Sunset for Florida Democrats - The Sequel

Georgia ain't on my mind now.  Let me talk about Florida.

Two weeks ago today, I saw Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and incumbent Florida senator and re-election candidate Bill Nelson come up short in their respective campaigns but by the end of the night, neither race had been called and subsequent recounts had to be held, providing a modicum of hope for Democrats in the Sunshine State.

As of this weekend, however, Ron DeSantis is to be the new governor of Florida, and Rick Scott - who, like Madonna, somehow manged to turn accidental fame into a long career - is the state's new U.S. Senator. 

So what went wrong?  How did the two most loathsome Florida politicians not named Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who, alas, was re-elected to the House) pull off such high-profile wins when much of the rest of the country was turning against Trump Republicanism? The answer is not in the incompetence of Broward County election officials, but rather in three simple facts.  First, Florida is as divided as the country at large.  Second of all, despite Florida's young multiracial population, retirees - most of whom are white - keep moving into the state at a pretty good clip, and even the registered Democrats among them are more conservative than the state's younger and browner residents.  Older people, of course, vote more than younger people, though Florida likely has a lot of young white conservatives - DeSantis, at 40, is one of them.  Third, retirees and working people alike live in Florida for the low taxes as well as the (mostly) sunny weather, and the policies Gillum in particular espoused meant more amenities and, thus, more spending.

Florida has long been seen as the country's most populous swing state.  But is it time to cede Florida to the Republicans?  Probably.  Because after the debacles of centrist candidates for statewide office such as Alex Sink and Patrick Murphy, Florida Democrats tried something new by nominating a black progressive for the governorship even as it renominated a tried-and-true incumbent three-term white moderate senator for re-election.  They both ended up losing, albeit narrowly, to Republicans.  Two different sorts of Democrats . . . losing to Republican opponents . . . in the same state in the same year. 

That show of solidarity Gillum and Nelson had with former President Obama made for good pictures but also made for ineffective politics.

At 76, Bill Nelson is now, like many Floridians his age, retired.  And Gillum?  Pundits are already saying that Gillum isn't going anywhere, though by that they mean that he will remain active in Florida politics.  Really?  As a former mayor of Tallahassee?  That's hardly a springboard for future endeavors for higher office.  Florida doesn't have another election for statewide office until 2022, when Ron DeSantis runs for a second term as governor and Marco Rubio is up for re-election to the Senate.  A rematch between Gillum and DeSantis is unlikely; Democrats never renominate to oppose an incumbent Republican officeholder the guy that incumbent Republican defeated for that office; DeSantis would like nothing better than a rematch with someone he's already creamed once.  And Rubio is such a huge political star that Floridians will keep sending him back to the Senate for as long as he wants to be sent back.  Gillum said that the struggle to move Florida in a more economically and socially just direction wasn't about him.  He's right; by 2022, Florida Democrats will have moved on to someone else.

But who?  Gwen Graham?  (Excuse me while I laugh at the thought of her name.)  Philip Levine, the millionaire businessman who ran for governor in the Democratic primary in 2018 and was mayor of Miami Beach from 2013 to 2017, might want to try again for either the governorship or Rubio's Senate seat.  But even having been mayor of Tallahassee is preferable to being a former mayor of Miami Beach.

So, despite a few key (no pun intended, if you get my drift) U.S. House victories two weeks ago, Florida Democrats are still in the dumps.  And their queen bee, their top honcho, their most visible pol, is still Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Pathetic.         

I have friends and relatives in Florida who keep inviting me to come down there.  In their dreams.  As long as Florida keeps electing bigoted climate-change deniers to office, I plan to boycott Florida completely.  (California orange juice all the way!)  Instead of traveling to Florida, I hope to take a vacation to warm, sunny, exotic . . . Wisconsin! :-D

Congratulations to Wisconsin's incoming Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

The Decline of the Democratic National Committee Explained

If the Democrats manage to win back the House of Representatives and take over eight governorships next week, it will be no thanks to the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Let me explain how the DNC declined and fell like the Roman Colosseum.

Under DWS, when the political careers of many Democrats went RIP,  the DNC went DOA.

In 2016, when the DNC got in trouble for tipping the scales for Hillary Clinton's presidential nomination, and DWS was Xed out, the party had to turn it up a couple of DBs.

 And once America got the DTs . . .

. . . the Democrats TP'ed themselves in response.

And so many rank-and-file Democrats are disillusioned, they want to go running to Mom.

Maybe they should consider running to M'OM.

Because, through his Win Back Your State PAC (don't you hate those silly initials?), Martin O'Malley has learned what voters want and what voters are concerned about.  Unlike the Democratic National Committee.  If the Democrats do well in this election, thank Martin O'Malley, and pay attention to what he says if and when he runs for President again.  

Listen to your M'OM.

Win Back Your State.  Because the DNC won't.  

Sunset for Florida Democrats

I didn't know at first if this meme was made by someone for Martin O'Malley or someone against Martin O'Malley, though the unflattering picture of O'Malley's head that was Photoshopped in suggested the latter. (And it was an anti-O'Malley meme; it's from a conservative Web site.)  Nevertheless, it sums up Florida congresswoman Debbie Wassserman Schultz in a nutshell.

It was three years ago today that then-presidential contender Martin O'Malley called for more Democratic presidential primary debates at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) meeting in Minneapolis, only to be given a death-ray gaze by Wasserman Schultz, then the DNC chair.  After tipping the scales for Hillary Clinton so she could lose to Donald J. Trump, you'd think that Debbie - now running for re-election to the House for the first time since Trump became President - would be punished by Florida Democrats with a robust primary challenger.  Think again, sucka - Debbie is running in today's House primary unopposed, while Democrat Tim Canova, who unsuccessfully challenged her in the 2016 House primary, is running against her as an independent.  Florida Democrats would rather renominate and reward someone who screwed the national party and the country rather than take a chance with someone else in what is a solidly Democratic district.

And Deb's constituents will vote for her because they will be brainwashed into thinking that if they vote for Tim Canova, they're only going to split the vote, help the eventual Republican nominee win, and lessen Democratic chances of taking back the House.

Alas, lameness of the brain among Florida Democrats isn't confined to the 23rd U.S. House district.  The Democratic Party in the Sunshine State managed to allow Republican Rick Scott get elected governor twice by somehow finding nominees even more unelectable than he was; now he's leading in the U.S. Senate election against incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson, running for a fourth term.  It seems that Scott has grown on Florida voters, like a wart, almost.  Today, Florida Democrats are expected to nominate for governor Gwen Graham, a former one-term congresswoman with no executive experience whose biggest claim to fame is that she's the daughter of former Florida two-term governor and three-term U.S. Senator Bob Graham.  That is, Florida Democrats are going to nominate her for the same reasons national Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 - her sex and her family name.

And I'll bet Debbie Wasserman Schultz has something to do with this.

Ahh, who cares?  The Democrats should just give up on Florida.  It's not worth fighting for, even though Martin O'Malley, in his unappreciated efforts to help rebuild the Democratic Party, keeps going down there to fight for it.

No.  Give it up, Democrats. Florida is lost.  You're not going to put Gwen Graham in the governor's mansion, and you're not going to save Bill Nelson's sorry hide.  Concentrate on the House nationwide and forget saving Nelson's Senate seat . . . or the Senate.  There may very well be a blue wave in the November elections, but the only blue wave that's going to wash over Florida is going to be from a Category 5-plus hurricane.  Never mind Florida, Democrats, climate change and rising sea levels are going to push it into the sea anyway.

In which case, the 49-star flag that was only our official flag for one year may very well make a comeback.

Barack Obama? Is That You?

Have you ever wondered what happened to Barack Obama? Well, the forty-fourth President of the United States is back.

The former President, who turned 57 this past Saturday, announced that he and his wife Michelle are endorsing 81 Democratic candidates for congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative elections, with more endorsements to come.  It's part of Obama's efforts to help the Democrats regain power nationwide.  Two of those candidates are in my home state of New Jersey - Andy Kim (no, not that guy who sang "Rock Me Gently" in the seventies) for the state's Third U.S. House District and Tom Malinowski for its Seventh U.S. House District.  No endorsement for Mikie Sherrill in my district, the Eleventh, just yet.

So why is Obama doing all this?  Because he says that, in the past decade, the Democrats lost far too many elective offices, including governorships and control of federal and state legislatures, to the Republicans, and they have to start winning these offices back if they have any chance of surviving going forward.

Hmm . . . it's too bad Obama was never in a position to do anything about this before!

And what Obama has said sounds suspiciously like what another Democrat who had hoped to succeed him as President has been saying for about nine months now. This other Democrat has been doing something about it for those nine months and counting  - and he's already done more than what Obama did for his party in eight years!

And here he is!            

Martin O'Malley has been toiling in obscurity - obscurity created by a media establishment that doesn't give a twit about him - helping Democrats win state and local elections (mostly special elections) through his Win Back Your State PAC.  The fanfare he has failed to get will likely be compensated by the numerous endorsements from the state and local Democratic officials he helps get elected this year and next should he run for President in 2020.  Obama isn't doing anything now that O'Malley hasn't already done.

O'Malley was always charitable toward President Obama (who apparently wants former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick to run for President in 2020) during Obama's two terms, saying that he couldn't solve every problem in America because he was merely the President, not a magician.  But Obama was a magician - he made the Democratic Party disappear!  And party chairs Tim Kaine and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were his apprentices.   

I'm glad Obama is helping people like O'Malley rebuild the Democratic Party.  But with Donald Trump having reversed every policy initiative Obama instigated, the sad truth is that Obama's legacy is a smaller Democratic Party with a thousand fewer elective offices - death by a thousand cuts.  Before 2017, no President had left office with his party in such a sorry state since Millard Fillmore left office in 1853.

Millard Fillmore, of course, was the last Whig President.     

No Excuses

Hillary Clinton is at it again.

At a recent conference in California, Hillary sat herself down in a red leather chair - apparently symbolic for a hot seat - and once again blamed Trump, the Russians, James Comey, and others for her loss in the presidential election in November 2016.  Only this time was different, because she also blamed the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee for her defeat.  She also complained that the party was bankrupt.

Well, it's certainly intellectually bankrupt, but Hillary means it was financially bankrupt and "on the verge of insolvency" when she became the nominee, and she bitched that she had to throw money at the DNC's data collection system.  "Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong," Clinton explained. "I had to inject money into it."

This comment left Democrats incredulous.  While the party has had its money issues, party insiders said that the problem with data has been less of a cash-infusion issue or a quality issue than a chronic inability to make it uniform and consistent - something that Hillary apparently failed to grasp when she was the party's de facto leader as its presidential candidate.  According to one Democratic insider, Hillary showed disregard for warning signs in key states like the so-called "blue firewall" of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which all went to Trump.  The DNC's voter data in those three states, he said,  didn't look anywhere near safe but Hillary's campaign team "thought they knew better."  Her deflection of responsibility for her loss to people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz is more like mean, stunted fruit than sour grapes.

Hillary has taken to acting like the 2016 presidential campaign isn't over.  She needled Trump for his infamous "covfefe" typo on Twitter, and when Trump re-iterated her penchant for blaming everyone but herself for her loss, she then replied, "People in covfefe houses shouldn't throw covfefe."  She's still campaigning and apparently won't leave the stage until she gets a rematch with Trump.

Hillary - it's over!  Stop it!  You're not doing any favors for anyone!  Except the Republicans, particularly Reince Priebus, Trump's chief of staff, who cheerily tweeted how you conceded that the Republican Party "has much better resources and data than [the Democrats]."  You just didn't throw the Democrats under the bus, you threw them under a convoy!

But then, getting thrown under a convoy of buses by the candidate she rigged the system for doesn't make Debbie Wasserman Schultz a martyr . . .

. . . it just proves that she's as incompetent as a political operative as she is as a member of Congress.

Florida Democrats Are Sinking

As noted here on this blog and elsewhere, Democrats have been getting their posteriors kicked - sometimes with the boots wedged in the orifices pretty darn good - in so many down-ballot races that one wonders why it is the Republicans who are marked for extinction.  And nowhere is the Democrats' trouble more obvious than the state of Florida.  Democrats in the Sunshine State are doing so poorly, it's a wonder President Obama won the state twice.  Because a lot of these losers can't even win once.

  

When Marco Rubio ruled out a run for a second term to the U.S. Senate to concentrate on the Presidency, Democratic prospects for a Senate seat pickup seemed assured . . . until Rubio reversed course and decided to run for another term after all after ending his presidential bid.  He's so far ahead of his Democratic opponent, U.S. Representative Patrick Murphy, in the polls that Democrats have stopped throwing money at the Murphy campaign and are throwing in the towel instead.  Which makes sense, considering Murphy's background; he's a former Republican who has received campaign contributions from an admitted felon, and his father and his family's business donated money to a super-PAC supporting him, under ethically dubious circumstances.

Did I happen to mention a bill Murphy co-sponsored in the House to help his family's business?  You can read all about it here.

Then there's that other former Republican, former governor Charlie Crist, who in 2014 proved to be as ineffective in running as a Democrat against Governor Rick Scott to get his old job back as he was when he ran for the Senate in 2010 as an independent.  Having lost the least loseable gubernatorial election in the 2014 midterm cycle, Crist is now running for the U.S. House of Representatives against Republican incumbent David Jolly, who in 2014 whopped Alex Sink in a special election for the seat (four years after Rick Scott whopped Alex Sink for the governorship).   Crist, in his new role as a professional candidate, showed how out of touch he is with his own would-be constituents by defending Hillary Clinton as someone who's honest and trustworthy during a debate with Jolly.  The audience erupted with laughter.

Then there is Representative Alan Grayson, who has been accused of spousal abuse by his ex-wife and recently lost as much as $18 million of his considerable fortune in an investment scam.  He gave up his House seat to run against Patrick Murphy, the Democratic establishment's choice for the U.S. Senate nomination, and, as you obviously have already figured out, lost. His new wife Dena Minning, whom he married this past May, ran in the Democratic primary for the House seat he gave up to run for the Senate.

She lost.

So did Tim Canova, a Bernie Sanders-type reformer, in his bid for the Democratic nomination for the seat of Florida's Twenty-Third U.S. House District.  The person who beat him?  Incumbent congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Who, as I understand it, is responsible for the many problems and disasters Democrats have had in Florida and elsewhere.

Florida Democrats, for all their efforts to stand tall and proud, are going down faster than the state itself, as sea levels rise.  An historical note: Florida was one of the first states in which the Whigs collapsed after that party's 1852 disaster.   

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Rotting From Within

Okay, Hillary Clinton is running ahead of Donald Trump in most polls, and those of us who believe the Clintons have outstayed their welcome likely won't be able to stop their desired restoration.  But just remember this; even if  Hillary does win in November, that is not going to fix the problems of the Democratic Party!  The Democrats will still have a minority of governorships and state legislative chambers, they'll still be a minority in the House, and they may not even win the Senate this year if enough voters decide that Hillary, if elected President, is too untrustworthy to be given a Democratic majority in either house of Congress.  And whoever becomes the permanent chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2017 will have his or her work cut out for him or her by having to undo the work of his or her two predecessors, Tim Kaine (who lost the House and several governorships to the Republicans in the 2010 midterms) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who lost the Senate to the Republicans in the 2014 midterms).  Kaine is the Democratic vice presidential nominee; Wasserman Schultz is a Hillary stooge who has assumed an honorary leadership position in the Clinton campaign and was just renominated to run for another U.S. House term in her district over an opponent who supported Bernie Sanders.  Not good.

The problem remains an inability to cultivate plausible candidates for down-ballot offices.  One example of this is Kentucky, where, after Democrats abandoned their fifty-state strategy, Democratic "rising stars" were handily defeated and humbled into irrelevance.  Jack Conway famously lost his U.S. Senate bid to Rand Paul in 2010 but was tagged by a Chris Matthews as a Democrat to watch.  After Conway's loss in Kentucky gubernatorial election of 2015, Democrats stopped watching; he withdrew from politics and returned to private law practice after having served as the state's attorney general.  And no one wants to talk about the future of Allison Lundergan Grimes, who challenged Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell for his seat in 2014 only for McConnell to emerge as the winner and still champ . . . and Majority Leader.  Now that Rand Paul is facing what should be an easy re-election victory over a different opponent (I could look up his name again, but it's not important), we don't hear much about Democratic prospects in Republican states or a fifty-state strategy.  Republican prospects in Democratic states?  Don't count out Scott Walker for a third term as governor of Wisconsin in 2018.

Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, once a Democratic rising star himself but long since laughed out of the limelight when he tried to run for President, has long complained about Democratic inattention to down-ballot races and has been touted as a possible Democratic National Committee chairman.  However, neither the committee itself nor the Clintons themselves have taken such a proposal seriously, which is why no one else does.  O'Malley loves the Democratic Party and wants to save it, but the same people who doomed his political career to irrelevance have already doomed the party to the same. They let it rot from within, and while the party's prospects look good on the surface, its collapse is only one presidential election defeat away, whether it be in 2016 or 2020.  Perhaps concerned Democrats like O'Malley should stop worrying about what's best for the party and start thinking about what's best for the country . . . and form a new party.