Revitalizing the Democratic Party

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Too much is at stake for our country and our people for us not to learn from our past failures and move forward in a way that makes the Democratic Party stronger so we can take on and beat Trump and the right-wing Republican agenda.

What the recently released book excerpt from former interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile made clear is that unless we get our act together, we are not going to be effective in either taking on Donald Trump or in stopping the extremist right-wing Republican agenda. We have to re-establish faith with the American people that in fact we can make positive changes in this country through a fair and transparent political process that reflects the will of voters across this country.

In order to do that, we need to rethink and rebuild the Democratic Party. We need a Democratic Party that opens its doors to new people, new energy and new ideas. We need a Democratic Party that is truly a grassroots party, where decisions are made from the bottom up, not from the top down. We need a Democratic Party which becomes the political home of the working people and young people of this country, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American ... all Americans.

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But we must also make it clear – if we are going to elect Democrats who will move us forward as a country – that we must institute long-needed reforms in the Democratic Party. When we do that, we will not only create a dynamic and progressive party, we will be able to transform our nation and create a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top...

BERNIE SANDERS WON'T BECOME A DEMOCRAT, WILL RUN AS AN INDEPENDENT IN 2018

Bernie Sanders has announced he will be running as an independent in 2018, prompting speculation over whether he will run as a Democrat presidential candidate in 2020. But the Vermont senator, who faced pressure to join the Democrats following his bid for the party’s 2016 nomination, said he had always been an independent and was not planning on making any changes in 2018.

“I am an independent and I have always run in Vermont as an independent while I caucus with the Democrats in the United States Senate. That’s what I’ve been doing for a long time, and that’s what I’ll continue to do,” Sanders said in a Sunday-night interview with Fox News.

When Sanders filed for the NH Primary as a Democrat on 11/5/15, he said he would run as a Democrat in future races. https://t.co/XdAJ1aHaHy https://t.co/EynNOgUvaY

— Kailani Koenig (@kailanikm) October 23, 2017

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Sanders: I won't be as naïve as Obama was with Congress

By ELIZA COLLINS 09/29/15 02:02 PM EDT

If Bernie Sanders were president, he wouldn’t be as naïve about compromise as President Barack Obama.

At least that’s what the Vermont senator told David Axelrod on the former Obama adviser’s first episode of his podcast “The Axe Files with David Axelrod.”

Sanders said that after a “brilliant campaign” Obama made a mistake by expecting that he could easily negotiate with the other party.

“He thought he could walk into Capitol Hill and the Oval Office and sit down with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and the Republicans and say, ‘I can’t get it all. You can’t get it all. Let’s work out something that’s reasonable,’ because he’s a reasonable guy. He’s a pretty rational guy,” Sanders said. “These guys never had any intention of doing [serious] negotiating and compromising … I think it took the president too long to fully appreciate that.”

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Brooks first met Obama in 2005, when Obama was a freshman senator. He was impressed by Obama’s command of political philosophy, not to mention his tailoring. When Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope came out in 2006, Brooks praised it in his column and urged Obama to run for president.

Since then, Obama’s team has courted Brooks assiduously. Emanuel once arranged for Obama to swing by a meeting he and Axelrod were having with Brooks. At a dinner of conservative writers at George Will’s house, where the guests included Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, among others, Obama jokingly asked Brooks, “What are you doing here?” At another meeting with journalists, Brooks sat next to Obama, who would periodically turn to Brooks and point out that the policy being discussed was quite Burkean. “You could tell he was really conscious of his presence,” says his Times colleague Gail Collins.

At The Week’s opinion-journalism awards dinner in 2009, where Brooks was being honored, Axelrod made the love affair explicit, praising him as a “true public thinker” amid the “insipid, instant commentary and one-hour news cycles.”

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Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Left


For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.

Since he showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as

Half black and half white...
Half American urbanite, half world-citizen...
Half wonk, half preacher...
Half Harvard Yard, half Back o' the Yards...
Half red and half blue...

And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the Presidency...if this were 1960.

But it is not 1960 -- nor is he dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols -- and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly broken no longer works.

Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefor, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.

From Paul Krugman:

Lacking All Conviction

Mark Thoma directs us to an appalling story — apparently Obama held a meeting after the midterm to debate whether our unemployment problem is cyclical or structural.

What I want to know is, who was arguing for structural? I find it hard to think of anyone I know in the administration’s economic team who would make that case, who would deny that the bulk of the rise in unemployment since 2007 is cyclical. And as I and others have been trying to point out, none of the signatures of structural unemployment are visible: there are no large groups of workers with rising wages, there are no large parts of the labor force at full employment, there are no full-employment states aside from Nebraska and the Dakotas, inflation is falling, not rising.

More generally, I can’t think of any Democratic-leaning economists who think the problem is largely structural.
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In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

And that this is your fight, President Obama.

This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be shirked and cannot be delegate.

If you take up this challenge, millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.

But if you cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and truly fucked.