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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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DCCC chief overhauls hiring operation after lawmaker outcry

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DCCC chief overhauls hiring operation after lawmaker outcry

“We are moving quickly to fill this role, but we will do so in a way that honors the values of the most diverse House Democratic Caucus in U.S. history,” Rep. Cheri Bustos wrote. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

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Rep. Cheri Bustos is working to ease concerns about the lack of diversity at the campaign arm.

Rep. Cheri Bustos, chair of House Democrats’ campaign arm, is trying to hit the reset button after a tumultuous month — hoping to convince frustrated black and Latino lawmakers that she is taking diversity seriously while maintaining her focus on holding the House.

Bustos (D-Ill.) notified members on Thursday of a new advisory council that will conduct the search for an executive director, following a massive senior staff shakeup from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in late July.

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The move, which comes after two POLITICO reports detailing the unrest within the caucus over the lack of diversity in the committee’s senior ranks, is intended to further underscore her commitment to reshaping the upper echelons of the campaign arm.

Twelve Democratic lawmakers and five technical experts with former experience working at the campaign arm will sit on the council, according to a letter from Bustos obtained by POLITICO.

Bustos and her top aide have held repeated phone calls with lawmakers on the issue. And she assured members in the letter that she is running a “broad and open search for the DCCC executive director.”

“We are moving quickly to fill this role, but we will do so in a way that honors the values of the most diverse House Democratic Caucus in U.S. history,” Bustos wrote. “I look forward to hearing your ideas and suggestions.”

The letter also includes a link to a questionnaire soliciting members for advice on what “qualities and experiences” Bustos should look for in a new executive director, what “topics” should be covered in the interviews, and what information the next executive director should “keep in mind” when they enter the role.

In conversations with members across the caucus’ ideological spectrum, Bustos has sought to reassure them that the DCCC is addressing its diversity issues while remaining fixated on her end goal: Keeping the House majority.

In addition, Bustos has enlisted her senior aide, chief of staff Jon Pyatt, to reassure skittish lawmakers following the staff departures at the DCCC. Pyatt reached out to chiefs of staff for vulnerable Democrats in the last week, promising them that protecting freshmen in swing-district seats remains the campaign arm’s first priority.

But some lawmakers remain restless.

The announcement of the new advisory council comes after lawmakers began privately expressing concerns that Bustos and the remaining DCCC leadership had not done enough in recent weeks to implement a thoughtful — and thorough — hiring process to fill the vacancies at the campaign arm or devise a timeline for doing so.

A group of a half dozen black and Latino lawmakers held a conference call earlier this week to air concerns about the lack of a coherent hiring strategy at the DCCC, more than two weeks after five top staffers were forced out. Bustos emailed members last week informing them of her next steps and that the executive director position had been posted publicly, a rare move for a top job at a political committee.

The advisory council will consist of a dozen Democrats, all of whom already have various leadership roles within the campaign arm’s sprawling hierarchy: Reps. Charlie Crist (Fla.), Madeleine Dean (Pa.), Suzan DelBene (Wash.), Val Demings (Fla.), Robin Kelly (Ill.), Gwen Moore (Wis.), Scott Peters (Calif.), Raul Ruiz (Calif.), Linda Sanchez (Calif.), Brad Schneider (Ill.), Mark Takano (Calif.) and Marc Veasey (Texas). The members will have the option to sit in on interviews of executive director candidates.

“I spoke with the chairwoman today and from our conversation it’s clear she has heard her colleagues’ concerns about diversity in the DCCC’s senior leadership and is taking immediate action to get on track,” said Ruiz in a statement. “It takes guts to admit you’ve messed up, and there is no one who can question that Cheri Bustos is owning where she fell short and working to make the DCCC an organization we can all be proud of.”

“As a former frontline member who flipped a red-district, I know personally how important the work Chairwoman Bustos and the DCCC are doing,” Ruiz said.

In addition, several House Democratic campaign veterans will assist with the search: Dan Sena, executive director during the 2018 cycle; Kelly Ward, executive director from 2013 to 2017; Doug Thornell, who worked at the DCCC for two cycles from 2007 to 2010; Raghu Devaguptapu, a longtime consultant for the committee; and Jacqui Newman, current interim executive director and chief operating officer for DCCC.

“All of us care about what’s happening at the DCCC. … It’s gotta get fixed. It’s serious,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who co-chairs the financing arm of the campaign committee, said in an interview. “But in terms of recruitment and supporting the candidates and delivering for them, it’s about their districts and it’s like two different buckets.”

Democrats have watched closely to see how Bustos would reorganize the DCCC staff after several senior aides were forced out late last month. Bustos was criticized by her colleagues for failing to meet promises to diversify the DCCC’s senior staff and making comments about how her husband and children are of “Mexican descent” that were seen as insensitive.

Lawmakers were also vexed by the status ofDCCC staffer Tayhlor Coleman, whose nearly decade-old tweets hostile toward Mexicans and LGBTQ people surfaced in a Washington Free Beacon story.

Some members were told by the DCCC that Coleman would be immediately moved to a different position having nothing to do with outreach to minority voters, but as of POLITICO’s July report, Coleman continued to work on a critical outreach project, angering some Democrats.

Bustos soon made an emergency trip back to Washington to address the growing concerns. The DCCC’s executive director, a longtime Bustos aide, then resigned followed by several other senior committee staffers.

And Coleman is now expected to move to a senior role on the DCCC’s independent expenditure side, which would be located physically outside of the campaign arm’s building, according to multiple sources.

Privately, Democrats have been worried about whether the DCCC, and Bustos, could recover before the 2020 campaign kicks into high gear. The topic came up in several conversations during the Congressional Black Caucus’ annual nonprofit conference in Mississippi last week, according to sources present.

It’s not all bad for the DCCC. It’s fundraising consistently outpaces its Republican counterpart, a recent slate of House Republican retirements have created potential new pickup opportunities, and vulnerable freshmen are steadily breaking fundraising records of their own.

Bustos has also been in constant contact with lawmakers across the Tri-Caucus — the Black, Hispanic and Asian Pacific American Caucuses — and freshman members over the last three weeks to reassure them of her ability to stabilize the campaign arm.

“I feel like the DCCC is really doing great work and that [Bustos] has taken on the diversity issues head on with the seriousness that it requires,” said freshman Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.), who flipped a Republican seat in LA County last year. “As a frontliner I feel totally supported and like I have the resources I need.”

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fullspectrum-cbd-oil · 6 years ago

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Struggling in White House Bid, Democrat Gillibrand Seeks Bump in Trump Country

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand rolled through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan last week on a bus emblazoned with “He broke it, we’ll fix it,” as part of a campaign tour highlighting what she called President Donald Trump’s “broken promises” to the region.

Gillibrand told laid-off auto workers in Youngstown, Ohio, and healthcare workers in Pittsburgh she would repair the damage of Trump’s presidency if voters choose her as the Democratic nominee to take him on in November 2020.

But to do that, she will require a significant boost. The New York senator is stuck in the bottom of national polls of the field’s 25 candidates, and time is running out.

Posing for selfies with voters after a town hall on gun violence in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on Friday, Gillibrand said she needed thousands more supporters to qualify for the third Democratic primary debate in mid-September.

“I’ve got a month and a half to accomplish that,” she said in an interview with Reuters. “It’s a heavy lift, but I’m going to do it.”

To earn a spot in the September debate, candidates must draw at least 2% support in four national or early-voting state polls, and have 130,000 unique donors, including 400 in 20 separate states.

Gillibrand failed to catch fire after a spirited performance during the first televised debate in June. She remained at just 1% support among Democratic voters in a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken June 29-July 2, and was below 1% in a NBC/WSJ poll released on Thursday.

Gillibrand’s campaign did not disclose her latest fundraising total ahead of the second-quarter filing deadline on Monday, a likely sign she did not raise as much money as many of her opponents.

In any other election cycle, Gillibrand and rivals including fellow Senators Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, as well as former Obama administration housing chief Julian Castro, would be top-tier candidates, Democratic strategists said.

But she is in a crowded field competing for donors and media attention with nationally known contenders like former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders.

“I don’t think it’s a reflection of a bad campaign or a poor candidate,” said Doug Thornell with SKDKnickerbocker, a Democratic strategy firm founded by Obama administration veterans. “If history is any guide, she should have an opportunity to get a second look.”

SEARCHING FOR A SECOND LOOK

Gillibrand, 52, sought that second look in three Midwestern states Trump wrested from Democrats in the 2016 presidential election, touting a political resume she cited as proof she could win over more conservative and swing voters.

Before joining the Senate, she represented a heavily Republican congressional district in upstate New York that she was told she could not win as a Democrat.

After being appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated when Hillary Clinton became Barack Obama’s secretary of state, Gillibrand was re-elected in a 2010 special election. She won full terms in 2012 and 2018, when she carried nearly every county, including 18 Trump won in 2016.

While Gillibrand is best known nationally for her work addressing sexual assault in the military and her call for former Democratic Senator Al Franken to resign over sexually inappropriate conduct, she notes she has spent the past decade on agriculture and infrastructure panels.

At modestly sized campaign events, Gillibrand took notes in a leatherbound notebook and said her “super power” is the ability to find common ground on any political issue with anyone, anywhere. Gillibrand leaned on her experience as a mother of 11- and 15-year-old sons to explain racial disparities in marijuana sentencing and “white privilege” to a mother who said white voters are also suffering. At more than one event she said her New York district was not unlike the Midwestern areas in which she campaigned.

“There is no substitute for just showing up, meeting voters, telling them about your vision and listening to them and their concerns,” Gillibrand said during her Reuters interview.

“I don’t have unanimous name recognition,” she added, “so it’s going to take me a long time to introduce myself to places around this country.”

Political strategist Karen Finney, a spokeswoman for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, said Gillibrand’s slow-and-steady campaigning could lead to the breakout she needs – if she has the time and money.

Finney said the fight Gillibrand showed in her first congressional race could enable her to persevere long enough to draw voters in with a bold policy proposal, or to make the case why she is best to take on Trump.

“I think part of what people liked is she didn’t back down, she didn’t take no for an answer, so part of it is remind people what they like about you,” Finney said.

Nearly every voter who spoke to Reuters at Gillibrand’s events said they were in the window-shopping phase.

Jaladah Aslam, a labor and political consultant who introduced Gillibrand at the Youngstown event, was among the undecided. Afterward, she praised Gillibrand’s performance, noting she saw people nodding and liking what they heard.

“She was prepared,” Aslam said. “She wasn’t stumbling. I loved when she started taking notes. Thank God someone is actually listening and not coming here to give us a political speech.”

(Reporting By Amanda Becker; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Chizu Nomiyama)

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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A group of millionaires dedicated to decreasing the influence of money in politics is planning to endorse candidates for the first time, in the 2018 midterm elections.

The only requirements: The candidates it backs have to be running against an incumbent who voted for the Republican tax cuts, and they’ve got to be able to talk about taxes in a way that doesn’t put voters to sleep.

“It’s like situational narcolepsy, the minute you start talking about the tax code, you’ve lost your audience,” said Erica Payne, progressive strategist and president of the Patriotic Millionaires, the group making the endorsements. “We’re looking for people who recognize the grand-scale theft that just happened and are looking to be aggressive fighters against that.”

The GOP thought the tax bill would be something they could run on, but it hasn’t really worked out that way. It’s not very popular with voters and, so far, it hasn’t gotten much attention in 2018 midterm campaigns.

Patriotic Millionaires is a group of about 200 wealthy Americans who advocate for less income inequality and against the concentration of wealth. It’s a bipartisan group, but it’s opposed to a central Republican idea: that benefits for the wealthy will eventually “trickle down” to the rest. That’s the thinking behind the 2017 tax cut bill, which reduced the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent and disproportionately benefits businesses and the wealthy.

The group first came together in 2010 to oppose the extension of Bush-era tax cuts for millionaires. Since then, it’s expanded its focus beyond taxes to also include issues such as the minimum wage and campaign finance reform.

It has also expanded its membership to more than 200 people — to join, you have to have an annual income of more than $1 million or assets of more than $5 million. Morris Pearl, a former director at the investment firm BlackRock, chairs the group.

Up to now, most of the Patriotic Millionaires’ efforts were largely centered on media campaigns and letters to and meetings with lawmakers. But this year it’s endorsing candidates for the first time and encouraging them to speak out against the tax bill.

“We want to get more people talking about it,” Pearl told me. “If that’s part of the narrative, then there will be more of an impetus to deal with these inequality issues in the next Congress.”

Patriotic Millionaires is currently considering about 60 candidates for potential endorsement, most of which are Democrats opposing incumbent Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives in competitive districts. The candidates on the list they’re looking at tend to fall into the more moderate, establishment camp, but some, such as Katie Porter in California and Kara Eastman in Nebraska, are avowed progressives.

The group is bipartisan and would therefore theoretically be willing to back a Republican who voted against the tax bill — there are 12 of them. I also asked if they were willing to back a democratic socialist candidate, to which Payne, the group’s president, replied that they will consider endorsing any candidate who is running against one of the lawmakers who voted to support the bill. “This tax bill is such a complete abomination that anybody who voted for it should be hurled from office,” she said.

Patriotic Millionaires expects to endorse a few dozen candidates during the 2018 midterms, most before Labor Day or soon after. They’ll launch a media push around the endorsements to encourage their members to support the campaigns selected and hold events in the districts where candidates are running in on the tax code.

Prior to the tax bill’s passage on a Republican-only vote in December 2017, the GOP thought it would be a winning issue in the midterms. That hasn’t really been the case.

Polls show that many Americans aren’t noticing the tax cuts in their paychecks, and the new tax law is actually becoming less popular over time. Wages aren’t rising significantly, while corporations and rich people are seeing major savings.

According to estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the top fifth of earners get 70 percent of the bill’s benefits, and the top 1 percent get 34 percent. The new tax treatment for “pass-through” entities — companies organized as sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, or S corporations — will mean an estimated $17 billion in tax savings for millionaires in 2018. American corporations are showering their shareholders with stock buybacks, thanks in part to their tax savings, and have returned nearly $700 billion to investors this year.

Republicans are struggling to sell the tax cuts, and many are turning to other messages, such as immigration, to motivate voters.

One veteran Republican strategist told me the tax bill has fizzled as an issue for the GOP to appeal to voters, though he wasn’t sure it would be a big winner for Democrats, either, especially over other issues, like health care.

“I think it’s going to be hard to take a big swing at us because I do think that people did see a tax cut, but I still think that’s not resonating as a top-of-mind issue for midterm voters,” the strategist, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about the matter, said. “Democrats quite possibly have better bullets to shoot at us, and frankly I think that our voters have moved on to other issues. It’s not as big of an issue as we thought it might have been in January or February of this year.”

Democrats have an opportunity to back into the health care debate via the tax bill because the legislation repealed Obamacare’s individual mandate.

“I think Democrats are going to look at the tax bill, but they’re going to look at, particularly, what it did to the Affordable Care Act and how it has caused a spike in premiums and fewer people receiving coverage. It really was a tool for Republicans to sabotage health care coverage for millions of Americans even more than they already have,” Doug Thornell, a Democratic strategist and former spokesperson at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me. “When you combine the tax cuts that were given to the top 1 percent along with ways in which Republicans undermined health care in this country, you have a pretty potent message.”

The individual mandate’s repeal as part of the tax bill is part of the Patriotic Millionaires’ messaging, but it’s not a central feature.

“We think [taxes] are a winning issue for Democrats and for people running against it,” Pearl said.

To help candidates with messaging on the tax cuts, Patriotic Millionaires is launching Patriotic Millionaires University, a website that makes the case for running against the tax cuts and gives tips and resources on how to do it. It provides advice on how to curate and create content, make ads, and use social media to get a message out and lays out basic talking points and information about tax laws.

“The storyline is pretty straightforward if presented the right way: The majority of voters right now believe that the economy is rigged, and our message to them is that yes, the economy is rigged, and if you want to rig an economy, you start with the tax code,” said Payne, the group’s president.

Payne is a veteran progressive strategist and founder of the Agenda Project, a nonprofit political organization. She is behind the infamous granny-over-a-cliff ad from 2011 that depicted a Paul Ryan lookalike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off of a cliff to highlight his proposals to overhaul Medicare.

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Patriotic Millionaires is also planning to launch a “university” website for citizens as part of a public education campaign. “We believe that if someone fully understands what this tax bill is and how it has rigged the economy against regular Americans, they will act in response to that information,” Payne said.

Ryan Williams, managing director at Republican consulting firm FP1 Strategies, said he thinks Republicans should welcome the opportunity to have a debate about taxes and said much of the problem is that President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to be able to stay on message.

“There’s nothing more that Republicans running for office would want to talk about than the success of the tax bill and the strong economy. Unfortunately, whenever there’s news, the president seems to lose focus on it and offer up a tweet, a statement, or an action that distracts from the economic issues, and that’s a problem,” he said, adding, “I would welcome a campaign over taxes.”

Pearl said he recognizes that not everyone agrees with the Patriotic Millionaires’ stance on taxes, but he thinks plenty of people are on their side. “We think political people are actually wrong in thinking this is bad for Wall Street. It doesn’t make a difference of what tax rates are in terms of how business is done,” he said. “Wealthy people are going to invest their money, and if they keep 80 percent of it or they keep only 70 percent of it, they’re still going to invest, because 70 percent of returns are a lot more than zero percent.”

Original Source -> A group of “patriotic millionaires” thinks Democrats can run — and win — on taxes

via The Conservative Brief

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