Happy Hanukwanzmas

People are starting to get it

Thanks to Gadfly, via Twitter... this.

If Hillary Clinton ends up winning the Democratic nomination for president, some Bernie Sanders supporters will vote for her anyway. I can respect that decision. While the differences between Democrats and Republicans are often overstated -- to give just two examples (there are many), the same people advise Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz on foreign policy and Hillary Clinton is at least as cozy with Wall Street as most Republicans -- there are some real and important reasons to worry about a Republican White House. The Supreme Court and heads of agencies are, in my view, the biggest concerns in this vein. I'd have low hopes for Hillary Clinton's appointees but no doubts that they'd be better on balance than those offered by a Trump, Cruz, or Rubio.

Yet I will not vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. While I understand the lesser-of-two-evils mentality, I disagree with it; most of Clinton's policy positions are unacceptable to me. If Sanders loses the primary, I will probably vote for Jill Stein.

I don't know if Ben Spielberg of 34justice reads the same things I read or came to the conclusions I did months ago by reading Brains, but it's not all that big a stretch if you value actual progressivism and do some thinking.

Wouldn't that be a strategic blunder, some friends and family ask me? Democrats who aren't quite as polite ask if I'm an idiot. Don't I realize that this type of thinking led to George W. Bush becoming president in 2000 and that I may similarly "blow this election" by deciding to vote my conscience?

The premise of these questions, however, is completely wrong, and not just because, as Jim Hightower documented at the time, voting records show that "Gore was the problem, not Nader," in the 2000 election. In fact, refusing to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election is both a principled and strategic decision that I encourage more people to embrace.

There are two possibilities when it comes to my vote: it will either impact the outcome of the election or it won't. If my vote won't impact the outcome of the election, I might as well vote for the candidate with the best policy positions, regardless of his or her supposed electability.

If my vote will impact the outcome of the election, I may have to decide which matters more: (a) the differences between a bad Democrat and worse Republican over the next four years or (b) the degree to which I'd undermine our chances to enact fundamental change to a broken political system in the long-run by pursuing a lesser-of-two-evils voting strategy.

I'm going to do the linear, bipolar Democrats a favor here by making their argument -- the one they need to make to non-voters, not to people like me and Spielberg.

"Not a dime's worth of difference."  "Don't vote; it only encourages the bastards."  (I have a Facebook friend -- a former Democratic precinct chair, then a former Green, now a voting atheist who uses that second phrase s good bit.  THE most argumentative person, in the harshest of various ways, I have ever encountered.  And that's quite definitive, but it's also a digression.)

Back on point.

... (T)he type of political "pragmatism" that would lead someone to choose (a) undermines power-balancing policy goals. Because politicians and Democratic party officials know that many voters think this way, they have little incentive to listen to our concerns. Instead, they can pay lip service to progressive values while crafting a policy agenda and decision-making process more responsive to wealthy donors than to their constituents.

That dynamic is on full display already in the 2016 Democratic primary election. Clinton is campaigning against priorities, like single-payer health care, that Democrats are supposed to embrace. While early union endorsements for Clinton initially improved her rhetoric on education issues to some degree, she is already backtracking to assure corporate donors that her positions are unchanged. The unions who endorsed Clinton early have no negotiating power relative to rich donors who make their support contingent on Clinton pursuing their interests; given that fact and her record, she seems unlikely to keep her promises if elected.

The Democratic National Committee's actions are also illustrative. The party establishment lined up behind Clinton before the race even started, and the DNC's debate schedule is, despite their protestations to the contrary, quite obviously constructed to insulate Clinton from challenge. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's recent decision to suspend Sanders' campaign's access to its voter data (in response to a data breach by a since-fired Sanders staffer; the access was restored after the Sanders campaign sued the DNC) has caused even party loyalists to believe that the DNC "is putting [its] finger on [the] scale" and pro-Clinton journalists to acknowledge that the DNC's behavior "makes Clinton's lead look illegitimate, or at least, invites too many 'what ifs.'"

What is developing for 2016 -- and I thought it was obvious before I wrote yesterday's post -- is that the 'status quo' candidate(s) are going to be, indeed already are, at a strategic disadvantage.

Both Clinton and party leaders are making a mockery of many of the principles the party is supposed to stand for. And pledging to support Clinton in the end -- no matter what she and the DNC do -- enables this kind of behavior. It's hard for me to see how we will ever fix our political process and reclaim our democracy by refusing to draw some lines in the sand.

I could accuse those who disagree with that assessment of propping up a sham political system. I could say that, by downplaying the unfounded smears the Clinton campaign has spread against Sanders and insisting that we must support Clinton in the general if she wins the nomination, they are destroying the Democrats' credibility and thus helping to ensure ever more privilege-defending and corrupt elected officials and government policy. But it would be a lot fairer of me to acknowledge that a lot of the Republicans are really scary, that my strategy isn't guaranteed to work the way I think it will, and that people evaluate the risks differently than I do.

That last sentence is the kindest acknowledgment that can be extended to the Clinton folks.  Spielberg is about to make up for it, though.  Bold emphasis is mine.

Similarly, those who disagree can continue to accuse people like me of "helping the GOP" in the 2016 election by pointing out that the Democrats have extreme flaws and don't always deserve our support. But it would be a lot fairer of them to acknowledge that millions upon millions of people have suffered at the hands of lesser-of-two-evils candidates over the years, that an open commitment to support a lesser-of-two-evils candidate robs voters of bargaining power, and that the Democratic Party has brought voter discontent upon itself.

Bottom line: if Hillary Clinton loses to Donald Trump, it won't be anybody's fault but HERS.  I had to defriend someone on Facebook just yesterday who couldn't understand this, kept typing "Trump/GOP thanks you for your support," etc. and so on.  There's no time to waste with horses' asses, led to water, who refuse to drink.  Too many people outside the current electorate that need persuading to forfeit effort teaching swine to yodel.

Here is another olive branch.

Hopefully Sanders will win the Democratic primary and this discussion will become a moot point. In the meantime, it's good for those of us who believe in social justice to push each other on our tactics. We would just do well to remember that reasonable people with the same goals can disagree about which electoral strategy is most likely to help us achieve them.

Clinton people can do their thing, Sanders' people can do theirs, at least until he is disqualified.  It  makes more sense than to continue antagonizing each other on social media, no?  I don't think not voting sends the right message -- somewhere around 75% of Americans already do that, and I don't get that the powers that be are listening.  I also don't think writing in Sanders' name in November is a good way to go, but at least it's a protest vote and not a protest non-vote.

An alternative to vote in favor of, and not against some objectionable candidate or party -- outside the 'left-right, left-right' -- that matches up best with one's progressive populist principles.  I also think that the movement -- a political revolution, thanks Bernie -- makes the strongest statement when it advocates for a living wage.

Bernie Sanders has many of the right economic ideas, but he's also still too beholden to the military industrial complex as well as an abbreviated version of the Second Amendment (truncating the "well-regulated militia" part, like the NRA and all of its adherents do).  And I simply don't think that his social justice message is going to reach enough minorities to help him get to the lead, and even if he got a sudden groundswell of support that pushed him to the front after winning Iowa and New Hampshire, that the DNC establishment would allow him to claim the nomination.

So the question remains: cast no vote, cast a symbolic protest vote, or cast a vote that really sends the loudest message to the DNC.  The choice has always been, and will continue to be, yours.

All the best of the holiday season to all my readers.  A few Toons posts lie ahead but nothing serious -- unless circumstances warrant -- until after Christmas.

The Schlonger he leads the race...

.. the more terrified the RNC gets.  Terrorism is, after all, the only thing that motivates Republicans, whether they are giving it or receiving it.  Bold throughout Jeff Greenfield's intriguing Politico piece is mine...

Donald Trump may have eased some Republican fears Tuesday night when he declared his intention to stay inside the party. But if their angst has been temporarily eased at the prospect of what he would do if he loses, they still face a far more troubling, and increasingly plausible, question.

What happens to the party if he wins?

With Trump as its standard-bearer, the GOP would suddenly be asked to rally around a candidate who has been called by his once and former primary foes “a cancer on conservatism,” “unhinged,” “a drunk driver … helping the enemy.” A prominent conservative national security expert, Max Boot, has flatly labeled him “a fascist.” And the rhetoric is even stronger in private conversations I’ve had recently with Republicans of moderate and conservative stripes.

This is not the usual rhetoric of intraparty battles, the kind of thing that gets resolved in handshakes under the convention banners. These are stake-in-the-ground positions, strongly suggesting that a Trump nomination would create a fissure within the party as deep and indivisible as any in American political history, driven both by ideology and by questions of personal character.

Indeed, it would be a fissure so deep that, if the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run—from the Republicans themselves.

Shrillary fans, you should be able to sleep with visions of sugar plums dancing in your heads.  I know it's more fun to be angry at Sandernistas...

The history lesson continues.

The most striking examples of party fissure in American politics have come when a party broke with a long pattern of accommodating different factions and moved decisively toward one side. It has happened with the Democrats twice, both over civil rights. The party had long embraced the cause of civil rights in the North while welcoming segregationists—and white supremacists—from across the South. In 1948, the party’s embrace of a stronger civil rights plank led Southern delegations to walk out of the convention. That year, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond led a National States Rights Democratic Party—the “Dixiecrats”—that won four Southern states. Had President Harry Truman not (barely) defeated Tom Dewey in Ohio and California, the Electoral College would have been deadlocked—and the choice thrown into the House of Representatives, with Southern segregationists holding the balance of power. Twenty years later, Alabama Governor George Wallace led a similar anti-civil-rights third party movement that won five Southern states. A relatively small shift of voters in California would have deadlocked that election and thrown it to the House of Representatives.

In two other cases, a dramatic shift in intraparty power led to significant defections on the losing side. In 1964, when Republican conservatives succeeded in nominating a divisive champion of their cause in Barry Goldwater, liberal Republicans (there were such things back then) like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Michigan Governor George Romney and others refused to endorse the nominee. More shockingly, the New York Herald-Tribune, the semi-official voice of the GOP establishment, endorsed Lyndon Johnson—the first Democrat it had supported, ever. With his party split, Goldwater went down in flames. Eight years later, when a deeply divided Democratic Party nominated anti-war hero George McGovern, George Meany led the AFL-CIO to a position of neutrality between McGovern and Richard Nixon—the first time labor had refused to back a Democrat for president. Prominent Democrats like former Texas Governor John Connally openly backed Nixon, while countless others, disempowered by the emergence of “new Democrats,” simply sat on their hands. The divided Democrats lost in a landslide.

There was also Ted Kennedy's insurgent 1980 bid for the nomination against Jimmy Carter, and at the end of yesterday's post, I mentioned Connally, Allen Shivers and the Shivercrats who abandoned Adlai Stevenson in favor of Dwight Eisenhower, and Bob Bullock, who endorsed George W. Bush for governor of Texas in 1998 and for president in 2000, as he retired from the lieutenant governorship.  What we are seeing in 2015 -- and will see in '16 -- is an updated version of the same old shit from the duopoly.

Except maybe a little different.

Would a Trump nomination be another example of such a power shift? Yes, although not a shift in an ideological sense. It would represent a more radical kind of shift, with power moving from party officials and office-holders to deeply alienated voters and to their media tribunes. (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham have not exactly endorsed Trump, but they have been vocal in defending him and in assailing those who have branded Trump unacceptable.) It would undermine the thesis of a highly influential book, "The Party Decides", which argues that the preferences of party insiders is still critical to the outcome of a nomination contest. This possibility, in turn, has provoked strong feelings about Trump from some old school Republicans. Says one self-described 'structural, sycophantic Republican' who has been involved at high levels of GOP campaigns for decades: “Hillary would be bad for the country—he’d be worse.” 

Greenfield has more on Lyndon LaRouche, and David Duke, and a few other of the two parties' least desirable elements threatening the respective establishments.  My fascination, as you might imagine, is going to be with the potential independent 2016 presidential candidates.

... Rob Stutzman, another veteran of California Republican politics—he helped spearhead the 2003 recall that put Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Governor’s Mansion—foresees a third party emerging, both as a safe harbor for disaffected GOP voters and to help other Republican candidates.

“I think a third candidate would be very likely on many state ballots,” he says. “First of all, I think most GOP voters would want an alternative to vote for out of conscience. But Trump would also be devastating to the party and other GOP candidates. A solid conservative third candidate would give options to senators like (NH's Kelly) Ayotte, (WI's Ron) Johnson and (IL's Mark) Kirk to run with someone else and still be opposed to Hillary. In fact, I think it’s plausible such a candidate could beat Trump in many states.”

Any candidate attempting a third-party bid would confront serious obstacles, such as getting on state ballots late in the election calendar. As for down-ballot campaigns, most state laws prohibit candidates from running on multiple lines; so a Senate or congressional candidate who wanted to avoid association with Trump would have to abandon the GOP line to re-run with an independent presidential contender. The (Adlai) Stevenson example shows that leaving a major party line is fraught with peril—although the write-in triumph of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010 suggests that it can sometimes succeed.

Two items worthy of note:

-- GOP Senators have quietly abandoned not just Trump but Ted Cruz (he doesn't play well with others, as we know) in favor of Marco Rubio, and the rumors of a brokered Republican convention are being discussed on Thom Hartman's radio program, where he has already advanced the postulate that Speaker Paul Ryan will emerge from the split, possibly with Rubio as running mate.

-- Christina Tobin of Free and Equal -- they sponsored the 2012 televised debate between the Green's Jill Stein, the Libertarian's Gary Johnson, the Constitution's Virgil Goode, (who recently endorsed Trump) and the Justice's Rocky Anderson -- has taken a ballot-access qualification job with an as-yet-unnamed independent candidate for president.  That candidate is rumored to be... Jim Webb.

So...

R (a): Trump/Cruz, either/or at the top, maybe both together
R (b): Ryan-Rubio?
D: Clinton-Castro
G: Stein
L: Johnson
C: Possibly former Cong. John Hostettler
J: Poll on website asks if the JP should endorse Bernie Sanders 
I:  Webb
Other very minor party and independent candidates TBD

Won't this be fun?

The local Democrats' chairmanship squabble

Not even an anthill -- much less a molehill -- in the grand scheme, but worthy of some brief commentary.  Stace has already weighed in; let's begin here by republishing the full letter from the challenger and the leader of the Gang That Couldn't Get Signatures Straight.

Last week I wrote to all of you announcing that I had filed for a place on the ballot to run for Chair of the Harris County Democratic Party.

I was informed late Friday and again via official letter over the weekend by the chairman of the party Lane Lewis (my opponent) that my petition signatures were invalid and that I had failed to make it onto the ballot for the primary election this March. With my name not on the ballot and the deadline passed, I will not be running for party chair.

Even as I accept the decision, I was very disappointed to receive this news. The signature process is a precise one and requires 48 legible signatures from current precinct chairs. It also requires that none of these chairs sign more than one petition for a single race, yet some had forgotten they had signed Lane Lewis' petition during the summer.

Here in Harris County, our democracy has been dealt a setback. The process to challenge a sitting party chair is convoluted and flawed, and the number of signatures I received displayed a level of anxiety with our party leadership that needs to be addressed immediately. My challenge of Lane Lewis's chairmanship was never personal, but it was meant to send a strong message that change is needed in order for our party to start growing again and winning big.

That message has been sent.

I look forward to remaining a leader in our party and working with all of you to elect Democrats up and down the ballot, promote diversity, fight for equality, and move our city forward.

Thank you, Happy Holidays to you and your family!

-Philippe Nassif

In the bold emphasis above (which is mine), "legible" is not the word used in the election code but "eligible".  Perhaps this is just an unfortunate typo or autocorrect error, but it tells a story about the competence of the very abbreviated campaign Nassif was running.  Also take note in the third paragraph that the description of the process of gaining ballot access for the county chairmanship is described as "precise", and in the very next graf "convoluted and flawed".

It can be both of those things at the same time, which I believe was the author's intent to convey.  But he communicated it poorly: the rules is still the rules, and if you don't like 'em, you need to follow 'em at least long enough to get elected and change 'em.  Don't blame the rules if you can't abide by 'em.  Herein lies the more nuanced dilemma: if precinct chairs can't remember whether they signed a ballot petition for your opponent before they signed yours... whose fault is that?  But more to the problem-solving point: if you're savvy enough to anticipate a potential shortfall, what is your strategy to overcome it?  Anyone who has gathered ballot petition signatures -- which is to say, every single judicial candidate who has run for office in the last several years -- could tell you, and probably at no fee.

Was there an attorney versed in election law on Nassif's campaign?  If there was, did that person give good counsel to the candidate and his team?  Did the campaign not only understand but heed that advice in this regard?  We know the failure was in execution but only Nassif and his Gang of Three (or Four) know the answers to the rest.

I am not a lawyer, as everyone knows, but I did stay at a nationally branded hotel chain recently.  Not last night.  Anyway, best of luck to the rebel faction in 2018, and I hope everybody learned a lesson.  Insert that tired "if you strike at the king" parable here.  Comparing Lane Lewis to Debbie Wasserman Schultz is most assuredly the wrong tack, but when you lose in embarrassing fashion there's always a good excuse or two; just be sure to pick the right one.  I wonder if they would blame a member of the Green Party for their defeat if they could.

Had Nassif cleared the very low bar for ballot qualification, there's an analogy that shows up in Kuff's very cogent post about Adrian Garcia and his challenge to Gene Green: if you can't offer a sensible, demonstrable reason for changing out an incumbent, then the voters simply aren't going to make a change.  The attacks on Lewis were that his bid for Houston city council "caused (TeaBagging Republican) Mike Knox to be elected to AL 1", and he "abandoned his job as chairman" in the process.  The first part of that premise is a laughable fail; using this logic, Knox's election could just as easily be blamed on Tom McCasland, whose city council campaign was funded in large part by Amber and Steve Mostyn.  The second half of the premise simply fails on the evidence: nobody has worked harder to elect Democrats in Harris County than Lewis, with but one possible exception: Art Pronin, the president of the Meyerland Area Democratic club, who poured himself out on the streets and sidewalks of southwest Houston in the mayoral runoff.

As for Nassif, he still has a bright future in Democratic politics, but should be more cautious about who he falls in league with, generally exercising greater due diligence.  As a hint, any bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Young Turk wanting to get a job for Team Blue should look to the Mostyns, who are assimilating all aspects of Texas Democratic and Harris County Democratic politics, internal and external.  Just last week, the their 'longtime advisor', Jeff Rotkoff, was installed at the Texas AFL-CIO as campaigns director.  The power couple are currently hiring loyalists, like the fellow who recently moved from BGTX into the candidate recruitment directorship at the TDP, and the former Steve Costello campaign operative who has taken a high-ranking position at the HCDP, at three times the salary of the previous person in that slot.

Kindly note that GOP experience has no negative bearing on future Democratic leadership positions.  Especially when confronted by progressive Democrats, and especially in Texas, where there is a long history of what we call Blue Dogs today -- Allen Shivers, John Connally, Bob Bullock -- holding themselves out as the last of the Mohican moderate Republicans in the nation.