#change the candidate to someone younger than either him or trump and they will have one hell of an argument to reach undecided voters

[ferociouslycreativemystery]

YES PLEASE snälla jag BER dig

[alphacrone]

title: for better or for worse pairing(s): Zen & Kiki, Zen & Kiki & Mitsuhide tags: au - canon divergence, arranged marriage, manga spoilers summary:

In a world where Zen never meets Shirayuki, he is still expected to marry. Unfortunately, Kiki is the best choice among his suitors.

Or, Zen has many awkward conversations and realizes something about love.

-

Zen Wistalia, second prince of Clarines, was 20 years of age when his brother commanded him to marry. 

It wasn’t that Zen misliked women, or even that he had grand dreams of finding true love. But Zen had never been comfortable in the company of noble ladies, who did not share his interests in sword fighting and horseback riding through the mountains. He loved his mother dearly and looked up to Queen Haki like an older sister, but the only woman who’d ever truly understood him was Kiki and she, unfortunately, was not an option. 

“I don’t understand the issue,” Izana said, only the barest hint of frustration in his tone. “Lady Kiki is one of your closest aides and a dear friend, is she not? That is a better choice than most in our position ever have.” 

Zen clenched his jaw. “She is…” he hedged. 

“Then it is her appearance?” Izana continued, casting his eyes down to the papers on his desk. “She’s grown lovelier since the days of being mistaken for a boy. But perhaps you prefer a brunette, or something else entirely…” 

“Kiki is very beautiful,” Zen snapped, more out of habit than anything. He’d grown very protective of her when she first arrived at the palace, and there had been more than a few hushed comments on her boyish appearance. “That’s not the issue.” 

“Then, my dear brother,” Izana sighed, bringing a few slender fingers to press at his temples. “What is the issue? I thought, of all the acceptable candidates, Kiki would be the best option—no, the only option. You’ve refused marriage interviews with any other lady. Please.” He cast a tired gaze at Zen. “Enlighten me.” 

“She’s in love with Mitsuhide.” 

Zen smacked a hand over his mouth, horrified. He hadn’t meant to tell his brother anything of the sort. 

Izana blinked once. Twice. Then he closed his eyes and sighed. 

“Is that all?” 

“What?” Zen froze, mouth agape. “What do you mean? I couldn’t do that to her or Mitsuhide.” 

“What is it you would be doing to either of them?” Izana asked, idly picking up one of his papers and examining the contents. “It’s not as if they are ever going to marry.” 

Zen pinched the bridge of his nose. “You don’t know that! When Kiki returns to take her father’s place-” 

“Kiki has already proposed to Mitsuhide,” Izana said without looking away from the document, reaching out to grab a pen. “And he has already rejected her.” 

It was said, for many years later, that every soul within a mile radius of the palace heard Zen’s strangled cry that day.

“He did what?! ” Zen slammed his hands down on Izana’s desk, scattering papers everywhere. Izana glared at him. “Why did he- How could he- Why didn’t she tell me?!”

“I didn’t ask,” Izana said drily. “I was quite too busy discussing the logistics of an heir marrying a crown prince with her and Lord Seiran.” 

“Kiki knows about this ?!” Zen slammed his hands down again, knocking over an inkwell. Izana stood swiftly, righting the bottle and tossing a handkerchief onto the spilled ink to soak it up before it could stain his work. 

“Of course she does,” Izana snapped, tossing a few books to the ground, out of harm’s way. “Because, unlike you , she understands her duties to her family and to her country. If you are to ask for her hand in marriage, Lady Kiki Seiran is ready to accept.” 

The blood in his veins turned to ice and Zen’s hands went cold and numb. Kiki, the third friend he’d ever had, the only woman who’d ever treated him as a peer, was willing to marry him. For life! For her whole life, she’d- she’d what? Support him? Work beside him? Dance with him at balls and parties? She did all of those things already, usually with a sword in hand. Perhaps…

But there were other things that came with marriage, things that resulted in heirs . Zen’s face burned at the idea of seeing his friend naked, of doing... things with her. He’d never even kissed a girl before, and now he would have to- he shook his head to rid himself of the thought. 

“This is my ultimatum, Zen,” Izana said, voice heavy with an unleashed sigh.  “Either make Kiki your fiancé, or I will choose another woman for you.” 

Zen buried his face in his hands, too overcome to respond immediately. Finally, after a long, torturous moment of silence, he nodded. “Okay,” Zen whispered. “Alright. I’ll talk to Kiki.” 

Izana tilted back his head, shoulders drooping as if he’d just set down a heavy burden. “Thank you,” he said, and it sounded sincere. “I do think you will find happiness in each other.” 

“Thank you, brother,” Zen said. He thought of his sister-in-law, the way she threw everything she had into her duties, the way her eyes lit up when she caressed the growing roundness of her belly. Haki certainly had not been in love with Izana when they’d said their vows, but every day the two of them worked together to find small joys in their marriage. 

With a tense bow, Zen left the King’s office, hurrying away to his own wing of the palace. He needed to talk to Kiki, then yell at Mitsuhide, then- 

Zen huffed in frustration. Were he a coward, he’d have let his brother choose someone—anyone—else and live with the consequences. But Zen was too bullheaded to let his brother make that decision for him, and so his stubbornness would trump the terror he felt at the idea of asking Kiki to marry him. 

“Zen!” 

That voice...was not one Zen wanted to hear just now. He turned to see Mitsuhide approach and he felt all his earlier anger well up in him. 

“ You ,” he hissed. “You idiot !” 

Mitsuhide stopped in his tracks, hands raised in defense immediately. “What? What did I-”

“You-! Kiki proposed to you?!” Zen jabbed a finger in Mitsuhide’s face. “And you rejected her ?!” 

His aide’s eyes grew wide. “I-I-” He grimaced. “Yes. I did.” 

Zen stared at him until Mitsuhide averted his gaze. He knew the man before him could be thick at times, even downright stupid, but this …

“Don’t bully him, Zen. He’ll cry.” 

Startled, Zen jumped as Kiki approached, face far too placid for someone approaching the man who’d turned her down and the man who was reluctantly planning to propose. Zen frowned. “I think he deserves to cry a little.” 

“You know, I asked King Izana to let me tell you about this,” she said with a sigh. “I assume you’ve just come from speaking with him?” 

“Yeah,” Zen said. “I, uh. I think we need to talk?” Despite himself, Zen felt his face turning pink. Mitsuhide clearly noticed, because the fear in his eyes turned to concern. 

“Is everything okay?” he asked, looking between Zen and Kiki. 

Kiki nodded, still far too stoic. “Zen is going to propose to me, I believe.” 

The silence that fell was staggering. Zen’s face burned like he’d stuck his head in an oven. Mitsuhide’s eyes grew comically large. Kiki, the demon she apparently was, had the gall to smile, just a little. 

“Y-y-you-” Mitsuhide sputtered. “P-p-pro-pro-pose?”

Kiki looked at Zen. “Am I mistaken? The King seemed certain you’d choose me over a stranger.” 

“I…” Zen rubbed at his forehead. “I didn’t imagine Mitsuhide would be here for this conversation.” 

“Really?” Kiki looked genuinely surprised. “I imagined he would be here for every step of our marriage.” 

Despite his better judgement, Zen asked, “ Every step?” 

That, it seemed, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Kiki’s impassive stare turned dark. Mitsuhide doubled over, hyperventilating. The hallway was suspiciously devoid of staff.

“That’s not what I meant!” Zen exclaimed, gripping at his hair. “I just- fuck .” 

“Maybe I should leave the two of you to talk,” Kiki said, slapping Mitsuhide on the back as he struggled for air. 

“No,” Zen groaned. He could feel a headache forming in the base of his skull. “No, you and I need to talk about this.” 

“What is there to discuss?” Kiki asked. “It would be mutually beneficial for us to marry. Your brother and my father approve. We don’t hate each other. It seems logical.” 

“Don’t you find it weird?” Zen asked, his voice shooting up an octave. Next to him, Mitsuhide was still wheezing, so Zen joined Kiki in pounding on the man’s back. “The idea of marrying me ?” 

“Not particularly,” Kiki said with a shrug. “I’ve always known I would probably need to marry for political benefit, not love. Since my love belongs to Mitsuhide, who can’t return it, then I’d rather marry someone I care about than someone I don’t.” 

The sound Mitsuhide made sounded like a cross between a dying cat and breaking steel. Zen sighed and moved to rubbing comforting circles in Mitsuhide’s back. 

“Okay, but what about the...intimate parts of marriage? Heirs will be expected…” 

“Zen.” Kiki cast him an incredulous look. “Did no one prepare you for that when you were younger? Does Mitsuhide need to give you the talk? He can explain how it works.” 

“I know how it works!” Zen protested. “But isn’t it weird, doing it with someone you don’t...love? Love like that?” 

“I have three cousins, all girls,” Kiki said, hand stilling on Mitsuhide’s back. “All of them married much younger than me, all to strangers. They all have children now. As nobles, we are raised with the understanding that we will have to copulate with someone for whom we bear no feelings.” 

Shame and embarrassment stung the back of Zen’s throat. “So you...aren’t scared?” 

Kiki’s gaze softened. “Of course not. It’s you .” 

“ I’m scared,” Zen admitted, pouting a little. “I don’t want to ruin our friendship.” 

“Aww…” Mitsuhide cooed. Zen smacked the back of his head, causing him to fall to the ground. 

“It would take more than sex to do that, Zen,” Kiki said drily. 

Zen looked down at his feet. “You’re right,” he said. “But things will change.” 

“They will,” she agreed. “But then, they always do.” 

Zen swallowed back his worries and smiled, genuinely. Then, unceremoniously shoving Mitsuhide out of the way, he bent down on one knee, reaching out for Kiki’s hand. She gave it to him, returning his smile. 

“Kiki Seiran, would you do me the pleasure of becoming my wife?” 

“Why Prince Zen,” she deadpanned. “I thought you’d never ask.” 

Zen pinched her arm in retaliation, then placed a chaste kiss to the back of her hand.  Kiki turned her grip to haul him back to two feet, and they stood there for a moment, hands clasped in a familiar gesture of comradery.  This was what their relationship was built on: trust, loyalty, and years watching each others’ backs. If it was like this , Zen thought, then maybe marriage wasn’t so scary. 

A loud, watery sniff came from the floor, and both turned to see Mitsuhide watching them with emotional, teary eyes. “You guys ,” he said, then pulled them both into a tight hug. “You’re both- Zen, you’re so grown .”

“Oh, don’t even ,” Zen sniped, trying to wriggle free. “I’m still angry with you. Kiki, did he make you cry? Be honest with me, I’ll put him to work in the stables if he did.” 

Kiki cast a look between the two men. “I did find myself getting a little misty-eyed, now that you mention it.” 

Mitsuhide gasped. “You did not -” Then grunted as Zen pulled him into a chokehold. “ Kiki- help-” 

“Oh, no,” Kiki said. “I consider this a wedding present from my fiancé. I’d like to see how this fight ends.” 

Zen laughed and let Mitsuhide break his grip, then yelped as the older man lifted him off the ground. Kiki hid a smile behind her hand, watching her closest friends wrestle, and Zen felt a weight lift from his chest. 

It wasn’t a storybook romance, this love of theirs; it wasn’t a romance at all. But when Zen was with Kiki and Mitsuhide his world was soft and warm and safe. These were his friends, the people he loved most in the world, and while their dynamics would change and relationships would grow, this —the family he’d found for himself—would be the only love story he’d ever need. 

[guruwithin]

I received a Private Message earlier but my response won’t format into the message box in a legible way so I’m going to post my response here.  To protect the person who messaged me, while I will quote their words I will omit their blog url.  

Their message:

I just took an interesting tour thru your tumblr. I’m curious if you research the publications you reblog? I’m surprised, given the tenor of what you usually reblog, to see multiple items from The Hill.  Are you not aware that that publication is a conservative, Republican mouthpiece with strong white supremacy ties? Not far from Fox in its readership, actually.  Clearly you’re not a Biden fan, which I can understand. My guess is you’ve thrown your support to Sanders.  I’m sorry for your/that loss. I caution you against letting your grief be manipulated by the hiding-in-plain-sight trolls at The Hill. Peace

I actually pay attention to the videos.  I agree that the print version of The Hill has a reputation as a right wing rag, but since her awakening, Krystal (formerly a centrist Democrat) has reflected the view of the left in her criticism of the Democratic Party.  Saagar, although coming from a right wing perspective often has some insight that bolsters her case.  I see them both as budding populists who, like many of us have had it up to here with both parties.  The editorial control of the Hill’s Youtube channel seems about as hands-off (so far) with regard to “Rising” as RT is with Rick Sanchez, Tyrel Ventura, Redacted Tonight and the late Ed Schultz.  Krystal Ball broke the Tara Reade story which mainstream corporate MSNBC and CNN were very slow to touch on. 

As to Biden and Trump, there is no lesser evil there.  Where Trump will gives us two right wing Supreme Court Justices, Biden will continue to expand U.S. wars of aggression.  Biden, in his younger days, before he started yelling at people to “go vote for someone else,” was the more superficially affable of the two.  Both Trump and Biden want to end Social Security, and they both oppose a national health service (M4All).  Trump thinks climate change is a hoax and Biden still thinks we have decades to slowly lower emissions. 

Unfortunately, Howie Hawkins (the Green), like Trump and Biden, seems to have diminished capacity due to age but he does reflect most of the issues I support that both Biden and Trump strongly oppose.  Therefore, I consider Howie a lesser good. 

As to supporting Sanders, I supported most of the issues he stood for, less so the man (although I did admire him for decades).  I also support Yang’s UBI, Tulsi’s end to regime change wars, and Williamson’s Department of Peace.  Bernie opposed UBI because he saw it as incompatible with his Federal Jobs program to which I add “why not both”?  Bernie has recently become something of a Hawk when it comes to Venezuela and appears to support a regime change war there. 

Medicare for All, an end to mass incarceration, UBI, an end to regime change wars of aggression, an end to the surveillance state, a dedicated vigorous effort to save the environment, public education through university, debt (especially student debt) forgiveness etc., will never happen under either the Republican or Democratic party.  That is why no matter what, if a person acknowledges the need for those things, that person (unless they are MAGA red or Any Blue Will Do) must vote for someone other than a Democrat or Republican.

The issues superseded the personalities of the candidates.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

There is a simple explanation for why Sen. Bernie Sanders, who officially suspended his presidential campaign on Wednesday, lost the Democratic nomination: Former Vice President Joe Biden trounced the Vermont senator when the race narrowed to a one-on-one contest after Super Tuesday. The results of the caucuses and primaries before and on Super Tuesday left Sanders trailing Biden by 83 pledged delegates — a significant, but perhaps not insurmountable, deficit.1 But the Vermont senator lost eight of the 11 contests after Super Tuesday,2 winning only North Dakota, the Northern Mariana Islands and among Democrats who are American citizens but living abroad. Moreover, many of Biden’s wins were blowouts, ballooning his pledged delegate lead to 311, a margin that is essentially insurmountable.

Of course, the simple explanation for Sanders’s loss begs a deeper question: Why did Sanders do so badly in a one-on-one contest against Biden? I’d offer three explanations, none of which are mutually exclusive from the other two.

Sanders didn’t run a smart enough campaign

In 2016, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money, but lost to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. In 2020, Sanders built a passionate bloc of supporters who crowded his rallies and flooded his campaign with money but lost to Biden, a more centrist, establishment Democrat who had greater appeal among black, Southern and older voters. Sanders got almost no backing from elected Democrats in 2016, and didn’t court the party establishment that much in 2020 either. That was a major barrier to his candidacy — not only did Sanders again get little support from the party elite, but that same elite was instrumental in helping Biden consolidate the field and winnow the race to a two-man contest.

Both Clinton and Biden were strong opponents, each having deep connections to a recent Democratic president. But it’s fair to criticize Sanders for losing in 2020 in a fairly similar way to 2016.

By all indications, Sanders and his team did make some attempts to avoid the pitfalls of his 2016 run. It’s hard to measure this, but it seems like Sanders’s outreach to black voters in 2020 was more extensive than four years ago, even if it didn’t bear much fruit. But Sanders’s failure to expand his coalition to older voters, minorities and establishment Democrats all but doomed his campaign.

Sanders and his aides also made new mistakes in 2020. There were some clear indications that some of Sanders’s success in 2016 — among white voters without college degrees, in particular — had more to do with anti-Clinton sentiment than strong support for Sanders. But the senator’s advisers seemed to think that Sanders had a unique appeal to white working-class voters that would simply continue in 2020. So the Sanders campaign decided to invest heavily in the March 10 primary in Michigan, a state packed with white voters without a college degree. Biden not only won Michigan easily, but he won overall among white voters without a college degree (and pretty comfortably).

Sanders stayed in the race for about a month after Michigan, but that loss was really the end of his campaign. It undermined one of Sanders’s central arguments — that his brand of politics appealed to white voters without a degree in a way that the more centrist vision of Biden and Clinton did not, making the Vermont senator a stronger candidate than Biden in the general election.

Sanders and his team also expected that he would boost turnout among younger voters. This did not pan out.

Sanders is clearly a skilled politician — he was probably a few breaks away from winning the nomination in a crowded field that included some formidable figures. But former President Barack Obama (in 2008 against Hillary Clinton) and President Trump (in 2016 against former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush) were able to defeat primary rivals who entered the race with strong political pedigrees. Sanders fell short.

Democrats were wary of a very liberal nominee

We made this case in more detail in an article earlier this week, arguing that Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic left were always going to face an uphill climb in the 2020 primary. Democrats’ overriding priority in 2020 has been defeating Trump, and many in the party view left-leaning ideas as something that makes it harder to win over swing voters. The boomlets around former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, neither of whom had the traditional qualifications for a presidential nominee, had the feeling of the Democratic Party desperately searching for a white, male, centrist-y candidate to take on Trump. The party landing on Biden (white male, centrist-y) fits that general narrative.

In this view, any mistakes that the Sanders campaign made likely played a trivial role compared to the core elements of his political persona, such as identifying as a democratic socialist and favoring fairly left-wing ideas like Medicare for All. Maybe Democrats would have taken a chance on someone like Sanders at another time, but not with the specter of another four years of Trump if the party’s nominee loses in November.

“If Sanders had this well-organized of a supporter base in 2016, he might well have won,” David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University who specializes in political communication and media, told me. “2016 was defined by deciding the future of the party in power. 2020 was defined by trying to remove the party in power. Those are just completely different dynamics.”

Trump aside, Sanders was always a weird fit as the Democratic nominee

Sanders has finished in second place in the Democratic nomination process the past two cycles. But it’s worth asking: Was Sanders, a white male democratic socialist in his 70s who is not officially a Democrat, really the second-most likely candidate to win the nomination in either 2016 or 2020? Clinton was a strong front-runner in 2016 and basically cleared the field. If she had opted against running in 2016, it’s fairly likely that other prominent Democrats — say, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Biden or Warren — would have run, and it’s not clear that Sanders could have defeated them either.

The way the primary process played out, with Sanders the clear front-runner after the Nevada caucuses and Biden needing a surprising comeback to win, suggests that Sanders could have won in 2020. But it would have been somewhat fluky if a candidate (Biden) who led in the polls for basically the entire race crashed without the party’s establishment able to mobilize behind any alternative. Had Biden not run in 2020 or faltered fairly early, could Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Sens. Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, or even Warren have defeated the Vermont senator in the same way Biden did, by getting into a one-on-one race with Sanders, running to his right and receiving the bulk of support from the party’s establishment? That seems entirely possible.

Sanders being an older white man is probably relevant here too. In 2016, Democrats opted for a historic choice in nominating a female candidate. In 2020, they nominated a centrist white guy who they believe is the most electable candidate. It’s hard to imagine Democrats in 2016 blocking the first-ever female major-party nominee in favor of a white socialist man — or in 2020 for them to choose a white socialist man over a white centrist man.

In other words, even though a Sanders win seemed plausible and even likely after Nevada, are we really surprised that Sanders is not the Democratic nominee? In the context of modern presidential primaries, the real surprise would have been if Democrats had chosen Sanders over a slew of other candidates running on either Bill Clinton-style electoral centrism (Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, Biden, Klobuchar) or Obama-style hope and change (Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, O’Rourke). Sanders has pushed the Democratic Party to the left on policy and ideology — but now the party has pushed him back to the U.S. Capitol.

[hachama]

Second Democratic Debate Analysis, pt. 1

Like last time, I’ve (finally) read the transcripts.  I read the fact-checkers’ analysis.  I have ranked them. 

Also like last time, due to the size of the field, I’ll be splitting my analysis into four groups.  This first one will be the Please Do Not Make Me Vote For Them group: 

Good news!  Due to candidates dropping out, it’s a shorter list!

Biden, Williamson, Delaney, Ryan, and Bullock

Under the break, I’ll be analyzing their debate performance, how effectively they represented themselves on the issues, and how much I hate them, in reverse order of preference. Let’s begin.

17) Bullock

Governor Steve Bullock did not make an appearance in the first set of debates, and now I know why. He is the Shirley Exception made flesh. “Surely no one would actually use our laws to hurt someone.  Surely if someone is really a good person they won’t face terrible abuses.  Surely not…” Stevie, these are things that are currently happening.  These are facts.  

Those who read my analysis of the first debates should know that I do not accept any luke-warm “healthcare choice” arguments, and Steve is full of those, too.

He’s very worried about other candidates campaign promises being unrealistic, and says that it’s important to listen to “real Americans,” as if democratic socialists and the majority of Americans who support universal healthcare aren’t “real” enough for him.

As if that weren’t enough, he also argues in favor of some of the abuses of immigrants, as a deterrent to immigration.

To his credit, he supports treating gun violence as a public health issue, including research by the CDC into causes, which could inform actually useful gun control policies.  He wants to see Citizens United overturned, which is also good.  But not good enough.

16) Ryan

Representative Tim Ryan has the distinction of being one of the candidates I hated entirely in this debate. I agreed with none of his points, and most of my notes contain profanity.  He introduced himself as New and Fresh, playing on his youth (he’s 45. The average age of the democratic candidates is 54.  There are 4 people running who are younger than Tim) without offering much substance.

He opposes decriminalizing the border.  On healthcare he seems to think we can’t make healthcare better for everyone because then unions won’t have anything going for them which is just… He thinks letting businesses “buy in to medicare” is a good idea, and all I can hear is “privatize the social safety net and let companies decide whose grandma actually deserves to have proper care when she breaks her hip.”  

I’m not saying Tim is evil. I’m saying he’s spineless and would let bad things happen because it’s too much work to stop them.

15) Delaney

Representative John Delaney joins Tim Ryan in the dubious category of “I hate you and everything you stand for.”  The only reason he ranks slightly higher than Tim is because someone had to.  Their scores were the same level of shrieking profanity.

John thinks that reminding everyone that he was the youngest CEO in the history of the New York Stock Exchange is a good thing, showing that he has absolutely no idea what democrats are looking for in a candidate.  Surely, we should trust him!  He sold his soul early and has abided by the contract for so long!

He is another candidate decrying “unrealistic” campaign promises.  He reiterated his concern that Medicare for All would underfund the healthcare industry in America, he considers it an “extreme” policy proposal, and called it an “anti-private sector strategy.”  Yes, John, because the private sector’s profit motive has been working so well, let’s all continue dying so that small groups of people can make lots of money off of the price of insulin.  Fuck you.

14) Williamson

Marianne Williamson’s contributions were blessedly brief and infrequent.  She supports public campaign funding, which is great, but she also spent an entire minute on “I have concerns” without once proposing a solution, referred to the American healthcare system as a “sickness care system,” which for me evokes concerns about chemtrails and chemikillz, and her opening statement evoked American Exceptionalism.  

I’m so tired of Marianne Williamson.

13) Biden

Former Vice President, Former Senator Joe Biden was invited to comment on everything.  As a result, I have over a page of notes just for him. The moderators’ bold strategy of checking in with Uncle Joe every time anyone said anything gave him opportunities to say a few things I agreed with, but ultimately was not enough to get him out of my lowest ranked category.

As he said in the last debate, Joe supports rejoining the Paris Climate Accord.  This time, he said we need to “increase” the standard, apparently recognizing that solutions negotiated several years ago will not be sufficient now, and he wants to see an end to fossil fuel subsidies.  These are good things I can agree with.

Joe is concerned by the treatment of immigrants seeking asylum, and the excessive wait times for their cases to be heard and the refugees either released or returned to their country of origin.  His solution is to “flood the zone,” spend more resources to make decisions faster. This guarantees nothing except a reduction in detainees which, while generally positive, is less than half a solution.

The thing Joe said that I liked best was about the treatment of former-inmates after the completion of their prison sentences.  Joe said that former-inmates should have access to public programs and benefits upon release.  This would be a significant change from the current system, which continues to punish people long after their sentence is served.  He also said that drug crimes should result in rehab, not prison.

Joe continued to use his association with Obama as a shield against criticism, which was worn thin before the first debate started.  He evaded questions about Eric Garner, refused to answer questions about Obama-era deportations (with the added bonus of “what I said was said in confidence, you’d share it, but not me”), invoked American Exceptionalism in his opening statement, interrupted Cory Booker at one point, blamed all of our current political and social dysfunction on Trump, and thinks we should renegotiate the Trans Pacific Partnership.  

The cherry on top of this shit sundae?  He said the phrase “I have the only plan that (…)” I haven’t talked about this much, because it’s a little hard to express in text, but I have a very, very negative response to any claim to being the only person who can solve a problem.  It’s bad when Trump does it, it’s bad when Biden does it, it’s an abuser’s tactic.  “I’m the only one who loves you, I’m the only one who can help you, I’m the only one” is always a) a lie, and b) a red flag.

Granted, I was so far behind that some of Biden’s comments formed parallels I might not have seen when he initially said them, but some of the things he said about immigration were symptomatic of the same thought process that gave us that abominable rewrite of Emma Lazarus’s New Colossus.  Biden, when trying to make a point about the strength of America being in our diversity, said that “we’ve been able to cherry pick from the best of every culture,” and followed it up with “anybody that crosses the stage with a PhD, you should get a green card for seven years. We should keep them here.” Not everyone who immigrates to the U.S. is going to have an advanced degree. Not everyone who immigrates to the U.S. is going to be “the best and brightest.”  And that’s a good thing.  There is a limit to the number of doctors and lawyers a society needs. Some immigrants are going to be nurse’s assistants and cab drivers, and we need them here, too.

Even with all of that, the worst of what Joe had to say was about healthcare.  Joe thinks that limiting co-pays to $1000 per person is part of making healthcare accessible to everyone.  He thinks your health insurance premium should be no more than 8.5% of your annual income.  I did some math.  For minimum wage, that’s almost $2500 for insurance, out of pocket, before anyone sees any benefit.  After taxes, that leaves about $10k for a minimum wage worker to live on for a year. At $15/hour, $20k to live on.  These are not reasonable numbers in most of the country.

[onceuponamirror]

Hey! I've got a political question for you. I'm feeling really excited/nervous about one of the democratic hopefuls. I am loving everything, absolutely everything, about this person. In my mind, they seem like just the one to see us through a time that could be pivotal, someone who could really bring both sides together if given the chance. Since this person is not either Biden or Sanders, I also have this fear in me. Any encouraging words at this phase? And do you have a favorite??

i’m not personally ruling out sanders at this point. yeah he’s old but i think, truthfully, he and trump can corral the same stray disenfranchised voter. those who want change and have gotten a taste of trump’s version and not liked it, etc. and he’s doing well in california, which is a big pull. and he deserves, if nothing, total credit for completely re-aligning the democratic party. he changed the entire popular platform—plans he’s been pushing for long before he entered the big scene. i think he’s not to be underestimated. 

that being said, big picture, i think kamala harris is looking like a pretty solid option. she’s a great speaker, she’s surefooted, and all else aside, i’d love to see her do her classic deadpan stare on trump—

—however, i need to know more of her policy than just being anti-death penalty, which is about all she’s known for at the moment. it’s still early though, and not everyone has the strategy of warren and sanders, which is to hit the ground running on policy information dumping. (a strategy which i think works, by the way) regardless, without really comprehensive attack plans, i do worry that the next president would just be spending all of their time undoing the damage of this one. but that’s a more general stress, not about her specifically. 

imo, a kamala harris + beto VP ticket would be really strong. he’s a little too much of a sponge to be president right now—i’m not sure what policies are actually his own—but you can’t deny his ability to get voters on a national level. basically---he’ll be anyone’s great choice of VP. or idk, maybe he’ll win me over on the debate stage. but right now, i’m not sold, even if i actually really like his skateboarding, sweaty, post-punk-dad vibe. 

i really like elizabeth warren on policy but i’m worried about the way she’s already been set up as massive republican foil. her straightforward style is commendable as a voter, but looking at it big picture, she’s easy for the right to swing at and turn into a bigger villain than hillary. which worries me. but again—i think she’s very smart, and comes at politics for the right reasons. she’s out to make change and i haven’t disagreed with much of her suggestions as of yet. and i don’t want to be cynical at the gate—i like her a lot. 

i also am really liking mayor pete! i know he’s kind of a long shot, both in terms of just being a small town mayor and being openly gay, but i think he’s gaining momentum. he’s crazy smart and also seems very surefooted. i really liked his positions in the cnn town hall i saw (he was my first campaign donation of the year!) and he makes a strong case for a younger candidate; i like what he has to say about the green new deal but he needs to come out stronger on some very individual policies for him to make a bigger break into the mainstream. but he made the donor threshold for being hosted on the debate stage, so i’m excited to see him up there.

cory booker is also fine, but i honestly think he isn’t the most focused debater/speaker. he’s very verbose, and eloquently so, but i recently listened to an interview with him on pod save america and it was almost to the point of poetic rambling. he loses his center point a lot—but he does have good things to say on racial and social justice, and he turned me around on his relationship to wall street; he defended as part of the ugly and necessary work to turn his community around—which he did. 

and when he got riled up about the way people talk/treat these older cities in america with large black/brown populations was really passionate, and i think the fact that he has a proven track record fighting for disenfranchised cities is a big check in his favor. 

anyway. i feel you on the nervously hopeful energy. it’s the first time in a while i feel a lot of my needs and the needs of my peers are being addressed, the future is being addressed, and policy includes a much broader scope than just, idk, defense funding. everything is on the table, and it’s all getting some attention. and people are energized too. and most of the top candidates aren’t taking super pac money. that’s a big deal. things are changing, even before the ballot box. 

right now, due to the fact that south carolina and california are voting earlier and i think they’ll go to her, i have a feeling it’s gonna be kamala + beto on the final ticket. but it’s so early, we’ll see! 

[billyagogo]

A survivor. A funeral director. A marriage divided. How Americans' COVID experiences shape their votes

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2020/11/03/a-survivor-a-funeral-director-a-marriage-divided-how-americans-covid-experiences-shape-their-votes/

A survivor. A funeral director. A marriage divided. How Americans' COVID experiences shape their votes

In Wisconsin, a funeral home director who has watched the COVID-19 pandemic rip through her community can only blame President Trump.

In Texas, little can change one woman’s loyalty to the president — not even her own struggle for breath as she lay in a hospital bed.

In New Mexico, an underemployed firearms instructor plans to cast his vote as a rebuke to Democrats he says were overzealous in closing businesses.

In Arizona, a Joe Biden voter found political detente with his Republican wife as the lingering effects of infection continue to cause them pain.

In Michigan, a school bus driver won over by the president before the pandemic deepened her devotion and took up arms to protest shutdowns.

Even before the coronavirus sunk in its teeth, the United States was deeply polarized. Facts mattered less than feelings and political parties acted like tribes.

The virus — a shared, microscopic enemy that demanded a unified response — offered the nation a chance to come together. But from face masks to shutdowns, the pandemic quickly became the main thing Americans were fighting over.

As the death toll grew so did anxieties about who would win the presidency.

Election day arrives as the virus surges like never before, with an average of more than 80,000 new cases reported each day last week — well over previous spikes and up more than 44% from two weeks earlier.

Once concentrated in urban centers like New York and later in Sun Belt states, the virus is now ravaging the rural Midwest and Rocky Mountain states.

Field hospitals have been pitched in parking lots from Texas to Wisconsin. In the past week, hospitalizations reached new highs in 18 different states.

Treatment is improving and infections are increasingly concentrated in younger people with high odds of survival, but experts predict a significant rise in the U.S. death toll, which now tops 230,000.

The surge poses a dilemma for officials trying to balance health concerns with economic ones as the public grows wary of more forced shutdowns.

Polls suggest that most voters have made up their minds — and record numbers have already cast their ballots.

All of the issues that divided America before coronavirus have been eclipsed.

This is the pandemic election. And these are the stories of five voters.

The funeral home director The first call came in late March.

A 70-year-old had died shortly after being taken off a ventilator. Michelle Pitts sent a hearse to pick up his body from the hospital.

Michelle Pitts, owner of New Pitts Mortuary, stands outside her Milwaukee funeral home.

(Kurtis Lee / Los Angeles Times)

There would be no funeral, just a burial at the cemetery attended by three relatives. The family was too worried about contagion.

Pitts was left with the feeling that “this virus was going to be bad.”

The calls kept coming, at all hours. Pitts could only watch as the coronavirus spread through the neighborhood. As owner of the New Pitts Mortuary, she has been serving the predominantly Black northside of Milwaukee since the 1990s.

The disproportionate toll the virus was taking on Black people was obvious to her. The two dozen victims her funeral home has handled included bus drivers, nurses and grocery clerks — essential workers who didn’t have the luxury of sheltering in place.

“If you live in this community, you know someone who has either contracted the virus, or died,” she said. “It’s an American tragedy plain and simple.”

As the months wore on, Pitts couldn’t stop thinking about the ages of the deceased. Early 50s. Mid-40s. Late 30s.

She herself was 60.

Pitts remembered the expression of the parent standing over the oak casket of a beloved son, who days earlier was taken off a ventilator. She recalled the woman whose husband died before he could line up a life insurance policy to help take care of the couple’s two young children should something happen to him.

How are they doing now, she wondered?

To sustain herself, she often recited her favorite scripture, a section of Psalm 23: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

In late October, she filled out her ballot.

There was never any doubt that she would vote for Biden. In her view Trump had only responded to the pandemic with callousness.

She deposited the ballot in a nearby drop box.

“I felt like a weight was kind of lifted off my shoulders,” she said. “As if it was my time to be heard.”

— Kurtis Lee

The survivor It had become her evening ritual: Order dinner from Doordash, mix a cocktail, draw a bath and pretend she was swimming in her complex’s off-limits pool.

“It just became very lonely,” said Jaime Vollmar, 35.

Meanwhile, her hours as an operating room technician at two plastic surgery clinics were severely cut.

It all seemed overblown to Vollmar. She knew friends who had contracted the coronavirus, but nobody who died from it.

Then, in early October, Vollmar and her boyfriend decided to take a risk and get together for dinner with another couple. The woman hosting began to feel ill that night, and within days called to tell Vollmar she and her husband had tested positive for the virus.

Vollmar also tested positive.

After two weeks of feeling “like death” at home, Vollmar was admitted to United Memorial Medical Center in Houston. During sleepless nights, she struggled to breathe as she watched a monitor showing her blood oxygen level drop.

She began to wonder: “Am I actually going to survive this?”

Her second priority was making it to the polls to vote in person.

She had supported Trump in 2016 and appreciated all he had done on immigration, the economy, even the pandemic.

“He did a great job. He’s human,” she said, adding that her bout with the virus “gives me more appreciation for him.”

Jamie Vollmar was admitted to United Memorial Medical Center in Houston after contracting COVID-19.

(Molly Hennessy-Fiske / Los Angeles Times)

Vollmar was released from the hospital Friday. At the polls, she plans to “be a dork” about safety and wear a mask, keep a distance of six feet and encourage others to take more precautions.

Looking back, Vollmar believes that she might have contracted the virus when she tasted the dinner host’s new vaping flavor — watermelon strawberry bubblegum.

“It was a heavenly flavor,” she said from her hospital bed. “But not worth all this.”

— Molly Hennessy-Fiske

The expectant father Marcos Sanchez was irked.

Driving by the local hardware store in the early days of the pandemic, he’d see lines of hundreds of people waiting to get in.

Yet Sanchez, a 35-year-old firearms instructor in Española, a small city tucked in the mountains of northern New Mexico, wasn’t allowed to work after an order from the state’s Democratic governor closed all businesses except those deemed essential.

Sanchez, who had been steadily growing his business for two years, had no income for three months straight.

“It’s frustrating because they’re raking in money and I’m struggling,” he said.

The way Sanchez sees it, the pandemic was an act of God. The shutdowns were an act of man.

Under current restrictions, he can work again, but must limit his shooting and self-defense classes to a quarter of normal capacity. With a second child on the way, he’s now contemplating whether his business can continue.

“I’m not blind or ignorant to the damage that the virus has done, but I see the damage it’s done economically and that leads to a whole lot of other problems,” he said.

Rio Arriba County, where Sanchez lives, went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 — 64% versus 24% for Trump. But Sanchez plans to vote for Trump, like he did four years ago.

His decision is largely based on his opposition to firearm restrictions and his religious beliefs, particularly his objection to abortion. But the pandemic has also played a role.

Trump is not a perfect candidate, he said. He thinks no candidate ever is. But most important for him are the kinds of policies a person will enact once they are in office, and Trump has opposed widespread economic shutdowns in the face of the virus.

“You have to ask what’s worse,” he said. “The virus or the constant anxiety we’ve been putting ourselves in?”

— Kate Linthicum

The activist Bill Whitmire had to leave for a doctor’s appointment, but his keys were nowhere to be found.

It’d been months since he felt clear-headed. Lapses in memory and reasoning — so uncharacteristic for a 56-year-old who prided himself on being organized — had become the norm.

He chalked it up to the coronavirus, which he believes he contracted back in January, before testing was available in the United States.

His wife, Ann, came down with the virus in June. She still faces bouts of nausea, body aches and feeling like she has no energy.

The pandemic brought the couple closer together — and not just in their shared suffering.

She is Republican and he is a Democrat, which seemed like less of an issue when they got married back in the 1980s than it did in 2016, when she voted for Trump and he went for Clinton.

“Sometimes we have to agree to disagree,” he said.

Whitmire kept an open mind about Trump in the beginning but grew increasingly disenchanted with him — especially after the pandemic struck.

As a former high school biology teacher, Whitmire was appalled by White House news conferences, in which Trump repeatedly contradicted his own health experts.

“He acts like he’s cured the virus: ‘We’ve rounded the corner, it’ll be over soon, live your life,’” Whitmire said. “Yeah, right.”

For the most part, Whitmire and his wife avoided conversations about Trump and kept focus on their common values of compassion and helping the less fortunate. But it was clear that Ann was losing faith in the president too.

Whenever her husband would turn on a presidential news conference, she would leave the room in disgust.

Anger and grief turned Whitmire into an activist. He joined Marked by COVID, a support group for people who have lost relatives or suffered other effects of the virus. On Friday at the Arizona state Capitol in Phoenix, he lit candles honoring victims and listened as a woman who survived — but lost her sister — sang a haunting rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

“I will never forget it,” he said.

Ann, still ailing, did not attend.

When they they both filled out their ballots in mid-October, he enthusiastically marked his for Biden.

She made him promise not to tell anyone who got her vote, only that it was not Trump.

— Richard Read

The militia member Michelle Gregoire stood guard outside Karl Manke’s Barber & Beauty Shop with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol and a flag emblazoned “Don’t tread on me.”

Manke had no intention of following state orders to close this past May as coronavirus infections were climbing. Gregoire and dozens of other members of a militia known as the Michigan Home Guard were there to keep out the authorities.

She had long been disillusioned with both major parties. But Trump’s outsider status and unusual political style had appeal.

She reluctantly voted from him in 2016, the same year she made a failed bid for a seat in the Michigan state house as a libertarian.

“I was scared when he took office,” said Gregoire, now 29.

That changed when she got a $16-per-hour job as a school bus driver, plus a bigger tax refund. She and her husband were saving to ditch their rental in Battle Creek to buy a house big enough for them and their three children.

Gregoire was growing more political. She decided to run for a state house seat again — this time as a Republican.

Last November, she joined the militia, which claims to have at least 1,000 members and says on its website that it is preparing “for tyranny, social discord, natural disasters or anything else that may arise.”

The pandemic only fortified her faith in Trump, whose downplaying of the virus reflected her own experience.

“I don’t social distance, I don’t wear a mask,” she explained. “If anybody has COVID, I should have COVID… Nobody around me has tested positive.”

Gregoire lost badly in the August primary for the house seat. She is still jobless, saying that she has not been allowed to return to driving school buses because she is facing charges of trespassing and resisting arrest stemming from her militia’s occupation of the state Capitol in Lansing for a week in May.

But she paid off mounting credit card bills using the $2,400 her family received in checks as part of the federal stimulus package, each accompanied by a letter signed by Trump.

She was planning to vote in-person because it feels more “patriotic.”

— Jaweed Kaleem

Read More

[bigyack-com]

Black Workers’ Wages Are Finally Rising. Can Everyone Share in That Climb?

PHILADELPHIA — On a brisk January morning Markus Mitchell arrives at his desk at 8:30, his phone ringing before he can even log into his computer. An employee at the giant nonprofit where Mr. Mitchell works is locked out of the organization’s network and needs the 24-year-old’s help.Mr. Mitchell became a full-fledged employee at JEVS Human Services in Philadelphia in October, after a year as an apprentice. Just three years ago, he was making $13,000 working in the kitchen at a Chick-fil-A, feeling unsure about his future. Landing the $38,000-a-year position was the latest step in a rapid career ascent made possible in part by America’s record-long economic expansion and low unemployment rate.President Trump frequently celebrates the experience of black workers, noting correctly that the group’s unemployment rate is at its lowest on record.Their wages are also going up — a New York Times analysis of government data found that wage growth for black workers has accelerated recently after lagging for much of the decade-long economic expansion.But when Mr. Mitchell looks around his relatively low-income and heavily black neighborhood, he worries that the rising tide of a strong economy has not been equally good for everyone in his community. And when it comes to his own labor market gains, he’s working hard to make sure they do not prove fleeting.A malignant reality lurks beneath the happy surface as black workers finally make job market progress. Not only did the gains take a decade of steady job growth to materialize, but they could evaporate at the first sign of economic weakness, as they did after previous expansions.In April 2017, Mr. Mitchell quit his low-paying job, hoping that he could achieve a better life. By June that year, he was in a training program, one that helped connect him to another backed by JEVS. That led to a pre-apprenticeship role in partnership with AmeriCorps, then an apprenticeship and now his full-time job.He has one certification, is working on another in networking and could even progress to a cybersecurity test down the road. He’s conscious that without a college degree he has challenges, but hopeful that his on-the-job experience and practical training will help him weather future downturns.“I know that the fact that I don’t have a degree puts me at a disadvantage, over my peers,” he said. “I’ve gained enough knowledge to go and do computer work for people myself, so if that’s what I had to do, I’d do it.”Mr. Mitchell’s story is, on one level, a lesson in the power of a strong labor market to lift up disadvantaged communities. When workers are scarce, companies are more likely to hire people without much experience or formal education, and to provide training to help those employees succeed. Employers are also more likely to consider candidates with disabilities, criminal records or other barriers to work and to offer other options, like flexible hours, to attract people with caregiving responsibilities.Companies are also more likely to raise pay. Wage growth, which was sluggish for much of the recovery, has picked up in recent years, with the strongest gains among workers at the bottom of the earnings ladder, in jobs that are often concentrated in the service sector, like fast food and retail.The Federal Reserve sees the continually expanding work force as a key reason for future patience on interest rates. Mary C. Daly, president of the San Francisco branch, has said Fed officials should see how far the labor expansion can run “experientially.”But tight labor markets alone cannot undo established structural barriers. Even now, the unemployment rate for black Americans is double that of whites — a figure that does not even take into account higher rates of incarceration for black men in particular. The median black worker still makes 78 cents to the median white worker’s $1 each week.Mr. Mitchell grew up in Grays Ferry, a neighborhood in South Philadelphia where rows of identical low-income housing units sit alongside faded corner bodegas. He has lived in his home, which is subsidized, since his family ran into hard times around the last recession. His mother, a teacher, had to take time off work after a bad car accident — and then struggled to find new work as the economy reeled. Since she was the primary breadwinner for her five sons, including one with a severe disability, it was a major blow.The boys were interested in college, but for Mr. Mitchell, high school changed that. He felt that his teachers did not care about him, especially after concerns about the building’s safety forced his high school to shut down before his senior year. Fights plagued the hallways of his new school. There were cages on the windows.“It was waking up to go to a day care, that was actually a jail, that you could freely walk out of,” he said.He cut classes, sneaking out a side door to the freedom of the surrounding city. Though an avid reader — his dresser is buried under psychology classics, as varied as Dale Carnegie and Machiavelli — he failed English. He was pushed through graduation anyway.Early adulthood flowed by in a string of odd jobs.He worked in poison ivy removal (he stopped getting a rash after the fourth or fifth outbreak) and had a short stint at UPS before starting work at Chick-fil-A, where he made $9.50 an hour. He promised himself the job would be short-lived, and spent his mornings and nights reading computer-related training material.But more than a year in, as he was cleaning the floors at Chick-fil-A, a moment shook him.“I was squeegeeing water up, and these guys walked in,” he said. They were technicians, sent there to fix the restaurant’s computer network. They were close to his age, and he couldn’t help comparing their work with his own. “I just told myself: Here’s the risk, here’s the reward. What are you going to do?”It took a few months to finally quit. He was getting a lot of hours at Chick-fil-A, and helping his mother, who now works at a day care, to pay rent.“I didn’t want to set myself up for failure long term, but I didn’t want to set myself up for failure short term, either,” he said.“I knew computers, and people with skills in computers, were in demand. I knew it in my heart,” he said. But at the same time, “who is going to pick this kid up with no college degree, no experience?”His timing was ideal. The shortage of qualified workers in information technology is prompting employers to cast a wider net, fueling demand for apprenticeship programs like the one he completed.“We know because of the economy, employers are trying to expand the pipeline of talent that they’re tapping,” said Edison Freire, a former teacher who founded the apprentice program Mr. Mitchell went through.Mr. Mitchell has made huge gains in the past few years. But his long-term prospects remain uncertain. He still doesn’t have a college degree. He is hoping that his certificate and experience make up for that, but they have yet to be tested in the crucible of a recession.What happens to Mr. Mitchell and others like him has implications for the broader economy. Historically, the gains made during periods of low unemployment have proved transitory for black workers, who are among the last to benefit from a good economy and among the first to suffer in a downturn.But there have been few past examples of a labor market as strong and sustained as the current one. Some economists hope that as more workers like Mr. Mitchell get a foothold in the labor market, and even manage to climb a few rungs up the ladder, they will be better positioned to weather an eventual recession. That larger pool of workers would leave the American economy better off in the long run.Today’s solid labor market comes with costs. A strong economy fuels urbanization and lifts rent, and can make it harder for lower-income minority families like Mr. Mitchell’s to get by. Rent has marched up along with his salary as the family’s housing vouchers have been reduced. Money is manageable, but Mr. Mitchell remains frugal — when he eats a $3 cheesesteak for lunch, he carefully wraps half of it for later.But Mr. Mitchell has big goals. He is hoping that he and his younger brothers can pull together sufficient savings to move themselves and their mother to another neighborhood. He loves where he grew up, but it’s changing — gentrifying, diversifying. And the bustling local market doesn’t seem to be pulling black workers up with it.He noted that Pennsylvania’s minimum wage has not increased, and “very seldom do I hear of someone getting a better job.” (Philadelphia last year raised the minimum wage for city employees and contractors, but state law prohibits the city from raising the floor for all workers. Federal efforts have yet to gain traction.)Philadelphia is a university town, but he worries that it is not focused on educating its native youths, a group that is heavily black. Standing outside his old high school last month, he glumly pointed out the door he used to skip classes. Nobody stopped him, he said. And years later, a steady stream of students — mostly racial or ethnic minorities — are still pouring out.“I don’t see much of a change, as far as my people elevating economically,” he said. “There’s often a loophole through things, sometimes there’s not. I was lucky enough to be blessed with one.”Jeanna Smialek reported from Philadelphia, and Ben Casselman from New York. Read the full article

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

Digital Elixir Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

  “It’s too late baby Now it’s too late” –Carole King

  Politics is show business for ugly people. And you’ve got to play by show business rules.

Show business is all about preparation, getting the act, song, movie, TV show, ready and then marketing it so people will be aware of it and buy it.

And you always want to be first, and you want to eliminate all chance.

You want an upward curve, even if you start low and slow.

You want no lulls. You want to keep people interested, by teasing them with new information on a regular basis.

You want to control the narrative.

And what is the narrative the Democrats are trying to sell?

Damned if I know. The only thing they can agree on is they hate Trump. I hate KISS, but that doesn’t keep them off the road, playing to empty arenas, their fans support them. And speaking of KISS, Gene Simmons is one of the greatest marketers of all time, a complete blowhard, but he’s making it work for himself and the band. Maybe he learned it all from Neil Bogart, who changed his name from “Bogatz,” to give the right “impression.” Bogart failed on his first attempt, trying to sell a record of Johnny Carson routines, it went instantly into the cut-out bin, but then he pivoted to disco and Donna Summer and KISS.

And Bogart was a showman, full of crap. Seemingly everything he said was inflated and wrong. Remember when there were four simultaneous KISS solo albums and Neil said they were instantly gold? The press bought it, even though all of them but Peter Criss’s came back.

You see it’s all about perception. Sell the myth, not the facts.

It’s more important that Elizabeth Warren be seen as a fighter against the man than any specific policy position. People don’t go that deep. CONGRESS doesn’t go that deep! Did you read the “New Yorker” story on Al Franken? His accuser told boldfaced lies, there was history disputing her account, but she got out there first and what she said ruled, even though she was working for a pro-Trump radio station. Once again, the Democrats reacted, and now they’re doubling-down, can’t see why they were wrong. Kirsten Gillibrand, YOU’RE HISTORY!

The press said Trump was losing because he brought up the “i” word before the Democrats. But Trump knows you get ahead of the blowback, you make the first punch, and you load the media with so much b.s. that it can’t keep up.

Meanwhile, the public doesn’t know the difference between impeachment and conviction and Pelosi seems as old as she really is. She’s Perry Como after the Beatles. Doesn’t she realize THE RULES HAVE CHANGED?

Happens in entertainment all the time. Suddenly you can’t sell hair bands. Suddenly hip-hop is burgeoning. And if you fight the tide, you drown. Oh, little fish can still swim in their own private backwaters, but if you’re playing for everything, if you want to run the table, you’ve got to be looking to the future, not the past!

Trump speaks to the public. Pelosi speaks to insiders.

That’s why AOC gets so much traction, she speaks to the public-at-large, it’s less about legislation than attitude, which is move over you old farts and let the younger generation take the reins, you oldsters have no idea what is going on anymore!

But Team Pelosi says you’ve got to run to the center, because you’ve got to appeal to those districts that flipped for Democrats in 2016. That’s like making Aerosmith play acoustic, and refusing to let them play new material.

Of course, Aerosmith doesn’t play new material, and Chris Christie is a big Boss fan. It’s kinda like long hair. Once upon a time it symbolized something, you were either for us or against us, then it was just a fashion choice.

Anyone who plays to the rearguard is always disrupted. Didn’t you ever read Clayton Christensen? Everybody pooh-poohs the new, saying it’s not as good as the old, and then it becomes better and the old folds overnight. Christensen says to embrace the new, and then eliminate the old when the new gains traction. The DNC is being disrupted and their answer? Let’s go back to Good Ol’ Joe. That’s like asking your grandfather for music advice.

So what we’ve got is candidates who want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and the Democrats are freaking out, they can’t even get aligned on one position. Criticize the Republicans all you want, but after Trump they all got in line. That’s how you win, when you play like a team!

And if you try to appeal to everybody, you lose. The road is littered with middle of the road artists, who fail on the chart and play to a dwindling audience in Branson and clubs. You want to get people EXCITED! That’s what Warren and Harris and Bernie and Buttigieg are doing.

And what does the establishment say?

THEY’RE TOO FAR LEFT!

AC/DC was too heavy until suddenly they weren’t. “Back In Black” is still streaming prodigiously today, “You Shook Me All Night Long” is an American anthem! Of course Mutt Lange helped. The right has Karl Rove, who do we have on the left?

So the reason you wanted impeachment is so the whole world would watch, so Trump’s bad behavior, criminal or not, would infect the public. When the truth outs, it’s hard to deny.

But no, it was never time. Pelosi and her pals are like a Silicon Valley outfit that never releases its product. It’s so busy getting it right that it can never come out. Meanwhile, Facebook becomes so big by having a motto of “move fast and break things.” Forget that Zuckerberg is the enemy now, he’s on top of the pyramid, he controls the conversation more than not only Congress, but the mainstream media! Furthermore, he just pivoted, saying it was about private conversations, when the Democrats are still looking for that elusive consensus. Everything worth paying attention to starts off the radar, small, and then it blows up and BECOMES THE MAINSTREAM!

So Barr says Trump is innocent.

The Dems folded their tent.

Then Mueller sends his letter and they think…wow, maybe there’s something here. Like a band the label has stopped working that is suddenly selling tickets…the label is on to something else, it’s hard to get it restarted on your old product.

And then the Democrats placed all their hopes on Mueller testifying. That’s like taking someone with a great record, who’s never been on stage, and having them headline Coachella! No one would do that, the odds of failure are too high.

So Mueller didn’t deliver. Oh, don’t make it about Russia, the Dems thought Mueller was gonna blow a hole through the curtain, reveal that Trump was culpable and should be charged. Not only did Mueller not do this, he said as much after he delivered his report earlier…this was his final statement!

And the Dems are playing by old rules and crying to the nonexistent refs that the Republicans are cheating. No, Trump and his posse have invented new rules, like no one in the regime needs to testify. When they up the ante, so do you! You don’t say there’s no crying in baseball!

So now, on left wing radio, all the talk is about getting the transcripts from the grand jury. God, even in the NFL when you lose, you lose, no matter how heinous the call. Because without rules, you’ve got no game.

And that’s what’s happening now, WE’VE GOT NO GAME! Trump and his cronies are running ragged and the Dems and the media are so flummoxed, they do NOTHING!

Come on. Even the most lame influencer knows you’ve got to deliver product on a regular basis. You’ve got to hook the audience and deliver. That’s certainly what Trump has done, and all the left keeps saying is HE SHOULDN’T TWEET!

Meanwhile, these same wankers are posting to Instagram, the national pastime, and despite their constant disparagement of the internet and Twitter, Twitter is where the news happens, and if you’re not on it, you don’t know what’s going on.

So impeachment failed in the marketplace. It’s like Annapurna, Megan Ellison’s movie company. No matter how great the film, and she’s put out plenty, they never reach expectations. “Booksmart,” one of the best-reviewed movies this year, which appeals to oldsters and youngsters…dead. Product is only one part of the puzzle, you need the aforementioned marketing. The big studios may put out lame films, but they’re experts in marketing them.

When you fail, you write it off. Just look at the Fortune 500, that’s what they do. Did Bezos try to improve the Fire phone? No, he deleted it from the catalog. And today, your mistakes don’t haunt you as long as you continue to play and make noise. Once again, the game has changed, there’s so much noise that the biggest challenge is just reaching the public. And if you don’t, people forget what you were selling, they’re inundated with new messages.

And I’ve used a plethora of metaphors here, but now I’m gonna use one more. Pro football used to be a running game. Now running backs make a fraction of what they used to, all the emphasis is on passing and receiving! You change with the times!

Seems like everybody can change with the times but the Democrats.

So forget impeachment. This is the gang that can’t shoot straight, even if they have clear evidence that Trump needs to go, the right will spin it otherwise and rule the marketplace, i.e. public opinion. And just like a record, you don’t have to appeal to everybody to win. How come Trump knows this and the Democrats don’t?

Instead of clinging to the past, trying to rebuild the old edifice, it’s time to build a new one. And there are a number of candidates promising this. Safe rarely succeeds. Can you say Romney? Can you say Kerry! One of the reasons Obama won was because he HAD little history. There was little to nail him on and he promised hope.

Believe me, Ol’ Joe is not promising hope. He’s like a boomer musician waiting for Hilary Rosen to save them from streaming. But Hilary’s moved on from the RIAA, and streaming has already won, soon there won’t even be any hardware to play discs! Apple kills the iPod because the innards are no longer manufactured, and the Democrats keep trying to prop up oldsters, held together by baling wire. Bill Clinton had Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and her husband selling him, and despite baggage, he won anyway!

Who do the Democrats have?

Maybe it’s time to hire Bill Belichick.

Oh, that’s right, HE’S A TRUMPER!

  ~~~

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    Politics is Show Business for Ugly People…

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[inketernal]

Quote Blatherings || Crooked Kingdom

      'By all that was holy, nothing could motivate the Kerch like cash.' (pg. 9)

To me, this screams of the state of the U.S. at the moment. We're all so hungry for money that we'll do whatever it takes to get it. But in doing that, we've more or less sacrificed our humanity. I didn't vote for him, but many did vote for Trump under the belief that he could bring us money again. That by running the country as he would a business, we would once again prosper monetarily. And that's the problem; world politics isn't business and trying to run it as such is going to cost us more than just money. What's worse, the people who voted for this unqualified man are people who already have lots of money themselves. People who don't want to lose a little of it to the government, but would rather have it taken from those of us who are struggling to hold on to the little we do have. It's that greed and desperate motivations and actions that will undoubtedly be the end of us, one way or another.

 "You don't look like a monster."

"I'll tell you a secret, Hanna. The really bad monsters never look like monsters." (pg. 30)

In it's simplest form; looks can be deceiving. Something or someone can look harmless and yet be the downfall of everything. Or, it could look like a deadly opponent, etc. and wind up the kindest of all. We shouldn't live our lives based on first glance perceptions. I've been told by my friends that when we initially met, they never would've guessed that I would be this ultimate boybandaholic, book nerd fangirl. Why? Because what they saw was this angry looking girl, usually dressed up in black or wearing sweats, seemingly taking life with a grain of salt. Needless to say, I'm not taking life that way, but admittedly it was nice to know the façade I put up was working. I'm a reverse Kaz in the sense that I want to look scary to keep away anyone who might attempt to take advantage of me.

                     "My father likes it too. He places a high value on learning."

                                             "Higher than money?"

Wylan shrugged... "Knowledge isn't a sign of divine favor. Prosperity is." (pg. 71)

It always comes back to money, doesn't it? The world's view of the highest accommodation in life. The ultimate goal of having more money than you can do with; money that won't leave with you once you're done with this life. "A sign of divine favor," proof that your creator believed you worthy enough. But then what does that say about the rest of us who aren't "blessed" with such a favor? Do we exist solely to make the prosperous feel their wealth in comparison to ours? Do we exist just to be mocked by them? And why isn't knowledge viewed as such a gift either? If it's just something that everyone can have or has a right to, shouldn't it always be free? Instead, we're charged for our education, making the rich richer and the rest less so. We live in a world and society where they want you to believe that the more knowledgeable you are, the more prosperous you become. But that's not really the case because the more you know, the more dangerous you become; a liability. People with the highest of degrees are being turned down for jobs so that a younger or less certified candidate so that the company can save money on a salary. And all the while, the loans you took out in order to pay for this grand education are accumulating more interests as time passes. Leaving you more in debt than when you started while the "prosperous" managed to hold on to their money.

"I am not a brute. I've employed the methods you are most accustomed to-- threats, violence. The Barrel has trained you to expect such treatment." (pg. 99)

Like so many other quotes in this book, this relates so much to the world we live in today. Causes have effects; violence breeds violence. As much as it's said that it no longer exists, racism is a bright example of this. People of Color are the ones dying on the streets, often times without due cause, while their white killers go free to live their life. After so much progress, we've reverted back to a world where we fear anyone different then us and as a result we make world changing mistakes. It isn't only about race anymore, either; now it includes sexual orientation. Because a lifestyle is different then our own, so many people don't know how to take it. Differences have always been a problematic thing to accept and now even more so. Failed attempts at understanding lead to accusations of mockery and offense, which in turn breeds hate. And that hatred becomes the violence that spreads across this world and believed by many unfortunates to be the "norm" because it's what's believed everyone is accustomed to. Truthfully, if we stopped functioning as the world around us has bred us to and instead did as we would like done to us, we probably wouldn't be in the mess that we are.

 'Even the people, clinging to traditional Ravkan dress, looked like relics of another time, objects salvaged from the pages of folktale. Had the year she spent in Ketterdam done this to her? Somehow changed the way she saw her own people and customs? She didn't want to believe that.' (pg. 191)

I think we've all experienced this, one way or another. It doesn't even have to be as specific as your ethnic culture looking different to you. If you live long enough in one place, you'll adopt whatever customs are its norms. Move someplace else and, given time, those things will seem odd to you. It's all a matter of adapting to survive. We take on what we think is necessary, inadvertently ridding ourselves of old traits, and in turn become an entirely different person. A person that our old self wouldn't recognize and vise versa. It happens so subconsciously that we're unaware of it until we're thrust in a situation of enlightenment. And when we are, we experience the position of being an outsider in a culture we once existed. Which to me, just proves that no one truly belongs to any one lifestyle and shouldn't be rejected because of it. Given the right circumstances, that person can be us.

Source: @inketernal

[ridleykemp]

Primary Season

This has certainly been an interesting Democratic primary so far, hasn’t it? I have some thoughts about this that I wanted to get down before whatever plague is heading my way starts to eat my brain and soil my memories. Let’s start this out by saying that I’ve already voted in the primary, so you can get mad at me for my opinions but the die is already cast, so to speak.

I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the Presidential primary. I doubt anyone who knows me is surprised by this. To me, she was a near-ideal combination of ideology, effectiveness, and preparedness. She’s the closest thing I’ve had to a no-compromise candidate in my 36 years of voting in national elections. She’s off the board now, as are many other attractive alternatives, so we’re down to two options, both of whom are less than ideal to me.

Let’s start with Bernie Sanders. On the plus side, I agree with his hopes and dreams almost 100%. Almost everything he wants is what I want as well. I may agree with him more than I do Warren, which is saying something. He’s an inspiring speaker who seems younger than his physical age. He’s able to get people excited about things that I’ve wanted for ages. There’s a lot to like here.

So why is he “less than ideal”? Let’s start with the most important one: Most of the people in the Democratic party prefer Joe Biden and that is a really big deal. His winning the nomination as a non-Democrat was always a moon shot, and it turns out that he drives a lot of people to the polls to vote against him. Once significant numbers of minority voters got a chance to cast their ballot, it was over. Even if he were to cross that hurdle, I remain unconvinced he’s a superior candidate in the general election. If he were to hit those two jackpots, what’s his upside? Carter? A president elected by a popular groundswell who has the support of neither party and, thus, neither house of Congress. The downside is Goldwater. Sanders’ record in the Senate suggest that he’s an uncompromising leftist who has struggled to get results.

Goldwater’s an instructive example here. He was the ideologically pure right-wing candidate that the true believers on the right wanted. He got clobbered in the general, but the movement Republicans learned an important lesson: You can’t start at the top. Nominating or electing a President to represent your movement is attractive, but it’s not really effective.

Both of my parents were movement Republicans. The lesson they took from Goldwater was that you start at the bottom. You take the school boards, the city councils, the county infrastructure first. Then, build from that. I vote progressive in every single local election, and I donate to those campaigns, because that’s where the change comes from. Electing a President without the structure to support their goals is a short-cut that just doesn’t work.

And, you’ll note that I say “goals” and “hopes” and “dreams” and not “plans” (not that “having detailed plans” has ever helped anyone get elected). Senator Sanders hasn’t shown much of a gift for building consensus, making compromises to get things done, and all of the stuff you have to do to effectively govern. I love his uncompromising ideology. I fear that he would be utterly ineffective at implementing it.

And then there’s Joe Biden.

Sigh. I don’t like Joe Biden. I don’t like what little he stands for. I don’t find him inspiring. He’s a corporatist centrist who is somewhere right of Obama (and well right of Clinton, H.). His congressional record is mediocre and punctuated with some genuinely awful votes. I know, I’m really selling him here, huh?

So what does Joe bring to the table? He’s going to get the Democratic nomination and he’s not Donald Trump. That’s the #1 job, because without beating Donald Trump, none of the rest matters. I don’t care how beautiful a candidate’s agenda is; if they can’t win the primary, they can’t beat Donald Trump, and if they can’t do both of those things, then why are we having this conversation?

Anyone who tries to tell you that there’s no difference between the two of them is simply being obtuse. There are more differences between Trump and Biden than Biden and Sanders. I’ve seen the charts on the policy positions. They’re great. They don’t list things like “Believes the Constitution grants the President unlimited power” and “Doesn’t believe that Congress has any legitimate oversight over the office of the President”. I could go on, but you get the idea. You want to say Biden is like Romney? Yeah, OK, I’ll buy that. But Trump? I struggle to believe that that’s an honest opinion.

And make no mistake about it: Joe Biden almost certainly is going to be the Democratic nominee. I might even agree that he should be, even though I have very little agreement with him on policy. He is the more likely to beat Trump because he will be nominee and Sanders won’t. I want Sanders to do well and to stick around until the convention and I want him to be able to force a few promises from the establishment and for his people to have a seat at the table.

The wild card, of course, is that if/when Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, a lot of his supporters will either sit out the election, vote third party, or even vote Trump. There might even be enough to do this to throw the election to Trump if it’s close. I cannot wrap my head around the thinking, but there was a lot of it last time, too. Tired of voting for the lesser of two evils? Me too! But, unfortunately, that’s all that’s on the menu. In fact, that’s almost always what’s on the menu. You very seldom get exactly what you want in a candidate. And, on those rare occasions when you do get a unicorn but they don’t win the primary? It hurts. That’s what I’m dealing with right now. In November, I’ll hold my nose and vote for the candidate who I believe will be better for the most people because that’s my job as a citizen.

-RK P.S. I wish that policy had more to do with winning elections, but there’s just no evidence that it does. I’ve seen posts suggesting that Democrats lose when they nominate a centrist: Clinton, H., Kerry, Dukakis, Gore (which is weird, because he was probably the furthest left since McGovern). What they leave out is that the Democrats also win when they nominate a centrist: Obama (who ran in the primaries on the left, but abandoned that upon winning the nomination), Clinton, B., Carter…the Democrats almost always wind up with a centrist as the nominee. It’s been almost 50 years since someone I’d describe as “significantly left of center” was the party nominee. Sigh.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Imagine this scenario: In November’s elections for the U.S. House, Democrats win the national House vote by a few percentage points and gain nearly 20 additional House seats,1 by both winning open seats and defeating some longtime GOP incumbents. In the Senate, Democrats pick up Nevada; win races in states President Trump carried in 2016, including in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and West Virginia; and only narrowly lose in the GOP strongholds of Indiana, Missouri and Tennessee.

That sounds like a pretty good night for Democrats. But it wouldn’t be. That scenario would leave Republicans with a majority of, say, 222-213 in the House and a 51-49 advantage in the Senate.

Don’t get me wrong — I share the view of other analysts that Democrats are favorites to win the House this fall, and that an accompanying Democratic win in the Senate is somewhat less likely.2 But based on the data we have now, the scenario above is certainly possible — just as possible as, say, Trump being elected president and Republicans winning both houses of Congress on Nov. 8, 2016.

That potential outcome didn’t get enough coverage in the run-up to the 2016 election. So let’s avoid repeating that mistake in 2018. How would the political world react if Republicans maintained control of Congress in November? I can’t say for sure, but here are four likely responses.

Renewed GOP attempts to shrink government

If Republicans control the House and Senate next year, I would expect them to push some kind of health policy proposal that uses the so-called reconciliation process, which requires only a majority of votes in the Senate, rather than a filibuster-proof 60. That legislation could be a full-scale repeal of Obamacare. Or it could be a bill that doesn’t repeal all of Obamacare but both cuts spending on Medicaid and turns Medicaid into a block-grant program where states can choose to spend the dollars they get from the federal government as they see fit. Overhauling Medicaid was a key plank of the various Obamacare repeal bills Republicans pushed in 2017.

Republicans in the House are currently trying to add requirements that food stamp recipients be either employed or actively looking for a job in order to continue to receive those benefits. That legislation is currently stalled, but it’s a long-held GOP goal.

You might think that doesn’t sound like a particularly popular agenda heading into the 2020 elections. And shouldn’t last year have convinced Republicans to give up on health care? After all, they struggled to pass an Obamacare repeal bill in the House when they had more than 230 members, and it failed in the Senate. So why would Republicans come back to this? Well, some conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill, major party activists and officials in the Trump administration want to.

“They will be searching for an agenda, and health care is a natural place for them. And there will be pressure for them to act,” said Yuval Levin, a conservative health policy expert who served in the Bush administration.

And the political environment in 2019 could shift in ways that both force Republican party leaders to move in a more conservative direction and make it easier to get conservative proposals through both houses of Congress.

Sure, the GOP’s overall margin in the House might narrow. But the House and Senate Republicans who are defeated in November will likely come from the bluer districts and states that the party currently holds — including some where Clinton won in 2016. So the remaining Republicans will, on average, represent more conservative constituencies than the current group does. They will not be scared to vote for an Obamacare repeal — after all, they voted for one in the run-up to 2018 and kept their seats. And they may face intense pressure back home from conservatives if they oppose it.

Moreover, the more conservative factions among House Republicans, particularly the Freedom Caucus, are likely to have more influence in 2019 if the party retains the majority. With Speaker Paul Ryan retiring, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is the favorite to become the top Republican in the House, but Freedom Caucus members are looking for ways to either get one of their own elected speaker or extract some concessions from McCarthy. The Freedom Caucus strongly pushed for an Obamacare repeal even after the effort’s failure in the Senate, and the caucus has also been pushing the party to be much more aggressive in cutting federal spending. So McCarthy may have to pledge to pursue an Obamacare repeal and other conservative fiscal policies if he wants to be the speaker.

“They will be dominated by the Freedom Caucus and will get serious about slashing safety-net expenditures,” said U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Kentucky. “The Senate will not go along, so it will be worse gridlock, I would think.”

Yarmuth is right to bring up the other chamber of Congress. Even with continued GOP control of the House, if the party’s advantage in the Senate stays narrow, more moderate members like Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski remain potential barriers to major spending cuts.

Weakening of the investigations against Trump

If Democrats don’t control the House or the Senate, they can’t initiate investigations of Trump or some of his more controversial cabinet members, such as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.

More importantly, after the 2018 elections, the electoral process will recede as a constraint on the president and GOP in terms of the Russia investigation (assuming it’s still going) — at least for a while.

We don’t really know why Trump, despite his constant criticisms of the investigation, has not fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, or why he has not directly tried to stop the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller. Maybe Trump, despite his rhetoric, has some real respect for the rule of law. I think it’s more likely that Trump understands that firing Rosenstein or making a drastic move to stop the Mueller probe would increase both the chances of Democrats winning the House and/or Senate this year, and the odds that the resulting Democratic-led chamber(s) would feel compelled to push to impeach Trump. But if the GOP emerges from 2017 and 2018 without losing control of the House or the Senate, I suspect that, with the next election two years away, the president will feel freer to take controversial steps to end the Russia probe. And I doubt Republicans on Capitol Hill would try to stop him.

“If the GOP retains the House, Trump will claim credit,” said Didi Kuo, a scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. “He will be emboldened to do as he pleases with respect to the Mueller investigation.”

In fact, certain Trump defenders on Capitol Hill, particularly House Intelligence Community Chairman Devin Nunes, could emerge emboldened from a 2018 election in which Democrats directly targeted them for defeat but failed. Republicans like Nunes, already in effect running an investigation of Mueller’s investigation, could take more steps to push back against the FBI, Justice Department and any other part of the federal government seen as threatening Trump’s power.

A Democratic freakout

Nancy Pelosi already had Democratic critics who felt she had stayed on too long as the party’s House leader, blocked a younger generation of lawmakers from taking power and failed to lead Democrats back to majority power. But that situation has gotten worse in the first few months of 2018. Republicans are running millions of dollars in ads linking Democratic congressional candidates to the unpopular Pelosi, leaving some of these Democratic hopefuls feeling compelled to distance themselves from the California Democrat and say they do not want her to remain the party’s leader. If Republicans win the House this fall, I expect Democrats on the Hill will force Pelosi out as leader after pinning at least some of the blame for their defeat on her (or just deciding that they need someone new).

“It will be like 2016 for Democrats. They will think they lost an election they should have won,” said Seth Masket, a University of Denver political scientist who is working on a book about the post-2016 Democratic Party. “There would be enormous anger directed at Pelosi.”

But I don’t think she would be alone in being deposed. The No. 2 and No. 3 Democrats on the Hill (Steny Hoyer of Maryland and James Clyburn of South Carolina) are basically the same age as the 78-year-old Pelosi (Hoyer is 78, Clyburn 77) and considered part of the old guard by some younger Democrats. It’s more likely that Hoyer and Clyburn will be pushed out of leadership completely than that one of them will be asked to replace Pelosi and lead the party into the 2020 elections. Some party activists are dissatisfied with the Democratic National Committee too, and I’m not sure DNC Chairman Tom Perez can survive a major Democratic underperformance this fall either.

This freakout could go way beyond sidelining the Democratic leaders in Washington, though. Would the calls asking for a figure from outside of politics (say, Oprah Winfrey) to run for president to save the Democratic Party and save the country from Trump get louder, in effecting casting aside more traditional presidential candidates like Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren? Before the 2020 presidential election, would party activists beg former president Barack Obama to get more involved in electoral politics, taking a 2018 defeat as a sign that the current crop of Democrats are not equipped to take on Trump?

I’m not sure about the specifics, but that seems like the right scale here; if Democrats feel they’ve underperformed in 2018, we may come to see the party’s post-2016 reprisals as only the warm-up act for the internal strife that would follow these midterms.

A media reassessment

The initial media reaction to the 2016 election (“Should we cover Middle America more often?”) has largely been supplanted, I would argue, by news organizations investing more time and resources in covering the Trump administration, particularly the Russia investigation. That’s a logical decision. There is a lot of news in Washington — and that news is probably both more important and more likely to attract clicks and eyeballs (media is a business) than what’s happening in, say, small-town Wisconsin.

That decision has also been reinforced by two factors. The Mueller investigation and the media’s own reporting has shown that there is much to be covered in terms of Russian interference in the election and connections between Russians and Trump allies, if not the president himself. And polling since Trump’s election has suggested that American voters are not particularly enthusiastic about Trump or congressional Republicans — even if the voters gave the GOP total control in the 2016 election. Trump is unpopular for a president this early in his tenure, and polls suggest a majority of Americans disapprove of the job he’s doing and a plurality would prefer Democratic control of the House.

So the media has covered the Trump story largely through Washington, not Middle America, and has covered Trump fairly negatively.

I suspect that a Republican win in the House, even if the majority of voters back Democrats (Republicans’ built-in seat advantage makes it possible for the party to hang on to congressional control while losing the nationwide popular vote), would spur some rethinking of that tactic. Coverage might go in a somewhat pro-Democratic direction, asking if something is amiss with the electoral system if Democrats keep winning the national popular vote but remain shut out of power. But I think there will be renewed questions about whether the media is out of touch with a country that not only elected Trump but also kept his party in power in Congress despite intense coverage of the president’s foibles.

Other important things would happen, of course. GOP control of the Senate would allow Trump to continue to fill federal courts with conservative judges. Moving the judiciary to the right has become one of the chief goals of the administration and a major part of Trump’s appeal to more traditional Republicans who might otherwise be wary of his political style. Additionally, a good 2018 for the GOP might send the message abroad that the American public has ratified Trump’s domestic and foreign-policy approach, and world leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel might begin to more forcefully distance themselves from the U.S.

“For all those [foreign leaders] who have found reassurance in the idea that this is a temporary aberration and that America will go back to its regularly scheduled programming soon, it would be an argument for starting to recalculate,” said Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, the executive editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.

In any case, it’s worth thinking through the repercussions of various 2018 outcomes, even relatively unlikely ones. As we all should have learned by now, unlikely isn’t the same as impossible.

[mastcomm]

Black Workers’ Wages Are Finally Rising. Can Everyone Share in That Climb?

PHILADELPHIA — On a brisk January morning Markus Mitchell arrives at his desk at 8:30, his phone ringing before he can even log in to his computer. An employee at the giant nonprofit where Mr. Mitchell works is locked out of the organization’s network and needs the 24-year-old’s help.

Mr. Mitchell became a full-fledged employee at JEVS Human Services in Philadelphia in October, after a year as an apprentice. Just three years ago, he was making $13,000 working in the kitchen at a Chick-fil-A, feeling unsure about his future. Landing the $38,000-a-year position was the latest step in a rapid career ascent made possible in part by America’s record-long economic expansion and low unemployment rate.

President Trump frequently celebrates the experience of black workers, noting correctly that the group’s unemployment rate is at its lowest on record.

Their wages are also going up — a New York Times analysis of government data found that wage growth for black workers has accelerated recently after lagging for much of the decade-long economic expansion.

But when Mr. Mitchell looks around his relatively low-income and heavily black neighborhood, he worries that the rising tide of a strong economy has not been equally good for everyone in his community. And when it comes to his own labor market gains, he’s working hard to make sure they do not prove fleeting.

A malignant reality lurks beneath the happy surface as black workers finally make job market progress. Not only did the gains take a decade of steady job growth to materialize, but they could evaporate at the first sign of economic weakness, as they did after previous expansions.

In April 2017, Mr. Mitchell quit his low-paying job, hoping that he could achieve a better life. By June that year, he was in a training program, one that helped connect him to another backed by JEVS. That led to a pre-apprenticeship role in partnership with AmeriCorps, then an apprenticeship and now his full-time job.

He has one certification, is working on another in networking and could even progress to a cybersecurity test down the road. He’s conscious that without a college degree he has challenges, but hopeful that his on-the-job experience and practical training will help him weather future downturns.

“I know that the fact that I don’t have a degree puts me at a disadvantage, over my peers,” he said. “I’ve gained enough knowledge to go and do computer work for people myself, so if that’s what I had to do, I’d do it.”

Mr. Mitchell’s story is, on one level, a lesson in the power of a strong labor market to lift up disadvantaged communities. When workers are scarce, companies are more likely to hire people without much experience or formal education, and to provide training to help those employees succeed. Employers are also more likely to consider candidates with disabilities, criminal records or other barriers to work and to offer other options, like flexible hours, to attract people with caregiving responsibilities.

Companies are also more likely to raise pay. Wage growth, which was sluggish for much of the recovery, has picked up in recent years, with the strongest gains among workers at the bottom of the earnings ladder, in jobs that are often concentrated in the service sector, like fast food and retail.

The Federal Reserve sees the continually expanding work force as a key reason for future patience on interest rates. Mary C. Daly, president of the San Francisco branch, has said Fed officials should see how far the labor expansion can run “experientially.”

But tight labor markets alone cannot undo established structural barriers. Even now, the unemployment rate for black Americans is double that of whites — a figure that does not even take into account higher rates of incarceration for black men in particular. The median black worker still makes 78 cents to the median white worker’s $1 each week.

Mr. Mitchell grew up in Grays Ferry, a neighborhood in South Philadelphia where rows of identical low-income housing units sit alongside faded corner bodegas.

He has lived in his home, which is subsidized, since his family ran into hard times around the last recession. His mother, a teacher, had to take time off work after a bad car accident — and then struggled to find new work as the economy reeled. Since she was the primary breadwinner for her five sons, including one with a severe disability, it was a major blow.

The boys were interested in college, but for Mr. Mitchell, high school changed that. He felt that his teachers did not care about him, especially after concerns about the building’s safety forced his high school to shut down before his senior year. Fights plagued the hallways of his new school. There were cages on the windows.

“It was waking up to go to a day care, that was actually a jail, that you could freely walk out of,” he said.

He cut classes, sneaking out a side door to the freedom of the surrounding city. Though an avid reader — his dresser is buried under psychology classics, as varied as Dale Carnegie and Machiavelli — he failed English. He was pushed through graduation anyway.

Early adulthood flowed by in a string of odd jobs.

He worked in poison ivy removal (he stopped getting a rash after the fourth or fifth outbreak) and had a short stint at UPS before starting work at Chick-fil-A, where he made $9.50 an hour. He promised himself the job would be short-lived, and spent his mornings and nights reading computer-related training material.

But more than a year in, as he was cleaning the floors at Chick-fil-A, a moment shook him.

“I was squeegeeing water up, and these guys walked in,” he said. They were technicians, sent there to fix the restaurant’s computer network. They were close to his age, and he couldn’t help comparing their work with his own. “I just told myself: Here’s the risk, here’s the reward. What are you going to do?”

It took a few months to finally quit. He was getting a lot of hours at Chick-fil-A, and helping his mother, who now works at a day care, to pay rent.

“I didn’t want to set myself up for failure long term, but I didn’t want to set myself up for failure short term, either,” he said.

“I knew computers, and people with skills in computers, were in demand. I knew it in my heart,” he said. But at the same time, “who is going to pick this kid up with no college degree, no experience?”

His timing was ideal. The shortage of qualified workers in information technology is prompting employers to cast a wider net, fueling demand for apprenticeship programs like the one he completed.

“We know because of the economy, employers are trying to expand the pipeline of talent that they’re tapping,” said Edison Freire, a former teacher who founded the apprentice program Mr. Mitchell went through.

Mr. Mitchell has made huge gains in the past few years. But his long-term prospects remain uncertain. He still doesn’t have a college degree. He is hoping that his certificate and experience make up for that, but they have yet to be tested in the crucible of a recession.

What happens to Mr. Mitchell and others like him has implications for the broader economy. Historically, the gains made during periods of low unemployment have proved transitory for black workers, who are among the last to benefit from a good economy and among the first to suffer in a downturn.

But there have been few past examples of a labor market as strong and sustained as the current one. Some economists hope that as more workers like Mr. Mitchell get a foothold in the labor market, and even manage to climb a few rungs up the ladder, they will be better positioned to weather an eventual recession. That larger pool of workers would leave the American economy better off in the long run.

Today’s solid labor market comes with costs. A strong economy fuels urbanization and lifts rent, and can make it harder for lower-income minority families like Mr. Mitchell’s to get by. Rent has marched up along with his salary as the family’s housing vouchers have been reduced. Money is manageable, but Mr. Mitchell remains frugal — when he eats a $3 cheesesteak for lunch, he carefully wraps half of it for later.

But Mr. Mitchell has big goals. He is hoping that he and his younger brothers can pull together sufficient savings to move themselves and their mother to another neighborhood. He loves where he grew up, but it’s changing — gentrifying, diversifying. And the bustling local market doesn’t seem to be pulling black workers up with it.

He noted that Pennsylvania’s minimum wage has not increased, and “very seldom do I hear of someone getting a better job.” (Philadelphia last year raised the minimum wage for city employees and contractors, but state law prohibits the city from raising the floor for all workers. Federal efforts have yet to gain traction.)

Philadelphia is a university town, but he worries that it is not focused on educating its native youths, a group that is heavily black. Standing outside his old high school last month, he glumly pointed out the door he used to skip classes. Nobody stopped him, he said. And years later, a steady stream of students — mostly racial or ethnic minorities — are still pouring out.

“I don’t see much of a change, as far as my people elevating economically,” he said. “There’s often a loophole through things, sometimes there’s not. I was lucky enough to be blessed with one.”

Jeanna Smialek reported from Philadelphia, and Ben Casselman from New York.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/black-workers-wages-are-finally-rising-can-everyone-share-in-that-climb/

[bigbirdgladiator]

As the Democratic candidates prepare for their last debate of the year, the race for the nomination has been reshaped again. The dramatic and sudden decline in Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (Mass.) polling has left progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) as the main counterweight to three ascendant moderates: former Vice President Joe Biden, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. For the first time since Warren began her steady climb, it seems like a majority of Democratic primary voters currently prefers a moderate.Wasn't this the year that Democrats were going to make a decisive turn to the left? It certainly seemed like the primary was following the script of a newly radicalized party when Warren briefly overtook Biden for the national polling lead in September, and scraped her way to the top of early state polling in Iowa and New Hampshire. But since then, she's made a series of missteps that have cost her that lead and then some.Warren's decline has many causes. Unable or unwilling to get to the left of Sanders, she is the only candidate still in the race getting hammered from both sides of the party's ideological spectrum. While Sanders himself has mostly refrained from taking her on directly, his proxies savaged both her plan to pay for Medicare-for-all without raising middle class taxes, as well as her phased-in approach to the policy. An endorsement from the beloved, dying progressive activist Ady Barkan did nothing to stop the bleeding.Worse, she seemed to walk back from her embrace of the Sanders plan, at least its timeline, which alienated supporters on the left for whom health care is the most important issue and gave grist to establishmentarians eager to paint her as untrustworthy. And in the past two debates, Buttigieg, Biden, and Klobuchar — who is finally getting some traction in Iowa — successfully teamed up to paint Warren's health-care reform as too radical.They've collectively gotten a huge boost from deep-pocketed health-care industry giants who have been blanketing early voting and swing states with ads against Medicare-for-all under the guise of anodyne-sounding organizations like The Partnership For America's Health Care Future. That plan has been out there since it was leaked to The Intercept just after the midterms, a strategy designed to make Medicare-for-all have "support only from the far left."It's working. The phenomenal national and early-state rise of Buttigieg, an opponent of Medicare-for-all, seems to have come entirely at the expense of Warren. Like Biden, Buttigieg is loathed by the left-wing Twitterati and has almost no support from younger Democrats despite his ostentatious effort to position himself as the vanguard of a new generation. But his relentless attacks on Warren's health-care plan have convinced a slice of her supporters that somehow the mayor of a mid-sized town is a safer bet against President Trump than she is. The theatrical entry into the race of billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last month only reinforced the sense that party elites and center-leftists were in a state of full-blown panic about a Warren nomination.Yet the unsubtle moderate mob hit on Warren, as successful as it has been, has also had the unintended effect of boosting the fortunes of Sanders. He's up more than three points in the polling average since his campaign announced he had suffered a heart attack on Oct. 4 — a time when he had fallen behind Warren and seemed at risk of falling out of the race altogether. But he looked healthy and unfazed in the Oct. 15 debate and rolled up a series of important endorsements. Flanked by the wildly popular young progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders has taken second place back from Warren, looks like he's surging in Iowa, and has even led some polls of California and New Hampshire. But Sanders, like Warren, would need momentum from early state victories to cut into Biden's leads in the Super Tuesday states. Coming close probably won't cut it.Warren and Sanders both might also be suffering from the ongoing economic expansion. With unemployment and inflation both low, the argument for aggressive economic policy change isn't finding the audience it might have in the midst of a recession. I don't have any data to back this up, but my hunch is that a large slice of the primary electorate thinks the economy will still be humming along nicely in November, and that a moderate whose message is "Look at me, I'm normal and I'll keep the good times rolling, just without the misogyny, the acts of genocide at the border, and the relentless assault on truth and the rule of law" stands a better chance than someone promising a fundamental revision of the nation's economic system.Presiding toothily over all of this chaos is Biden, the man who remains the race's frontrunner. Despite his terrifyingly incoherent debate performances, his inability to come up with a convincing one-sentence explanation of the Hunter Biden scandal, and his almost total lack of appeal to anyone under the age of 45, the former vice president is sitting just about where he was from the get-go in national polling: in first place, with a clear path to the nomination.Everyone has taken a turn trying to eat into Biden's lead, and no one has really succeeded. The ones who came at Biden hardest — California Sen. Kamala Harris and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro — are gone or on the ropes. Despite trailing in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden still looks set to win Nevada and South Carolina and then catapult himself to a dominant Super Tuesday. He's up big in Texas and he's led three of the last four surveys of delegate-loaded California. If he wins Texas, North Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Virginia and finishes in the top three in California, it's hard to see how or where other candidates would make up those delegates.Where does that leave the field? Klobuchar, who cracked double digits for the first time in a recent Iowa poll, absolutely must win Iowa to be viable moving forward. She almost certainly needs to go harder and more ruthlessly after Buttigieg — a Chris Christie-like moment of humiliation could cut him down to size and give her a shot at his supporters. Biden likely wants to avoid getting routed in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but his campaign doesn't think he needs to win either state. Buttigieg, on the other hand, might want to lay off Warren for a while. He has already picked off the moderate faction of her coalition, and if she gets knocked out early — probably by failing to win either Iowa or New Hampshire — her remaining supporters would disproportionately go to Sanders.With more than a month-and-a-half, the holidays, the formal impeachment of the president, his Senate trial, and God knows what else to go before Iowa votes, there's still plenty of time for Warren to recover her momentum, for Sanders to to close the gap with Biden in national polling, or for the race to be shaken up in ways we can scarcely foresee now. For now, though, Buttigieg, Biden and the moderates appear to have the upper hand.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com Trump's pathological obsession with being laughed at The most important day of the impeachment inquiry Jerry Falwell Jr.'s false gospel of memes

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[thisdaynews]

We asked 100 New Hampshire insiders about the Democratic field. Here's who they favor.

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We asked 100 New Hampshire insiders about the Democratic field. Here's who they favor.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention on Saturday. | Scott Eisen/Getty Images

2020 elections

The 1,280 most influential Democrats in the state hosted 19 presidential hopefuls on Saturday for the party’s annual convention.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Joe Biden found little mojo for his candidacy among Democratic Party insiders at their state convention here Saturday, despite leading the polls in the first-in-the-nation primary state.

Dozens of state representatives, party leaders, operatives and volunteers said they weren’t planning to vote for the former vice president in the nomination contest — and many publicly aired concerns about his age, energy and gender.

Story Continued Below

A striking number of party activists said they were undecided as 19 presidential candidates delivered stump speeches over seven hours at the SNHU Arena, according to interviews with 100 delegates by POLITICO.

Elizabeth Warren led the way among the surveyed delegates who had made up their minds, followed by Bernie Sanders in second and Biden in third.

“I’m not here to criticize any other Democrat or anyone else’s campaign,” Warren told reporters. “What I saw in that room were a whole lot of Democrats here in New Hampshire who are not only ready for change. They’re ready to get out there.”

Just over half of the 100 delegates said they haven’t picked a candidate yet. Of those who have decided, a third named Warren as their favorite.

“I think that Joe Biden is too old to be president,” said Richard Post, a 26-year-old delegate who is undecided. “We need someone who is younger, more attached to the future of the planet.”

The complaints about Biden from party soldiers often centered on his campaigning skills, and a desire for more diversity in Democratic leadership. Notably, few undecided delegates named Biden when asked who they were leaning toward.

“I’m tired of old white guys telling me what to do,” said Rachel Cisto, an uncommitted delegate who is leading toward Warren or Sanders.

Warren, on the other hand, showed significant strength among those who said they hadn’t selected a candidate, but were moving toward one or more contenders. Of the undecided delegates surveyed, a third said they’re leaning towards Warren, either exclusively or as part of a small list of others.

Warren had also won the support of a handful of people who backed Sanders four years ago.

“She has the most thought-out policies, and I’m particularly in favor of Medicare for All,” said Jessica LaMontague, who voted for Sanders in 2016. “I think Bernie’s a little too old and grumpy.”

Dressed in her trademark “liberty green” T-shirts, Warren’s supporters swarmed the convention. When Warren took the stage, the audience exploded, at one point chanting “2 cents, 2 cents!” in reference to her proposed wealth tax. Sanders also received an enthusiastic welcome from the crowd.

Warren and Sanders are familiar faces in New Hampshire, living in bordering states and visiting more frequently than Biden. Both progressives have high expectations in the state due to the proximity and other factors. Sanders won the New Hampshire primary by 22 points in 2016.

“I met him in 1996 and had a chance to talk to him,” said delegate Mark King of Sanders, who he is supporting. “He talks about the same things and has the same attitudes he had back then.”

Biden has strong connections and endorsements in the state, some of which go back to when he first started running for president in 1987, making his lack of support among the surveyed delegates notable. One of Biden’s most formidable allies in the state confronted him during his trip to the state this week, warning him to speak less and be more concise in his answers.

“I like all of them very much,” said Carol Shea Porter, a former New Hampshire congresswoman and delegate who has endorsed Biden. “But because of his experience in the White House and experience on the international stage, he is probably the person who can best remind ourselves and the world of who we are.”

The 1,280 party delegates who gave up their Saturday to cheer on their party are key to the ground game in New Hampshire: They’re some of the most willing Democrats in the state to make calls, knock on doors and plant lawn signs. They run town and county committees and are instrumental in the retail politicking of the first primary state.

“These are the 1,280 most influential Democrats in the state,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley.

The delegates are selected in local elections throughout the state. In off years, they would vote on platform issues, but this year will only serve as party evangelists.

Local powerbrokers met privately with candidates in private suites at the arena during the day. Several hopefuls moved from suite to suite, kissing rings of party leaders, unions and some of their campaigns’ biggest backers. Biden spent a significant amount of time at the International Association of Fire Fighters’ room, shaking hands with everyone and whipping out cash to buy a non-alcoholic drink.

Sanders’ campaign did less so-called “visibility” outside of the convention than other campaigns, opting instead to organize, aides said. A staffer said his team knocked on more than 9,000 doors on Saturday as of 4 p.m., and Sanders greeted a large crowd of volunteers at a canvass kickoff at a local pub after he spoke at the convention.

Biden’s campaign this week downplayed expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire, upsetting some of his strongest supporters here who said he needs to make fixes to his campaign in early states to win.

Sanders and Warren made remarks during their speeches Saturday that could be interpreted as subtle jabs at Biden. “It is not enough just to defeat Trump,” said Sanders. And Warren commented, “We can’t ask other people to vote for someone we don’t believe in.”

The latest poll of likely New Hampshire voters, conducted more than a month ago by Suffolk University and the Boston Globe, showed Biden in the lead with 21 percent, followed by Sanders at 17 and Warren at 14. It also found that half of the general electorate was undecided, similar to the party operatives interviewed Saturday.

The largely friendly tone among the different campaigns’ supporters and “Anybody But Trump” signs were a stark contrast to the event in 2016. The party’s annual convention that year was marred by chants and boos, forcing former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schutlz to stop speaking.

In a sign of unity this year, hundreds of delegates agreed to hold signs for whichever candidate was speaking at the time, regardless of which contender they backed personally. The only jeers were when several candidates couldn’t remember or pronounce the names of the state’s congressional members.

“Whoever wins the primary is who I’m supporting,” said delegate Stephanie Vuolo, adding that she is undecided in the race for the nomination.

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[democratsunited-blog]

Obama Speechwriter Jon Favreau's New Podcast Talks Dems Through 'The Wilderness'

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=6929

Obama Speechwriter Jon Favreau's New Podcast Talks Dems Through 'The Wilderness'

The Democratic Party has some figuring out to do between now and 2020—what lessons to take from 2016, how to govern if they win the House of Representatives in November, who to run against Donald Trump in 2020, what kind of campaign that should be. Big, consequential stuff.

Fairly early in Crooked Media’s new podcast series The Wilderness about the future of the Democratic Party, there’s an episode called “The Nightmare” about the 2016 election. Jon Favreau, the former Obama speechwriter and Crooked Media co-founder who hosts the series, talks to journalist Rebecca Traister about the optimism of Barack Obama’s second inaugural, about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the story of America.

“Those were back in the hopeful days before Trump,” Favreau says in the episode. There are no lights or cameras, just two politically astute vets of the Obama years talking into microphones. “It’s because we’re on the brink of getting to that next place that we are being hit so hard,” Traister says. “That’s exactly what we’re in the midst of right now. And it’s not because it’s impossible to get to that next step. It’s because it’s really possible.”

I hear all of this as I’m running on an outdoor loop at the YMCA a mile from my home, and the experience is like being on a conference call with the two of them. They’re talking, and I’m listening. The show has the same factual foundation and the same politics as Crooked Media’s popular Pod Save America, but it’s a few clicks removed from the news cycle. Other big thinkers—historians, sociologists, political observers—weigh in. A hopeful sense runs through the show that Democrats are still in the woods but have a few trails to follow.

The Wilderness premiered July 16 on podcast platforms and will drop weekly installments on Mondays through the end of September. If you hadn’t considered that one of the battlegrounds for 2020 will be your earbuds, start considering it. Favreau sat down with The Daily Beast to talk about the new series.

The obvious outlets for this kind of project are a book or a Netflix-style documentary series. Other than the fact that you’re running a podcast company, why does this make sense as a podcast series?

I thought about doing a traditional documentary. Having seen those and been interviewed for those, I think people are more candid when they don’t have a bunch of cameras pointed at them. When you’re sitting around a table chatting or talking to someone on the phone, it’s a much different interaction. And I’m too lazy to write a whole book. [Laughs.] Looking back at the series, I feel like I wrote enough voiceover to fill up a book.

You’re trying to reach young voters and people with influence in the Democratic Party, and I suspect those people will experience a podcast much differently—in their car, on the morning run, etc., than watching a documentary on TV.

I think that’s right. Pod Save America has a big audience of political junkies like us, but there’s another big audience of people who did not pay attention to politics before Donald Trump became president. We think about those people a lot. We meet them at our live shows. To tell a story about the Democratic Party, I quickly realized it would require history and context for people who haven’t paid as much attention to politics. A lot of the upcoming episodes tackle separate issues like immigration, foreign policy, the economy, etc. The first half of each of those episodes is about the political decisions that led to today, and the second half is about where we go from here.

Aren’t you talking mostly to people who are already with you on these issues?

I talked to Cornell Belcher, who was one of President Obama’s pollsters, and he pointed out that 12 percent of Obama voters in 2008 were first-time voters. That’s a significant number. If we really want a blue wave in 2018 that will flip the Senate and give Democrats a strong majority in the House, we have to bring in voters who haven’t voted before or haven’t been active in politics before.

If Republicans hold the Senate and keep at least a narrow majority in the House, will they have a good basis to claim victory in the midterm elections?

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Yes. If Republicans hold the House, for sure. I think the Senate is more of an uphill climb for Democrats, but I think we have a good chance of taking the Senate.

The Supreme Court confirmation hearings in September will be one of the last big things that happens before the midterm elections. Will that more energize Democrats or Republicans?

I tend to think it will be a big rallying point for Democrats. One of our problems over the last several years is that we don’t have as many voters as Republicans who vote based on the Supreme Court. Donald Trump putting out a list of proposed justices during the campaign was one of the things that rallied a lot of the Republican base that wasn’t necessarily happy with him during the campaign. It’s not just the Supreme Court—it’s state legislators, governors, Congress, local elections. Democrats have focused too much on the presidency and not enough on the other levers of power.

After I listened to the first 10 minutes of the first episode of The Wilderness, about election night in 2016, I texted your publicist “first 10 minutes” followed by that green, sick-face emoji. She texted me back: “It gets better.” Why did you want to start with that?

[Laughs.] I’m a “hope” guy, and the thrust of the series was always going to be hopeful and inspirational. From a storytelling perspective you have to earn that, and I think we needed to remind people how bad that election night was.

Episode 3 is about the various factors that went into Clinton losing the election—James Comey, Russian interference, Hillary fatigue, etc.—and I wondered how much any of that stuff matters going forward. Does sorting through all that really help Democrats in 2020?

I think about 2016 in terms of factors that we couldn’t control and factors that we could have controlled. Hillary Clinton faced a certain amount of sexism, and it was a factor in why she lost. We have to confront that challenge, but it’s not something we can fix overnight. We can fix how Democrats communicate their message in a fractured media environment. Democrats can propose a policy agenda bold enough and progressive enough for the current moment. There are lessons in 2016 about what we should do differently in 2018 and 2020.

If 2020 shapes up as a question about whether to nominate a moderate or a progressive—which I don’t necessarily think will be the question—is that a proxy for whether voters think the election will be more about swing voters or more about turnout?

In Episode 4, I sat down with Obama-Trump voters from outside of Detroit who were white 40- to 60-year-olds, and I sat down with younger, more diverse voters outside of Houston who either didn’t vote in 2016 or voted for a third-party candidate. The same issues motivated both of those groups. Democrats have a problem if they think the issue is centrist positions vs. liberal positions. Inequality has been on the rise for decades, people are having difficulty paying for basic necessities, and they’re seeing a political system that doesn’t work.

Republicans say, “Government doesn’t work and is not the answer to your problems, so we’ll just cut taxes and fight culture wars.” Democrats believe that government can make a difference, but it’s a problem for Democrats that Washington is just people yelling at each other. Big, bold, progressive, economic solutions will appeal to middle-aged voters in the Midwest and to young, diverse voters in Texas who thought Bernie Sanders seemed interesting but then didn’t vote in 2016.

So you would look at an issue like Medicare for everyone in terms of how it works as a positive issue rather than how to present it in a way that minimizes the Republican response to it?

I do. I don’t fear that at all. Republicans have demagogued Democratic positions and been so hyperbolic in their attacks going back to the beginning of the Obama years. They called the Affordable Care Act socialized medicine and a government take-over. They have nowhere to go on Medicare for all beyond the exact same attack.

Republicans will demonize whatever you say, so say what you actually want to do?

They’re going to demonize whatever you say, they will do it unfairly, and they will not care when the fact-checkers point out that they are lying. Those hyperbolic attacks by Republicans liberate Democrats to say what they actually believe will fix the problems. If you’re a Democrat who believes that Medicare for all won’t actually work and you’d rather have a public option, or if you think we need to reform ICE rather than abolish it, there should be space within the Democratic Party for people to propose what they actually believe.

The Democrats who run for president will be looking for areas of disagreement the way Obama and Clinton disagreed on the individual mandate in healthcare in 2016.

Democrats tend to have big slogans—“change” or “opportunity”—and a laundry list of small, incremental policy positions. What we often lack are ideas—goals—with simplicity and clarity like Medicare for all or debt-free college that go beyond gauzy talk about equality and prosperity.

I listen to Pod Save America fairly regularly, and sometimes it’s just too much. Sometimes, there’s just too much happening, and I can’t deal with it. Do you go through that?

With the outrage?

With the outrage. With just the news. Are there days when you just say “fuck politics” and go to a baseball game?

I’m a masochist. I’m a junkie. I have a hard time tearing myself away from Twitter. There are days when I feel like the hill is steeper than other days. [Laughs.] The day Justice Kennedy announced his retirement was bad. Some days are dark. I don’t think I would feel as hopeful as I do if I hadn’t worked for Barack Obama. I never saw him freak out or get too worried. Even during the worst of the financial crisis, he told us we had to take the long view on these things. The only thing we can do is work to try and make it better.

Jon Meacham said recently in an interview on WNYC about his book [The Soul of America] that Joe McCarthy had a national approval rating in the 30s during the McCarthy hearings. We’ve always had one-third of the country that didn’t want change, didn’t want minorities in their restaurants, didn’t want women in their workplaces.

That is a big reason why I wanted to do this series. There’s hope in the realization that we’ve always had these fights. We think: “How did we get here. This is the worst that things have ever been.” And when you go back into history, there was no Golden Age for the Democratic Party ever.

LBJ had big majorities in 1964 and ’65 and passed Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act—and Vietnam ran him out. FDR had his great moment with the New Deal and World War II, but—oh, by the way—that didn’t include African-Americans. There was no moment when the full promise of the Democratic Party for everyone actually happened. Recognizing that, there’s hope that this could really happen.

You talk in one of the early episodes about the rally in Philadelphia the day before the 2016 election. The Obamas and the Clintons were there, and they talked emotionally about those kinds of goals.

I started that story with what Obama had told me he wanted in the speech for the second inaugural—that the entire history of the United States was about trying to live up the ideals of the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

You have a Pod Save America series coming to HBO this fall. Is that a variation of the podcast?

We originally thought that we would spend the fall doing live shows like what we’ve been doing for the last year in swing districts and swing states to help Democrats take back the House and the Senate. When we talked to HBO, the thought was to do a series of specials about the live shows. We’re still figuring out what that’s going to be, but our hope is to tell the story of the 2018 election and the sleeping giant that Trump has awakened with all of the activism that’s happening on the ground.

Does that make Crooked Media more of an advocacy group than a news organization?

We’re sort of a political-media hybrid organization. I think the difference is that news—whether it has a conservative bent or a progressive bent or is right down the middle—tells you everything that’s wrong with the world today. We go the extra step and tell people what they can do to change it.

Are you the Fox News of the left—a political organization with a newsy delivery?

Fox News was founded on the lie that it’s “fair and balanced.” We don’t pretend to be that. We’re Obama staffers. You know what our views are. We want to be as honest as possible about the facts we provide and what we believe. We’re trying to tell people that you can do something about this, and these are the organizations you can work with, and you can actually make a difference.

One of the names that jumped out at me from the list of people you talked to for upcoming episodes is Ruy Teixeira, who’s an expert on Latino demographic change. The success that Republicans are having state by state seems to run against the idea that the country is becoming more ethnically diverse. What did he tell you about that?

My college thesis was about his book with John Judis, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which famously argued that demographics was destiny for the Democratic Party. He now thinks they may have overstated it a bit. [Laughs.] They didn’t know that the Democrats’ share of non-college-educated, white vote would go as low as it has gone. After the first black president left office, we didn’t think that the share of white voters would go lower for Hillary Clinton than it did for Barack Obama. It did.

The predictions they made about how college-educated whites, Latinos, African-Americans, and women would continue to drift toward the Democratic Party turned out to be correct. If the national popular vote winner had the power in this country, it wouldn’t be as much of a worry, but the Electoral College and gerrymandered states have made the math such that Democrats need to win back some of the non-college-educated white voters. Not as much as you’d think from the prevailing narrative, but Democrats can win back some of those voters without giving an inch on the fight for racial justice and equality.

And 2020 is a census year, so big wins in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and several other states would mean undoing the gerrymandered districts in those states.

That’s right, and that’s huge. The challenge will continue to be the Senate. By 2040, 70 percent of the country will live in 30 states. Democrats will likely have to get rid of the filibuster to have an operating majority because it will be difficult to ever get to 60 Democrats again.

Do you foresee doing this going forward rather than running a presidential campaign or running for Congress in 2020?

Yeah, for sure. I never imagined this is what I’d wind up doing. I don’t think Tommy Vietor or or Jon Lovett or Dan Pfeiffer thought this is what we’d be doing either, but it’s the most fun I’ve had since the early days of the Obama campaign in 2008. Our role is helping amplify the progressive voices that are out there and to—as we always say here—inform, entertain, and inspire action. That feels more right to me than jumping into another campaign.

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