy by limiting our choices.

Brazile went further in showing contempt for democracy in an op-ed today in USA Today. I do not believe it is a stretch to assume that this represents the attitudes of others in the party establishment. Brazile complained about the loss of her power, writing as if she and other superdelegates are entitled to decide the nominees and override the decisions of the voters:

According to the new rules, we superdelegates won’t be able to vote on the first ballot at the convention. Or on any ballot, unless there’s a tie or some other sort of deadlock in the process.

So, we superdelegates are now what? Merely the mechanism you default to in case of a tie? Great. I’ve fought for the Democratic Party my entire life, and now I’m one notch above a coin toss.

She argued that the “party faithful” deserve their power to override the decisions of elected delegates for the work they have put into the party, failing to understand that in a democracy power should go to those who receive the votes. She claimed that, “the superdelegates aren’t the infamous ‘smoke-filled room’ full of ‘old white men’ deciding the fate of everybody else.” Having greater racial and gender diversity does not change the fact that having decisions made by the superdelegates are just as undemocratic as the smoke-filled rooms. She argues that “I earned my place at this table,” but in a democracy the table should be made up of those who have been elected to be there.

It would be different if we had a multi-party democracy, or if we were talking about a minor party. I would not mind if those who have built the Libertarian Party limited their nominees to those who have a roughly libertarian philosophy as that would not limit our overall choices. However, in the current duopoly, the system is rigged so that the either the Democratic or Republican Party nominee will win virtually all elections. Supporters of the major parties certainly make that point clear when they insist that this is the case and try to guilt us into voting for their candidates.

They don’t even allow other parties to participate in debates, with participation controlled by the Commission on Presidential Debates, controlled by the Democratic and Republican Parties. As a result, the two-party duopoly limits views which are considered. The parties essentially differ on reproductive rights, some differences in taxation rates, and on how much is spent on social programs. The elections rarely offer a choice on matters such as continuing our state of perpetual warfare, mass surveillance, or the drug war and mass incarceration.

The Democratic Party remains stuck in the past, seeing current elections as filtered by the 1972 loss by George McGovern. For Democrats to say that they should not nominate a candidate of the left because McGovern lost badly back in 1972 would be like Republicans saying they should not nominate a conservative because Barry Goldwater lost badly in 1964.

A better parallel for Democrats to think about would be fifty years ago when the party leadership rigged the nomination for Hubert Humphrey, instead of allowing an anti-war candidate supported by the party’s base to be the nominee. This resulted in the Democrats losing to Richard Nixon, comparable to how the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump after the party leadership rigged the nomination for pro-war candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Our most realistic chance of having a real choice in elections is to have the ability for candidates outside of the system to have a fair shot at the major party nominations. It is not fair for Democrats to both support a system which only allows those they consider to be true Democrats to run, and to simultaneously support a system which intentionally makes it extraordinarily difficult for outsider candidates to win outside of the two-party system.

The reality is that the rules changes by the Democratic Party were far too limited. Superdelegates should be entirely abolished. Our entire electoral system also needs to be overhauled, included rank-choice voting and proportional representation. These are necessary so that people like Donna Brazile can no longer set the entire menu of which people we can vote for and which issues are considered during elections.

DNC Votes To Reform Party And Apologizes For Past Sins (A Fake News Fantasy)

The Democratic National Committee met in Chicago, with the most controversial matter being a vote to reduce the power of superdelegates. Rather than approving a weak compromise measure which would prevent superdelegates from voting on the first ballot, Democrats decided that a party which calls themselves Democrats must embrace democracy, and voted to totally eliminate superdelegates.

Democrats went to enact rules to prevent the abuses of 2016, including giving Hillary Clinton effective control of the party  before the primaries began, limitations on debates, and front loading of southern states in an attempt to get a more conservative presidential candidate. Delegates realized that their failure to recognize that it is no longer 1972 has led to serious losses by Democrats over the past decade. One imaginary rational Democratic leader explained, “Saying Democrats shouldn’t nominate someone on the left because McGovern lost badly in 1972 is like saying Republicans shouldn’t nominate conservatives because Goldwater lost badly in 1964.”

Democrats also showed remorse for how Bill Clinton moved the country to the right, and for nominating a corrupt warmonger in 2016. Democrats voted to vacate both of the victories by Bill Clinton and the nomination of Hillary Clinton in 2016. The record books now showed that the United States had a Republican president from 1993 to 2001 and that there was no Democratic candidate for president in 2016. The party also enacted new ethics rules to chastise politicians who use elected office for personal financial gain to the degree practiced by the Clintons, and recommended the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate their crimes.

Besides altering their position on government corruption, Democrats issued statements supporting an end of big money influence over politics, ending our state of perpetual warfare, ending mass surveillance, and ending the drug war.

It was at this point that I awoke from this dream.

Psychiatrists Debate Speaking Out On Donald Trump’s Mental Health

The Goldwater Rule has received considerable attention this year with the election of Donald Trump. The rule was put into place to dissuade psychiatrists from talking about the mental health of politicians without actually doing an exam after some had speculated about Barry Goldwater’s mental health.  As I noted in July, the American Psychoanalytic Association has released an emailed statement freeing its members to give opinions on the mental state of Donald Trump. The controversy has continued with the publication of a book entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.

The New England Journal of Medicine has an article by a psychiatrist, Claire Pouncey, resonding to criticism of the book and making an argument for psychiatrists to be able to comment on the mental health of Donald Trump. Here is a portion:

…in October, psychiatrist Bandy Lee published a collection of essays written largely by mental health professionals who believe that their training and expertise compel them to warn the public of the dangers they see in Trump’s psychology. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President rejects the position of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) that psychiatrists should never offer diagnostic opinions about persons they have not personally examined.Past APA president Jeffrey Lieberman has written in Psychiatric News that the book is “not a serious, scholarly, civic-minded work, but simply tawdry, indulgent, fatuous tabloid psychiatry.” I believe it shouldn’t be dismissed so quickly…

The relevance of the Goldwater rule has spiked in the past 2 years in the setting of Trump’s candidacy and now presidency. There are good reasons to respect the intention of Section 7.3. Most psychiatrists want to teach the public about the myriad presentations of mental illness and character pathology and not to oversimplify, stigmatize, promote stereotypes, or disparage the persons whose mental health we work to improve. We believe that people with mental illness can flourish and contribute to our communities, and on the flip side, we do not assume that everyone who behaves erratically or earns public disapprobation is mentally ill. Most psychiatrists do not think we have superpowers that let us know the inner thoughts and psychological workings of strangers. Section 7.3 reminds us to remain humble about the claims we can reasonably make and to present ourselves responsibly for the sake of our patients and our profession.

Increasingly, however, some psychiatrists are expressing professional concern about Trump’s public remarks and behaviors and what they mean for public safety. Lee and her coauthors clearly take themselves to be fulfilling the moral obligation of Section 7 by using their specific expertise as mental health professionals.

The Goldwater rule, like the other APA annotations, is meant to clarify a principle of medical ethics, not contradict it. Yet in March 2017, shortly after Trump’s presidential inauguration, the APA broadened the rule to apply to “any opinion on the affect, behavior, speech, or other presentation of an individual that draws on the skills, training, expertise, and/or knowledge inherent in the practice of psychiatry”5 — an expansion that would silence psychiatrists who want to honor the moral obligation of Section 7 by educating the public about the dangers they see in Trump’s psychology. The problem is that psychiatric diagnostic terminology has been colloquialized, so the public and the press use it to describe Trump, but when a psychiatrist does so, use of the same words is considered to be a formal diagnosis (at least in the eyes of the APA). As a result, psychiatrists are the only members of the citizenry who may not express concern about the mental health of the president using psychiatric diagnostic terminology.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump challenges the APA position that a psychiatrist cannot know enough about a person she has not interviewed to formulate a diagnostic impression. Contrary to the APA, a physician who has not formally evaluated a patient is not making a diagnosis in the medical sense, but rather using diagnostic speculation and terminology informally, with the benefit of education. That characterization applies to the orthopedist or physical medicine specialist speculating on the knee injury of the football player limping off the field and the dermatologist wincing at a stranger’s melanoma in the grocery line as well as to the psychiatrist interpreting Trump’s public statements. Physicians don’t stop knowing what we know when we leave the clinic. Psychiatric terminology has become part of the common parlance, and the authors in Dangerous Case describe and define that terminology much better than, say, Ralph Northam. The question is whether psychiatrists are the ones we should hear it from.

I expect that the APA will denounce and dismiss this book and its authors, but I encourage others not to do so. Dangerous Case is unapologetically provocative and political, and the authors clearly take themselves to be contributing to the improvement of the community and the betterment of public health, as the AMA (and APA) principles of medical ethics direct. Dangerous Case will have supporters and detractors for good reasons — some political, some social, some psychiatric — that have much more to do with views of Trump’s mental health than with the Goldwater rule. I believe that the APA, in the interest of promoting public health and safety, should encourage rather than silence the debate the book generates. And it should take caution not to enforce an annotation that undermines the overriding public health and safety mandate that applies to all physicians. Standards of professional ethics and professionalism change with time and circumstance, and psychiatry’s reaction to one misstep in 1964 should not entail another in 2017.

Trump Support Falls With Increased Speculation That Trump Will Be Impeached Or Resign To Avoid Prison

Donald Trump’s unwillingness to consistently take a stand against white supremacists might have been the last straw placed upon an administration which is both failing to have its agenda passed and which is under investigation. He is losing support from members of his own party. There is increased talk about the possibility of impeachment or even his resignation.

First Read summarized the position which Trump is in:

The president’s job approval rating hovers between 35 percent and 40 percent. Key American corporations have withdrawn from his business-advisory councils after the response to Charlottesville. He’s regularly lashing out at members of his own party. His top advisers are calling up liberal publications — and letting loose. Forty percent of Americans want him impeached, according to a new poll.

And we’re on the 210th day of his time in office (without a major legislative accomplishment under his belt, and with a special counsel already investigating him and his team).

Here’s the thing: We have no idea how this all plays out for President Trump and his administration. We’ve seen Trump survive past controversies (Khizr Khan, Access Hollywood), but he no longer has an opponent/foil like Hillary Clinton.

We’ve seen past presidents (LBJ, Nixon, Clinton) endure their share of turbulent times, but it’s never come this early in a presidency. And we’ve never seen so many members of the president’s own political party openly criticize him, but still vote for his agenda most of the time.

Using the words “uncharted waters” has become a bit cliché during the Trump Era — everything has been so different. But there also are no better words to use right now. And the turmoil comes at a pressing time: escalating tensions with North Korea, a debt ceiling that needs to be raised, and midterm elections that are right around the corner.

The Fix reports on how Republicans are unwilling to appear on not only NBC but Fox to defend Trump:

Congress is in recess, but Republicans are in hiding, apparently unsure how to answer questions about President Trump’s response to last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville — and unwilling to try.

“We invited every single Republican senator on this program tonight — all 52,” Chuck Todd said on MSNBC’s “MTP Daily” on Wednesday. “We asked roughly a dozen House Republicans, including a bunch of committee chairs, and we asked roughly a half dozen former Republican elected officials, and none of them agreed to discuss this issue with us today.”

That’s about 70 rejections altogether, and other news anchors had the same experience on Wednesday — even on Fox News.

“Our booking team — and they’re good — reached out to Republicans of all stripes across the country today,” Shepard Smith told his viewers. “Let’s be honest: Republicans often don’t really mind coming on Fox News Channel. We couldn’t get anyone to come and defend him here. Because we thought, in balance, someone should do that. We worked very hard at it throughout the day, and we were unsuccessful.”

With support so low, a story from the Brookings Institute (and reprinted by Newsweek) speculates that, Trump Is Just Six Senate Votes From Impeachment.

At some point in 2019 (if not sooner) a Republican Senator may walk into the Oval Office and say to President Trump: “Mr. President, we don’t have the votes,” at which point the Trump presidency will end in a resignation or a conviction in the Senate.

This scenario actually occurred forty-three years ago this summer when Republican Senator Barry Goldwater walked into the Oval Office and told Republican President Richard Nixon that they didn’t have the votes in the Senate to save his presidency.

Following impeachment in the House, a trial takes place in the Senate. Conviction requires two-thirds of the Senate and by my count there are already twelve senators who have shown a willingness to take on the president when they believe he is in the wrong.

If you add that to the forty-eight Democrats in the Senate (who have shown no inclination to work with this President), Donald Trump could be six votes away from conviction in the Senate…

The article goes on to list Republican Senators who have been critical of Trump. Of course being unwilling to publicly defend Trump, or even to criticize him, does not necessarily mean they would vote to remove him from office. Even if these Republicans would support removing Trump from office, this would also require a majority in the Republican controlled House, and winning over six additional Republican Senators. This could be complicated by many Republican voters still sticking with Trump.

Tony Schwartz, who c0-wrote The Art Of The Deal with Trump, is repeating his earlier predictions that Trump will resign, possibly by this fall. I have a tough time seeing Trump resigning, but Schwartz does know Trump about as well as anyone outside his inner circle. It is conceivable that he could resign, as Schwartz predicts, as part of a deal to avoid going to prison as the investigations against him proceed. Schwartz also Tweeted, “Trump’s presidency is effectively over.”

The Danger Of Hillary Clinton’s Theocratic Views

The Atlantic has a story about Hillary Clinton’s religious views entitled, Hillary Wants to Preach. They miss the real issue with regards to Hillary Clinton and religion as her religious views have affected her views on policy. Clinton has always been oblivious to First Amendment rights, seeing no problems when her political policies violate First Amendment related to either freedom of expression or separation of church and state.

I have always suspected that the vast ideological difference between myself and Clinton is that while I am a civil libertarian concerned with defending our rights, Hillary Clinton’s political views are based upon her strong religious views. The article notes, “Clinton might argue that her politics were the ultimate expression of her faith. Methodists helped lead the early 19th-century Social Gospel movement, a faith-based campaign for greater aid to the poor and vulnerable.” While perhaps her religious views led her to some admirable goals, her religious views probably have also been responsible for many of her conservative political positions on social and cultural issues throughout her career. Plus, like many who are deeply religious, she finds in her religion a way to justify her dishonesty and personal corruption.

While Clinton has usually kept open talk about her religion out of her political speeches, this is hardly the first time it has come up. She was mocked quite a bit when she cited the Bible as the book which influenced her the most. This was generally taken as a politically calculating move, but afterwards I believed, for better or worse, that in this case she was saying what she believed.

Clinton discussed her religious views in an interview with Newsweek in 1994. (Hat tip to The Blaze for the link.) One paragraph is particularly interesting:

Despite what some critics believe, the nation’s First Lady is not markedly feminist in her religion. She thinks abortion is “”wrong,” but, like her husband, she says, “”I don’t think it should be criminalized.” She does not follow feminist theology and seems unaware of the upheaval its most radical exponents have created among Methodists in the name of greater inclusiveness.

Even without having read this interview before, I have longed warned that Hillary Clinton’s support for abortion rights has never seemed very sincere, and had predicted that if she was elected she would be far more likely than Donald Trump to actually bring about further restrictions on abortion rights while triangulating with Republicans. She has already expressed a willingness to compromise, and has supported restrictions such as parental notification laws. Her often stated view of keeping abortion safe, legal, and rare plays into Republican policies to restrict access, along with placing a stigma on women who have had abortions.

The danger of Clinton’s religious views were most apparent when she was in the Senate and worked with The Fellowship to increase the role of religion on public policy. I posted about this in 2008, quoting from an article from Mother Jones: 

These days, Clinton has graduated from the political wives’ group into what may be Coe’s most elite cell, the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. Though weighted Republican, the breakfast—regularly attended by about 40 members—is a bipartisan opportunity for politicians to burnish their reputations, giving Clinton the chance to profess her faith with men such as Brownback as well as the twin terrors of Oklahoma, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, and, until recently, former Senator George Allen (R-Va.). Democrats in the group include Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, who told us that the separation of church and state has gone too far; Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) is also a regular.

Unlikely partnerships have become a Clinton trademark. Some are symbolic, such as her support for a ban on flag burning with Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and funding for research on the dangers of video games with Brownback and Santorum. But Clinton has also joined the gop on legislation that redefines social justice issues in terms of conservative morality, such as an anti-human-trafficking law that withheld funding from groups working on the sex trade if they didn’t condemn prostitution in the proper terms. With Santorum, Clinton co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act; she didn’t back off even after Republican senators such as Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter pulled their names from the bill citing concerns that the measure would protect those refusing to perform key aspects of their jobs—say, pharmacists who won’t fill birth control prescriptions, or police officers who won’t guard abortion clinics.

Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons’ approach to faith-based initiatives “set the stage for Bush.” Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.

I discussed this again during the 2016 campaign cycle, again noting that Clinton’s affiliation with the religious right was seen in her support for the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, a bill introduced by Rick Santorum and opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union for promoting discrimination and reducing access to health care, along with her promotion of restrictions on video games and her introduction of a bill making flag burning a felony.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, Clinton’s lack of concern for First Amendment issues includes a poor record on both separation of church and state and freedom of expression. This includes her support for making flag burning a felony as mentioned above, as well as sounding remarkably like Donald Trump in mocking freedom of speech while promoting restrictions to supposedly fight terrorism. After losing the election, Clinton called on Congress to restrict what she considered fake news. This appears to include both the many bogus attacks on Clinton, along with the many valid points made despite her repeatedly debunked denials. Regardless of the accuracy of someone’s speech, First Amendment rights do not have an exclusion for “fake news” which a political leader objects to.

Clinton’s primary problem might be that she wound up in the wrong political party. Every bone in her body is that of a conservative Republican and she has struggled to alter her public statements to fit in with Democrats. It is often pointed out that she started in politics as a Goldwater Girl, however this is an insult to Barry Goldwater. Despite other faults, Goldwater was far more socially liberal than Clinton. Goldwater abhorred the religious right and its influence on the Republican Party, and certainly would not have joined The Fellowship as Clinton did.

It is also notable that many of Clinton’s supporters have as little respect for freedom of expression as she does. Write a comment on Facebook about what you had for lunch that day, and nobody will complain. However post something critical of Clinton and her supporters will descend repeating the same lines about what a waste of time it is to still talk about her (while also Liking and Sharing posts if they are favorable to her). Of course the battle between liberals and DLC Democrats like the Clintons has gone on since the 1990’s and this battle for control of the party continues to this day. Clinton supporters have been engaging in an on-going dirty attack against the left. As I posted just earlier today, Clinton has announced two new people for her “Resistance” PAC, oblivious to how she is part of what we are resisting.

American Psychoanalytic Association Gives OK To Call Trump Nuts

It is customary to do an exam on a patient actually in their presence for psychiatrists to make a diagnosis. This led to what has been known as the Goldwater Rule prohibiting psychiatrists from giving their opinion about the psychiatric state of public officials they have not examined. The American Psychoanalytic Association has released an emailed statement freeing its members to give opinions on the mental state of Donald Trump:

The impetus for the email was “belief in the value of psychoanalytic knowledge in explaining human behavior,” said psychoanalytic association past president Dr. Prudence Gourguechon, a psychiatrist in Chicago. “We don’t want to prohibit our members from using their knowledge responsibly.”

That responsibility is especially great today, she told STAT, “since Trump’s behavior is so different from anything we’ve seen before” in a commander in chief.

STAT also reports:

In October, a book titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” will be published.

“When the book comes out, there will be renewed furor about the Goldwater rule, since it is precisely about what is wrong with him,” said psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired professor at Harvard Medical School who is now in private practice in Los Angeles.

The Goldwater Rule got its name after some psychiatrists answered a survey on whether Barry Goldwater was fit to serve as president in 1964. His slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right” was mocked by the Johnson campaign with the alternative, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”

There have always been exceptions to this rule. It has been customary for the State Department and other federal agencies to ask psychiatrists about the psychological state of foreign leaders based upon public behavior and speech. The rule also carried no penalties, and enforcement by government officials, including license boards, would likely violate First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.

Fortunately other medical organizations have not had such restrictions, as long as it is made clear when a medical opinion is being made without having examined the person. With that in mind, pointing out that I have never examined Donald Trump and that my opinion is based upon observing his public actions alone, in my professional opinion he should also be tested for early Alzheimer’s.

The opinion that Trump might be nuts is not limited to the psychiatric profession. The Washington Post reports on two Senators, Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), being caught by an open mike questioning Donald Trump’s sanity:

“Yes,” Reed replies. “I think — I think he’s crazy,” apparently referring to the president. “I mean, I don’t say that lightly and as a kind of a goofy guy.”

“I’m worried,” Collins replies.

Finally something we have bipartisan agreement on.

Centrist Democrats Lose Again In Georgia Special Election

Yesterday’s loss by Jon Ossoff has Democrats now wondering if opposition to Donald Trump is enough to enable them to retake control of the House. It remains to be seen if special elections in traditionally safe Republican seats provide a meaningful indicator, but Democrats did more poorly than expected in the Georgia race. This is causing some to question the strategy and messaging utilized by the Democrats.

Molly Ball has a rather boring description of Ossoff and his campaign:

Just as Handel aspired to be as generic a Republican as possible, Ossoff hoped be, as much as possible, a blank slate, a nice young man in whom disgruntled voters of all stripes could see the alternative they wanted. His campaign slogan proclaimed him “Humble. Kind. Ready to Fight”—a positionless vessel of 2017’s cross-cutting political angst. It was a decision many would second-guess after the results were in. For this district, at least, Ossoff believed it was the only way he could possibly win.

David Adkins thinks Democrats are making a mistake in trying to attract Romney voters:

In July of 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer made a statement that will go down as one of the greatest political miscalculations in modern history: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.

This strategy undergirded every decision of the doomed Clinton campaign, from ignoring the white working class in her Rust Belt firewall, to chasing suburban Republican women in Missouri and the South. It is a strategy that establishment Democratic operatives continue to pursue to this day…

In GA-06, Jon Ossoff ran a deliberately anti-ideological campaign. Centrist think tank Third Way bragged that Ossoff used a “centrist message aimed at attracting disillusioned Republican voters.” South Carolina’s Parnell, despite his Goldman Sachs background, ran a much more hard-charging campaign of Democratic values

In the end, Steve Kornacki told the tale, referencing not only Parnell’s surprisingly strong showing, but also the strong performances of other populist Democrats around the country: In specials so far, Dems have seen double-digit improvement in HRC’s ’16 # in KS-4, MT and now SC-5. In GA-6, Ossoff may not improve at all.

The lesson of the special elections around the country is clear: Democratic House candidates can dramatically outperform Clinton in deep red rural areas by running ideological, populist campaigns rooted in progressive areas. Poorer working class voters who pulled the lever for Trump can be swayed back to the left in surprisingly large numbers—perhaps not enough to win in places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina, but certainly in other more welcoming climes. Nor is there a need to subvert Democratic principles of social justice in order to accomplish this: none of the Democrats who overperformed Clinton’s numbers in these districts curried favor with bigots in order to accomplish it.

But candidates like Clinton and Ossoff who try to run inoffensive and anti-ideological campaigns in an attempt to win over supposedly sensible, wealthier, bourgeois suburban David-Brooks-reading Republican Romney voters will find that they lose by surprisingly wide margins. There is no Democrat so seemingly non-partisan that Romney Republicans will be tempted to cross the aisle in enough numbers to make a difference.

The way forward for Democrats lies to the left, and with the working classes. It lies with a firm ideological commitment to progressive values, and in winning back the Obama voters Democrats lost to Trump in 2016 without giving ground on commitments to social justice. It does not lie in the wealthy suburbs that voted for Romney over Obama in 2012, or in ideological self-effacement on core economic concerns.

I agree that centrism doesn’t work, but the need for a message extends beyond economics. Shaun King had a better analysis last week when looking at the Virginia primaries, and tying it to the presidential election:

The Democratic Party has shifted to the right. It’s not anti-war. It’s not strong on the environment. It’s not strong on civil and human rights. It’s not for universal health care. It’s not strong on cracking down on Wall Street and big banks or corporate fraud. Ralph Northam was and is weak on all of those core principles of the progressive left, but we’re expected to get behind him, and candidates like him, as if we’re just a few small details away from seeing eye to eye with him. We aren’t. He’s not a progressive. He’s not a liberal. He’s hardly even a Democrat.

Millions of us who ultimately voted for Hillary Clinton felt the very same way about her. On issues ranging from war, to corporate fraud, to campaign finance, to universal health care, and so much more, her positions were not discernibly different from the most basic Republican talking points.

Was she better than Trump? Of course she was. But I’d literally rather have a Kardashian sister or Curious George be President of the United States over Trump. Someone being better than Trump cannot be our key metric for choosing candidates.

I’m hearing more and more of my progressive friends talk seriously about the need for us to form our own political party. I get it. At the very best we are slightly tolerated guests in the Democratic Party. We are as different from establishment Democrats as those establishment Democrats are from everyday Republicans.

Being begrudgingly tolerated is a terrible feeling. We are an enthusiastic, organized bunch, but I certainly don’t feel welcomed.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid all but confirmed as much in a widely shared tweet earlier this week in which she said, “Bernie and his followers are like that college friend who stays at your place for weeks, pays $0, eats your food & trashes your aesthetic.”

That Reid, who makes a living as a political commentator, came to this conclusion about Bernie Sanders and his millions of followers was deeply disappointing, but revealing. Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America. He has done far more for the Democratic Party than it has for him.

When the new head of the Democratic Party, Tom Perez, went on a speaking tour recently with Bernie, the enthusiastic crowds of thousands didn’t show up at every single venue to hear Tom — they were there for Bernie. Tom didn’t do Bernie a favor, Bernie did Tom a favor. Bernie got behind Hillary Clinton and campaigned for her all over the country and asked his supporters to follow his lead.

I was one of those people who did just that. I’ve been a Democrat all of my life and have campaigned for and donated to so many Democratic candidates across the years. That the millions of us who support Bernie and his values have been reduced to bad guests who don’t pay our way, eat up all the food, and trash the place, is a terrible insult rooted in something other than reality.

Democrats lost the House, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, and the strong majority of state houses and governorships across the country. I agree that it sure does look like somebody trashed the place, but it damn sure wasn’t Bernie and his followers. Anybody saying that is delusional.

King accurately describes how many on the left feel about the Democratic Party–including both those who held their nose and voted for Clinton, along with others who would not do this out of principle. These days it seems like the major difference between the parties is that the Republicans pander to fear of Muslims while Democrats spread hysteria about Russia. The great paradox of American politics is that we have hyperpartisanship in Washington, yet both parties promote essentially the same policies. Both parties support similar economic policies and continuation of the warfare/surveillance state.

When Republicans lost in a landslide in 1964 under Barry Goldwater, conservatives did not give up. It takes time to spread a message and build a party around it. Democrats mistakenly thought they had a winning strategy when Bill Clinton won, but his success was probably more due to his personal charisma than overly conservative policies. They squandered what could have been an advantage with the unpopularity of George W. Bush by moving to the right and ultimately adopting much of his agenda.

Trump Supporter Roger Stone Forming Coalition To Push For Legalizing Marijuana

As has been the case with other issues, Donald Trump has been inconsistent in his statements and actions related to marijuana. One longtime adviser, Roger Stone, plans to work with people of various political ideologies to push for legalization of marijuana. Another goal is to have marijuana rescheduled to Schedule I so that it can be prescribed by doctors. Business Insider reports:

Longtime Trump adviser and staunch conservative Roger Stone has a new mission: legalizing marijuana nationwide.

Stone announced on Friday at the Cannabis World Congress and Business Expo in New York the formation of the bipartisan United States Cannabis Coalition, an advocacy group with the express purpose of protecting state’s rights to legalize and regulate marijuana…

“I am going to be working with a coalition of Republicans and Democrats, progressives and libertarians, liberals, and conservatives to persuade the president to keep his campaign pledge,” Stone said in a talk on Friday, “and to remind the president that he took a strong and forthright position on this issue in the election.”

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura will join Stone in the advocacy group, as well as a host of both Republican and Democrat political strategists.

Stone pointed to the decreased rates of incarceration for low-level drug offenses and opioid-related overdoses in states that have legalized marijuana, along with the boon in tax revenue and job creation.

During the campaign, Trump told The Washington Post that legalizing marijuana should be a “state issue,” and he expressed “100%” support for medical marijuana in an interview with Bill O’Reilly in 2016…

Trump hasn’t been friendly to marijuana since he took office. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a noted opponent of marijuana legalization, and he asked Congress in recent days to roll back federal protections for medical marijuana.

The protections in question, the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, directs the Department of Justice to refrain from spending money to enforce federal medicinal marijuana laws.

Sessions has also called for a review of a 2013 directive from the Obama Administration, known as the Cole Memo, which stipulates that the Justice Department place “low priority” on enforcing marijuana laws against businesses and organizations that comply with state law.

“In all honesty it’s time for [President Trump] to tell Attorney General Jeff Sessions to cut the shit,” Stone added.

Stone also called out Homeland Secretary John Kelly, who has called for a federal crackdown on legal marijuana.

Geek.com has more, but prefaced this with a look at Stone’s record:

Roger Stone is bad. This is known.

The depths of the veteran Republican strategist’s consummate shittiness are like a rotting onion. Layer upon layer of dirty political tricks and cons from a conspiracy theorist and serial liar who has found his way behind the scenes into most of the major political controversies and scandals of the past 40-plus years. The Nixon acolyte been allegedly involved in everything from Watergate and the 2000 Florida recount to the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal and of course, his decades-long friendship and association with President Donald Trump (and alleged back-channel involvement with WikiLeaks in the current Russian hacking scandal).

Stone has routinely made racist, sexist, and Islamophobic statements in public and on Twitter, which led to a ban from appearing as a commentator on CNN and MSNBC. Stone showed up to President Trump’s inauguration in an outfit that can only be described as 19th-century robber baron Mr. Peanut meets Oswald Cobblepot. He has a website called the Stone Zone. These trifles alone are irrevocable proof of his objective shittiness.

Nonetheless, Roger Stone may be one of our best hopes for marijuana legalization in this the Year Of Our Lord 2017…at least while Donald Trump is still running the show.

This is an issue which crosses party lines, as Stone himself noted when he praised Bernie Sanders and chastised Hillary Clinton, who has also been a hard line opponent of ending marijuana prohibition and was the most conservative candidate on the issue during the last presidential campaign:

“I’ve looked, I can’t find Hillary Clinton ever coming out for the legalization of cannabis, and this astounds me. I salute Bernie Sanders because he had the courage to say it. I salute Gary Johnson and Dr. Jill Stein; they had the courage to say it. Donald Trump had the courage to stand up for medical marijuana on a states’ rights basis. Where was Hillary?”

While Stone was right that Clinton was too conservative on this (along with other social/cultural issues), Donald Trump has not done any better in turning the matter over to others who are conservative on the issue. It is unknown whether Stone has enough influence on Trump to change this. His description of the political spectrum is also flawed:

“The essence of old-fashioned Barry Goldwater-style conservatism is I don’t want the government telling me what I can smoke,” said Stone. “To me, when the government tells you how to live, what you can ingest, well that’s the essence of big government liberalism, which I oppose.”

His claim of “big government liberalism” being on the other side of the issue might apply to some liberals, but in general polls have shown that liberals are more likely than conservatives to support legalization. Fortunately Stone does understand this enough to be forming an alliance with liberals along with conservatives and libertarians.

Lincoln Chafee Enters Race For Democratic Nomination–Attacks Clinton On Iraq

Chafee Facebook Image

Lincoln Chafee has become the fourth candidate for the Democratic nomination, becoming the third liberal to enter the race along with front-runner Hillary Clinton. Bloomberg reported earlier in the day:

Chafee, 62, left the governor’s mansion in January and announced in April he had formed an exploratory committee. He has said he would focus a presidential campaign on growing the middle class by raising the minimum wage and supporting social programs such as Head Start. He has also indicated he will target primary frontrunner Hillary Clinton on her vote to authorize the Iraq War when they both served in the Senate. The vote, which hurt Clinton in her 2008 bid, raises questions about her judgment, Chafee has said.

“I don’t think anybody should be president of the United States that made that mistake,” Chafee told the Washington Post in April. “It’s a huge mistake, and we live with broad, broad ramifications today—of instability not only in the Middle East but far beyond and the loss of American credibility. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

Environmental stewardship and “protection of personal liberties,” such as freedom from phone searches and the right to an abortion, are other priorities of Chafee’s, according to his exploratory committee website.

I will put aside the horse race matters for now, with us all knowing he is a long shot, and give him a chance to make the case for his candidacy. Clinton’s poor showing in the recent polls certainly does leave her looking far less inevitable.

It would be good to have a candidate challenging Clinton on her foreign policy issues. I do hope that he goes beyond just her support for the Iraq War and looks at her overall hawkish world view which is virtually indistinguishable from the neocons. In looking at her position on Iraq, I would also suggest that Chafee go beyond just her vote to authorize force. While any Democrat who voted for the war was wrong at the time, there was a considerable variation in views among those who did vote to authorize force. Some, such as John Kerry, looked at the evidence, and in the lead up to the war argued many times that there was no justification to use the authorization and go to war. On the other extreme were Democrats such as Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, who strongly supported going to war. Clinton went far beyond most Democratic supporters of the war in making false claims of a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Chafee is having some trouble being taken seriously as a Democratic candidate due to only joining the Democratic Party two years ago. Bernie Sanders has also been an independent, but he has also been consistently liberal and was never a Republican. Chafee points out that, “Jim Webb was a Republican and Senator Clinton was a Goldwater Girl.” In many ways Hillary Clinton’s views have not changed very much from when she was a Goldwater Girl, except that Barry Goldwater was more liberal on social liberal than Clinton and would probably condemn Clinton’s association with the religious right. Clinton is even using a variation of Goldwater’s old campaign logo as her current campaign logo.

Hillary Clinton Begins Campaign Hiding From Press & Marco Rubio Jumps In

Clinton Announcement Video Screen Grab

Hillary Clinton has started her campaign, and is already hiding from the press. From The Los Angeles Times:

Hillary Rodham Clinton shocked nobody in the media when she announced that she was running for president on Sunday – but her next move took reporters by surprise.

Clinton didn’t get on a campaign plane and head to Iowa. Instead, she and a small group of staff piled into what the candidate calls the Scooby van. They are road-tripping it to Iowa. The press was not invited.

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic was far more impressed with Clinton’s video announcing her campaign than I was, but his article might not be doing her any favors. Beinart reminded readers of all the conservative imagery in previous Clinton announcements and her long history of cultural conservatism:

Here are some of the phrases that appeared in Hillary’s 2000 senate announcement: “voluntary uniform rating system for movies and films,” “welfare,” “more police on the streets,” “teacher testing in the face of boycotts,” “I don’t believe government is the solution to all our problems” and “parents, all parents, must be responsible.” The message was pure Clintonism, as developed when Bill ran the Democratic Leadership Council in the early 1990s: To deserve government help, people must be morally responsible. And it came naturally to a senate candidate who, although caricatured as a sixties radical, was better described, by a former White House aide, as “a very judgmental Methodist from the Midwest.”

In 1993, Hillary had declared herself “not comfortable” with distributing condoms in schools. In 1994, she had endorsed “three strikes and you’re out” laws that expanded prison sentences.

In 1996, she had backed Bill’s decision to sign the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act. And in the 2000 senate campaign, she supported parental notification laws for children seeking abortions, a position that placed her to the right of her initial Republican challenger, Rudy Giuliani.

I agree with Beinart that this year’s video displayed more liberal imagery, but it was just imagery. Nothing was said about actual political positions or plans upon taking office. Until she shows evidence otherwise, and there is a long way to go, this video is not enough to believe that she has really changed. In many ways Hillary Clinton has remained the same Goldwater Girl she was in the 1960’s (except that Barry Goldwater was more socially liberal than Clinton, and not much more hawkish).

At Salon, (better known in the blogosphere as just Digby) warned about the Dangers of a Hillary Clinton campaign: The disastrous centrism she desperately needs to avoid.

Barack Obama says that he and Hillary are friends (she is likable enough after all) but he won’t automatically endorse her. After all, “there are other people who are friends of of the president” who still might run. This must make the Draft Biden movement happy. Joe Biden has never been my top choice for president, but I sure wouldn’t mind seeing him get into the race against Clinton. Biden spent the first four years of the Obama administration opposing Clinton’s hawkish views, and I would like to see this explored during the campaign. Plus Biden gets points for the manner in which he pushed Obama to “evolve” on gay marriage, and for coming to the rescue in the vice presidential debate in 2012 after Obama bombed in the first debate.

In addition to the conservatives already in the race from both major parties, another has joined them. The best thing about Marco Rubio entering the race is that he cannot run for reelection in Florida, increasing the chances the Democrats can pick up the seat. He is gambling everything on winning the presidency, and he might be optimistic over only trailing Clinton by three points in the latest Public Policy Polling survey.

Brian Beutler says that Marco Rubio Is the Most Disingenuous Republican Running for President. Considering who he is up against, that is quite an accomplishment. Rubio claims Hillary Clinton’s Ideas ‘Will Not Help Everyday Americans’. That can be debated, once Clinton says what her positions are, but it is a safe bet that at least Clinton’s ideas won’t screw everyday Americans as Rubio’s ideas would.

If the Republicans plan to continue to run against Obamacare, they got more bad news. Gallup has found that the uninsured rate has continued to drop since the Affordable Care Act was passed, now down to 11.9 percent. If you got insurance thanks to Obamacare, don’t forget to turn out to vote for whoever wins the Democratic nomination.

Many more candidates will still be entering the race. Bill Kristol asks, If They Get To Nominate Hillary Clinton, Why Don’t We Get To Nominate Dick Cheney? Ok Bill, go ahead and nominate Dick Cheney, and see how the Republicans do with that.

There are many more elections besides the presidential elections in 2016. A group of liberal donors is stepping up to counter all the money the Koch Brothers and other conservatives have been spending to help Republicans win in statehouses.