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awesmoe posted:Is the job of the DNC chair primarily policy, or strategy around election organization (ie sending money places, directing how money is spent at the state level)? The job of the DNC chair is primarily strategy around election organization. To be specific, their main jobs are fundraising and soliciting donations, directing the usage of those resources to protect incumbent Dems and elect new ones, and so on. They have no real say over policy; at best, they can somewhat guide national-level messaging and ad buys. Their ability to change the party is fairly limited - they're not in any position to tell centrist Dems to gently caress off and back primary challengers against them, or anything like that. And most importantly of all, the chair is not a dictator, and is very limited in their ability to do something that the DNC's 400-plus members disagree with. For example, the initial draft of the 2016 Democratic platform was composed by a committee of 15 DNC members, and was finalized by a committee of 187 DNC members. Even on executive decisions, the chair's power is nowhere near absolute - the DNC also has five vice-chairs and a National Finance Chair, all of whom are elected by the entire DNC membership. There's not much info out there on the day-by-day workings of the DNC, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't much matter who wins the chairman battle - both viable candidates have pretty much the same plan for the party anyway. It's mainly just a proxy battle being waged by various factions intent on getting a symbolic victory to demonstrate their power over the future of the party. What matters far more for changing the direction of the party is changing the composition of the DNC as a whole, which mostly means putting new people in high positions in state-level DNCs - which we should be doing anyway as part of reversing Dems' heavy losses in state governments. Honestly, the focus on the national DNC chair might be damaging that effort - both because people are directing resources and attention at that rather than at the far-more-important state races, and also because progressives are directing their attention and resources toward a guy who's actively undermining state-level progressive efforts. The Sanders folks in Florida are not happy with Ellison, who endorsed an establishment megadonor against their preferred candidate in the race for Florida DNC chair, and I can say from personal experience that being a Florida progressive is discouraging enough already without being outrighr betrayed like that.
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Jan 5, 2017 18:04
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Helsing posted:Why? There's symbolism at play here. You can't really escape the fact that Bernie and Warren are putting their chips behind one candidate and that a lot of people who are still pissed off over the primary are mobilizing around stopping that candidate. There's a factional power struggle going on here and that power struggle is likely to have implications for how the party interprets it's defeat in 2016. Close, but not quite. This isn't a struggle over who controls the party - that's fantasy talk (the people voting for DNC chair are the same ones who voted for Hillary). It's a struggle over which demographic the Dems should focus on the hardest right now. Should they seek to shore up the left side of the Democratic coalition and motivate young voters with Ellison, or should they focus on rebuilding their collapsing support among unions and the Rust Belt with Perez? Obviously they plan to do both, but which group should they consider most important? That is the issue that Ellison vs Perez is playing proxy war for, and that is also why they're going to such lengths to drag what's normally a backroom process in front of the cameras with a televised debate and everything. They're hoping the winning pick will help them motivate a demographic now, even without actual policy changes.
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Jan 6, 2017 04:12
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Fulchrum posted:Well this is weird. What's weird about it? They're not endorsing him, they're just saying he's not an anti-Semite.
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Jan 18, 2017 15:50
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Ytlaya posted:My feeling is that even if they were nearly identical as people, the fact that Ellison has the support of the more left-leaning wing of the party and is generally perceived as representing more leftist interests is still significant and important, because him getting the position would sort of symbolically represent a potential increase in influence ad visibility for that portion of the party. On the other hand, Obama was generally perceived to be to the left of Hillary and a relative outsider to the Dem establishment (at compared to Hillary), and he didn't end up being a big triumph for leftists or anti-establishment, not even in messaging. In fact, I'd say the net effect was pretty bad, because people who had thought he would be more of a leftist were generally slow to change their opinions, so for the first couple of years of his presidency, most of the progressive enthusiasm his campaign drummed up ended up being directed at defending his centrism and making excuses for his foot-dragging. I'm real worried about another betrayal like that - if the left elects someone they think is a leftist but turns out to be another lovely centrist, I think that's honestly worse than electing a clear centrist that the left can spend the next two years hating unconditionally.
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Jan 24, 2017 06:59
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Cease to Hope posted:This is fear of winning. Sometimes you will win and it won't work out as well as you hoped. That isn't a reason to stop trying, or worse yet to actively play to lose. I think the worst enemy of the left is overly high expectations, because they can become actively counterproductive. The intense drop in enthusiasm among the left was painful to see, and watching progressives make excuses about "11th-dimensional chess" and "political capital" while Obama was trying to bargain away Medicare and SS was downright excruciating. If people had realistic expectations of what Keith Ellison is going to do (say slightly more leftist things while continuing to support centrist and establishment candidates against progressive challengers), I'd be fine with it. But I don't think they do. Keeping young people involved has always been a challenge, and I'm worried that too much emphasis has been placed on the DNC chair election - to the detriment of other, more important, races. I'm worried that if Ellison wins, people are going to take that as a victory for progressivism and check out of politics for four years, while if Perez wins the angry progressives would react by increasing their efforts elsewhere, which is exactly what I want to happen. Apparently, the third of six DNC chair debates happened Monday night. I don't even know when the second happened, since it certainly wasn't mentioned here. According to Politico, "on virtually every question asked...the candidates were in near-perfect agreement" and "the only real disagreement between the candidates was which candidate had more experience needed to be elected chair".
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Jan 24, 2017 16:15
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Ytlaya posted:While I see what you mean, in terms of actual policy he still probably wasn't worse than Hillary would have been (they probably would have been mostly the same, minus possibly foreign policy), so I think the benefit of having a concrete manifestation of the popularity of more leftist views outweighs the downside of a potential negative backlash from them not actually being leftist (and it's not like Obama's lack of leftism hurt leftists; if anything Sanders' performance in the primary is well beyond what he could have achieved pre-Obama, though this is more evidence of Obama having no effect than Obama having a positive effect). Obama's lack of leftism isn't impairing the left now, when people have long since concluded that he's just another lovely centrist, but it was a very big deal in 2010, when progressive Obama supporters still hadn't fully come to terms with it and were thus reluctant to pressure him on his shittier policies and behaviors. 2010, of course, is when the Dems took big losses to the Republicans and lost their near-dominance in Congress, in large part because Obama's aggressively centrist agenda and inclination to let anyone scuttle a plan meant that Congressional Dems didn't really have anything to show for those two years of controlling both Congress and the White House. Obama wasn't considered a socialist, but many progressives expected him to implement single-payer healthcare, raise taxes on the rich, prosecute the bankers who destroyed the economy, implement extensive economic stimulus plans, and legalize weed. My favorite LF Goldmine thread ever, to this very day, was "Obama extends Bush tax cuts" - because even though it was a joke thread whose OP said it would never happen and implied that only a centrist Hillary shill could possibly think something like that, Obama later did just that as part of his half-baked stimulus plans. I don't think that winning is necessarily bad for the left. I think they just have to be careful about what they win and who they win with. I think the DNC chair race is a relatively unimportant race whose value is entirely symbolic, and even the left's preferred candidate will govern as a consensus-building centrist and do little to push for progressive candidates or policies (not that the DNC chair is capable of much more than that anyway). Winning state DNC chairmanships would have a lot more real power to shift the direction of the DNC, and a lot less risk of backfiring. The problem is that Keith Ellison has already intervened in at least one state DNC race - in favor of the establishment candidate. And that's exactly the kind of betrayal effect I'm worried about. If Ellison endorses a DNC insider over a progressive challenger, that hurts a lot worse than if someone like Perez does it.
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Jan 24, 2017 18:10
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Helsing posted:Yeah but the solution is to be willing to continue exert pressure even after someone has elected and to have a realistic understanding of the fact that you can't just elect the right person, you have to be constantly pushing them in the right direction. The response should be "ugh it's too hard to keep someone accountable, might as well just let the pro-corporate centrists run things forever so we can maintain our stock of righteous indignation at maximum levels." You can't just elect the right person, you have to elect hundreds of right persons. And they have to actually be the right people - "symbolic wins" aren't worth the paper they're printed in. If Hillary had won in 2008 and proposed the ACA in 2010, progressives would have figured out it was bad in 2010, not 2014.
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Jan 24, 2017 20:02
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:So Perez is still pretty decent right? This isn't Ellison vs some crappy stiff right? As DNC chair, their proposed strategies and their paths forward for the DNC are basically indistinguishable. As marketing entities for the Democratic Party, Perez is noticeably less charismatic and clearly was not ready to be quizzed on issues (which, to be fair, are not usually the concern of a DNC chair).
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Feb 2, 2017 23:46
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Helsing posted:You're advocating an autistic view of politics that completely ignores the role that morale plays. Granting concessions to different wings of the party is part of how a big tent organization functions. This is especially true when there's a lot of justifiable bad blood over past grievances. If the party once again ignores the endorsements of the more energized and progressive wing of the party and picks an Obama administration official whose finger pints are all over some lovely decisions like the TPP, while passing over a more progressive candidate that is the clear favorite of the Bernie/Sanders wing of the party, then that's going to be a signal about what kind of rebuilding the Democratic party is or isn't willing to consider. Concessions are very important, yes...and I would like those concessions to come in the form of progressive policy pushes, not progressive individuals being appointed to meaningless figurehead positions with zero impact or influence on policy. The faction that gets the DNC chairmanship is the one that's going to get screwed, IMO - the factions that don't get ceremonial positions will have to get some kind of policy or messaging concessions, while the "winner" of this fight will be neglected because they already got a concession in the form of a useless figurehead position. Call me an autist all you want - I'm the one with my eyes on the real prize rather being distracted by lovely decoy plays.
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Feb 3, 2017 22:47
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Helsing posted:Do you have any evidence for this supposed trade-off being a thing? Because it seems like regardless of who is elected DNC chair, pushing the Democrats in a more progressive policy direction is going to be like herding cats. The hard fight is going to come down the line, it's not seriously effected by which of these candidates becomes DNC chair, except insofar as now is a time when the Democrats need more engagement and a symbolic victory like this would be a helpful nudge to the forces who are promoting Ellison. I just don't see why letting the establishment pick another DNC chair would make them any more likely to cede ground on policy. The fact that there's even a fight over the DNC chair at all. There's clearly a feeling among the establishment politicians that more than one of the factions in the big tent need concessions right now, as well disagreement about which factions need attention and what level of concession is appropriate for each faction. Ultimately, several factions are going to get concessions - at the very least, the DNC is almost certainly going to come up with something for organized labor and something for the Bernie wing, the two clear forerunners in the chair race. They have only one fake high-level fake concession left to give right now, so it naturally follows that whichever of those two factions doesn't get the fake concession will have to get some sort of real concession instead. On the other hand, letting them set Keith Ellison up as a DNC chair will make them even less likely to cede ground on policy, for three reasons. First of all, when real progressives agitate for progressive policies, the establishment will wave them off because they already got a concession and now they need to focus their *~political capital~* on doing things to please the other demographics in the big tent. Second of all, the massive movement of Bernie progressives will considerably reduce the level of pressure they're levelling against the Democratic establishment, because a Bernie movement figure got put in a leadership position, so surely the establishment has learned its lesson and DNC chair Keith will usher in a new progressive era, right? And last but not least, if progressives still continue to pressure the establishment, they'll just get Keith to come up and make a speech about how he's totally going to usher in a progressive revolution later if everyone just sucks it up and votes for the centrist Dems in their own districts, and everyone but the real hardcore progressives will quickly be peeled off.
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Feb 4, 2017 00:15
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Aurubin posted:I mean, we at least agree that the Podesta emails were real right? So primary salt aside, I think the decisions Perez made in this strategy session reflect poorly on his potential term as DNC chair. What an awful article. The left used to have good writers - what the gently caress happened?
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Feb 4, 2017 01:18
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BI NOW GAY LATER posted:No, but I think this DNC is going to be instrumental in shaping our policies going forward as an alternative to Sexmonster and Freinds The DNC doesn't set policy, and even if it did, that would be up to the DNC membership rather than the chair.
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Feb 4, 2017 02:48
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Kilroy posted:That one's pretty easy, right? Run a fair primary. There's more than two candidates - right now there's six or seven (I think one got booted for being Islamophobic?)
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Feb 4, 2017 04:15
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Ardennes posted:The thing is Ellison all things considered is certainly not left-wing as Sanders, but he is relatively to the left of Perez (who wouldn't even take a basic question on Israel). The head of the DNC has zero influence on policy-making. Ellison may be to the left of Perez, but it doesn't matter because he would have no say in Israel policy and would likely avoid the subject entirely in order to avoid hurting Dems with differing opinions. Keith has already demonstrated that he's not going to do poo poo like cut off funding to candidates who support Israel, and he's also demonstrated that he will back the establishment just as the DNC chair job would require. Ellison is better on the issues than Perez...which is why he should stay in the House, Perez should run for office in a red district somewhere, and the chairmanship should go to Buttgeig instead.
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Feb 4, 2017 16:52
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Helsing posted:Either the party establishment is frightened enough to start opening up space for more progressive candidates and ideas or they are deciding to circle the wagons and resist what they view as an unwanted encroachment on their own turf. There is zero reason to think they'll act the way you're anticipating. This is some seriously ludicrous 11th dimensional chess you're playing in your own mind here. You're way off. The party establishment is not scared, but they're not resisting anything either because they don't even think there's anything to resist. These are people who think a big tent party thinks making a checklist composed of every demographic in the party and then doing or saying one or two things to appeal to each of those demographics. To the establishment, the 2016 loss wasn't emblematic of some deep core problem in the party, it's just an indicator that they didn't put enough checkmarks next to certain demographics in their list. The DNC chair fight isn't a fundamental battle for the direction of the party, it's a battle over which demographics get which checkmarks - and this checkmark falls solidly in the "saying" column, not the "doing" column. Michael Steele tells a lot of stories about his time as RNC chair, and there's one that perfectly illustrates what's going on here: after he was elected, he says that a GOP lawmaker came up to him and talked about how great it was that they were going to get African-American votes now that they appointed a black person to a position if power. To that particular unnamed legislator, black people were just an item on the list of voter demographics, they needed to do a thing to appeal to that demographic, and Steele was just a checkmark in that long-empty box. Naturally, he responded that merely electing a black chairman wasn't a substitute for having better messaging and positions on minority issues, but you can see how well the Republican party has done there! Condiv posted:that'd be about the only thing I'd do if the dems forced perez into place and triangulated to alt-fascism or fascism-lite. the party was nauseating enough with an alt-republican as our nominee That's what you should be doing either way! Hell, that's what you should have been doing all along! The power of the DNC chair is tiny compared to the power of the DNC members - it's like making a fuss over who gets to be minority leader when the Senate is full of centrist shitheads anyway.
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Feb 4, 2017 19:23
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Ardennes posted:I say forced though because it is pretty evident that there is a real institutional push at the moment to get Perez in as DNC. It isn't a democratic election in the first place, but it does seem Perez came out of nowhere quickly. I will say that again, but primarying "libs" is not going to made easier by picking the candidate that is even more centrist. As opposed to Ellison, who had endorsements from top Dem leadership before he even officially announced his candidacy? Ellison and Perez are both clearly being pushed by core members of the establishment - this isn't a war between outsiders and insiders, it's a mild strategy disagreement between different flavors of insider.
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Feb 4, 2017 20:11
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Cease to Hope posted:Both Perez and Ellison are running against DWS (and Brazile). Using up local party donation caps to launder donations to the presidential campaign left a huge impression, and both of them are running on not only ending that but reversing the flow of money to support local candidates and parties. Well, that plus the fact that a sizable portion of the voters in this race are state and local party officials who obviously would very much like to have the DNC sending money to their area. Paracaidas posted:We are again clearly operating under different definitions of terms if Obama was the Third Way Centrist Blue Dog in 2008. He was. Or, to be more precise, every candidate was. It's just that Obama was charismatic enough that the left not only projected their own views onto him but took upward of two years to run out of excuses for his centrism and finally stop defending him. When he halfassed economic stimulus and let the bankers go free, so-called progressives whined about he just had no choice because of the mean Republicans. When he made austerity his main priority and put Social Security and Medicare "on the table" for deficit reduction, the self-proclaimed left blathered on about eleventh-dimensional chess and political capital. It took loving forever for the leftists of 2008 to give up their illusions and face the fact that they elected a centrist, and it seems clear that the same thing is going to happen with Keith Ellison. He hasn't even been elected yet and people are already making excuses for his centrism. Endorsing and supporting establishment candidates against progressive challengers? There was a whole queue of people lining up to say that he's just acting to please the establishment voters and he'll totally change his tune once he's elected. Blew off the Women's March to go attend a Dem donor retreat with Perez and Schumer? All just an unfortunate campaign tactic, I'm told, and he'll totally make up for it later. You know what? Every time a so-called progressive tells me Keith Ellison is an outsider who will change the DNC, all I hear is "this is why the American left is dead". Condiv posted:oh? has perez actually taken a stance on that now? last I heard he was refusing to make the same pledge ellison did (yet another reason he's a bad choice imo) What, the no-lobbyists pledge? Ellison's backed down on that, didnt you hear? All just a cunning trick, I'm sure.
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Feb 4, 2017 22:59
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Condiv posted:he's gathered a vast majority of his money from under $200 donations so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt Obama got plenty of small donors too and look at how anti-establishment he turned out
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Feb 4, 2017 23:12
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Cease to Hope posted:This isn't the thread for relitigating the primary. We get it, Perez is Clinton and Ellison is Sanders. Point made. Buttgeig is Sanders, Ellison is Obama: the decoy floated by the establishment to draw gullible Sanders supporters into the fold.
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Feb 5, 2017 02:13
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readingatwork posted:If both Ellison and Perez are the same (and they kind of seem to be) then the DNC would be pretty stupid not to go with Ellison. Not only would they not get any tangible benefit with Perez but choosing him would piss off the Bernie supporters who see this as part of the left/neoliberal fight and further split the party. There's plenty of benefit to Perez. He has a really, really good relationship with organized labor, and I've heard that he has strong ties to the Latino community as well. The thing is that only the left sees this as a titanic left-vs-center showdown for control of the party. Whether that's the left overestimating their own importance or the center underestimating the left's importance, I can't say, but there's definitely a big gap between their perspectives. To the center, the left is just one of several Democratic factions that need to be pacified right now, and this is just a fight of competing strategies. Trump's performance among white laborers in traditional manufacturing hubs was a decisive factor in the election, for example. And while he lost Hispanics badly, he didn't lose them nearly as badly as one would expect.
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Feb 10, 2017 00:36
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:I'm entirely aware of that. Are you arguing that public opinion has no bearing on how this vote will play out? Of course it doesn't. Party officials' perception of public opinion has some bearing on how the vote will play out, but I don't think anyone in this thread has accused Dem party officials of being good at accurately judging public opinion. Perception goes to the heart of this election, really - after all, the DNC chair race is perceived by some as a fight for control of the party, the only meaningful difference between Ellison and Perez is how they're perceived by various demographics, and the only reason that this fight is even a big deal to anyone besides party officials is that the left perceives this fight as being all about them.
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Feb 10, 2017 02:55
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Neither will Ellison. Yeah, this is the real problem with the whole Ellison vs Perez debate: Buttigieg is to the left of both of them, and has far fewer establishment ties, but by throwing Ellison into the ring the establishment effectively froze out real anti-establishment candidates. Sure, Buttigieg has zero chance, but the nature of this race is such that outsiders never had a chance; thanks to Ellison, though, he doesn't even get press. Setting up Ellison as the "true" leftist outsider candidate and setting it up as a one-on-one outsider vs establishment race means that the only reason anyone even remembers Buttigieg is because he's got a funny name, and I wouldn't be surprised if the establishment was quietly pushing that view themselves to make sure that the two establishment candidates totally dominate the discourse.
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Feb 10, 2017 05:10
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Fiction posted:Yeah, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of "just doing his job" to help the donors if he's made chair. Well, yes, that is literally the job of the DNC chair. Perez and Ellison both know what the role entails and have signaled their full willingness to carry it out. Ellison has already demonstrated (with actions, not words) that he intends to back establishment candidates against progressive challengers, throw the public under the bus in order to please donors, and give his full and unconditional support to Pelosi and Schumer. It's just that it no longer matters what he says or does, because the narrative's already been built and no one's going to let pesky things like facts get in the way of daydreams about Keith destroying the Democratic establishment forever and singlehandedly laying the groundwork for full socialism at last. Funny how that narrative just so happens to exclude Buttigieg, Brown, and every other candidate except for the two candidates who were very obviously being fully backed by establishment factions before they even declared their candidacy. I don't understand how the supposedly anti-establishment wing don't understand that they've been downright suckered into choosing between two establishment candidates by a false narrative that essentially silences every other candidate, freezing out potential dark horses and out-of-nowhere challengers. If nothing else, the establishment has demonstrated that it's still utterly excellent at clearing the field.
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Feb 13, 2017 23:18
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BI NOW GAY LATER posted:It's a race being decided on by party loving insiders dude. Yeah, but because the insiders put forward two candidates rather than one, the other candidates don't even get press. If there was just one horse being backed by the establishment, the news would make a big deal about the outsiders in hopes of striking a more interesting narrative than "single candidate with no credible opposition sails to totally predictable victory", and outsider candidates would also likely attract the attention of the anti-establishment voters. Because there's two candidates, though, both the media and the anti-establishment voters instead focus on the one-on-one horse race and utterly sidelines the actual outsiders. And since both establishment candidates are acceptable to and loyal to the establishment and have essentially identical policies, it hardly matters to them who wins. People keep asking "but what about the perception and the symbolism" without realizing that the party insiders put Ellison in the race for the explicit purpose of creating that perception and symbolism. mcmagic posted:The entire congressional party has lined up behind Pelosi and Schumer. I'm not sure how you get past that. Start replacing Congressmen until they get the idea. If no acceptable candidate can win the race, then you're running the wrong race.
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Feb 14, 2017 00:49
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Ytlaya posted:There seems to be some sort of general opinion that Buttigieg is to the left of Ellison/Perez. Why is this? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with it, but I can't find anything specific that seems to point towards that conclusion. He's definitely left-leaning, has a good reputation for working with the grassroots, and has been very vocal that the Democratic Party needs to start treating people as people rather than numbers and demographics. Everything I've seen him say and write has been spot-on, and I've heard that he's said good stuff in the debates as well, although I didn't watch them. And while he's only a mayor, he's the mayor of a poor ex-manufacturing town in red Indiana. The big thing that's really catapulted his leftist cred, though, is the fact that Buttigieg was the only DNC chair candidate to participate in the Women's March. All the others, including Ellison and Perez, were at a luxury resort in Florida attending a private retreat for big donors and top party officials. Obviously, blowing off the activists and protesters to go schmooze with party leadership and influential donors is the way to get elected as DNC chair...but on the other hand, the optics of it are absolutely awful and it puts a big damper on their efforts to portray themselves as advocates for the voters who'll prioritize the grassroots over big money. Buttigieg was the only one willing to live up to his rhetoric and prioritize the base over the donors, even if it hurt his standing among the establishment - and people noticed. That's how Mayor Pete won my heart, at least. His "Letter from Flyover Country", authored about three weeks before he joined the DNC chair race, shows that he's got his priorities in the right place, which is something quite rare in the debate over reforming the Democratic party: https://medium.com/@buttigieg/a-letter-from-flyover-country-5d4e9c32d2ac#.xs23gzv6t (I'm just posting a couple of excerpts, but go read the whole thing, it's good!) quote:None of this is theoretical for me. I didn’t see Afghanistan on the news, I saw it through the armored windshields of the vehicles I drove or guarded on dozens of missions outside the wire, and as a Reservist I could be sent back to war if a reckless president leads us into peril. I don’t think about gun violence as an abstraction, not when I’ve had to attend funerals and console the mothers of victims in my city — and swear in police officers alongside family members who pray they will come home safe every day. Marriage equality isn’t a political rallying cry for me, it is a legal fact without which my future family cannot even exist. Obamacare isn’t a political football for me, it’s a matter of household finance: it’s how my partner pays for his health care and how his mother pays for the chemotherapy on which her life depends. Climate change isn’t about polar bears for me. It’s about the South Bend families whose homes I stood in last summer, their basements flooded with muck and excrement while children wandered around the porch the night before school started, because our city had just experienced one of those unprecedented rainfalls that science kept warning us about.
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Feb 14, 2017 17:31
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BI NOW GAY LATER posted:Mmm: Careful, if you kneejerk any harder you might kick yourself in your own face. What's so offensive about "we should talk to actual people to find out what they think about gun rights and how their individual lives are affected by them, rather than having party leadership dictate a Washington consensus down onto people"?
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Feb 14, 2017 18:24
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BI NOW GAY LATER posted:He's talking about talking to White People Rust Belters who saw loving children murdered in a school and don't care enough to demand change. In short, gently caress them? I am sure we can have a totally reasonable dialog on Gun Rights that doesn't amount to surrender on the issue. Forty percent of South Bend's population is non-white. That may not fit your narrative of red states being lily white hillbilly hellholes, but it's the truth. It's rather striking that you saw a call to dump narratives and demographics in favor of a focus on real people, and immediately responded by repeating a narrative and insulting a demographic. "Working-class whites" has been a popular buzzword in the Trump era, but the Rust Belt has a sizable black population. Let's not forget that lower-than-expected black turnout played a part in the election as well, and not just because of voter suppression. Buttigieg is right on when he says that the Dems need to be working with the base all the time, rather than going down the list of Dem demographics once every four years.
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Feb 14, 2017 21:28
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BI NOW GAY LATER posted:Because the people he's talking about are explicitly working class whites! Can you point to where he specifically said that he was talking only about white people, or is "explicitly" just the new "literally"?
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Feb 14, 2017 21:42
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mcmagic posted:It should be very clear to everyone at this point that DNC assholes aren't a proxy for actual voters. Most DNC business isn't decided by the DNC chair, it's decided by a vote of some portion of the DNC membership. The DNC chair has some say in which DNC members vote, but there's only so much committee stacking they can do if they don't have a hefty portion of the membership on their side. Doesn't matter anymore, though, because questions like "what have the Democrats done recently to reach out to the black community" have once again been sidelined by excuses like "the massive nationwide Republican gains in basically every election since 2008 are all Hillary Clinton's fault" and "but what about the voter suppression we did nothing to stop".
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Feb 14, 2017 23:57
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Mukaikubo posted:this really feeds into my contention that modern leftism is a race to be able to say "i told you so" with the most moral authority to the other prisoners in the gas chamber before dying Modern leftism is fine. The problem is with modern leftists. The Dems have been lovely centrists for decades, but the so-called left did fuckall about it until someone who's spent a quarter of a century in Congress told them to. There's been no great wave of Iraq War protesters or Occupy marchers primarying Democrats. The activist left stayed silent while Obama pushed Congress to ignore the left and focus instead on appeasing the right. In my eyes, the fact that the self-proclaimed left calls itself the "Sanders wing" rather than the "Occupy wing" is a perfect sum-up of why the left no longer has any power in this country. Instead of working from the bottom up, the angry grassroots sat around waiting for someone on the top to tell them what to do. Instead of organizing and entering politics themselves, progressives shouted "we're really mad" every few years and then waited for politicians to come to them. I have no problem with Sanders, but the fact that he had to take the role of a movement leader and spend two hundred million dollars to get the progressive movement to start doing what they should have been doing all along doesn't reflect well on his supporters.
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Feb 15, 2017 17:20
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Crowsbeak posted:Well you're the guys claiming you want to defeat the facsist. Yet you don't want to do anything different to defeat him, and then wonder why we don't show up. Maybe you need to be willing to give us a inch. Maybe offer real change to a sick system rather then saying it was fine b before we got Orange Peron into office. I'll support Ellison for Governor in 2018. So he can run for president in 2020. Then we can ensure you centrists understand who actually represents the party. (Its us, not you losers who cheered a loving financier like Tim Kaine as the VP) Instead of primarying Mark "close tax loopholes for the rich and the corporations" Dayton in spite of his solid progressive record, why not work on booting out Collin "Founder of the Blue Dog Coalition" Peterson, you unbelievable moron? You're talking about booting a reliable progressive out of some idiotic anti-establishment sentiment while your fairly blue state has two Republican reps, a Blue Dog rep, and Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature. RaySmuckles posted:i feel like this is a really harsh indictment of the left. the left is weak and directionless because the levers of power have been used to destroy all of the left's traditional institutions. Where do you think unions came from in the first place? Organized labor wasn't created by the government - it was organized by the people, from the bottom up. The protections unions enjoyed in their heyday weren't generously given to them by the government - they were concessions extracted from the government after hard-fought battles, often physical as well as political. Sure, unions are facing challenges today as the protections they won back then are now being rolled back...but that's nothing compared to the challenges they faced back in labor's heyday, when not only did they lack those protections but the Supreme Court also said it would be unconstitutional to grant them those protections! The same is true for campaign finance laws. Back in the Gilded Age (a time of historic inequality), campaign finance was basically unregulated, with banks and corporations being able to donate unlimited amounts directly to candidates with no disclosure requirements whatsoever. Campaign finance restrictions came in response to progressive activism and public outrage at candidates who were more and more obviously in the pockets of big business. These institutions were not graciously given to the left to allow them to fight on an even stage - they were hard-won concessions that did not exist until the left organized and fought for them. The left has to build - and defend - its own institutions. It can't rely on top-down structures if it wants to succeed.
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Feb 15, 2017 18:51
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Alter Ego posted:For the last time--Perez wouldn't even be in the race if the Obama people hadn't asked him to run out of "fear" that Keith Ellison would become chairman. No, the reason Obama's people asked Perez to run is because they think his ties to organized labor and Hispanic communities are more important than Ellison's ties to college progressives and Muslim organizations. readingatwork posted:You're right. Guess the Dems don't need my support after all... Feinstein has beaten primary challenges literally every single election she's had for that seat, and in 2010 California voters created a jungle primary system that makes it far more difficult to primary her from the left than it's ever been before, so I'm sure she's really worried about her next election.
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Feb 15, 2017 19:01
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Alter Ego posted:Because Dayton might not run again? He has prostate cancer. Fair enough, but from the way he talked about replacing Dayton with Ellison as if it represented some major change, I thought he was saying Dayton was an establishment centrist.
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Feb 15, 2017 19:15
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Kilroy posted:Maybe the first step to doing that is to cease the endless attempts at conciliation with a Democratic party that clearly wants them to have no influence on the platform or the party but expects their votes anyway? You're right that unions came from bottom-up organization - and they are being systematic destroyed by Democrats arm-in-arm with Republicans, from the top down. Maybe leftists don't want to be a part of that anymore and maybe the election of Perez will be just another in a long list of clear indicators that the left has no actual place in the Democratic party. Let Nancy "We Are Capitalists, Period" Pelosi and her ilk have it. What I'm saying is that the left needs to start actively organizing, not voting third-party once every four years while smugly patting themselves on the back for doing their part to destroy capitalism. And although I say "needs to" in the present tense, it really needed to start doing that thirty years ago. The fact that the left stood around with their thumbs up their asses doing nothing for the last couple of decades while both parties collaborated to destroy them is exactly why I don't have any faith at all in the current progressive "revolution" - it's way too top-down. There's plenty of outrage on the bottom, but it steadfastly refuses to organize itself into something meaningful; it just sits around waiting for somebody to tell it what to do, just like the Tea Party did.
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Feb 15, 2017 19:43
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RaySmuckles posted:i'm well aware of the history of unions, the gilded age, and turn of the century politics Oh, I agree. It's a difficult fight with no guarantee of success. But it's been won before under far worse circumstances, so the decay of the institutions built by those victories isn't a good excuse for not trying. If people were honestly trying to rebuild the institutions and organize a lasting progressive movement, "but it's hard, the system is against us" would be fine. But aside from some outliers, like BLM, that's not really happening and all that leftist rage isn't being channeled into useful pursuits. I'm sick of watching leftists get so mad that they take to the streets en masse and march for change...and then when they're done marching and go home, they're totally done and essentially disappear, leaving behind nothing but plenty of war stories about how they totally Occupied their local public space and they held signs and everything and it was just such a great victory for the people. It's happened over and over and over again, and I'm absolutely sick of self-proclaimed progressives who think civic engagement just means marching around with a sign for a few days and then writing a totally sick burn on the establishment in their "Write-In Candidate" box on the ballot three years later.
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Feb 15, 2017 20:51
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JeffersonClay posted:
This is somewhat misleading, since Trump just finished a long and expensive presidential campaign while Warren hasn't campaigned for the presidency at all.
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Feb 16, 2017 01:36
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There's a big difference between the popularity of general ideas vs the popularity of specific policies, and the Clinton campaign should have taught us a thing or two about overreliance on polls.
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Feb 20, 2017 04:36
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Kilroy posted:Can you give an example of a hypothetical which would prompt you to actually support a shift to the left by the Democrats? Can be as far-out and unrealistic as you want. I just want an idea of what it would take, since "a lot of people seem to support it" apparently isn't cutting it. I do support a shift to the left by Democrats. I've wanted to see leftist policies in America for a long time. But the idea that the electorate has a large number of dedicated socialists who never say anything and don't ever vote (perhaps we could even call it a "silent majority") doesn't really hold up, and I'm tired of seeing leftists proclaim that they don't have to do anything because their victory is assured due to demographic trends/silent majorities and they just have to wait for the corrupt centrist politicians to realize it.
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Feb 20, 2017 15:47
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WampaLord posted:They wouldn't call themselves as such, but they're the same people who are saying "yes" to things like public option for healthcare in polls where it gets 70%+ support. I have two problems with those polls, though. First of all, just polling someone's approval of a general concept isn't necessarily useful unless you can be assured that a) they'll feel the same way about specific solid proposals, and b) it's a strongly held belief that won't swing thirty points in the other direction once it becomes a realistic enough prospect for the super PACs and interest groups to start buying ads about it. Having seen the way opinions sway on issues as they enter the sphere of serious public debate leaves me dubious about the whole idea of general issue polling. For example, polls showed two years ago that Republicans absolutely loathed Putin, but just look at how strongly-held that belief has been:  Second, there's the question of methodology. It's well-known that the wording of polls matters quite a bit, and there's been a lot said about the wording of public option polls - it's exceptionally easy to end up with leading questions, and while polling generally suggests a public option is good, the numbers vary widely depending on the details and there've been plenty of doubts raised about the quality of most (but not all) of that polling. Here's an example: https://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/polls-and-the-public-option/ quote:In recent weeks, polls kept showing solid support for a public insurance option, seeming to breathe new life into its viability as a provision of the health care legislation under way in Congress. In fact, advocates of a public option, from left-leaning groups to pundits to lawmakers, seized on each new number and trumpeted the news across the 24/7 news spectrum of Twitter, TV ads, blogs and headlines. If the NYT is too archconservative for you, Nate Silver did an in-depth look at a number of public option polls a few years back, going into detail about why he thought they were flawed. His conclusion was as follows: quote:Overall, polling points toward the public option being at least mildly popular and indeed perhaps quite popular. But more polling is required on this question, particularly by the news organizations and other unaffiliated groups like Pew and Gallup, and more care should be taken to frame both questions and answers in a neutral and informative way.
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Feb 20, 2017 17:40
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:I don't think anyone disagrees that millions of dollars of PAC money can change people's minds, and I don't understand how that's a good reason to ignore polls. Democrats being crappy at fighting off PAC propaganda is a thing that needs to be improved, not a reason to ignore your constituency. If you want to cement the belief in left wing policy that's clearly starting to take hold, start debunking the counterclaims now. Did you read the articles I posted? They give a lot of telling examples of why the polling data can be unreliable. For example... quote:The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found more support for the public option, even though it used a question similar to the NBC News-Wall Street Journal query. On this topic, Kaiser introduced the question with a lead-in sentence saying that public health insurance option was a means to increasing the number of Americans with insurance. So in this poll, 20% of public option supporters change their minds and go against the public option when they think about it in the context of what it might do to the private insurance market. That is not what I'd call a reliable base of support for a realistic public option. And, as Nate notes, that poll doesn't explicitly say that the "public health insurance option" refers to a government-run program (you might think that would be obvious, but no, it does make a difference in the numbers). Now, how many of the people who still support it even after that actually care enough to go out and vote based on that? Despite the general lack of good, in-depth polling, I think that Americans are generally favorable to ideas like "more people should have health insurance" and "there should be a plan for people who can't get health insurance", but the favorability rating quickly drops when you get into specifics like "how much should we spend on it" and "how easy should it be to get" and "what will it do to the private insurance marketplace". That goes even for general things. For example, one poll says that 50% of Americans favor single-payer...but that only 30% would still support single-payer if they heard opponents say that it would cause their taxes to go up. Obamacare is a good example of the dangers of relying too heavily on polling and focus groups. Even now, many of the provisions of the law poll extremely positively - except for the mandates and the various taxes included (like the medical device tax and cadillac tax, both of which are quite unpopular). But when packaged into an actual program, 41% of Americans say it "gives government too big a role in the health care system" and 35% say it leads to government spending too much on healthcare.
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Feb 20, 2017 19:05
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