Clueless

In the dim recesses of their feckless minds Institutional Corporatist Democrats sense that something has changed. This week in Baltimore they had a meeting to try and figure out what it is.

Even some reliably mercenary office holders like Chuck Schumer understand that voters are no longer buying their line of Republican-lite Neo Liberal crap and at least lip service must be paid to populist anger (only folks more hated in D.C. by the country at large than Trump are Congress members)_

What they certainly don’t need to be doing is listening to the dimmest bulbs in their string like Nancy “Impeachment is off the Table” Pelosi, Barack “Look Forward, Not Back” Obama, and Debbie “I Endorse Republicans” Wasserman-Schultz.

And they absolutely ought not pay attention to Rahm “Retarded” Emanuel who, lest you forget, is an accessory to Police Murder After the Fact. Way to motivate your African American base, idiots.

Emanuel is the last person to give Democrats advice on strategy
By Curtis Black, Chicago Reporter
February 8, 2017

Mayor Rahm Emanuel thinks he has some advice for the grassroots activists who are responding with such urgency to the rise of Donald Trump: “Take a chill pill.” They won’t listen to him, nor should they.

Emanuel may be uniquely unqualified to comprehend, much less comment on, the progressive upsurge seen in the huge Women’s March on Washington, airport blockades in response to Trump’s Muslim immigration ban, and crowds of hundreds corralling members of Congress across the country over the future of health care.

The mayor’s comments came in response to a question framed by his supposed success in winning a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives in the 2006 midterm election. Emanuel claims the victory was due to the “moderate” candidates he ran, saying he “got a lot of crap for recruiting Iraq war vet football players, a sheriff, business people.”

The problem wasn’t his candidates’ resumes, though. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emanuel recruited candidates who were pro-war, pro-guns, anti-abortion and anti-immigrant.

That’s pretty much the opposite of the values of millions of citizens who have taken to the streets in recent weeks, and who are determined to turn around the Democratic Party. If the party is to have a future, they are it. Nor are they the “hard left,” as some media types cast them. They are the American center, appalled at what’s happening to our country under Trump.

Emanuel now says his goal in 2006 was to “take cultural issues off the table” and “present economic issues.” But on economics, his candidates represented the Washington consensus in favor of free trade agreements that enshrine investor rights – the same tired consensus against which Sen. Bernie Sanders mobilized deep opposition in the Democratic primaries last year, and that Trump exploited so cynically in November.

The truth of the 2006 election was that the top three recipients of DCCC cash – who together got nearly $10 million – all lost, and of 22 initial candidates backed by Emanuel’s committee, only nine won their elections. What swung the election to the Democrats was the deep unpopularity of President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, nourished by a new “netroots” insurgency within the Democratic Party. Emanuel’s pro-war candidates had trouble catching the wave – but now he claims the election victory as his own.

The Blue Dog Democrats Emanuel elected were a major source of trouble when President Obama was trying to pass an economic stimulus and health care reform. And these “Republican Lite” politicians were the first to fall in the Tea Party election of 2010.

Now Emanuel wants us to believe the problem with the Democrats is that “our party likes to be right, even if they lose.” His mantra: “Winning is everything. If you don’t win, you can’t make public policy.”

True enough. The logical flaw is that Emanuel’s tactics don’t win and have left the Democratic Party in as weak a position as it’s been in decades, so weak that even a candidate as obviously abhorent as Trump can win.

The solution is not to chase after the 30% of bigoted misogynous racists who like The Donald just fine, it’s to motivate the 70% who think he’s scum.