Last June I posted a diary about a warning Matt Taibbi had for Democrats in a Rolling Stone piece titled “Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie” and subtitled “Instead of a reality check for the party, it'll be smugness redoubled”. Tibbi’s prescient warning went largely unheeded, and what Matt warned us about is exactly what has unfolded since June. Democrat leaders and strategists assumed their opponent would be so repugnant Hillary would win easily without making a strong affirmative case for her beyond contrasting her extensive governmental experience against her neophyte opponent’s. All with disastrous results for the Party, and very probably disastrous for the country, and beyond.
Instead of a reality check for the party, it'll be smugness redoubled
By Matt Tabbi
June 9, 2016
This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion.
The classic example was James Hohmann's piece in the Washington Post, titled, "Primary wins show Hillary Clinton needs the left less than pro-Sanders liberals think."
Hohmann's thesis was that the "scope and scale" of Clinton's wins Tuesday night meant mainstream Democrats could now safely return to their traditional We won, screw you posture of "minor concessions" toward the "liberal base."
If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants like Capeheart would not be celebrating this week. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support.
They should be freaked out, cowed and relieved, like the Golden State Warriors would be if they needed a big fourth quarter to pull out a win against Valdosta State.
But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn't just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey).
The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders this year were equally a blistering referendum on Beltway politics. But the major-party leaders and the media mouthpieces they hang out with can't see this, because of what that friend of mine talked about over a decade ago: Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.
In D.C., a kind of incestuous myopia very quickly becomes part of many political jobs.
The People is an annoying beast, young pols quickly learn to be focused entirely on each other and on their careers. They get turned on by the narrative of Beltway politics as a cool power game, and before long are way too often reaching for Game of Thrones metaphors to describe their jobs. Eventually, the only action that matters is inside the palace.
Voter concerns rapidly take a back seat to the daily grind of the job. The ideal piece of legislation in almost every case is a Frankensteinian policy concoction that allows the sponsoring pol to keep as many big-money donors in the fold as possible without offending actual human voters to the point of a ballot revolt.
This dynamic is rarely explained to the public, but voters on both sides of the aisle have lately begun guessing at the truth, and spent most of the last year letting the parties know it in the primaries. People are sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances who only get whatever policy scraps are left over after pols have finished servicing the donors they hang out with at Redskins games.
Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen.
Will our party’s leaders be motivated enough, or even capable of shaking off the incestuous myopia Taibbi described so well?
We better try.
BY MIKE LILLIS
House Democrats are poised to launch an internal examination into their poor performance at the polls this year, a move reminiscent of the GOP's "autopsy" in 2012.
Headed by Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) at the request of Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), who leads the party's campaign arm, the probe is designed to get the Democrats back on a winning track after six years in the minority wilderness.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a leader of the Democrats' reform movement, said keeping Luján in place makes sense, "because we truly believe that he never headed the DCCC."
"He did his best to actually manage the relationship between DCCC, Democratic members of Congress, and Leader Pelosi and her staff that were working at the DCCC. And he did a great job considering the constraints," Gallego said Friday. "We realize that it's also unfair to blame him for the direction of the DCCC when systematically that staff of the DCCC, starting from the top, and almost all the way through middle-management, has been nothing but bureaucratic and ineffective for many, many years.
"He wasn't given the time or the power to get rid of them."