loquacius posted:

See, the thing is (a) I don't know what kind of answer he could have given to that question that would have satisfactorily addressed it short of "they said they'd fire me if I didn't put up with it and I could do more good as a slightly-compromised labor secretary than an unemployed person", and (b) "when you're on a team, you stick with the team" is red meat for hillarymen and let's be honest a good 90% of his grassroots support is hillarymen

So that answer wasn't necessarily a bad answer, it just wasn't for us

In short, Keith for DNC

Mirthless posted:

???

no part of that post was pro-hillary

or pro-perez

or pro-dnc-establishment

are you doing that thing again where you get outraged over abstract discussion of political strategy?

(edit: if you're referring to the dumb bernout comment it is not factually inaccurate to point out that HEE HOO HOO laugh is generally only heard when somebody's big creature gets countered the same term they play it)

Aurubin posted:

To be fair to the Very Serious People, isolating China economically will ensure US hegemony. That said, the IP protection, environmental regulations, and "future profit impact" poo poo made it clear that Obama would run as fast and hard as he possibly could from labor if he was politically able.

Mirthless posted:

are you doing that thing again where you get outraged over abstract discussion of political strategy?

GlyphGryph posted:

He's probably doing that thing we do a lot in this thread where he completely misreads something to mean to something else and then gets angry over it instead of seeking clarification

RENEGADE CUCKSKY posted:

"when you're with the team, stick with the team" is the message that organized labor has gotten about a billion times in the past thirty years whenever we're getting our ever loosening neg holes pozzed by the D's

Ace of Baes posted:

Thoguh posted:

Mitt Romney kept posting that the TPP is really just about limiting the influence of China and not to worry about all the bad or unknown parts but he hasn't shown up since the Dem convention so I don't know what the current talking points are supposed to be.

GlyphGryph posted:

He's probably doing that thing we do a lot in this thread where he completely misreads something to mean to something else and then gets angry over it instead of seeking clarification

Serf posted:

the party is on the way out, and it's not like he has much reason to cover his rear end after the spectacular failure of the Democratic party. if he wants to win votes, he does so by distancing himself from that stuff. I would have 1000x more respect for this dude if he looked straight into the camera and said "I did it because they would fire me if I didn't". regular people can relate to doing poo poo they don't like because their boss told them to, and it shows that politics is just like your regular job imo

Serf posted:

"when you're with the team, you stick with the team" is bullshit unless you're willing to call the team out when they gently caress up

Main Paineframe posted:

"when you're on a team, you stick with the team" is usually a good message for a party leader to have

but saying it right now indicates a total failure to understand why there's even a leadership fight to begin with

loquacius posted:

, but he wouldn't do that because the vast bulk of his appeal is his association with those people and if he threw them under the bus that association vanishes in a puff of smoke and he becomes basically just Keith but less experienced

RENEGADE CUCKSKY posted:

sorry, must have gotten deja vu with the smug bernie reference and the focus on messaging and triangulation

RENEGADE CUCKSKY posted:

Yes, I'm angry

RENEGADE CUCKSKY posted:

"when you're with the team, stick with the team" is the message that organized labor has gotten about a billion times in the past thirty years whenever we're getting our ever loosening neg holes pozzed by the D's

GlyphGryph posted:

He is not on the side of labour. He just thinks labour should be on his side.

Serf posted:

I would have a lot of respect for any politician willing to criticize their own side for poo poo. sure you're not supposed to do that in today's hyper-partisan society for fear of giving the other side ammo, but there's something innately human to me about saying "no, I don't agree with this, we should be different" about the stupid poo poo your own side tries to push. there's nothing I hate more than watching a politician lie through their teeth, claiming to love something they hate or vice versa

quote:

Keith Ellison’s one-man march

The man seeking to lead the Democratic Party on Louis Farrakhan, Donald Trump and his personal journey on race.

Keith Ellison is chair-slumped in a nondescript union office a few hundred yards north of the Capitol, surrounded by boxes of fliers for his campaign to chair the Democratic National Committee, nursing a nasty cold and eye-rolling at another question about his onetime admiration for Louis Farrakhan.

The Minnesota congressman — a powerful speaker and canny political organizer — was on the cusp of an easy victory in the race for DNC chairman until the past few weeks, when his decades-old writings on the Nation of Islam leader (he called him a “role model for Black Youth” in a 1995 student editorial) resurfaced and ignited.

Soon after, reporters unearthed 2010 comments about how Israel, “a country of seven million,” dominates U.S. policy in the Mideast — prompting a denunciation from the head of the Anti-Defamation League and Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban, casting his coronation into sudden and serious doubt.

“Everything is fair game and it’s interesting. … [But] I’m 53 years old,” Ellison said during this week’s episode of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast — adding that his fondness for the Nation of Islam movement began when he was a student and lapsed soon after. “I have four kids. My youngest child is 20. Some of the things they want to hit me for, I was younger than her when I wrote them. And so, come on. At some point, we all are human beings who have evolved over the course of 25 years, and yet we want to freeze each other in time.”

Ellison is an open and engaging guy to talk with — and he relishes the chance to explain himself at length, as he did in a recent memoir — but he bristled when I suggested that everything an elected official utters or scribbles during their adult life should be fair game.

“But every single word, though?” asked Ellison, a convert from Catholicism to Islam who was the first of his faith to be elected to Congress.

Despite the support of the first couple of populist progressivism — Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — the controversy has emboldened the opposition: Last week, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, a buddy of President Barack Obama (who called him “wicked smart” last week), jumped into the race. The effort to boost Perez, paradoxically and to Ellison’s irritation, is led by operatives allied with the country’s first black president, who view the Minnesotan as too tied to the identity politics they think cost Hillary Clinton the election.

“We like Keith,” one longtime Obama political ally, who was pushing Perez, told me in November. “But is he really the guy we need right now when we are trying to get all of those disaffected white working-class people to rally around our message of economic equality?”

If the flashpoint is Farrakhan, the subtext of the debate over Ellison’s election is a deeper debate over the future of a party rocked by the most stunning electoral rebuke in generations — and dry-rotting after eight years of neglect by Obama’s Barack-brand-obsessed political team. Perez, along with two highly regarded state party chairs — Raymond Buckley of New Hampshire and Jaime Harrison of South Carolina — have been making a broader case to learn the lessons of Donald Trump’s victory: a need to revitalize local organizing in all states, as opposed to replicating the Obama strategy of maximizing turnout among minority communities and on the liberal coasts.

Ellison espouses that approach too, but he’s more focused on the failures of the Clinton campaign to execute — and believes the future still lies in max-turnout operations among the groups that were targeted in 2008, 2012 and 2016.

“Of course, we’ve got to have a big tent. We’ve got to be inclusive. We’ve got to get everybody involved,” Ellison said. “[But] we’re not performing as well as we should with any sector.”

Ellison says there are “literally millions of people registered to vote or eligible to vote who have not voted, and some of them are white women, educated women and some of them are black college men and some of them are Latino.” He argues that the problem isn’t one of issues — or even a focus on pocketbook economics — but sparking sufficient excitement to motivate the party base. “If our problem is we’ve got low voter turnout, I am the one who is best suited to solve that problem.”

Like many Democrats I’ve spoken to recently, Ellison admires (in a hold-his-nose way) Donald Trump’s political skills and sees political profit in embracing his simplified, blunt message of economic resurgence. But he sees no gain in cooperating with him, even only tactically — for instance, he thinks Trump’s big infrastructure package, which would reportedly be powered by tax incentives, is a Trojan horse, trickle-down plan that Democrats should probably oppose.

When I asked him if thinks Trump’s campaign rhetoric means the president-elect is racist, as many African-American leaders have suggested, he shrugs.

“There are racists. There’s racially insensitive, and then there are people who are anti-racist,” Ellison said. “There’s a range, and I think that he is the kind of person who is not above manipulating race in order to gain something that he wants. So that’s pretty bad, in my opinion. That’s actually kind of low-down and not admirable at all. But is it in his heart that he just is — too much melanin just creeps him out or something? I would be happy to believe that that’s probably true, but at the same time, so what? Because if the power that he has derives from people who do hold racist views, he’s going to be all in with them.”

Ellison’s own racial views, now the subject of such intense political scrutiny, seemed to evolved along a fairly traditional path for young black college students of his generation. A child of the 1980s and 1990s, he witnessed the explosion of violent, community-killing drug-related crime in his native Detroit and adopted home of Minneapolis and searched for a way to push back.

“So, like, in 1991, you had Rodney King get beat right out there on videotape, 50-some blows, all on tape. Cops standing around doing nothing,” he explained. “It was happening all over the country. In 1995, in Minneapolis, which is known as a pretty laid-back, cool town, got the moniker Murder-apolis that year. And Detroit … unemployment was high, community violence was high, community police relations were awful, and you had people coming up in that space, speaking to that issue, and Farrakhan was one of them.”

Ellison’s critics dispute his account of an 18-month infatuation with Farrakhan followed by years of his public denunciations of the Nation of Islam founder. Citing newspaper clips of his early political career identifying him as a Nation acolyte, they say his affiliation stretched far longer. But Ellison sees the whole experience as transitional, part of an exploration that began with a role defending Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March.

“It’s hard for people who are not in the experience to understand it, but there are times in your life when somebody is speaking up in a bold, brave way against circumstances that you find intimidating, make you feel personally vulnerable,” he added. “And when the march started getting really attacked, I wrote back and tried to defend the march, and I thought it was important to defend the person who called the march. I came to learn that defense wasn’t deserved. Why? Because I just saw those guys as big on fundraising, using the platform to pander to people’s anger and fear without really giving them back much. And scapegoating other groups. Not just Jews but you name it: gays, black preachers, other Muslims. We had a long list.”

When I told him that his rhetoric on Farrakhan and Trump sounds similar, he smiled and sat up in his chair. “I’ll tell you this: They’re charismatic speakers speaking to people’s pain. Blaming other people is an old trick” — equating the leading black nationalist’s call to arms with a Trump rage-fest that fired up white nationalists.

As one of two Muslims in the House — Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) is the other — he’s had to spend much of his time explaining that, no, his beliefs do not entail support for violent global jihad or oppression of women. In one infamous 2006 exchange, Glenn Beck flat-out asked Ellison to “prove you are not working with our enemies.” He still gets some of that out on the road — and responds with a take-a-deep-breath explanation of what his religious practice entails, and how much in common it has with Christian and Jewish ritual.

Like that of Obama, Ellison’s narrative is rooted in shared legacy of growing up black, and, like Obama's, his unique branch grew beyond the bounds. He spent much of his young adulthood patiently explaining to schoolmates and voters that he didn’t grow up in fatherless, bookless ghetto poverty — his father was a prominent Detroit psychiatrist, and his mother was a social worker — and most of his recent forebears from Michigan and Louisiana were raised in two-parent families that valued education.

But even in his middle-class upbringing there were shadows of a different, earlier life — as he found out when, as a teenager, he asked his mother a seemingly innocuous question about her father, a prosperous local landlord.

“I learned quite accidentally that he probably couldn’t read,” Ellison recounted. “He was the smartest person I ever met. … He was a factory worker, and he saved up his pennies, and he bought some rental property, and he’d have my brothers and I cut the grass. And he would always ask us to write out the receipts to the tenants.”

One day, Ellison, returning home to change his clothes, asked his mother why grandpa needed so much help with the simple paperwork — were his eyes OK?

“Don’t you shame your grandfather!” his mother, now in her late 70s and still working as a social worker, shot back. “Where your grandpa comes from, they just didn’t let people like him go to school. He had to be in the fields when he was your age.”

Zikan posted:

keith good

Serf posted:

I would have a lot of respect for any politician willing to criticize their own side for poo poo. sure you're not supposed to do that in today's hyper-partisan society for fear of giving the other side ammo, but there's something innately human to me about saying "no, I don't agree with this, we should be different" about the stupid poo poo your own side tries to push. there's nothing I hate more than watching a politician lie through their teeth, claiming to love something they hate or vice versa

Aurubin posted:

On the flipside, here's a Politico article where Ellison articulates exactly why he supported Farrakhan in his youth. I didn't read the comments, because my eyes haven't stopped bleeding yet:

Serf posted:

holy poo poo so much of this is garbage. trying to tie Ellison to an idpol message is incredible when he's the one pushing the economic message lmao

loquacius posted:

One of the strongest political convictions that I had as a teenager that still remains with me today was a strong distrust of any politician who just follows the party line and doesn't make any decisions for themselves or stand up against bad ideas spoken by a teammate

Ironic that the same opinion that made dumb kid me like John McCain in the early-to-mid-'00s also attracted smart cool adult me to Bernie Sanders

quote:

The effort to boost Perez, paradoxically and to Ellison’s irritation, is led by operatives allied with the country’s first black president, who view the Minnesotan as too tied to the identity politics they think cost Hillary Clinton the election.

“We like Keith,” one longtime Obama political ally, who was pushing Perez, told me in November. “But is he really the guy we need right now when we are trying to get all of those disaffected white working-class people to rally around our message of economic equality?”

Serf posted:

holy poo poo so much of this is garbage. trying to tie Ellison to an idpol message is incredible when he's the one pushing the economic message lmao

loquacius posted:

Daily reminder that if it wants to succeed the Democratic Party must convincingly push both an idpol and ecpol message at the same time, and the only reason Hillary-era idpol is bad in any way is that it dismisses class as an identity and downplays economic factors

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

Mirthless posted:

John McCain was a pretty likable guy in that particular timeframe

In the leadup to the 2004 election it wasn't clear whether or not he was going to stay a Republican and he even had talks with Kerry over a VP pick. McCain could have stayed a likable guy, but for some reason he sold Bush his spine and went hardline conservative for a couple of years, presumably to support his 2008 presidential run

I honestly wonder if the GOP doesn't have some insane dirt on him

Serf posted:

unlike the unnamed Obama source, I think a black Muslim man is the perfect face for this one-two punch

pathetic little tramp posted:

It is true that dems could pick about anyone president-wise. The 'white working class' thing describes a set of workers who are going to vote based on their pocketbooks and those pocketbooks are not going to fare well under Trump.

Combine that with olds dying and voila, you win the presidency.

What they need for sure is to get a dude who needs to understand the democrats need to be a regional and local party.