Nothing To See Here, Folks

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has conducted an autopsy on the 2024 presidential campaign (thus, it simultaneously conducted an autopsy on Kamala Harris' political career) to see what went wrong, aside from everything.  The report is now completed and awaiting review.

Except for one thing: DNC chair Ken Martin (below) won't release it to the public.

Martin is trying to rebuild the Democratic Party after it lost a great deal of credibility with voters in 2024 and he should be doing the opposite of what Trump does by calling for full transparency in how to run things.  Yet, Martin, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, won't share with anyone his committee's findings on why Harris lost in 2024. 

Maybe he's afraid to admit to anyone that, yes, perhaps it was a mistake to nominate a black woman with a Jewish husband to run for President.  More likely, he found a damning defect in the party's messaging that might offend a key demographic in the party's coalition - say, that the party shouldn't have campaigned so much on the rights of non-heterosexuals when more people wanted to hear about the economy.  And short of this report being leaked, we'll never know just what the main finding was.  But it takes a lot of gall to lead a party demanding the release of the Epstein files (which I support) for the sake of transparency while keeping the DNC 2024 autopsy report under wraps. 

As for Martin's tenure on running the Democratic National Committee and thus, by extension, the Democratic Party, I can't evaluate how well he's been doing his job, because I frankly can't find any evidence that he's doing anything.  He's not out there answering Trump's lies, and he's given candidates for office minimal, almost token support.  Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia owe their gubernatorial election victories to themselves and to their talented campaign teams, not Martin, and I think I can safely assume that Martin and the DNC gave no genuine support to Zohran Mamdani in his New York City mayoral campaign.  Releasing the autopsy report on the presidential election that broke America is one of the many things, in fact, that Martin has not done.

Once again, Martin O'Malley, Maryland's sixty-first governor, has been vindicated for his warnings despite the fact that no one seems to care.  (Wait - did I just type "seems to"?)  O'Malley had been calling for a hands-on approach to down-ballot elections ever since he was in his first gubernatorial term in Maryland, warning the DNC back in 2009 - 2009! - that the Republicans were already doing the groundwork necessary to gain more power in state legislatures, as well as win congressional seats and governorships, with the knowledge that those who control the state legislatures control congressional redistricting. O'Malley's advice went unheeded, and in 2010 the Republicans won up and down the ballot all over the country.  Then-DNC chair Tim Kaine was deposed, but his successor was Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, whose role in screwing up the 2016 presidential campaign you already know about.

Anyway, O'Malley ran for DNC chair in early 2025 after quitting his job as Social Security Administration commissioner (before Trump could fire him), and he'd already shown what it takes to win elections for every available office, given his Win Back Your State (WBYS) political action committee's success in helping to flip fourteen state legislative chambers to the Democrats in 2018 . . . success that the mainstream press and even The Nation declined to acknowledge.  Given all that - and given that Democrats likely confuse WBYS with an AM radio station in a little Illinois town southwest of Peoria with those same call letters - O'Malley finished a distant third in a three-person field (sound familiar?) in his bid for DNC chair, mainly because no one knew who he was (sound familiar?).

Times may change, but one thing remains constant - no matter how many times Martin O'Malley shows how hip he is to the Democratic Party's troubles, all Democrats hear coming from him is a faint buzzing.  And rather than listen to what he has to say, the Democrats would rather try a different guy to run their party because he has a more impressive CV in party operations.

Martin ran the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party for fourteen years beginning in 2011 and has a record of success in Minnesota, having gotten the state party out of debt and won numerous elections.  When you realize that Minnesota hasn't elected a Republican U.S. Senator since 2006, hasn't elected a Republican governor since 2006, and hasn't been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, though, it's hard not to think that, at the time of his elevation to DNC chair, Martin was already coasting. 

MSDNC?

Donald Trump recently called MSNBC "MSDNC" as a way of suggesting that the cable news channel is merely an arm of the Democratic Party.  He may be right for once.

With the Israel-Hamas War continuing to rage in the Gaza Strip, Mehdi Hasan, a weekend MSNBC host of Indian descent and a Muslim, had been a extraordinarily vocal opponent of Israel's heavy-handed response to the Hamas attack on Israeli towns on October 7,  and he had grilled a leader of the Israeli Defense Force over the bombing deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza.  I'm using the past perfect tense for a reason; Mehdi Hasan was demoted from MSNBC.

Not canceled.  Demoted.  He still remains at MSNBC as an analyst and substitute host.  But the loss of his weekend program still sucks. 

Hasan spoke truth to power at a time when the Democratic foreign-policy establishment has a hard time absorbing the truth.  The Democratic Party is relentlessly pro-Israel and continued to put the onus on the Palestinians, continuing to blur the line between Palestinian civilians and Palestinian commandos - though, to be fair, Vice President Kamala Harris has sought to distinguish between the two in a postwar reconstruction plan for the Palestinian people that she recently outlined.  Hasan's fairness and toughness wih regard to the Israelis, though, was obviously too much for Democratic centrists, though many progressives - and reportedly, MSNBC staffers - are unhappy (to say the least) with Hasan's dismissal. 

This isn't the first time MSNBC has canceled a host for not towing the Democratic National Committee line.  Ed Schultz, you recall, was canceled in 2015 for speaking out so forcefully for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign at a time when the DNC was tipping the scales for Hillary Clinton to get the Democratic nomination and when many hosts and contributors were showering Hillary with praise, one contributor calling her the most qualified person to run for President since James Monroe two hundred years earlier.  Also, Phil Donahue's MSNBC show was canceled in 2003 in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq just as his dismal ratings were beginning to improve dramatically because of his opposition to the invasion.  Three of the four most recent Democratic presidential nominees, when they were in the Senate in 2002, voted to give Bush the authorization to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein.  Of those three, only Joe Biden became President. 

MSNBC is a clear liberal alternative to Fox News' red-meat Republicanism, and no, a Republican administration wouldn't handle the Israel-Hamas conflict any better.  In fact, a second Trump administration would let it or make it evolve into World War III, which is why it's important to stop Trump from regaining power.  But if the bosses at MSNBC, whose anchors promote the preservation of democratic values, want to avoid hypocrisy, they shouldn't acquiesce to Democratic (note capital letter) values and promote the Democratic party line on everything. Rather, it should promote more diverse points of view, but that obviously can't happen when someone like Mehdi Hasan gets canned for doing his job as a journalist - seeking the truth.

April 2015: The Month That Destroyed America

It was seven years ago this month, April 2015, that two seemingly unrelated events set the United States on a path to its eventual downfall . . . a place we haven't quite gotten to yet.

Why do you think Donald Trump became the 2016 Republican front-runner and was eventually elected President?  Because of his charm and charisma?  Because of his inspiring rhetoric?  Because of his fourteen points?  No, it was because he got help from his eventual Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton (below).  This is what she said in an e-mail about campaign strategy to the Democratic National Committee - written seven years ago this very day - that was later put out in October 2016 by WikiLeaks (admittedly, with a little help from their friends, their accomplices in the Kremlin):  

The variety of [GOP presidential] candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more "Pied Piper" candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party . . .. We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack.

The Pied Piper candidates were Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and another guy named . . . Donald Trump.  So, the Hillary campaign legitimized Donald Trump by focusing more on him than on a nice guy like Jeb Bush.  Really smart strategy, Hillary! 

Trump may by the type to lead rats out of town, but he can also lead lemmings to their deaths. 

Meanwhile, Martin O'Malley, the then-newly former governor of Maryland, was preparing to announce his 2016 presidential candidacy when suddenly Freddie Gray, a black man in Baltimore, where O'Malley had been mayor and had strengthened law enforcement tactics, was arrested for possessing a knife, which was perfectly legal.  He ended up being beaten in police custody and died, and even though O'Malley hadn't been mayor in eight years, the media and also David Simon - the creator of the Baltimore-set police TV drama "The Wire" - somehow blamed O'Malley for Gray's death.  This allowed a Washington press corps already skeptical of O'Malley and his viability as presidential candidate - the man was a protégé of the always laughable Gary Hart, for Pete's sakes! - to take him even less seriously than they already did.  Olivia Nuzzi's coverage of O'Malley's presidential campaign announcement - which focused on anti-O'Malley protestors at the event - was so satirically biting you could almost hear her snicker while you were reading it.  

Needless to say, the media's spin on Gray's death doomed O'Malley's chances to be  a serious contender against Hillary for the Democratic presidential nomination, transferring that role to Bernie Sanders - who could not win the Democratic presidential nomination as an independent, and the press knew it.  (That's why they didn't cover him; besides, they were too busy covering Trump.)  Add that all together, and you had the trajectory of a flawed nominee-in-waiting being crowned the Democratic presidential candidate to take on Trump, and you got . . .

Well, you got economic and environmental policy rollbacks that benefitted the rich, three right-wing Supreme Court justices, withdrawals from various international agreements, an out-of-control pandemic, and . . . January 6.

And all because Hillary - and thanks to her efforts, the press - wanted to elevate Donald Trump and no one wanted to elevate Martin O'Malley.

Hillary Clinton, though, remains the chief villain here.  She wanted Trump as an opponent, and she got more than she bargained for.  And the sooner these Hillbots stop worshipping her and start seeing her as the destructive force she is, the better. 😠

The Ghost of Hillary Clinton - The Sequel

In the 24 days remaining in the presidential term of Donald J. Trump, we are seeing the last violent convulsions - a raging pandemic, vetoed bills, cult loyalty, total chaos - that stemmed from a decision long ago made by the Democratic National Committee to anoint a 2016 presidential nominee with a charade of a primary process to ratify it.

Yes, we are seeing the grand finale of the effects of one woman's ambition to be President of the United States despite having already been rejected in favor of Barack Obama in 2008.  To think, the Trump Presidency could have been avoided if only the Democrats had had a fair nomination contest in 2016 and ended up with a nominee - any nominee - not named Hillary by the nominee's mother. And now the consequences of that decision - the horrible aftereffects of the decision to satisfy one woman's enormous ego, which led to the rise to power of a man with an exponentially more enormous ego - are playing out like the finale of a Fourth of July fireworks show, most of which were canceled this year because of the pandemic. 

Donald Trump won the White House because the Democrats nominated the only person he could have defeated.  The Democrats won it back because they nominated the only person who could have defeated Trump.

And Hillary Clinton has actually expressed interest in a role in Joe Biden's administration.

Good Lord!

A Tale of Two Ex-Candidates

Bernie Sanders has been putting his money where his mouth is.  After withdrawing as a presidential candidate form the Democratic primaries,  Sanders has sent out a fundraising letter for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), an organization he did not have a good relationship with back in 2016.  But with Hillary Clinton gone and a different chairman running the DNC this time, Sanders should be more comfortable doing the DNC's bidding.  And he's happy to do it; he's helping his friend Joe Biden in his presidential bid, and he's doing it also to stop Donald Trump. 

"My campaign for president may be over, but our struggle continues," Sanders' letter says.  "That struggle begins with defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history, but it does not end there. I will also be doing everything in my power to elect strong progressives at every level of government.  That is why I am about to ask you to join me by making a donation to the Democratic Unity Fund today."

Sanders is doing this to urge his supporters to vote for Biden, which, despite all the grumblings from Bernie bros, should be easier to do than get them to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.  He's made good on his promise of supporting the eventual nominee, an he's stepping up to the plate.

Meanwhile Michael Bloomberg, who gave a one-time donation of $18 million to the DNC and also gave the Democrats offices from his now-defunct campaign in states that Trump won in 2016, is turning his attention to the coronavirus. He is donating $10 million to help New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to not only test more people for the virus but also pursue contact tracing so the three states can trace the virus back to original carriers and try to get everything under control so more places in the three states should open.  He should be doing this in all fifty states . . . no, he shouldn't, because the federal government should be doing that.  On the other hand, if Bloomberg pays for contact tracing for the whole country, that would, in a de facto sense, make him President a job he wanted, while Trump continues to dither.  

Bloomberg may still have plans to help Joe Biden in the coming fall campaign that he hasn't publicized yet, and he is rumored to be planning to share information with the Biden campaign.  We'll see about that.

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.  

You Don't Fit the Suit

Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez (below) said he was going to do something about Trump when he took over his party's chairmanship, and today he filed a suit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government, Wikileaks, and Paul Manafort for hacking the DNC's e-mail server and releasing those unflattering e-mails about Hillary Clinton that Perez says tipped the scales for Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Wait a minute - I thought he said he was going to do something about Trump.

So let me see if I have this straight.  The Democrats are suing numerous entities on charges of a conspiracy that Robert Mueller has not yet proven existed, with little thought toward coming up with a message that will resonate with voters in this year's midterm elections, and they're going to spend exorbitant amounts of money - even as the national committee struggles to keep the party from going bankrupt - on this suit instead of on support for Democratic candidates and for get-out-the-vote operations in November . . . and they're doing it to send a message to the Russians and warn them not to tamper with the midterms (a problem state election boards should be doing something about) and also to fire up a Democratic base to vote for candidates in the general election who more often than not will be candidates favored by the Clintons while the party tries to stop progressives in state and local primaries - even, I believe, in states and districts where progressives can actually win - and continues purging progressives from positions of power.  

Does this all make sense to you?  Because it sure doesn't make sense to me.

Even more nonsensical is how the DNC has a lot of damn gall to sue anyone for rigging the system when the DNC itself was so good at rigging the 2016 primaries and caucuses to prevent Martin O'Malley from gaining any traction and to prevent Bernie Sanders from getting anything with the traction he actually gained.  One progressive by the name of Amir Amini summed up this hypocrisy on Twitter quite nicely: "So the DNC is suing a foreign country for being unfair to the Hillary Clinton campaign in an election in which the DNC was caught undermining democracy itself, violating its own rules and colluding with the [Clinton] campaign and the [mainstream media] to stop Bernie."

And Martin.

Next time the DNC wants to rig a primary process and collude with the press and a corporate presidential campaign to put the least winnable presidential candidate forward in the general election, maybe they should consider getting a better firewall for their server.   

Also, DNC factotums should think twice before firing off any e-mails that may make someone like Hillary "look bad."

But then, Hillary didn't need any help with that.

Many progressives seem to agree that this suit is a way for the Democratic establishment, which backed Hillary Clinton to the hilt, to get back at those who stood between Hillary and the White House while continuing to refuse to acknowledge that it was a mistake to nominate her for President in the first place.  In other words, they're trying to . . . exact revenge?  Oh no, you don't, DNC!  After you screwed my candidate, you don't get to avenge being screwed yourself!  You don't have to leggo my Eggo, but keep your filthy hands off my Pop-Tarts! ;-)    

Brazen Brazile

Almost twenty-five years to the day after Bill Clinton was first elected President of the United States, Donna Brazile brought the Clintons' control of the Democratic Party to an end in one fell swoop.

The revered veteran Democratic operative dropped a bombshell in the form of an excerpt in her new book about the 2016 presidential election, "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House."  It seems that President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign left the Democratic Party in so much debt - to the tune of $24 million - that when Hillary Clinton agreed to put money into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), it came with strings attached. The party would get just enough money from contributors to stay afloat, with the bulk of it going to Hillary's campaign.

The plan, finalized in August 2015, worked like this: Once a person contributed the maximum $2,700 allowed by the Federal Election Commission for individual contributions to Hillary's Brooklyn-based campaign, he or she could then contribute an additional $353,400 to a joint fundraising committee that served as a sort of a clearinghouse for Hillary's campaign, the DNC, and 32 Democratic state committees.  The joint committee was called - of course! - the "Hillary Victory Fund."

Brazile explains that the $353,400 contribution figure accounted for $10,000 to each of the 32 state parties who were party to this agreement, which totals $320,000, with the remaining $33,400 going to the DNC. "The money would be deposited in the states first," she wrote, "and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn."

This arrangement of such an organization seemed suspicious to Paul Blumenthal, a political reporter for The Huffington Post, who said that such agreements aren't made until a candidate has secured the nomination.  The fact that it was put together so early in the process didn't seem to bother Democratic bigwigs, some of whom defended the agreement rather glibly.  Raymond Buckley, the New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman, said that he didn't believe that it was ever "too early to start preparing to win the general election."

Already, Democratic leaders are insisting that Brazile's book is a bum rap and that Hillary couldn't have possibly rigged the primaries when the fund was meant for the general, not the primary, election campaign.  Snooty Democratic establishmentarians are citing a memo, recently obtained by NBC News, making it clear that any "activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary."  Besides, they say, Bernie Sanders signed a similar agreement, and Martin O'Malley certainly would have signed one if Debbie Wasserman Schultz had removed her boot heel from his neck long enough to let him.  So where's the rigging?

But Paste.com's Walker Bragman - full disclosure, he's a friend of mine and I'm also friends with his mom - invites us to pay closer attention to the choice of words in this memo.  "'Preparations for the General Election' does not necessarily mean 'during the General Election,'" he wrote.  "Moreover, [there was] the provision about hiring the new DNC Communications Director from the . . . candidates 'identified as acceptable to HFA [Hillary For America, i.e. the Clinton campaign]: to occur by September 11, 2015' - long before the primary had concluded."  To which I would add . . . long before the actual primary and caucus voting had even started. 

And here's the kicker:  Included in the agreement was a provision that the DNC would give the Clinton campaign "advance opportunity to review online or mass e-mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate."  Also, the DNC was required to alert the Clinton campaign "in advance of mailing any direct mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate or his or her signature."  As Brendan Fischer, the reform-program director at the nonpartisan voting-rights organization the Campaign Legal Center, wrote in a tweet, "How does anybody believe the DNC-HFA memo only applied to the general [election]? Clinton controlled every communication mentioning a primary candidate." 

The agreement definitely put Hillary in charge when it came to the party's preparations for the primaries.  The party had placed its ability to function in her hands, because it was so broke that it had no choice.   This newly revealed information dovetails quite nicely with the decision to hold a small number of primary/caucus debates (more debates were added only after Martin O'Malley dropped out), the inconvenient scheduling of said debates, and Hillary's own disregard for down-ballot races.  It also reveals a disconnected chairwoman in the form of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who pretty much let Hillary run amok with the party apparatus.  Brazile admits that Wasserman Schultz was "not a good manager" and that "Debbie expressed little interest in controlling the day-to-day operations of the party."

The biggest culprit in all this, surprisingly, is not Hillary or Wasserman Schultz but President Obama.  Obama was so insistent on remaining above politics that he paid no attention to the party and left it to its own devices.  As a result, the party not only ended up in the red, it allowed a thousand elective offices to go red - those House, Senate, gubernatorial, and state legislative seats that went Republican.  And when Donald Trump turned the White House Republican red, that was the GOP's nice red cherry on the top.  Obama  was a good President overall, but his neglect of the party's problems was a denial of his responsibility as a Democratic President.  Which begs the obvious question:  If he didn't like politics, why did he get into politics?  And here's another question:  If he was so concerned about his legacy, why didn't he help build up the party to ensure that his achievements would survive his Presidency?

Last night's gubernatorial victories for Democrats Ralph Northam in Virginia and Phil Murphy in New Jersey have given the Democrats a new lease on life in this Age of Trump, as has the approval of Medicaid expansion in Maine, but the party still has a long way to go before it can return to anything resembling a position of power on the national stage.  A candidate like O'Malley, who can appeal to both the mainstream and progressive wings of the Democratic Party if only more Democrats knew who he was, can move the party forward as its 2020 presidential nominee, but not a candidate that appeals to only one group or the other; Mike Lupica, speaking on MSNBC, said that DNC chairman Tom Perez has to be scared to death at the idea of another Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy (and Sanders isn't even a party member), and another campaign from a Clinton or a Clintonista, I would add, would be equally distressing.  Donna Brazile herself must have known just how much of a predicament the party was in back in 2016 when she discovered what Hillary had done and had to tell Sanders, er, what happened.

Brazile telephoned Sanders and told him of the Clinton agreement in September 2016, two months before the election.  "I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee," she wrote in her new book.  "Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election." Sanders, Brazile says, took all of this calmly and asked for his opinion.  She admitted that she didn't trust the polls showing a Hillary victory, finding a "lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere."

"I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart and hope he could muster," she writes.  "He might find some of her positions too centrist, and her coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country in peril. I knew he heard me. I knew he agreed with me, but I never in my life had felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call.  When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to."

And given how much she, like so many thinking people, feared a Trump Presidency, it's easy to see why she gave Hillary debate questions in advance to give her an inside advantage.  Or why she wanted to replace Hillary with Joe Biden.

Gimme Some Money

Recent articles from Vox.com's Jeff Stein and Politico's Michael Whitney and happened to catch my attention.

Stein reported on Vox that the Democrats are, at this point, within striking distance of taking back the House of Representatives by winning 34 seats - ten more than they need - in 2018, according to recent polls.

But get this.  According to Whitney, they're also having trouble fundraising.

While it's inevitable in this age of the Citizens United decision that the Republicans would have more money than the Democrats, and fundraising numbers from both parties show that the GOP has twice as much money as the Democrats, Whitney notes that the Republicans are actually getting more money from small donors - $33 million compared to the Democratic Party's $21 million.

"This isn’t just about money," Whitney wrote. "Small-dollar donors are an important measure of how much grass-roots enthusiasm a campaign or organization has. They are the supporters who will show up to knock on doors, make phone calls and get out the vote. And since they don’t donate enough to reach campaigns’ individual contribution limits, you can return to ask them for money time and again - which frees campaigns from continually being on the hunt for new, deep-pocketed donors who can max out."  And since the Democrats lack such support, Whitney added for good measure, that only "threatens to prevent major gains by the party in 2018 and beyond."

The reason?  Messaging.  Whitney also said that Donald Trump has been masterful in giving voters a message of empowerment, promising to restore America's greatness and promising to restore American jobs.  He's speaking to a base that feels that power has shifted from under their feet and wants to hear a message that they can get their mojo back.  And that's exactly the message he gives them.  Progressives, both inside and outside the Democratic Party,  have offered a similar message; while Whitney has cited Bernie Sanders and his promise of a "revolution," I can point to Martin O'Malley and his pledge to "rebuild the American Dream."  But the Democratic National Committee doesn't use messaging like that; its e-mails asking for money only react to Trump's agenda without offering a positive message of their own.  Also, the party has been using scare tactics to get small donors to cough up a few bucks by saying that if you don't contribute to the Democrats, the Republicans will become even more powerful and everything you cherish and hold dear will be taken away from you.

The problem is that everything Democratic voters cherish and hold dear has been taken away from them - their livelihoods, their communities, their health care (not everyone can get coverage under the Affordable Care Act), their children's future.  You can't scare small Democratic donors in to giving money because most if not all of their fears have already been realized.

The right message makes all the difference.  Sanders got that in 2016.  O'Malley got it.  For all I know, Lincoln Chafee got it.  But Hillary ("Stronger Together"; "Love trumps hate") certainly didn't, and Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez doesn't seem to get it either.  The fact that the Democrats have a chance to take back the House (is anyone paying attention to governorships and state legislatures) is academic at this point, since the 2018 midterms are fifteen months away, and things could change.  But yes, they do have a chance.  A chance, however, only provides an opportunity when you take it.  Perez doesn't even seem to be trying to.

Right now, people are hanging their hats on Russia investigations or the possibility of brinkmanship with North Korea and wondering how much longer it will be before Trump loses his job.  I have a feeling that Tom Perez will lose his first. 

He's Been Everywhere, Man

Before you put 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley in the "Where Are They Now?" file, here are a few places where he's been and where he's going.  He's been in Texas, he's been at an annual Democratic dinner in Kentucky and he's campaigned in South Carolina for Democratic House candidate Archie Parnell in a special election.  And oh yes, he was in Utah earlier this year.  Martin O'Malley is going everywhere all over America to build up the Democratic Party from the ground up and to campaign for Democrats on the local level - something Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez doesn't seem to be even remotely interested in doing these days.

O'Malley (shown above in Iowa during his presidential campaign) is leading the fight to restore the Democratic Party, but so far he's leading a phantom army.  While the Republicans are delivering a blow to the head, Democrats respond with a tap on the shoulder.  Although Marty didn't go for Perez's current job, you'd think he had it from the way he's been fighting.

Right now, no one cares.  O'Malley, still the butt of jokes in and out of Democratic circles and in the pro-Trump and anti-Trump media, wants to be a part of the "resistance" against Trump ("Now we fight!"), but people keep resisting him ("What exactly do you mean by 'fight,' here, governor?" - Jake Tapper of the Clinton News Network).  But O'Malley is positioning himself to have the last laugh.  He won't get every Democrat he campaigns for elected, but he is cultivating a lot of goodwill among rank-and-file Democrats with his progressive message and his devotion to the party, and that can only help him if he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

That is, unless Tom Perez runs the party into the ground first.

In which case, O'Malley should run for the 2020 presidential nomination of whatever party replaces it.  Many of his backers will likely be the ex-Democrats who got screwed by Perez.

Martin O'Malley has been everywhere, man.  So why are Democratic leaders treating him like a nowhere man? 

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.

Failure To Launch

Donald Trump is suddenly an internationalist.  He thinks the Chinese aren't so bad after all and the Russians aren't as cool as they seem.  I guess that proves it, the Russians had nothing to do with getting Trump into office - like, they were going to take a chance on promoting an irrational dude who just might turn against them?

It is in this milieu that the Trumpster decided to drop a Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb on an Islamic State contingent in Afghanistan, which earned him condemnation from . . . the civilized world.  Even anti-Islamic State Afghans were appalled at this move, as it killed only a few dozen terror commandos while causing destruction that went beyond "mass."  It makes me wonder if Trump would use a bazooka to kill a mosquito.

And, as these guys will tell you, there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded mosquito.

If using a megabomb with an acronym that sounds like the name of a town in Utah was meant to scare North Korea into thinking twice about testing a missile that could carry a nuclear warhead, it didn't work.  Kim Jung Un had the missile fired anyway.  

Meanwhile, speaking of misfires, the Democrats - you knew this was coming - ran a Bernie Sanders liberal, James Thompson, in a special election for the U.S House seat in Kansas vacated by Mike Pompeo when he became CIA director, and Thompson lost . . . but he could have won, despite the fact that Kansas has been a solidly Republican state since the the then-Grand Young Party shepherded the state into the Union in 1861.  But the Democratic National Committee, either convinced that Thompson would be blown out of the water (and so it wasn't worth the effort to help him) or so embarrassed that a progressive somehow got the nomination that it didn't want to be associated with him, didn't give Thompson the extra money and support that could have put him over the top.   The Democrats are now planning to blow a similar special U.S. House election in Montana, where another Sanders liberal is running for an open seat as the Democratic nominee, by ignoring him as well.  They seem to be concentrating more on tomorrow's special U.S. House election in Georgia to replace now-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, where Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff is running in an open primary and could get 50 percent plus one and avoid a June runoff.  If he doesn't win a majority, though, he'll have to face a single Republican candidate in June instead of several, and then it will be even harder for him to get above 50 percent.

Uh, Dems?  You sure you thought out your special-election strategy well?

It looks like this misfire is going to bomb.

Comey, Gorsuch, Whatever . . .

James Comey can't not tell the truth.  The FBI director publicly leveled with everyone about Hillary Clinton, and now he's doing the same about Donald Trump.  I love this guy.  

On Monday, he came right out and said there is no evidence whatsoever that Trump got wiretapped before taking office by President Obama, and yet Trump painted himself in an even deeper corner by refusing to admit he was wrong. He did tweet ecstatically when he said that Comey proved that the Russians had nothing to do with influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.  Not so fast - what Comey meant by that was that there's no evidence that the Russians hacked voting machines to stuff the electronic ballot box.  But he does believe that the Russians may have been responsible for the leaks of Democratic National Committee (DNC) e-mails and fake-news Internet posts that may have swayed enough people to vote for Trump.

On the other hand, the recent revelation of the government legally recording Trump campaign staffers in 2016 in an effort to get more intelligence on the Russians - not wiretapping, but an action that might have snared more than a few Trump aides - has made the waters even murkier . . .

Be that as it may, even if the Russians did hack the DNC, what they uncovered wasn't fake news.  It was true - an uncovering of real efforts to tip the scales for Hillary and manipulate the voters with a flawed general-election candidate.  And by the way, now that he doesn't have to campaign for her anymore, Martin O'Malley says he's done with the DNC.

I may be done with the whole damn party.  Because, also this week, Senate hearings for the confirmation of Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill a Supreme Court seat President Obama should have been allowed to fill began, and despite the fact that the Republicans are going to get him confirmed one way or another, even if it means suspending the filibuster rule, Democrats have no idea or strategy as to what the hell to do about it.  If they fight the nomination, they'll get steamrolled and look like fools.  If they acquiesce to it, the base will never forgive them, and party disunion will ensue.  

Delay it by trying to tie it to the Russia investigation? You're going to have to do better than that, Senator Schumer.

Those who say we'd be a whole lot better off if Hillary had won and picked Antonin Scalia's replacement on the High Court forget that Democratic hopes of retaking the Senate and controlling the confirmation process faded long before it became apparent that Hillary was actually gong to lose the election.  They also forget that the Republicans were ready to do to any Supreme Court nominee she would have put forward what they did to Merrick Garland - ignore said nominee. And her nominee would not have been another William Brennan or Thurgood Marshall - it would have been a centrist.  Merrick Garland, who's at least slightly left of center,  might be a Supreme Court justice today if the public had pressured Mitch McConnell into allow hearings, but no, the Democratic base was dissatisfied with the fact that he was just another white guy, and so couldn't get excited for him.  Yet another example of identity politics ruining America for everyone.  Now the hapless Democratic caucus in the Senate is trying to figure out how to avenge Garland without having it backfire on them.

But then, who cares when only 43 percent of Americans can name any Supreme Court justices and the other 57 percent are the ones who will be most affected by the rulings of a Justice Gorsuch?  Not that the Democrats did a lot to push the issue in the 2016 elections.

Face it, Democrats, you blew it.  While I'm glad to see Trump cratering, I'm also glad to see you doing the same.  Whig out and let a new party take your place.  It's over.   

The Crash Years

The United States is the Howard Cosell of nations. That is, we're so wrapped up in our own self-importance that we have no idea how much the rest of the world hates us, at least until we elect a dim-bulb conservative to be our President - then we get a sample of such antipathy.

Ironically, Donald Trump is causing antipathy among European nations for having no idea how important we are to them.  He's had to have Cabinet members like Defense Secretary James Mattis, quickly becoming the jewel in the tin crown of an administration (though I'm willing to give Secretary of State Rex Tillerson the benefit of the doubt for now, and new national security adviser H.R. McMaster looks to be a sensible guy), assure European leaders that the Trumpster will not pull back from the NATO alliance in the face of Russian expansion.  Oh yeah, and we're not out to grab Iraqi oil either.  

Also, Vice President Mike Pence went to Munich over the weekend to reassure fellow NATO members that the alliance is strong.  The fact that he's a heartbeat away from ultimate power couldn't possibly have reassured the Europeans, though, because whereas Trump is a vulgarian, Pence is just a rube.  He denies climate science and evolution, and he tried to regulate women and preserve legalized homophobia as governor of Indiana.  European leaders tend to be rather sophisticated, like a gourmet meal.  Mike Pence is the political equivalent of ham and raisin sauce. 

While the United States tries to avoid a collision with its own allies (can you really call them "friends"?), the Democratic Party is trying to avoid an internal crackup - a crackup that, I believe, is as inevitable as Hillary Clinton's perpetual campaign for the Presidency if Clinton stooge Tom Perez is chosen as the Democratic National Committee's (DNC's) chairman.  Perez will undoubtedly push the party toward the Clintons' corporate agenda and split the party down the middle.  Diana Price of Inquisitr.com made this point quite acidly in a recent column in which she also noted that, while the Russian government may very well have colluded with the Trump campaign, the Democratic e-mails uncovered, whether leaked by the Russians or by WikiLeaks acting alone, showed how the party establishment favored Hillary and was pulling every possible trick to ensure her nomination at the expense of other candidates, including Martin O'Malley and the front-running anti-Hillary, Bernie Sanders.

"It's the height of hypocrisy," Price wrote, "for the corporate Democrats and the DNC to complain about election manipulation when the DNC emails leaked verify that the DNC - and former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in particular - was gaming the primaries for Hillary Clinton."  Not only were debates limited, but - and this kills me - there was widespread voter disenfranchisement by reducing the number of polling sites in some areas and many voters were purged from the primary and caucus registers. Among other things.  Now that the election is over, Hillary backers in the party establishment are not only unrepentant, they keep ignoring O'Malley and disrespecting Sanders.  They even got angry at Sanders for proposing that less expensive Canadian drugs be legalized for importation into the United States, a bill amendment that every Republican and also thirteen Senate Democrats - including the heir apparent to the Hillary faction, New Jersey senator Cory Booker - refused to support.  Also, Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison. the "Sanders Democrat" in the DNC chairmanship race, has actually demanded that Sanders give his mailing list to the party establishment, which would most certainly be against the wishes of Sanders supporters.

So, imagine what will happen if Perez is chosen as the party chairman?   

So, even if the Russians worked in concert with the Trump campaign - and that is a very serious charge, and one that is grounds for impeachment should it be proven - that doesn't change the fact that whoever leaked these e-mails only proved that the Democratic establishment, by trying to silence the anti-Hillary members of their party and getting them to hold their noses and vote for Hillary in November, is more to blame for Trump's victory than the Kremlin.  If Sanders or O'Malley had been the Democratic presidential nominee and WikiLeaks or the Russians or the Trump campaign or whomever found evidence that the Democratic primary process was fair and clean and that rank-and-file Democrats were happy with the nominee, there would have been nothing for Trump to capitalize on, and, likely thus, no Trump victory.     

Price sums things up nicely:

"With the huge grassroots following behind Bernie Sanders, do you really want to push that argument that Sanders is not someone you want helping shape the Democratic Party, and, in fact, Sanders is someone who offers voters an alternative party to Democrats? This is yet another example of the arrogant thinking by the DNC that voters have to choose either their chosen corporate Democrat juiced into lobbyist interests or choose a Republican. Apparently, the DNC and establishment Democrats don’t realize they are promoting a mass exodus and the demise of their own party with that argument and are incapable of learning their lessons."

A Democratic National Committee chairman who serves the interests of the Clintons rather than the interests of the rank-and-file party members will surely trigger such a mass exodus the same way Whig squeamishness over slavery triggered a defection of its northern and western members to the nascent Republican Party in the 1850s.

At which point Martin O'Malley will do what Abraham Lincoln did in 1856 - tell his old party to screw themselves and join a new party, in the present case a party that Sanders will have already formed.   

New Leadership

Pundits and analysts from Chris Hayes to the insufferable Chuck Todd are finally saying what I've been saying for months - the Democratic Party has been thoroughly decimated and is completely bereft of leadership.  And Martin O'Malley, long rumored to be a possibility for the job of Democratic National Committee chairman, has indicated his desire for the job. 

O'Malley should get the job on the basis of his ability for seeing this catastrophe coming.  He warned the Democratic National Committee (DNC) about how the Democrats were in serious trouble at the state level, but his warnings were ignored.  During his presidential campaign, he called for more primary debates among the Democrats vying for the party's presidential nomination (one of them being himself, of course) to challenge the outrageous statements of "that racist carnival barker," Donald Trump, and added, in reference to the DNC tipping the scales for Hillary, "We're the Democratic Party, not the Un-Democratic Party."  Here's the reception he got from then-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after he said all that in a speech to a DNC meeting in Minneapolis in August 2015:

Her very expression says, "I'll bury you, you bastard!" Now she's been buried by the weight of her own hubris.

O'Malley got it.  He still gets it.  He should run the Democratic Party, hands down.  But he has competition.  Howard Dean, who pursued a fifty-state party-building strategy as DNC chair from 2005 to 2009 only to see it inexplicably abandoned by his successor (former future Vice President Tim Kaine), wants his old job back, and Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison has voiced interest in the position.   But Dean is a former Clinton confederate who voted for Hillary as a superdelegate to the Democratic convention despite a complete lack of support for Hillary for the nomination in his home state of Vermont, and he's become a health-care lobbyist working to prevent single-payer health care.  Ellison is a decent guy, but he's an incumbent U.S. Representative, and as Wasserman Schultz proved, you can't represent your constituents in Congress and be party chair and do both jobs effectively.  (And Debbie did neither job effectively.  Nonetheless, she was re-elected to the House - a triumph of establishment politics.)  However, Ellison's handicap as an incumbent House member hasn't prevented him from getting support for the DNC job from incoming Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer and Senator Bernie Sanders (wait - isn't Sanders an independent once again?).

I have a feeling that O'Malley, never well-respected in the Democratic Party, is about to get dissed again.  And if he does, well, screw the Democrats!  F--- 'em!  Let  them go the way  of the Whigs!  In the event that O'Malley is rejected for the DNC position, I hope he leaves the party and coalesces with the Greens, other progressive Democrats, and left-leaning independents to form a new progressive party . . . . and challenges President Trump and the presidential nominee of what's left of the Democratic Party for the White House in 2020.  

Back in February, I wrote that I wouldn't forget the slight against O'Malley.  I still haven't.  I'll be furious if the Democratic Party slights him again.  Forgive and forget?  Sure, I'll never forgive myself if I forget to stay angry at the Democrats.