The Premature Death of Declarations of the Death of Our Revolution

Habitues of Medium may, in recent months, have encountered an infrequent writer fashioning himself "Investigator." The non de plume is promising--the corner of Medium focused on public affairs could certainly use a healthy dose of serious investigators--but closer inspection quickly reveals that this "Investigator" is just another apologist for the Democratic party Establishment, dishing out a string of badly argued attacks against progressives. His standard technique to date has been to shotgun his readers with a string of false, fallacious or grossly misleading assertions presented in a matter-of-fact manner, the volume of them alone meant to make them look impressive, and backed up by a wall of links he hopes his readers will never check, as examining them usually deflates whatever claim he's sourced to them. In his latest, he aims his guns at Our Revolution, the non-profit founded by veterans of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and declares "The Premature death of Our Revolution."

Founded in August 2016, Our Revolution is a relatively new org. Its mission, as described by Newsweek at its launch, is "to revitalize American democracy by bringing millions of both working and young individuals into the political system; empower the next generation of progressive leaders; and elevate political consciousness by educating the public about issues confronting the country." The "Investigator"--let's call him Tig, for short--writes that the org's "goal was to get progressive candidates elected to Congress and also to push for certain ballot initiatives," a far more narrow representation of OR's mission than OR itself has ever offered. That very misleading framing is intentional. Tig's premise is that...

"Almost two years later now, I think it’s a fair assessment that Our Revolution has completely failed to get any important candidate or ballot initiative elected/approved."

...and it's much harder to make that claim if one examines the full scope of OR's activities, instead of just a narrow sliver specifically chosen to support that preordained conclusion. As it turns out, even the sliver doesn't support Tig.

Tig's assessment:

"The list of candidates endorsed by our Revolution and often by Bernie Sanders in person, who have lost their primaries/ elections is ever growing... Important Our Revolution endorsed candidates one by one lose their elections/ primaries.... The list of Our Revolution endorsed candidates who all lost their elections is huge by now. So far, not a single important race has been won by OR... So far, the electoral power of Our Revolution seems to amount to 0,0%."

Of the OR-endorsed ballot initiatives, Tig is equally as dismissive:

"All the important ballot initiatives Bernie fought for in 2016 were rejected by the voters: from California’s proposition 61, to Colorado’s Amendment 69, which would have introduced single payer healthcare in Colorado (defeated by 79 to 21%)."

OR keeps track of its endorsements and its wins/losses. The information is arranged by year on OR's site--2016, 2017 and 2018, where the contests have only just started.[1] Tig somehow declined to provide those links, and when one looks at OR's overall record, it's hardly this relentless failure Tig portrays. So far, slightly more OR-endorsed candidates have lost than won but that has as much to do with the campaigns it chooses as anything; OR backs grassroots progressives in many tough races, often in overwhelmingly Republican districts. OR-supported ballot initiatives have won more often than they've lost. From its launch, OR has endorsed 223 candidates in races that have, as of this writing, already played out. Of those, 101 won and 122 have lost. Of the 37 ballot initiatives backed by OR, 26 have won.

Tig offers some slick talk to justify his own conclusions. The slickest--and most jaw-dropping--is his declaration that he hasn't included in his assessment state and local races. "[T]his list does not include state senate or city council seats." OR backs grassroots candidates; its endorsements are primarily--and overwhelmingly--in state and local races. Tig is pretending to offer an appraisal of OR's record regarding candidates while ruling out from consideration nearly every candidate OR has endorsed. Tig contends that state and local races are entirely unimportant. "So far," he writes, "not a single important race has been won by OR," sentiment he restates throughout his article. Hilariously, he asserts that OR's endorsements in local races are just done by OR to game its success-rate. "OR tries to up its success number," he writes, "by listing city council and state senate candidates who would have won anyway, with or without OR’s help," the latter being an utterly empty claim that, like its direct opposite ("those candidates wouldn't have won without OR's endorsement"), could be made about every race (and, like Tig's version, wouldn't be entirely true in any race).

Ruling out these local races leaves Tig with a problem: a serious lack of material. When he wants to create an impressive-looking list of all those, as he defines it, "important" OR-backed candidates who failed to win in 2016 and 2017, there isn't much with which to work. His solution is to rattle off OR-backed U.S. House and Senate candidates who lost. He prefaces this with "to name just a few," but he manages to name nearly all of them. My quick scan found only one failed candidate in these categories that he missed. Even at this, he's forced to pad his list. Two of the candidates he includes--Arturo Carmona and Wendy Carrillo--both participated in the same very crowded race in California last year and OR didn't endorse either of them. Though Tig doesn't tell his readers this, at least three on his list were candidates in those local races Tig dismisses and says he isn't including; Dwight Bullard ran for state senate in Florida, Gabriel Costilla ran for state senate in Kansas and Vincent Fort ran for mayor of Atlanta. Then there's the other stuff Tig conceals from his readers. Nanette Barragan, Raul Grijalva, Rick Nolan, Marcy Kaptur, Pramilia Jayapal and  Tulsi Gabbard all won U.S. House races with OR endorsements in 2016. Jimmy Gomez won one in a 2017 special election in California. Though these fall into his "important" category as he, himself, has defined it, Tig entirely fails to mention any of them, while insisting OR hasn't won "a single important race."

When Tig turns to 2018, he lists three unsuccessful U.S. House candidates (Tig misspells Marie Newman of Illinois as "Mary Newman"), plus a mayoral candidate in Burlington, Vermont, a judicial candidate in Wisconsin and a gubernatorial candidate in Illinois. He describes all of these as "important," which is refreshing, if utterly random. He then spotlights two races as "typical" of those in which Sanders and OR involve themselves, and his examples are... that same Burlington mayoral race and Wisconsin state supreme court race he'd already covered. While he mentions Newman, he declines to mention Chuy Garcia, the OR-backed U.S. House candidate in Illinois' 4th District, who won his primary and advanced to the general election in November. He also declines to mention Laura Moser, who advanced to the runoff for the Democratic nomination in Texas' 7th District. Texas and Illinois are the only two states that have so far held their primaries this year, which also informs Tig's effort to portray OR as a failure in 2018, so he doesn't tell his readers that either.

Tig insists voters have rejected every important ballot initiative endorsed by OR. OR-backed initiatives that have passed include marijuana legalization initiatives in Maine, Nevada and California, medical marijuana in Montana, Arkansas and Florida, minimum wage increasess in Washington, Maine and Kansas City, a proposition to defeat a roll-back of the minimum wage in South Dakota, ranked-choice voting in Maine, anti-Citizens United amendments in Washington and California, an expansion of voter registration in Alaska, campaign finance reform in South Dakota and so on. Readers can decide for themselves whether these are, as Tig would have it, entirely unimportant.

Tig freely assigns to OR ridiculous motives pulled straight from his own orifices. "[T]o hide their complete lack of electoral successes, Our Revolution now proceeds to support moderate Clinton/Obama Democrats and claims their victory as their own." What he calls "a Perfect example," capitalizing the word, is Randall Woodfin, who ran for mayor of Birmingham. Tig describes Woodfin as "the Alabama State Director of Hillary Clinton’s campaign." What Tig doesn't describe is Woodfin's populist "Putting People First" campaign, which was pretty must straight Bernie Sanders--fighting for infrastructure investment, tuition-free community college for the city's high-school graduates and a $15 minimum wage (Woodfin's director of field operations was a 2016 Sanders campaign veteran). OR endorsed Woodfin in May 2017 and, alongside the progressive Working Families Party, worked on his behalf for five months, providing, among other things, 70 volunteers and making thousands of phone calls--Bernie Sanders recorded robocalls for the campaign--and text messages. OR chief Nina Turner went to Birmingham twice to campaign on his behalf. Woodfin won. To Tig, all of this was merely "to hide [OR's] complete lack of electoral successes."

Tig insists that "even conservative politicians are endorsed" by OR "based upon personal relations with Nina Turner, OR’s president":

"Dennis Cucinich who is running for governor in Ohio. There is literally nothing progressive about this candidate, who regularly goes on Fox News to defend Trump, who visited Assad in Syria and defended this mass murderer, and so on. Yet he won the endorsement of OR, most likely because his running mate (Tara Samples) is a close friend of Nina Turner."

Tig is maybe a young fellow and doesn't know it but before his perhaps questionable turn as a Fox News guest, Dennis Kucinich--Tig misspells the name--held several elective offices, most notably 16 years spent in the U.S. Congress, where he racked up one of the most progressive records in the body. Absolutely nothing about his platform--which includes a $15 minimum wage, public financing of state elections, ending fracking, marijuana legalization, etc.--would ever be mistaken for "conservative" or, indeed, anything other than uncompromisingly progressive. While Tig may believe his mindreading capabilities are top-notch, one suspects these facts, not Samples' friendship with Nina Turner, are actually behind OR's endorsement of Kucinich.

"Another way to judge how OR is doing," writes, Tig, "would be to look at its fundraising. Unfortunately it is impossible to get any info on this due to the form OR has chosen: it is a 501(c)(4) organization, meaning there is no need to disclose any numbers/ facts regarding its fundraising." Setting up OR in this way did indeed prove controversial among Berniecrats but OR does voluntarily disclose any donor who gives more than $250 in a year.[2]

Tig spends some time weaving a Clintonite persecution narrative wherein the news media uncritically treat OR as a threat to Establishment candidates. The corporate press has proven a virtual monolith of virulently anti-Sanders sentiment but in Tig's fantasy, "it seems the MSM blindly copies any pro Bernie stuff without even asking one critical question."

Yeah, I got a good chuckle out of that one too.

Tig's project is a familiar one from Clintonites, declaring the death of all things Bernie Sanders:

"Bernie’s electoral appeal never existed. Not in 2016 during the primaries, and not in 2016–2018 during down ballot races.

"In fact it’s a myth solely based upon C- rated, sleazy pollsters (Harvard-Harris) and bad unprofessional journalism."

Tig's bolding. The Harvard/Harris poll Tig mentions there has, of late, become a regular target of Clinton cultists, as it has shown, month after month, that Sanders is the most popular active politician in the U.S.. Tig, following the established talking-points, references 538's pollster ratings, which do indeed give Harris Interactive a C- but that's based on a relatively small average error of 5.5%--not enough to matter in this particular business--and those 538 ratings are, in any case, long out of date--the site to which Tig links makes clear they haven't been updated since August 2016, nearly 2 years. The Harvard/Harris collaboration began in 2017. The "sleazy" Harris is one of the longest-established pollsters in the U.S.--55 years and counting--and the "sleazy" Harvard is, well, you get the picture. Other pollsters rarely poll on Sanders' popularity now--fill in one's favorite speculation as motive for this--but when they still still did, their findings matched the then-contemporary Harvard/Harris numbers within a few points.[3] In January, when both H/H and Quinnipiac polled on Sanders; there was only a 5% difference in their results (with Quinnipiac showing a larger number of "don't know" answers than should have been the case). In February, even H/H mysteriously stopped including Sanders in its polls.

Tig despises Sanders so badly, he rhetorically links him to Trump more than once. He begins a sentence "Since November 2016, when Bernie was all too ready to start cooperating with Trump..." He rails against "bad unprofessional journalism... that, as was the case with the constant coverage of Donald Trump, wins by the suggestion Bernie is still a viable candidate." Tig can't stand the thought. He keeps insisting Sanders and OR are dead letters. "[T]he whole Bernie myth is basically history," as if the passion with which he clearly wishes to believe that could, itself, make it true.

Alas for Tig, nothing about his examination of an org that has yet to function through even one entire election cycle is going to convince anyone.

--j.

---

[1] In the 2018 cycle to date, only two states (Texas and Illinois) have held their primaries but Tig writes, "While the 2018 midterms are slowly approaching and while not every primary has been held, I think it's time to conclude that Our Revolution never accomplished much. Its candidates don't win, Bernie’s endorsement seems more like a kiss of death for candidates than anything else..."

[2] Tig suggests OR's "fundraising cannot be very impressive when we learn that OR could only contribute a measly 900 dollars to James Thompson's [2017 congressional] campaign [in Kansas], while for example Daily Kos contributed millions of grassroots dollars to Thompson." Tig's alleged source for the latter claim is a Huffington Post article that--what a surprise--doesn't say that. The actual amount Kos raised for Thompson was $143,000, most of it at the last minute. Progressive groups across the board underestimated Thompson.

[3] At the same time, many polling outlets poll on Donald Trump's popularity, and in evaluating H/H, one can match its findings against its contemporaries. The most recent H/H poll, conducted from 27-29 March, puts Trump's approval at 39%. At that time, YouGov had Trump at 39%, Morning Consult had him at 42%, Gallup at 39%, Ipsos at 40% and so on.

Mindlessly Promoting the Democratic Establishment Is Reactionary

Back in January, I critically examined a very poorly-argued article by Rantt's Kylie Cheung that alleged progressives have a problem with female candidates. Today, I came across her latest, "Blindly Smearing 'Establishment' Democrats Is Counterproductive," and featuring most of the defects of the earlier one--it's ill-informed, full of misdirection and glaring omissions and heavily dependent upon false Clinton-cult talking-points in place of any sort of sound premise--it's arguably as bad as that earlier one.

A false premise that pervades the entire piece is worked into the title. Progressives have, for years now, offered a critique of the Democratic Establishment that is both specific--meaning in no way "blind"--and based on specific actions of that Establishment--meaning in no way a "smear"--and Cheung, while attempting to dismiss it, never touches it, opting, instead, to set up and knock down a series of strawmen as stand-in.

In her subhead, she wheels out the tired Clinton cult line about progressives being "far-left purists." Talk of "purism" is the cult's stock dismissive description of anyone with any basic standards beyond party affiliation in what policies they want from a political candidate vying to represent them, and Cheung offers it here even as she, herself, clings to the sort of "purism" she makes a show of condemning. I'll get back to that in a moment. The "far left" talk is empty Clintonian triangulation--rhetorically marginalizing progressives in order to present "both sides" as extreme and artificially situate oneself as the sensible center (Cheung refers to this "far-left" as advocates of "utopic ideas and dogged, ideological purity"). The policies tagged by the cult as "far left" are, in fact, supported by huge majorities of Democrats and usually significant majorities of the general public; if they can be dubbed "far left," the designation has no meaning.

Progressives are all about policy--they have, in recent years, organized around a bold and ambitious slate of issues--but large swathes of their agenda, such as single-payer healthcare, a $15/hour minimum wage, conversion to renewable energy, etc., are absolutely anathema to entrenched Big Money interests and, by extension, to the politicians, pundits and political operatives in the pay of those interests. The latter would include the Democratic Establishment. This is an irreconcilable conflict; if progressives want those policies, it means going over, around or through the pols who are paid to oppose them. Moreover, the core conviction of the progressive critique of both the Democratic Establishment and government in general is that the bribery-and-donor-service system itself, the system that dominates American politics at every level, is fundamentally corrupt and must go. This view is an existential threat to pols like the Clintons who have thrived off prostituting their offices via that system and have used it as their power-base. This is the primary, nearly sole, root of the conflict between the progressives and the Establishment but Cheung refuses to even mention it by its name.

She tries, instead, to steer around it with oblique allusions about progressives demonizing "experience and Washington political networking." Her article--a love-letter to career politicians--is filled with paragraph after paragraph in praise of these things, framing the conflict as if they were the source of it. Assiduously avoiding that matter of money, she enters the mind of the political insiders on which she's crushing, assigning them entirely altruistic motives and, in turn, using this self-generated phantom to dismiss the progressive critique without addressing it:

"The idea that those who care enough to forge connections, educate themselves and develop literacy in policymaking and dealmaking, rack up years of experience, and align themselves with party leadership, are somehow unable to understand and work on behalf of 'real Americans' because of this proven dedication is baseless and damaging."

Most of these are just basic skills; a legislator will either learn them or he won't, and contra Cheung, progressives have certainly never taken issue with someone being good at what they do if what they do is, itself, good, but therein lies the rub, the one Cheung is trying not to rub. To note the obvious, it isn't the job of legislators to "align themselves with party leadership"; they're elected to represent their constituents. If a legislator isn't dong so, or, as is usually the case, he considers his Big Money donors to be his real constituents and serves them at everyone else's expense, that's a problem. As for "experience," Bernie Sanders, the pol who helped bring the progressive/Establishment dispute to a head, entered his first political race in the early 1970s and has held elective office since 1981--by any estimation, a very experienced pol. Sanders, who has significant political gifts, gained the support of progressives because he advocated the progressive policy agenda.

On this matter, all roads lead back to that. Policy. The rest is just squid's ink.

Cheung writes that Sanders "brought dangerous levels of divisiveness into the fold with his 'us vs. them,' 'anti-establishment vs. establishment' rhetoric," as if that rhetoric appeared in a vacuum as a pernicious alien import into the political discourse and had no basis in fact. The efforts by the party Establishment to tilt the 2016 primary/caucus process in Clinton's favor--everything from manipulating the debate schedule to establishing a major money-laundering scheme using the state parties as fronts for Clinton fundraising to the party Good Ol' Boys Club, with their superdelegate superpowers, lining up behind Clinton--are a matter of public record. The Sanders presidential campaign was a grassroots, issues-driven affair fueled by small-dollar contributions from Sanders' supporters, while Hillary Clinton was paying her bills with massive contributions solicited from entrenched Big Money interests while denigrating and dismissing progressive issues (or offering watered-down-to-nothing versions of them in an effort to undercut them).

That same situation is presently repeating itself all over the U.S. in the 2018 cycle. Sanders-inspired crowdfunded progressives have jumped into political races at all levels of government and the reaction of the Democratic Establishment has been to interfere in local primaries in an effort to defeat the grassroots candidates or bully them out of the various races in favor of corporate-backed rightist "Democrats" centrally chosen by the Establishment clique in the Capitol. In a political environment in which all the enthusiasm and activist energy in the party is with the progressives, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) announced in the Summer it was officially entering into what had, up to then, been a silent and unofficial alliance with the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of right-wing "Democrats" who are barely distinguishable from Republicans.[1] These are the kinds of anti-inspiring candidates the DCCC recruits, the ones behind which it throws nearly all of its support and resources. If one accepts the premise that it should be Democratic voters, not the D.C. Establishment, that choose their own Democratic candidates, the interference in these primaries by orgs like the DCCC is entirely inappropriate.

Cheung even mentions one of the races in which this has been an issue, Berniecrat Marie Newman's recent effort to unseat long-running Democratic incumbent Dan Lipinski in Illinois' 3rd District, though she declines to provide the context I just have. That's not all she leaves out either. The full extent of her take on that race:

"...none of this is to say that Democrats should never embrace change of any sort. In cases like the race of incumbent, notably anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski against progressive, liberal and notably female challenger Marie Newman, there are times when Democrats with dated, damaging values threatening to democracy and human rights simply have to go.

"But there is a significant difference between upholding basic standards of decency for our lawmakers and ruling out and smearing Democrats solely for their experience and connections."

The bolding on that dishonest strawman is Cheung's own, and at least shows that she's aware of her own hypocrisy in repeatedly damning "purists" while arguing against Lipinski from a purely "purist" perspective. Dan Lipinski, it's also worth noting, is an example of a pol with plenty of experience and Washington connections. He is, for example, one of the chairmen of the Blue Dog Coalition. And how did the Democratic Establishment handle this race? The DCCC endorsed Lipinski, throwing its money behind his ultimately successful effort to defeat his progressive rival. Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic Whip, and Joe Crowley, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, "contributed thousands of dollars to Lipinski’s campaign." House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was there for Lipinski too,[2] which is hardly surprising given that the DCCC is Pelosi's creature, but the actions of the party leaders here speak directly to both Cheung's reflexive defense of pols who line up behind the party leadership and her rather ludicrous citation of Pelosi, elsewhere in the piece, as an example of "strong, highly capable female leadership." Though everything I've just outlined directly impacts on everything else Cheung writes, Cheung declines to share any of it with her readers.

Cheung's piece wouldn't be a Clinton cult screed without the boilerplate appeal to weaponized faux-identity politics and the ugly implication that progressives are sexists.[3] "I would be remiss," she writes, "to conclude without acknowledging how this phenomenon"--progressive opposition to misdeeds by the party Establishment--"disproportionately affects women in positions of power." She frets that "generations could be deprived of strong, highly capable female leadership because of the lasting attitudes of the Sanders insurgency," a complaint instantly undercut by the fact that her examples of that great "leadership" include wretched political refuse like Clinton, Pelosi and California Sen. Dinosaur Feinstein (rather than keepers like, say, Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal or Nina Turner). I'd be remiss if, in the face of that identity rubbish, I failed to point out that the army of Sanders-inspired crowdfunded progressives currently running for office, the candidates Cheung relentlessly disparages and tries to render marginal and radioactive, is disproportionately made up of women and people of color (another subset of the populace Cheung makes a rhetorical show of defending), and that the Democratic Establishment Cheung is rhapsodizing is, in race after race, trying to defeat them. Marie Newman is only one example. In Texas' 7th District, Pelosi's DCCC conducted a very public smear-campaign against progressive Laura Moser, trying to push her out of the race. In Washington's 9th District, Sarah Smith is challenging incumbent "Democrat" Adam Smith and the party is trying to monkeywrench her campaign. Tanzie Youngblood, a black former teacher, jumped into the race for New Jersey's 2nd District seat only to have the DCCC endorse, instead, anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-death penalty state senator Jeff Van Drew, one of the most conservative Democratic elected officials in the state. The DCCC "Red To Blue" program hasn't endorsed a single black candidate in the 2018 cycle. And so on.

That's Cheung's Democratic Establishment. And in evaluating same, none of this merits so much as a mention from her.

Cheung does, however, spend a lot of time on Sen. Feinstein, calling her "moderate and pragmatic" and "the very image of a Clinton-esque, 'establishment' Democrat." That last one, at least, is about right. Cheung crows about the Dinosaur's "credentials" and "skill set," and for her, the bottom line is that Feinstein "has a long record of bipartisan dealmaking, upholding key relationships and experience in public service in a politically diverse landscape like Capitol Hill that these times require." For progressives, the bottom line on Feinstein is that she prostitutes her office to Big Money, opposes single-payer healthcare, is wrong on "free trade," supports the death penalty, is a war-hawk who, among other things, supported Bush's Iraq misadveture, supports the USA PATRIOT Act, has an absolutely horrendous record on civil liberties, is a fierce and long-time defender of warrantless surveillance and has repeatedly voted to expand it, voted to gut Glass Steagall, voted for the Bush tax-cuts (from which she--one of the wealthiest members of the Senate--derived a huge windfall), is wrong on the drug war and on into infinity--a great example, actually, of a Democrat "with dated, damaging values threatening to democracy and human rights." California is one of the most liberal states in the Union; it can do much better than this.

Cheung doesn't tell her readers about any of that either. While she complains that progressives aren't supporting Dinosaur and seeks to make a case for the long-running senator, her analysis of Feinstein is, like the rest of her article, almost entirely content-free insofar as policy substance is concerned, as if she believes one can do politics without the politics. Her talk of policy is almost entirely limited to the need to defend past accomplishments.

It's a particularly tired cliche of this dismal literature to melodramatically fear-monger about how past accomplishments could be rolled back if Republicans are given power.[4] From the worst of it, one would conclude that women, poor folks, people of color, those who are LGBTQ, etc. could be shipped to death camps at any moment. Clintonite pols use this in place of any positive platform as an argument for their own election. It's not only preposterously hyperbolic and utterly reactionary but a profoundly offensive inversion of reality in another way; it is and always has been progressives, not mushy "moderate" rightists, who fight for vulnerable communities. Cheung dives into the swamp anyway. "In the current national political landscape," she writes, "what we’re witnessing is an existential battle for the bare necessities" (bolding mine). But Cheung departs from the standard script and manages to offer an even more appalling--and even more reactionary--variant:

"President Donald Trump and his increasingly extremist party are not the only threats to marginalized peoples' rights in this country. Regardless of their well-meaning ideas and colorful visions for the future, electing people who lack the fundamental experiences and skill sets to fight for the basics place already vulnerable Americans further at risk."

This notion--that both votes for progressives and progressives themselves are a threat to "marginalized peoples" and that only the Democratic Establishment and those who cling to it are suited to saving the day[5]--is the central theme of Cheung's article. She restates it over and over again, doling out irrational fear in order to dismiss those progressives candidates[6] struggling to build movements to finally give their long-neglected communities a voice in government. Keeping them out of government denies them experience; their alleged lack of experience is then advanced as a rationale for keeping them out of government--a perfect exercise in reactionary circular "reasoning":

"If we fail to fight for the basics, today, by electing people who lack the requisite experiences and skills to fight for them, we could not only forfeit these basics but also lose even more ground."

Cheung even advances this ending of democracy in the name of democracy:

"When there is as much to lose--particularly for people of color, immigrants, women, low-income people, disabled people and LGBTQ people--as there is, taking chances on people with new ideas and little else backing them up is a risk our democracy may not be able to afford."

For a political party, what Cheung is peddling is the ultimate recipe for stagnation and death, and in an environment where people are so desperately clamoring for change that they turn to the likes of Donald Trump because they have some little hope he will provide it when the other side isn't offering any, it's a quick death too.

Cheung concludes by writing, "with basic decency, competency, progress and foundational Democratic values at stake, the onus is on us to make both the right choice, and the smart choice." Both the right choice and the smart choice--and the wise one--is to chuck in the nearest waste-basket everything Cheung has written here, and never think on it again.

--j.

---

[1] It's impossible to regard this move as anything other than breathtakingly tone-deaf and out of touch but it reflects the priorities and proclivities of the larger Democratic Establishment (and its financiers).

[2] In a man-bites-dog move, some elements of the larger Democratic Establishment lined up behind Newman but the elected leadership--Cheung's focus--was a monolith in supporting Lipinski.

[3] Among Rantt writers, the full litany of tired, mostly fictional Clinton cult talking-points seem to be treated as revealed gospel. Some of the others Cheung uncritically repeats include the idea that Hillary Clinton was "the most qualified candidate in U.S. history," that "we should recognize the role of [Sanders'] rhetorical talking points in helping to doom Clinton in the general election," that Sanders was "sidelining identity-based issues as purported distractions from 'real,' hard economic issues." I suppose Cheung deserves at least some credit for sparing us another rendition of "Bernie Sanders isn't even a Democrat."

[4] And given Cheung's steadfast defense of the party Establishment and her assertion in her subhead that "far-left purists will only keep Republicans in power," it's worth noting that Establishment has a terrible record when it comes to picking winners. In a progressive party, the rightists it recruits in nearly every race in which it involves itself brutally slay voter enthusiasm; in the 2016 cycle, the DCCC and the House Majority PAC spent over a million dollars in each of 30 races and lost all but 7 of them to the Republicans.

[5] This is like a steroid-infused variant on one of Hillary Clinton's 2016 smears of Bernie Sanders. Sanders advocated a single-payer healthcare system; Clinton insisted this meant Sanders wanted to repeal Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid--everything--leaving people with nothing while he tried to pass an all-new system.

[6] Again, since Cheung played the identity card, mostly women and minority candidates.