Friday, March 9, 2018

An Effort At A Contribution Toward Healthy Public Discourse On Progressives

Anthony Rogers-Wright has written a piece that asks, "Are 'Progressives' Becoming the Debasers of National Conversations?" It aims some criticism at Wisconsin congressional candidate Randy Bryce and Texas Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke, who are presently attempting to unseat, respectively, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Some of this criticism is appropriate, some not so much. My effort to unpack it:

It's an unfortunate habit of the left to consume itself and let the perfect be the mortal enemy of even the very, very good. In your piece, you get some important things wrong, and while these are probably honest mistakes, they do make portions of your article an example of this. You write:
"Bryce and O'Rourke have both been bankrolled by corporate donations from 1% corporations including Amazon, Apple, Time Warner, Google and Raymond James. Accepting corporate cash is profoundly antithetical to the platform of the Justice Democrats PAC, who endorsed Bryce while appealing for, 'a strong Democratic Party that doesn't cater to corporate donors.'"
But you don't establish that either Bryce or O'Rourke have gotten "corporate donations." Direct corporate donations to a candidate are, in fact, illegal. Such donations are still made, of course, but it's done through various backdoor means. Mostly, it comes in through PACs, super PACs and various dark-money groups but while you suggest--and at times even say--Bryce and O'Rourke are accepting money from such sources, you fail to establish this. And, in fact, both have forsworn corporate money from such sources.

You compare Bryce and O'Rourke unfavorably to Bernie Sanders "because as we see in the graphic above, some of their donations lack transparency and, therefore, could be characterized as 'Dark Money'--with warrant." But the only graphic above those words shows contributors to Bryce's campaign from ActBlue and various individuals. ActBlue is not a dark-money org; it's a conduit PAC. It merely provides, for a small percentage fee, fundraising infrastructure for campaigns engaged in grassroots fundraising. Donors earmark their contributions; the donors are disclosed.

Campaign finance law doesn't require disclosure of the names of small donors--those who give less than $200 to a candidate--but anyone who donates has to list his employer. Your chart regarding O'Rourke's fundraising lists various business interests as having made donations but your source, OpenSecrets, includes in those calculations anyone who works for a given company. If, say, 10 employees of Time-Warner donate $250 each to O'Rourke, that will be listed on OpenSecrets as $2,500 from "Time-Warner," even though it may just be from janitors, drivers, comic book colorists who work for parts of this huge corporation and don't even know one another.[1] The larger chart from which you drew the data you've used does make it clear that all of the money from these sources comes from individuals. This doesn't, of course, mean there's no possible corrupt influence here--that's a much more complicated matter[2]--but contributions from working people are just that: from working people. All of them work for someone. All who contribute have to list that someone. The big employers with the most employees have the most people who may decide to contribute to a political campaign. You can immediately see the problem your framing has created; presenting their contributions as "corporate contributions" is a profound mischaracterization.

You've accused Randy Bryce of accepting such "corporate contributions"--a toxic charge when it comes to progressives--but Bryce is, in reality, mostly funded by small contributions:

That's a larger percentage than Cathy Myers, his primary opponent whom you've spotlighted, though her cut from small donations--64.24%--is also impressive.[3] And compare either to Paul Ryan, who has a massive super PAC and has only raised 5.62% of his campaign war-chest from small contributions.

Among progressives, this kind of crowdfunding is a thing that should be encouraged, not met with ill-founded attacks.

The matter of Beto O'Rourke is a bit more complicated. He's been an advocate for campaign finance reform for as long as he's been in congress and has sponsored and co-sponsored a string of bills on the subject, but in his first two campaigns, he took the corporate cash like most other pols.[4] In the last cycle, he apparently had a come-to-Jesus moment or at least recognized the irreconcilability of this and dumped the corporate PAC money. Still, he's always had a disproportionate number of large contributors; they supplied over 86% of his funds in that 2016 run. The zeroes begin to increase in a Senate race but so far, he's at least improved on that--at present, 60.28% of his funds come from the larger $200+ individual donations. It will be curious to see if that percentage goes up or down as this year proceeds.[5] He's bragged about raising most of his money from Texans.

You write:
"Additionally, both Bryce and O'Rourke's campaigns have been bolstered by a who's who list of Hollywood celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow, to Charlize Theron, to Rosie O'Donnell who all live thousands of miles away from Wisconsin and Texas, and likely not fully informed of the specific challenges faced by the people who live in both states."
Hollywood celebrities are ideological givers. They give to causes in which they believe, not in an effort to purchase congressmen and receive favorable treatment for some business interest to the detriment of everyone else. Bernie Sanders received donations from a large number of celebrities. None of this is to say such contributions aren't potentially problematic but as corruption problems go, they're pretty far down the scale.

Down there with them at the moment is any serious fear of a "progressive Establishment," at least in the way you describe it. The last two years have seen the rise of a number of new orgs and a rejuvination of some older ones, all devoted to electing progressive candidates around the U.S.. This development is in its infancy--it hasn't even been through a single major campaign cycle yet--and as far as it has gotten, it's still a very tiny--cellular, even--David compared to the Goliathean forces arrayed against it. It's years--maybe decades--away from devolving into the kind of rich, fat, intellectually bankrupt and exclusive country club that perpetually rests on its flabby laurels, revels in old campaign war stories from the Glory Days and smothers innovation while complaining about those darn kids and their lack of respect for its Great Accomplishments. It may never make it that far; that remains to be seen. For now, it's an embryonic, neophyte, outgunned underdog, nowhere near the Man.

These criticisms aside, your larger point, that candidates should debate their primary opponents, is dead on target. It's a regular practice for frontrunners to refuse to debate their opponents. Some, like Nancy Pelosi, make it a regular practice to refuse to even acknowledge the existence of their primary challengers. One either believes in liberal democracy or one doesn't, and if one does, playing those sorts of games simply isn't defensible. For the new wave of crowdfunded progressive candidates that has arisen, carrying on in this way doesn't really debase the national conversation--that's pretty much where things have been for years--but it doesn't elevate it either, which is something such progressives should be in the business of doing. Any respect for a healthy public discourse demands no less. Something else it imposes is an obligation to try to get things right, and it's in this spirit that I offer my remarks here.

--j.

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[1] OpenSecrets is, in general, an invaluable resource but its data when it comes to this sort of thing must be used carefully.

[2] Bundled contributions, for example, can be used by various interests to get around campaign finance law; on paper, they're just a bunch of contributions from individuals. When it comes to trying to track campaign finance, such bundling can cause some real headaches.

[3] The items listed on Bryce's ledger as "PAC Contributions" aren't the big business corporations either:


[4] Thought it was never a big part of his overall take.

[5] Back in the Summer, Politifact did a piece on his fundraising that turned into a great little primer on the difficulties of tracking some areas of campaign finance via the publicly available resources.

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