He's running!

Last week the New York Times gave us one of those obligatory "Democratic Donor Class Is Panicked" articles that start coming out every quarter or so once we reach this stage of the Presidential pre-primary. Oh no are the candidates "too far to the left"?  Why haven't the piggies begun to rally around Amy Klobuchar's stern lectures about what they can't have yet?  Somebody has to do something about this. Who could we call on?

Would Hillary Clinton get in, the contributors wondered, and how about Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor? One person even mused whether Michelle Obama would consider a late entry, according to two people who attended the event, which was hosted by the progressive group American Bridge.

Hey you know that might work. Uncle Joe's exploding eyeballs may have embarrassed the hell out of everyone by yelling at Warren on stage last week.  But here is Hillary with her idea to yell at a completely different person instead.  Should they give that a go?   Maybe.

But hey, look who else appears in this article for some reason.

“I can see it, I can feel it, I can hear it,” Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor, said of the unease within the party. He said he thinks Mr. Biden is best positioned to defeat Mr. Trump but called the former vice president’s fund-raising “a real concern.”

It's a "real concern," but like a lot of these establishment Democrats, Mitch is still a Bidenite. Or, at least, he is until he is given permission not to be anymore.  When Joe finally accedes to the concerns of his fundraisers and drops out of the race, all of the career supplicants backing him out of obligation will be free to adopt whatever the next company line might be.

The early odds may have had them all landing on Kamala. But, more recently, one could argue they may cynically gravitate toward Warren.  Right now that seems like a logical evolution of the evergreen strategy of co-opting and crowding out the left. See this excellent analysis by Matt Karp for more on that.

Yet while she is sometimes described as an “economic populist,” Warren’s chief function in the primary race against Bernie Sanders has been to take the populism out of progressive economics. While formally embracing much of Sanders’s 2016 platform, the Warren campaign distinguished itself not by underlining the necessity of popular struggle, but by advertising the comprehensive wonkery of her policy agenda: “She has a plan for that!” Warren’s planfulness is Democratic savior politics in the style of Obama or Hillary Clinton. It does not summon the will of the masses; it says, “Chill out, she’s got this.”

The emphasis here is on the reasonableness of the plans, not the boldness of the demands. Even Warren’s most daring stroke on this front, a 2 percent tax on fortunes over $50 million, elicits chants of “two cents, two cents!” — with the campaign and its supporters alike practically fetishizing the modest limits of the request.

When Warren does vow to challenge the power the wealthy, her rhetoric often works not to stoke the popular mind against America’s inequality but to naturalize it as a fact of national life: “In America, there are gonna be people who are richer and people who are not so rich. And the rich are gonna own more shoes, and they’re gonna own more cars, and they may even own more houses. But they shouldn’t own more of our democracy.”

This isn’t economic populism; it’s closer to a folksy progressive riff on “there is no alternative.” Nor does such a cabined understanding of “democracy” — a question of fair procedures, walled off from the world of material goods — open much room for questioning the tyranny of bosses under capitalism.

Speaking of never questioning the tyranny of bosses, the New Orleans Times-Picayune-Dot-Nola-Dot-Com-Georges-Advoco-Gambit tells us that Mitch Landrieu is back in town to "formally launch" the same foundation he already formally launched a year ago.

Landrieu will formally launch the E Pluribus Unum initiative on Friday, an effort with influential backers including former President Bill Clinton that seeks to reshape the country's conversation about race. The goal, he says, is to more effectively reach out and help people gain a better understanding of racism in modern America.

The message is geared mainly toward the white community.

Mitch has been running around the country meeting with Lauren Powell Jobs, with Bill Clinton, with scores of corporate donors to see how much money he can pile up in the name of talking to white people about racism. That can't possibly mean he's even remotely within the universe of potential emergency Presidential candidates Democratic donors are supposed to be casting about for at the moment. Right?  Well just to be sure let's ask.

With years of work ahead to make a go of his new foundation, Landrieu brushed away suggestions that he might be seeking a position in the administration of any of the presidential contenders, using similar language to the incalculable times he was asked whether he had aspirations for the Oval Office.

“I don’t have any expectations of being in the next president’s cabinet,” he said.

Pretty cryptic! Maybe he's still waiting on the right call.  On the other hand, if Karp is correct about corporate Democrats warming up to an accommodation with Warren, it would mean that the Biden-Harris-Hillary-Mitch mode of centrist campaigning is no longer the new hotness.  But old habits die hard. Let's see how they feel after the convention.

All of this just seems too unreal to take seriously

See this is why I try to stay focused on the local doings nowadays.  All that requires a person to wrap one's mind around is exploding cranes, sewer cars, weekly boil orders, the occasional jaguar rampage, you know, normal stuff.  The national politics, on the other hand, I am convinced is not real. How can anyone take any of this seriously?

Everyone is foreign scum these days. Democrats spent three years trying to prove Donald Trump is a Russian pawn. Mitch McConnell is “Moscow Mitch.” Third party candidates are a Russian plot. The Bernie Sanders movement is not just a wasteland of racist and misogynist “Bros,” but — according to intelligence agencies and mainstream pundits alike — the beneficiary of an ambitious Russian plot to “stoke the divide” within the Democratic Party. The Joe Rogan independents attracted to the mild antiwar message of Tulsi Gabbard are likewise traitors and dupes for the Kremlin.

If you’re keeping score, that’s pretty much the whole spectrum of American political thought, excepting MSNBC Democrats. What a coincidence!

But people do. People take all of this bizarre Tom Clancy novel stuff constructed by cable news fantasists to be the actual meat of our national political debate.  Meanwhile poor people all over this country are living isolated lives. Left behind by a hostile ownership class, Americans find themselves without adequate housing, medical care, or any sustainable means of supporting themselves. And yet our politics is dominated by the nightly MSNBC hunt for imaginary Russian sleeper agents. Whenever I feel obliged to say anything about it at all what I want to say is it depresses and exhausts me.

Please just let me drive straight into the nearest flooded out underpass.  That, I can understand.

I guess they must think that's a bad thing?

It took me a while to figure it out yesterday but the general consensus out there is that this NYT article was intended as a criticism of single-payer health care. It's confusing because, of course, we ought to guarantee health care to every person as a basic human right. Only a monster would think otherwise.  All they're really pointing out here is doing that will be hard for us because there is so much wealth tied up in.. not doing it.

But doing away with an entire industry would also be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.

Such a change would shake the entire health care system, which makes up a fifth of the United States economy, as hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies would have to adapt to a new set of rules. Most Americans would have a new insurer — the federal government — and many would find the health insurance stocks in their retirement portfolios much less valuable.

And, okay, that's a fair point. Single-payer healthcare (currently branded as "Medicare For All") is a revolutionary project in scope.  It is a call to break up entrenched institutions controlling vast stores of wealth and power.   The CEO of United Healthcare makes 298 times as much per year as its median employee salary. That sounds like an industry in profound need of disruption. But NYT is saying that like it would be a bad thing. 


It's true that fulfilling this moral imperative to free people from the fear and debt machine that is private health insurance, not to mention save hundreds of thousands of lives in the process is going to be a heavy lift. It's such a heavy lift, in fact, that Hillary Clinton's admonition that it was "never ever" going to happen, as cynical and hopeless as it sounds, is still the most sober assessment.  That's no reason not to try, of course. It's just that doing the right thing in politics almost always means failure and Hillary has had a very long and successful career in politics.  

She's mostly out of the way for now but that doesn't mean there aren't other successful Democrats on hand to waver on Medicare for All and whittle away its purpose.  

House Democrats plan to unveil health-care legislation on March 26 aimed at lowering costs and protecting people with pre-existing conditions, according to an advisory from the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The bill, broadly timed to coincide with the 9th anniversary this weekend of Obamacare being signed into law, would “reverse the Trump administration’s health-care sabotage, and take new measures to lower health premiums and out-of-pocket costs for families,” according to the statement.

The measure is set to be proposed as more than 100 Democrats in the House back a “Medicare for All” bill introduced in February by Progressive Caucus co-chair Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state. The legislation, which right now has no chance of becoming law in a divided Congress, would create a universal, single-payer health program. Pelosi and a number of party moderates have resisted the idea.

Strictly speaking, this proposal to patch up some of the holes the Republicans have blown in Obamacare in recent years doesn't have to be at cross purposes with the larger project of passing single-payer. Not immediately, anyway.  Eventually the latter measure should render the former moot, though. So it's fair to assume that Democrats who are not among the 100 cosponsors of Jaypal's bill but do support more insurance-friendly bill's like what Pelosi is introducing tomorrow are making an explicit choice to support the industry over the needs of patients.

Cedric Richmond is the only Democratic member of the Louisiana congressional delegation. Which side is he on? 

How's the #Resistance doing?

Pretty well, it looks like.  Many of its founders are already getting rich Making American Great Again. 

Other Democratic lobbyists have found that their corporate clients’ interests align with the Trump administration. Some, like Podesta, are taking financial planning industry cash to work on the fiduciary rule.

Steve Elmendorf, a former senior advisor to Clinton’s 2008 run, maintained a high-profile role with Clinton’s 2016 run, raising $341,000 for the campaign. He is now one of the most prominent corporate lobbyists in Washington, D.C. Records show that Elmendorf, too, lobbied on the fiduciary rule. His client, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group for firms like Prudential, has made delaying the rule a major goal and celebrated Trump’s move to delay implementation.

UnitedHealth, the health insurance giant, is also an Elmendorf client. Filings made to ethics officials on Capitol Hill reveal that Elmendorf is helping UnitedHealth work on issues related to the Affordable Care Act, including the health insurance industry tax, a provision of the ACA that UnitedHealth has made clear it seeks to repeal or delay. Congressional Republicans have said that, if they are successful with their overhaul of the law, the tax will be gone.

Meanwhile we're still arguing over whether Democratic candidates who run in conservative leaning districts should advance a progressive agenda or just drift along to where the money is.  If you're in the club who gets paid no matter who wins, you can see how this might not seem like an important matter to you.

Who are we? Why are we here?

The Democratic Party has no idea what it is for.

Shattered is sourced almost entirely to figures inside the Clinton campaign who were and are deeply loyal to Clinton. Yet those sources tell of a campaign that spent nearly two years paralyzed by simple existential questions: Why are we running? What do we stand for?

If you're wondering what might be the point of rehashing this now, the responsibility for opposing Donald Trump going forward still rests with the (mostly anonymous) voices described in this book.

The problem here is that most of the people in charge of the Democratic Party figure the thing runs just fine the way it is. It doesn't really matter how many elections they lose as long as they are supporting the right, corporate friendly candidates to keep the donor money rolling in, everything is fine.  This is a machine that can run forever. If the elites running the show raise enough money to keep themselves ensconced in their roles, nothing has to change. 

Washington politicians tend to view everything through an insider lens.

Most don't see elections as organic movements within populations of millions, but as dueling contests of "whip-smart" organizers who know how to get the cattle to vote the right way. If someone wins an election, the inevitable Beltway conclusion is that the winner had better puppeteers.

It's fine with them that the party doesn't really stand for anything. That's actually kind of bad for the brand, frankly. 

Also, the Clintons are so nice. Can't imagine why people get such a negative impression...

This traced back to 2008, a failed run that the Clintons had concluded was due to the disloyalty and treachery of staff and other Democrats. After that race, Hillary had aides create "loyalty scores" (from one for most loyal, to seven for most treacherous) for members of Congress. Bill Clinton since 2008 had "campaigned against some of the sevens" to "help knock them out of office," apparently to purify the Dem ranks heading into 2016.

These people are still running things. And they have clearly learned nothing. 2018 should be lots of fun.

Why do Americans hate media elites?

Can't imagine why that would be.  Probably because they see too much "Fake News" that should be censored or something.  Or maybe it's something else....

.@FareedZakaria on Syria strikes: "I think Donald Trump became President of the United States" last night https://t.co/dLipRu6SZu

— New Day (@NewDay) April 7, 2017

bombing is fun, MSNBC edition  pic.twitter.com/qbtiBrpWLB

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) April 7, 2017

See also Pareene from about a month ago.

Here’s what you have to understand about the sort of people who become anchors, nonpartisan pundits, centrist columnists, and cable news political correspondents: They didn’t sign up to be the resistance. They don’t want Donald Trump to fail. They want him to “pivot” and “act presidential.”

Yeah, there are guys (and it is guys, for the most part) out there who spend their whole careers trying to be Dan Rather staring down Nixon or Cronkite turning on Vietnam—or even just Tim Russert making some elected mediocrity stammer with a patented “tough question”—but mostly these guys want to be witnesses to Great Men Making History. They want to Respect The Office Of The Presidency.

Here’s another thing you should understand about these guys: The only thing the elite Washington press corps likes more than a bipartisan commission on debt reduction is a stack of flag-draped coffins.

Bonus: Why do Americans hate elite establishment Democrats?  Can't imagine why.  

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, said, "Making sure Assad knows that when he commits such despicable atrocities he will pay a price is the right thing to do." 

He added: "It is incumbent on the Trump administration to come up with a strategy and consult with Congress before implementing it. I salute the professionalism and skill of our Armed Forces who took action today."

 Also

(CNN)Hillary Clinton called on the United States to take out Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's Air Force on Thursday, days after a chemical attack killed more than 70 people in the war-torn country. 

Logical conclusion

The Trump budget proposes to blow up everything. This is literal in the sense that the proposed $54 billion increase in military spending means more things can be blown up. But that's not the only sort of destruction he's aiming at.

The spending budget Trump is set to release Thursday will offer the clearest snapshot of his vision for the size and role of government. Aides say that the president sees a new Washington emerging from the budget process, one that prioritizes the military and homeland security while slashing many other areas, including housing, foreign assistance, environmental programs, public broadcasting and research. Simply put, government would be smaller and less involved in regulating life in America, with private companies and states playing a much bigger role.

Remember also there's really nothing there to push back against the coming of the new Gilded Age. Not only does a hard right Republican Party control the Congress, but the #Resistance, such as it is, is comprised of a Democratic Party who has swallowed whole and promulgated this exact ideology for decades.  Trump is only bringing it to its logical conclusion.

The real problem, though, as it always has, lies with the faithless Democrats. Every time you heard Bill Clinton tell you, "The era of Big Government is over," this was the logical outcome.  Every Democrat who has held hands with Wall Street bankers or Silicon Valley venture capitalists has pushed the ball further in Trump's direction. Every "Public Private Partnership" trumpeted in Aspen has furthered Trump's argument.

Now Trump is here to blow everything up. And the "opposition" is too steeped in complicity to present anything like a credible counterargument.

On today's episode of Bernie Woulda Won

Here is a must-read article by Thea Riofrancos and Daniel Denvir for In These Times. It is a comprehensive examination of so-called "identity politics" and the current problems of de-fragmenting what remains of the political left.  It's the best synthesis I've seen in a long while and should be widely distributed and discussed.

The following highlights I've picked don't really do it justice. But I do want to share with you what I see as the essential point. Anti-racism and economic equality must be conjoined movements in order to realize any true measure of  success. Political elites are continually trying to separate them in their cynical efforts to maintain power.  And their damaging efforts are a "bi-partisan" enterprise exacerbated to great effect by the Clintons. And where elites succeed, everyone else suffers.

Welfare reform and the war on crime, though justified by appeals to racist stereotypes, ultimately harmed many lower income and working class whites. As Ian Haney-López and Heather McGhee write at The Nation, racism has been the key tool that Republicans and neoliberal Democrats have used not only to advance racist policies but to attack labor and shred social welfare protections across the board: “The reactionary economic agenda made possible by dog-whistle politics is responsible not just for the devaluing of black lives but for the declining fortunes of the majority of white families.” Welfare reform’s politics—presenting economic success and failure as a reflection of individual morality—would smooth the way for a broader assault on the collective underpinnings of human well-being, from George Bush's “ownership society” through Gov. Scott Walker's decimation of organized labor in Wisconsin. These well-funded and tightly organized right-wing attacks on unions and the poor have been facilitated by the collapse of left-of-center working class institutions and the erasure of class as a point of common interest.

The potential corrective to this in 2016 lay in the Sanders campaign. But the Democratic establishment class, determined to submarine that effort at every turn, resorted to its standard divide and conquer playbook.

During the Clinton era, it was the Left, battered and divided in the wake of Reagan, that unsuccessfully protested police brutality, mass incarceration, welfare decimation and corporate rule. During this year's primary campaign, however, Hillary Clinton turned this historical debate on its head, suggesting that it was the Left that opposed the establishment’s embrace of racial justice: Sanders' program for class struggle, she warned, not only failed to attend to racial, gender and queer justice but was also inherently hostile to them.

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, and I will if they deserve it…would that end racism?” Clinton asked at a Nevada rally. “No!” the crowd chorused. “Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”As Matt Karp writes at Jacobin, Clinton staked her campaign on an “alliance between the Upper East Side and East Flatbush,” appealing not to working class people of any race but to a narrow sliver of moderate suburban Republicans who she incorrectly believed would be the swing vote turned off by Trump's vulgarity. As former Pennsylvania governor and DNC Chair Ed Rendell put it, “For every one of those blue-collar Democrats he picks up, he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that.”

That didn't work out so well.

And, yet, despite the miserable failure of their cynical, racist political strategy to defeat even the thoroughly despicable Donald Trump, establishment Democrats continue to insist on presenting us with a false choice between class and identity.  Just this week, Hillary Clinton's former Communications Director told MSNBC that the groundswell of protest against the Trump Administration isn't really about labor. It's about "Nordstrom."

“You are wrong to look at these crowds and think everyone wants $15 an hour,” Palmieri said in regards to the Trump protests. “Don’t assume the answer to big crowds is moving policy to the left. I think the answer to big crowds is engaging as much as you can and being as supportive as you can. What these people want—it’s all about identity on our side now. They want to show he does not support me. I support refugees, I support immigrants in my neighborhood. I want to defend you. Women who are rejecting Nordstrom’s and Neiman Marcus—this is power to them.”

If anything positive is ever to be built from the ashes of 2016, this poisonous rhetoric from elite Democrats cannot be allowed to continue.  As Riofrancos and Denvir show, it is deliberately damaging to the party's ostensible core constituency of poor and working class Americans of all races and genders. Moreover, it is ultimately a recipe for failure.  To see that, one need only check the scoreboard.  The Clinton wing just boned a national election.  The leftists, on the other hand, are putting some skins on the wall.

The two Trump nominees with the biggest headaches were the ones opposed by teachers' unions and service unions'. Not a coincidence.

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) February 15, 2017

"Investors"

This right here is exactly why Clinton Inc. is poisonous to Democrats.

“She understands that a forensic exam of the campaign is necessary, not only for her, but for the party and other electeds, and for the investors in the campaign,” said a close Hillary Clinton friend in Washington who, like several others, declined to speak on the record because their conversations with one or both Clintons were private. “People want to know that their investment was treated with respect, but that their mistakes wouldn’t be repeated."

The company is doing its due diligence. We are performing a forensic audit to determine why the company failed to hit its numbers. Above all we must ensure the shareholders remain confident. Not a word in this about how your political operation actually connects with people's needs and concerns.  It's the "investors" who matter. 

Can't keep doing the same thing

As we prepare to welcome the time of the dark lord (pictured*) this weekend, it's time for the highly compensated political professionals who run the Democratic Party... and who failed miserably in 2016... to start figuring out how to do better.  There isn't a whole lot of cause for optimism.

The DNC apparatus runs on money.  Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.  But the people who have been in charge of raising that money only know how to get it by cozying up to banks, and tech billionaires and multinational corporations which in turn become the source of the corruption which most people see as Exhibit A in the case of "Why Dems Lose Elections."  The problem is that the people in charge would very much like to remain in charge. But the party can't make the kind of transformation it needs to make unless they are relieved of duty. 

Okay so you've got your pitchfork and your torch and you are ready to go round up some #HillaryMen. The problem, then, is what next? Unless you replace the Democratic Party establishment, you can't repeal the Democratic Party establishment. The object is to find new ways of doing stuff or else the default machinery just keeps chugging right along. As with most things, this is easier said than done.

American Poli Sci 101 theory holds that the parties go through cycles of emphasis; that they can either choose to be the Presidential Party or the Congressional Party. It often works out this way... our constitutional structure all but invites it to, actually.. but I don't think it necessarily has to be like this. In any case, I would argue that the GOP has been the "stronger" party in terms of raw policy influence in recent decades even during the years when Democrats have held the White House.

This week, PBS Frontline ran a pretty okay four hour retrospective of the Obama years. I have quibbles with some of the points of emphasis and interpretations of events.  But it does a fair job of documenting the political (ugh) narrative of this Presidency. The film doesn't set out to make this point as explicitly as it should but the Obama years should serve as an object lesson in how to run an effective opposition. The pattern worked as follows:  1) Republicans stake out an unreasonable, obstructionist position. 2) Obama rushes to meet them halfway 3) This not only fails to satisfy them but they go on shouting and screaming that he won't meet them all the way because socialist/Muslim/Kenya.. yargle bargle and so on.  4) The press shakes its head at all the "polarization" because both sides. The Republicans more or less control the agenda in this fashion. This was all obvious and many of us identified it at the very beginning.

While that went on unchecked, Republicans used the perception of powerlessness as a rallying cry at election time to build strength in the Congress and in state houses across the country. Meanwhile the Democrats' sole focus on the Presidency only exacerbated their failures everywhere else. The party was built to raise money from big donors to run big Presidential campaigns every four years with money trickled out strategically to select "winnable" districts elsewhere. Over time such districts became fewer and fewer.

So it takes more than just winning Presidential elections in order to make a real difference.   Keith Ellison, currently bidding to chair the DNC, understands that. Or, at least, he says he does.

I think the reason that we've had those losses is because the DNC is viewed more as a presidential campaign apparatus rather than a program or an agency designed to get Democrats elected up and down the ballot all the time. The DNC really should be the instrument for the rank-and-file Democrat all over the country — in Idaho, in Chicago, in Minneapolis, in Florida. But we treat it like it's not the Democratic National Committee; we treat it like it's the Democratic Presidential National Committee. Because of that, we have not really had the outreach and the door knocking and the engagement year-round that we need to have. That's too bad. 

The thing is that before 2008, we had the 50-state strategy, and that is in fact still pretty popular among DNC members. As you notice, we did pretty well in 2006; we did pretty well in 2008. I think that's because we still had enough connectivity in place from that 50-state strategy, but as time wore on, the tremendous popularity of Barack Obama, his amazing rhetorical skills, his just unparalleled ability to explain things and to inspire people really is the fuel that we lived on. Because of that, we lost a lot.

Good luck to him. The so-called Hillary Wing is already circling the wagons. 

Third Way is joining a crowded field of Democratic organizations which are redefining themselves in reaction to the upending results of the November election and trying to map out a path forward. Many outside groups that backed Hillary Clinton during the campaign are now vying to become the nerve center of the anti-Trump opposition in Washington, D.C., ready to fight him on everything from Cabinet nominations to key legislative battles like the upcoming showdown over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

The liberal, non-profit Center for American Progress, led by Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden, has reorganized itself with the mission of resisting Trump’s legislative efforts. Clinton defender David Brock is also relaunching his super PAC, American Bridge, to act as a watchdog group monitoring Trump. And the super PAC that spent close to $200 million to support Clinton’s presidential bid, Priorities USA, is also rebranding itself as an opposition group to the president-elect, with the longer term goal of bringing voters back to the party.

Naturally, their "rebranding" strategy involves moving the party even further to the right. 

Part of the economic message the group is driving -- which is in line with its centrist ideology -- is to steer the Democratic Party away from being led into a populist lurch to the left by leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

“Populism is inherently anti-government,” Cowan said. “That works if you’re a right-wing conservative, like Donald Trump. That doesn’t work if you’re the party of government." He added: "You can’t meet right-wing populism effectively as a matter of politics or governing with big government liberal populism, or 1990s centrism. You have to do something entirely new for a new era.”

Did any of that make sense to you?  No, me neither. "Populism" = "anti-government" so you can't do "big government populism." This is what marketing ghouls who care nothing about people's actual problems sound like. They're definitely going to "do something entirely new for a new era," though, these same people who have been running things forever.

So far the "something new" is an amazingly new level of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand these wealthy bundlers are branding themselves as a #Resistance to an administration they have labeled illegitimate and traitorous. (I'm open to that rhetoric, by the way. But not on the unsubstantiated conspiracy grounds they are currently pushing.) On the other hand they are fighting tooth and nail to defend the very ideology the incoming right wing government is animated by. In other words, they are allowing their own cynical ambition to snuff out whatever meaningful "resistance" their slogan purports to offer.

The worst thing about all of this is it's very likely the conservatives are going to win and the Tandens and Brocks of the world will continue to run whatever is left of the Democratic Party machine as long as it pulls in enough money.  As far as they're concerned, that's Mission Accomplished. They're the pros. They can do this forever. The rest of us can't go on doing the same thing, though.  It's costing us too much.

So the outlook isn't good but the best advice I can offer Democrats, if they want any, is this. Protest everything (GOP is about to make that difficult for you), obstruct whatever you can (difficult with no control of any branch of government), and dump your corporate faction as soon as you can. That last bit might actually be the easiest one, all things considered.  Today is a good time to get started.

*Actually the monster in the photo is David Simon encountered on Mardi Gras Day 2016.  Turns out you never know who you're #Standing with at the parade.

"World's Greatest Healthcare"

.@BillCassidy met with @RepTomPrice today to talk about "The World’s Greatest Healthcare Plan," which is what Cassidy has named his plan. pic.twitter.com/NCJDH6MsmT

— Elizabeth Crisp (@elizabethcrisp) December 13, 2016

In case you are wondering, no, that isn't a thing where you buy your health plan from your neighbor's kid along with a box of chocolate bars. It's just a thing where they scrap the exchanges in favor of tax credits.  At present, though, Republicans are planning to repeal as much of the ACA as they can as soon as possible with no clear idea of how to "replace" it.

GOP leaders, who have repeatedly promised their core voters that they would repeal Obamacare, oppose any delay in a vote, despite the risk that Republicans may be held responsible for any ensuing turmoil.

They are pushing to pass a bill early next year that would repeal many key provisions of the law. That would include the money that has allowed states to expand their Medicaid safety nets and the billions of dollars in federal funds that have provided subsidies to low- and middle-income Americans to help with the cost of insurance premiums. More than 20 million Americans who previously lacked insurance have gained coverage under the law.

“We have to bring relief to Obamacare as quickly as possible so that it stops doing damage, not just to the healthcare system but to the families of America who need affordable health insurance,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters at the Capitol last week.

To minimize disruptions, senior Republicans want to delay when the cuts would take effect. The idea is to buy time to allow the party to develop an alternative — something that GOP lawmakers have been unable to agree on in the six years since the law passed.

In the very likely worst case scenario that the Republicans just do whatever without caring about the consequences, a half million Louisianans could lose access to medical care. 

A new report estimates as many as 558,000 people in Louisiana would lose health insurance if Republicans in Congress force a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and Louisiana would lose $1.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding.

In many ways, the report offers a glimpse from the edge of an abyss: It assumes that a Republican-led Congress, with support from President-elect Donald Trump, would repeal the Affordable Care Act and fail to replace it with any meaningful health care policy.

And while it's not clear that will happen, the report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities offers a dark reminder of what health care providers and patients stand to lose under an overhaul of key policy changes.

The numbers in the report are all the more dramatic because of Louisiana's longtime reliance on federal funding to finance health care programs for the working poor and indigent. But it also combines the low-income population insured under Medicaid with moderate-income families who rely on marketplace plans.

One of the many many reasons I did not want Trump to win was, regardless of who would be the next President, health care policy was due for a reckoning.  This crappy system of insurance-based reform with no public option we call "Obamacare" was going to fall apart. Premiums were going up and insurers were dropping out of the exchanges before the election anyway.

With Hillary in the White House, the argument we'd have as a result would have involved a lot of us saying, "Hey guess what. It's time for single payer." And sure, Hillary "Never Ever Ever" Clinton and the shittier Democrats would have fought us on that. And the Republicans would be even bigger dicks about it. And whatever "fix" they eventually hammered out wouldn't be everything we wanted. BUT we would have the opportunity to more clearly articulate a better idea. We would have something more like single payer at least on the table and people would be taking it more seriously.

Now we don't get to have that fight at all.  Instead, everybody is screwed for the foreseeable future. 

Art of the deal

Donald Trump is an excellent negotiator.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Trump got involved. He sat down with Carrier leaders. Afterward, he announced that 1,100 jobs would be saved. When I first heard the news, I was optimistic. But I began to get nervous when we couldn’t get any details on the deal. I urged caution, but our members got their hopes up. They thought their jobs had been saved.

When I met with Carrier officials last Thursday, I realized that that wouldn’t be the case. Though Trump said he’d saved 1,100 jobs, he hadn’t. Carrier told us that 550 people would get laid off.

Trump didn’t tell people that, though. When he spoke at our plant, he acted like no one was going to lose their job. People went crazy for him. They thought, because of Trump, I’m going to be able to provide for my family. 

All the while, I’m sitting there, thinking that’s not what the damn numbers say. Trump let people believe that they were going to have a livelihood in that facility. He let people breathe easy. When I told our members the next day, they were devastated.

I was angry, too. So I told a Washington Post reporter the truth — that Trump’s 1,100 number was wrong. When Trump read my comments, he got angry.

Trump used these Carrier employees as a campaign stunt. Then he used them as a post-election photo-op.  Then he kicked them in the teeth.

Today he did it again. 

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday named Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that operates the fast food outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor.

Mr. Puzder has spent his career in the private sector and has opposed efforts to expand eligibility for overtime pay, while arguing that large minimum wage increases hurt small businesses and lead to job loss among low-skilled workers.

During the campaign, Trump frequently sounded open to raising the minimum wage to $10. This is, of course, unacceptable but it would be more than Puzder would be likely to countenance. In context of the 2016 election, Trump's hollow promise of $10 less than the $15 actual minimum wage workers have been demanding in recent years. It's also less than the shitty $12 (sorta maybe in some states if they really try hard enough) reluctantly endorsed by Hillary Clinton this year.   I wonder who the Hillary people are going to blame for all of this.

Find something new or keep falling for this con

Joke's on us, America.  Because, surely, none among us could have predicted.....

WASHINGTON — Steven Terner Mnuchin, a financier with deep roots on Wall Street and in Hollywood but no government experience, is expected to be named Donald J. Trump’s Treasury secretary as soon as Wednesday, people close to the transition say.

Mr. Mnuchin, 53, was the national finance chairman for Mr. Trump’s campaign. He began his career at Goldman Sachs, where he became a partner, before creating his own hedge fund, moving to the West Coast and entering the first rank of movie financiers by bankrolling hits like the “X-Men” franchise and “Avatar.”

As Treasury secretary, Mr. Mnuchin would play an important role in shaping the administration’s economic policies, including a package of promised tax cuts, increased spending on infrastructure and changes in the terms of foreign trade. He could also help lead any effort to roll back President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and opening to Cuba by reimposing sanctions on Tehran and Havana.

His selection fits uneasily with much of Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric attacking the financial industry. Mr. Trump, in a campaign ad intended as a closing argument, portrayed the chief executive of Goldman Sachs as the personification of a global elite that the ad said had “robbed our working class.”

"Fits uneasily" with the rhetoric, but not so much with the parade of billionaires and oligarchs Trump has named to cabinet positions in recent days. But Donald Trump is a con man whose entire campaign was one long... and pretty transparent con.

Nevertheless, it is a con that worked.  Did it work, because Trump was able to stir up a tornado of resentment through a stream of racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric?  Absolutely.  Would any of that have been effective, though, if his opponent had not also been certain to install a government of (slightly woke) oligarchs and billionaires?  We never got to find out.  And, unfortunately, the Democratic Party is not going to learn a damn thing from the experience. Here's Tom Frank on that.

And here we are again. Today Democrats are wondering what went wrong, but before too many fundraising dinners have been digested they will have concluded they don’t need to worry, that demographics will bail them out sooner or later, and that the right and noble course of action is to proceed as before.

This will happen because what leading liberals cannot understand – what they are psychologically blocked from understanding – is that the problem isn’t really the white working class. The problem is them.

Let me explain what I mean by reminding you what this form of liberalism looks like. Somewhere in a sunny corner of the country, either right now or very shortly, a group of tech tycoons or well-meaning private equity investors will meet to discuss what went wrong in this election cycle.

They will consider many things: the sexism and racism of Trump voters, the fundamental foreignness of the flyover, the problems one encounters when dealing with evangelicals. They will celebrate some activist they learned about from NPR, they will enjoy some certified artisanal cuisine, they will hand out prizes to the same people that got prizes at the last event they attended, and they will go back to their comfortable rooms at the resort and sleep ever so soundly.

These people think they know what liberalism includes and what it doesn’t include. And in the latter category fall the concerns that made up the heart and soul of liberal politics a few decades ago: labor and work and exploitation and economic equality.

What portion of Hillary Clinton's campaign message addressed economic equality was largely cribbed in watered down fashion from issues that made up the core of Bernie Sanders's message. Instead of free college tuition, she offered loan forgiveness for "entrepreneurs" Instead of a $15 minimum wage, she offered $12... maybe... depending on whether or not individual state governments (largely Republican controlled, btw) got on board. Instead of holding corporate tax evaders accountable she offered them a "repatriation" plan that rewarded bad behavior with huge tax breaks. (More on that in a minute.)

But mostly she kept these issues in the background. Instead, her campaign emphasized Trump's many personal failings in the hope of perhaps shaming enough suburban well-to-do Republicans away from him. Here's Matt Karp on that.

Faced with a Republican opponent who openly touted his affinity for “the poorly educated,” Team Clinton focused on courting white voters at the opposite end of the class pyramid. Trump’s vulgarity and chauvinism, they hoped, would drive wealthy Republican moderates toward Clinton. Rather than aggressively contest Trump’s bogus populism, Democratic strategists concentrated on “moderate” suburban Republicans — the ideological cousins, and often the literal neighbors, of professional-class Democrats.

“For every one of those blue-collar Democrats [Trump] picks up,” former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell predicted in February, “he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that.”

Electorally, of course, this strategy proved catastrophic. In the Midwestern swing states, Clinton hemorrhaged white “blue-collar Democrats” without winning nearly enough “moderate Republicans” to compensate.

The most embarrassing fact of this election will forever be Hillary Clinton's failure to defeat a candidate as personally repulsive and as obviously full of shit as Donald Trump. If the Democrats had run a candidate capable of attacking the hypocrisy of the billionaire Trump's flimsy claim to status as a working class hero they should have walked all over him.  Instead they ran Hillary Clinton and the con man Trump is selling candlelight dinners to million dollar donors who fund his inaugural.

But before he does that, Trump has a campaign promise to keep to the people Hillary's neglect turned off whether they held their noses and voted for her or not. 

Mr. Presley, the 59-year-old white Crawfordsville steelworker who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 and Mr. Trump in 2016, was even more emphatic that racial resentment or ethnic bigotry was not behind his support for Mr. Trump. “I grew up on the West Side of Indianapolis in a racist environment,” he said. “But I went to a high school that was 57 percent black, and I played football with a lot of black guys and we became close friends. I learned not to be racist.”

Instead of bias, what animates these voters, whatever their race or political orientation, is a profound distrust and resentment of wealthier, educated Americans, a group they say lacks a connection to them and does not care about their economic situation. And to them, Mrs. Clinton seemed at least as elite as Mr. Trump, if not more so.

“I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for him, but both candidates are evil,” said Ms. Shanklin-Hawkins, who reluctantly voted for Mrs. Clinton, but has never forgiven her for her remarks about “superpredators” in the 1990s, or the mandatory prison sentencing guidelines Mr. Clinton signed into law as president

“Hillary hasn’t sweated a day in her life, unless it was losing a tough case as a lawyer,” Mr. Maynard said. “We wanted to take America in a different direction. I’m just hoping Trump will do what he says.”

In this case, he said he would stop Carrier from shutting down a manufacturing plant in Indiana and moving its operation to Mexico.  In his campaign speeches he also implied that he would prevent any company from following suit by threatening them with severe (though never elaborately specified) penalties. In the Carrier case, though, Trump promised to get personally involved. And so he has.

INDIANAPOLIS — The long-promised call from Donald J. Trump to the heating and cooling giant Carrier came early one morning about a week after the election, when he unexpectedly won the industrial heartland.

The president-elect warned Gregory Hayes, the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies, that he had to find a way to save a substantial share of the jobs it had vowed to move to Mexico, or he would face the wrath of the incoming administration.

On Thursday, as he toured the factory floor here to take credit for saving roughly half of the 2,000 jobs Indiana stood to lose, Mr. Trump sent a message to other businesses as well that he intended to follow through on his pledges to impose stiff tariffs on imports from companies that move production overseas and ship their products back to the United States.

“This is the way it’s going to be,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The New York Times. “Corporate America is going to have to understand that we have to take care of our workers also.”

Wow that is some might tough talk.   But, remember, this is the same guy who just appointed Steven Mnuchin to head the Treasury Department. What, exactly, did Trump and Hayes come to an understanding over? It can't really be "that we have to take care of our workers."  A thousand of them are about to be laid off.

Despite the cheers Mr. Trump received as he walked around the factory floor, where the lines continued to run and he had to shout at times to be heard, another 1,000 workers for the company in Indiana will be losing their jobs.

This includes 700 at a United Technologies factory in nearby Huntington, as well as several hundred here. The 800 or so jobs that are being preserved are mostly on the lines that build medium- and high-efficiency gas furnaces.

Not long after Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence departed for the airport and to another rally in Ohio to celebrate his victory, workers coming in for the night shift received a letter titled “Company Update on Indianapolis Operations.”

“While this announcement is good news for many, we recognize it is not good news for everyone,” the letter stated. “We are moving forward with previously announced plans to relocate the fan coil manufacturing lines, with the expected completion by the end of 2017.”

Probably the $7 million in Indiana "incentives" in the form of tax breaks had something to do with it. This plus the promise of future giveaways and lax regulatory oversight from a corporate-friendly Trump Administration... and, of course, the opportunity to be a part of this PR stunt has Carrier and United Technologies feeling pretty good about their decision to threaten to move.  This isn't unlike what NFL franchises do to cities from time to time. Trump should have built Carrier a stadium.


Here's Bernie Sanders on that.

In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Just a short few months ago, Trump was pledging to force United Technologies to “pay a damn tax.” He was insisting on very steep tariffs for companies like Carrier that left the United States and wanted to sell their foreign-made products back in the United States. Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut. Wow! How’s that for standing up to corporate greed? How’s that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad?

In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.

It should. If only they had been offered a better option during the election they might have taken it. But if Hillary Clinton represented something even slightly better than the con being run on them now, she certainly wasn't trying to convince them of it.  In fact, she was selling her own program of corporate giveaways. Remember that tax repatriation plan we mentioned?  Here's what that does.

American multinational corporations are currently stashing a staggering $2.4 trillion in profits — about 14 percent of the size of the entire U.S. economy — overseas. Multinationals are required by U.S. law to pay the statutory 35 percent tax on profits they earn anywhere on earth, but the tax is not assessed until the profits are brought back to the U.S.

This has allowed Corporate America to essentially hold U.S. tax revenue hostage, refusing to pay its taxes until Americans become so desperate that they will cut a deal giving multinationals a special new tax rate.

This strategy has already paid off once, in 2004, when multinationals got Congress to let them bring back $312 billion in profits at a one-time rate of about 5 percent. The legislation required that the cash be used to hire Americans or conduct research and development. Corporations ignored these provisions and instead used the money to enrich their executives and stockholders, while cutting U.S. jobs.

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton clearly envision cutting a similar deal during a Hillary Clinton presidency, although presumably they intend for the corporations to keep their part of the bargain this time.

"Their end of the bargain this time," was supposed to have been investment in an infrastructure bank which... assuming the money was ever collected... could eventually... depending on the form such a bank would take.. possibly lead to better roads, bridges, sewers, etc... and very likely some connected finance types getting rich in the process but that's Clintonism for you.

Anyway, if you are running the Hillary Clinton campaign, it is your job to draw the very easy (although maybe not exactly honest) line from this idea to "Jobs for working class people!" But the Clinton people never managed to sell their corporate tax  giveaway the way the Trump people sold and continue to sell theirs. And this is why they lost the rust belt. That and too many voters were turned off completely by the fact that they are ruled by billionaires and oligarchs either way. 

And while it's fine to point out that we're worse off under the gang of billionaires and oligarchs who are about to let Paul Ryan replace Medicare with gym membership coupons, looking down the road, it's important to understand that both are unacceptable and we need to find something new in our politics. Otherwise we're going to see new versions of this same con over and over.

What will your candidate do for us?

We hear so much about "voter apathy" and the need for people to recognize that elections have consequences in their actual lives. But too often we only hear about this in the form of tsk-tsk lecturing after the fact of another disappointing turnout. If your campaign isn't spending its time and energy telling voters what it will do for them, though, you shouldn't be surprised if they don't bother.

MILWAUKEE — Four barbers and a firefighter were pondering their future under a Trump presidency at the Upper Cutz barbershop last week.

“We got to figure this out,” said Cedric Fleming, one of the barbers. “We got a gangster in the chair now,” he said, referring to President-elect Donald J. Trump

They admitted that they could not complain too much: Only two of them had voted. But there were no regrets.

“I don’t feel bad,” Mr. Fleming said, trimming a mustache. “Milwaukee is tired. Both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.”

As Democrats pick through the wreckage of the campaign, one lesson is clear: The election was notable as much for the people who did not show up, as for those who did. Nationally, about half of registered voters did not cast ballots.

Even when you think the choice is or should be obvious. Even when it is obvious to people who think the other guy is "a gangster" or a deplorable or whatever, they aren't necessarily going to come out and vote for you unless you tell them what you are going to do for them.  People have concerns.  Your campaign ought to address them.

Mr. Fleming, 47, who has been trimming hair, beards and mustaches for 30 years, had hoped his small business would get easier to run. But it hasn’t.

“Give us loans, or a 401(k),” he said, trimming the mustache of Steve Stricklin, a firefighter from the neighborhood. His biggest issue was health insurance. Mr. Fleming lost his coverage after his divorce three years ago and has struggled to find a policy he could afford. He finally found one, which starts Monday but costs too much at $300 a month.

“Ain’t none of this been working,” he said. He did not vote.

 None of these people expect Donald Trump to solve their problems. But the Clinton campaign's theme was "America Is Already Great."  That probably didn't speak to these voters either. 

Post-mortems

Naomi Klein: "Trump Defeated Clinton, Not Women" 

Here is the biggest problem with elevating sexism to the defining explanation of Mrs. Clinton’s loss: It lets her machine and her failed policies off the hook. It erases the role played by the appetite for endless war and the comfort with market-friendly incremental change, no matter the urgency of the crisis (from climate change to police violence to raging inequality). It erases the disgust over Mrs. Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street and with the wreckage left behind by trade deals that benefited corporations at the expense of workers.

In this version, it’s all about sexism. And that is the surest way to ensure that the Democratic Party’s disastrous 2016 mistakes will be repeated — only next time, with a man at the top of the ticket.

Post-mortems: "We don't have time.."

This one is actually more of a sociological case study by Gary Younge. It's the tenth of a ten part series filed for The Guardian from and about Muncie, Indiana.  The entire series is great. Read the whole thing if you get some time.  This one is fine to start with for our purposes because it wraps up the election. Younge notes that what has been described elsewhere as a Trump "surge" implying some decisive expression of the voters' anger/racism/xenophobia whatever, is actually more about their apathy.

The link between economic anxiety and rightwing nationalism can be overdone. The easy narrative of a populist revolt has an appealing simplicity, but Clinton won votes from more than half of the people who earn less than $50,000; the rich voted for Trump. He won the electoral college and lost the popular vote. Thanks to the lowest turnout in 20 years, Trump won a lower percentage of the eligible vote than John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Gerald Ford – and they all lost. He got the same proportion of the white vote as Romney in 2012 and Bush in 2004 and only a little more than McCain in 2008. He may have led the charge to the right but comparatively few marched with him.

Nor is such a link inevitable. In several countries across Europe – from Greece to Britain – a populist left response has emerged to this same crisis. In the US Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who calls himself a democratic socialist, shocked everybody, including himself, by mounting a dynamic insurgent campaign that addressed these very economic issues.

Nonetheless, the link cannot be denied. The case for solidarity requires more effort and empathy than the case for scapegoating. It also flies against the prevailing headwinds of individualism, nationalism and a narrow understanding of self-preservation.

When people are abandoned, hopeless, and disconnected, it's easier for a politician, such as Trump, to use that to his advantage than to lead a movement that seeks to overcome it. Trump's appeal is strictly nihilistic. It expects that voters with no sense of purpose or future will either respond to the little bit of impotent rage you can sell them or (mostly, in fact) disengage from the process altogether.

Younge points out that the Sanders campaign tried the harder approach of motivating people to overcome their isolation and find the solidarity across racial and cultural divisions necessary to work for positive rather than destructive change.

But Trump didn't face Bernie in the runoff. Instead he faced a Clinton campaign whose theme "America is already great" merely reinforced the nihilism that favored Trump.  The campaign's job is to find out what people need help with and then, at least pretend as though, the candidate takes those challenges seriously.  Younge reports that Democrats haven't been selling themselves that way in Muncie.

But the issue was not simply about trade or globalisation: to many voters in Muncie, Clinton looked not only like an integral part of the establishment that had brought them to this place, but like a candidate advocating more of the same. “If you take a step back and look at all America has achieved over the past eight years, it’s remarkable to see how far we’ve come,” Clinton argued. For many of those who already had their backs against the wall, it was hard to see the progress. Trump, on the other hand, offered the near certainty that something would change. “At least he’ll shake things up,” was the phrase that kept coming up. One in five of those who voted for him thought he didn’t have the temperament to be president. For some who had little to lose, he was evidently a risk worth taking.

“The Democrats keep making out like everything is OK,” says Todd Smekens, the publisher of the progressive online magazine Muncie Voice. “And it’s not. Nobody’s buying it.”

I don't like to get too far into the hypothetical "Could Bernie have won?" discussion.  Maybe he could have. It would have been a different race.  But regardless of the candidate, the election certainly called for a different strategy. If Bernie OR Hillary had gone to Muncie, Indiana and other such "Middletowns" telling voters, hello we want to give you guys free health care and send your kids to college tuition-free and tell the banks we bailed out to ease up on your mortgages, that might have reached these people. It might have brought those disconnected non-voters who showed up for Obama back to the polls. It might have even brought some of those "angry white working class" Trump voters we're supposed to hate so much back into the fold. (Not that you'd need very many of them. If the 2008 or 2012 electorate had shown up, that would have been enough to win.)

But Clinton, in keeping with the modern neoliberal tradition, just kept telling people none of their problems were actually problems. Or, when the desperate were acknowledged, they were told to be patient. 

People need something to change. “The [Democratic party says] ‘Let’s just do the things we’ve always done and have incremental change’.” says Dave Ring, who runs the Downtown Farm Stand, an organic food store and deli. “So they’re very, very happy with incremental change. And the rest of the public is out here like: ‘We don’t have time for incremental change.’”

Telling people who are running out of time they need to sit down and wait is not how you win an election like this one. But that's what the Hillary campaign did and that's why they blew it.

Post-mortems

Said I was going to share these periodically. Here is Thomas Frank.

Start at the top. Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.

And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

You can explain this as "corruption" or undue influence of money if you want. And that's part of it. But it's also the inertia of the self-contained system of political pros who operate in a separate bidome from ordinary voters. To these consultants, staffers, sometime lobbyists, and think tankers, the whole business is about them and their career path.   The rest of us, if we exist at all, are an obstacle or a problem to be manipulated. As you can see below, Frank is done with it.  A lot of us are. 

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!

Post-mortems

I've got a number of worthy ones bookmarked. I think I'll post them one at a time.  The one I found myself nodding yep at the most at was Atrios and his familiar refrain, "Shit is fucked up and bullshit." Which is a problem when nobody in charge of the the shit seems to care.... except, of course the con-man who pretends he does.

As for Clinton, I know what her policy proposals were. I'm not sure anybody else did. The media is horrible and don't talk about policy, but we knew that. I also know that improving the EITC in a complicated fashion and promising free college, but not for all people because that's crazy Bernie talk, but for some people and "debt free" college for all and can you fill out this form please to determine your eligibility* and oh by the way none of this shit will get through Congress anyway so why aren't we promising the moon if we can't deliver the half a moon we are promising. All the Dems are now on board with "expanding" Social Security. This is great! What does it mean? Probably giving more to the blahs and the immigrants and the gays.

Sure all of this is "pundit's fallacy" stuff. But I'm not gazillionaire Tom Friedman telling you that what the people really want is to invade more countries and have better cell service in the subway. I don't actually think all the country wants from our politicians the same things I want. I do know that things are fucked up and bullshit for much of the country. President Trump is going to make everything a whole lot worse, of course, but candidate Trump said he'd fix things. We'll keep the immigrants out. We'll bring back coal jobs. Show me a problem, and I'll fix it. Not set up a plan to adjust the framework to tweak the incentives to modestly change the market outcomes. Just fix it.

The way to win is tell them why they should vote for you. Tell them about the wonderful things you will do for them. And, then, ideally, do those things.  Hillary told people "America is already great" and that national health care would "never ever happen."

You mean they're not gonna lock her up?

But... the con man said... 

Hot Air and Newsmax noted White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest's refusal on Wednesday to discuss the idea of a presidential pardon, but neither site seems to be clamoring to “lock her up.”

On “Fox & Friends” Thursday morning, Rudy Giuliani — who could be the next attorney general — said, “I don't like to see America become a country in which we prosecute people . . . about politics.”

Giuliani wouldn't rule out the idea of continuing Clinton probes, but his post-election rhetoric was a far cry from his proclamation just a few weeks ago that the former secretary of state “should be in jail.”

What was any of it all about?

This will be fun. Let's see how long we can go calling Trump on the most sensational Greatness he promised during the campaign.  Every day someone should ask him how the wall is coming along.  Did Mexico send the check yet? What day are we going to deport everybody? How?

Whoops. Uh oh. They might be serious about that one.

An immigration lightning rod joins Team Trump.

Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and an ardent opponent of immigration, has been added to Mr. Trump’s transition team, according to local news reports.

Mr. Kobach, who provided guidance on immigration policy to Mr. Trump during the campaign, will help the president-elect in the weeks before he takes office, according to the Wichita Eagle.

He told the paper he did not expect to get an offer to serve in the Trump administration, but just having him in a formal role in the New Washington could send shudders through the nation’s immigrants. Mr. Kobach has been one of the loudest anti-immigration voices in the Republican Party for years. He added Mr. Trump’s call for a border wall along the southern tier into the Republican Party platform over the summer.

Also it's worth noting Obama has deported more immigrants than any previous U.S. President. So we know how to boot people out of the country. America was already great at that. Maybe we should take some of this seriously.

But okay how about these?  Let's ask Trump every day how soon we're going to see that infrastructure plan.  Or better yet when is he going to get around to renegotiating NAFTA? Didn't every news organization decide that, despite no coherent policy anyone could point to, Trump was an "economic populist"?  How is that working out?

A senior person on President-elect Donald Trump's transition team contacted JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon to see if he would be interested in being U.S. Treasury secretary, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

It is unclear how Dimon responded, said the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Dimon has said multiple times in the past that he is not interested in the job - most recently in September.

JPMorgan spokesman Andrew Gray declined to comment.

CNBC earlier reported that Trump's advisers had discussed the idea of Dimon, 60, becoming Treasury secretary.

Dimon is viewed as a leader on Wall Street and his name has been floated for government positions in the past. On Wednesday, he sent a memo to staff calling for unity in the aftermath of the contentious election.

America chose a con man this year.  All you need to see that is the difference between what it was America said it wanted and what is about to be delivered. 

Despite lots of focus on Donald Trump’s remarks about women and Hillary Clinton’s emails, it appears that the election might again come down to jobs and GDP. According to early exit polls from Edison Research, the economy was the top issue with voters again in 2016. The economy, well, trumped foreign policy, immigration, and terrorism as the leading issue among voters.

Voters were most worried about the economy. Specifically, according to Reuters, "72 percent agree 'the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.'" So in this context, what is Trump's plan to Make America Great Again? 

Tax cuts for rich people.

The second idea is taxing noncorporate business income at a lower rate than other individual income. Currently, both are taxed the same way on the owners’ individual returns. Mr. Brady said his team is working on a “final design.”

The House plan and Mr. Trump’s plan are similar, in that they both lower individual and business tax rates, repeal the estate tax and rely on assumed economic growth to cover part or all of their budgetary costs.

The kicker is relying on the old Laffer Curve to magically make it all "revenue neutral."

Anyway, 2016 wasn't just a desperate, angry election for no reason. It was a desperate, angry election because people angry and desperate.  The con man won because he at least pretended to be angry too. I would offer the hypothesis that a fair number of voters probably understood he was pretending. Donald Trump is not a difficult con man to see through, after all.  But at least he was offering pretense. The other side was offering exactly nothing.

But the hate doesn’t stop there. One of the puzzles we’ll have to think through in the months ahead is why, faced with a populist revolt, the Democratic Party elite decided on Hillary Clinton, the human equivalent of a straight shot of technocracy, no chasers. No figure in American politics has cut a more awkward figure on the national stage since Nixon, and at least his political instincts were not—in the polite phrasing of Clinton apparatchik Neera Tanden—“suboptimal.”

Clinton’s failings as a candidate fit exquisitely with the central weakness of managerial liberalism. In the run-up to Clinton’s shellacking in the New Hampshire primary, her chief strategist asked, “do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?” She never found an answer, because she never wanted to. According to her campaign manager Robby Mook, “politics for her is, first and foremost, not an exercise in communicating to the masses. It’s about finding the right solution and then going after it.”

The issue here is twofold. It's bad enough that Clinton not really feel like "communicating to the masses" during the course of her campaign for President. But that solution she was finding in the meantime would probably have also involved Jamie Dimon.  But, hey, at least nobody is coming to "lock her up" now. Nobody ever was.