"I mean, have you seen the other guys?"

Shades of "We're not perfect, but they're nuts".

Dems are asking people to vote on a new sticker and I'm not sure anyone in history has been as bad at this. pic.twitter.com/isYaZV60Dp

— Mazel Tov Cocktail (@AdamSerwer) July 5, 2017

Again, gonna be as kind as I can about it.

Yes, national Democrats, I have seen the other guys. But being "not the other guys" isn't enough to wrest control of Washington away from them.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee became a bit of an internet laughingstock on Wednesday due to the circulation of some stickers with prospective 2018 midterm election slogans. One of them read "Democrats 2018: I mean, have you seen the other guys?" The "hey, we're not them!" message didn't go over super-well with plenty of pundits and tweeters, who noted that it packs a whole lot less punch and has a lot less loft than something like "Yes, we can."

Sure, it may have been only a silly sticker, not a party manifesto. But that someone over at DCCC headquarters felt secure enough to promote such a slogan publicly is also emblematic of a party that still hasn't figured out what it wants to be following a wholly unexpected loss to a reality television actor, after a campaign that was in large part premised on "hey, we're not that crazy Trump guy."

Plenty of others, mostly on Twitter, were meaner, so no need for me to pile on.  Oh, wait a minute ... yes there is.

(These pitiful slogans) are coming from the same organization that poured millions of dollars into Jon Ossoff’s failed congressional campaign and that has focused its recovery strategy on converting moderate Republicans. Since Barack Obama assumed office in 2009, the Democratic Party has lost nearly 1,100 seats in elected offices across the country to “the other guys.” Instead of stopping their losing streak with meaningful policies that would risk alienating their donors -- such as single-payer health care -- Democrats have obsessed about Donald Trump’s connection to Russia.

These slogans epitomize the current state of Democratic Party. None of the slogans address important issues or convey moral conviction. Rather, they expect their support base to “vote blue no matter who.” Democrats market themselves as better than Republicans, but they fail to address issues important to voters.

Right now, Democrats are the losing party, and leadership makes it increasingly more embarrassing to be affiliated with the party. It’s not a coincidence that Sen. Bernie Sanders -- an independent who won’t tarnish his name by affiliating with the party -- is the most popular politician in the country.  Americans (including Democratic Congressional candidates in red states like Texas) are increasingly identifying as independent, a symptom of their disenfranchisement from both political parties. Democrats fail to realize that trying to capitalize on hatred of the Republican party only creates more apathy. So far, Democrats have failed to develop a vision that resonates with voters and to sever ties with their corporate donors or widely unpopular leaders. Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Tom Perez and Hillary Clinton -- all widely disliked -- are the current party spokespersons. All these aspects combined ensure Democrats will continue losing until they drastically change course.

Ouch.  A less harsh take on the state of play, from the US News link at the top.

As befits a national party that is a bit lost in the wilderness, Democrats are being pulled in several different directions at the moment: There's the so-called Sanders-Warren wing, so named because of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who espouse an unapologetically progressive vision. There's the tech-bro wing attempting to use Silicon Valley-style thinking to "hack" the party for the internet age. And then there's the rump of Blue Dogs and mealy-mouthed centrists who believe that triangulating and being OK with bigotry is the only way to win back those disaffected white, working-class voters so famously wooed by now-President Donald Trump.

And a sunnier point of view from McClatchy, via Raw Story.

A trio of new political action committees — the People's House Project, Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats — are looking for ways to support candidates with economically progressive platforms and to challenge the party establishment, especially in Rust Belt states where President Donald Trump saw much unexpected success last November.

The activists aren't daunted by the odds.

"Democrats should be able to win in all these places," said Krystal Ball, founder of the People's House Project, which has endorsed its first candidate, Randy Bryce, an iron worker with an attention-getting advertising shtick who is running for House Speaker Paul Ryan's seat in Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District.

And in Appalachia.

They've already begun gathering candidates, and they're not just going after Republicans.

Frustrated with increased poverty and poor working conditions in her home state of West Virginia, environmental activist Paula Jean Swearengin launched a campaign with the help of Brand New Congress to challenge centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in 2018.

"It's a disgrace as a coal miner's daughter that I have to beg for clean water and clean air for my children," she said. "He challenged us to primary him, so shame on Joe Manchin that a single mom of four is going after his seat."

Since launching her campaign in early May, Swearengin said she has raised $81,000 through small donations from more than 5,000 people.

While she said it's unlikely she could raise more donations than Manchin, who has the financial backing of the coal industry, Swearengin believes her progressive messaging could resonate with discouraged West Virginians.

Sanders won 51 percent of West Virginia's Democrats in last year's primary, easily defeating runner-up Hillary Clinton, who eight years before handily defeated then-Sen. Barack Obama in the state's Democratic primary.

In Texas, we have Libertarians who voted in the GOP primary in 2016 (read the comments) running as Democrats in places like TX-31 against incumbent John Carter.  Some people believe this is the only kind of Democrat that can get elected in Republican districts.  James Cargas, the CD-7 Democrat who supports fracking and still does not live in the district, has sold that line three consecutive times with no luck.  Annnnd he's back for a fourth go.

There remain plenty of twists and turns before November of 2018, but Democrats have a lot of work to do, and despite Charles' optimism about the locals, their compasses still aren't all pointing true north just yet.

Russians may be coming again ... but we've larger voting problems

Before we go to war with North Korea, before the unhinged Right starts killing CNN reporters, before acetamenophin destroys what's left of our empathy ...

When last we tuned in to RT while clicking on Sputnik News, we learned that our antagonists Boris and Natasha Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear (see here and here for the Wiki background) had been hard at work scaring the pants off moose and squirrel everybody from Jameses Comey and Clapper to your friendly neighborhood Dem precinct captain about what, precisely, they had been up to in the summer of 2016.  That is to say, beyond humiliating Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, John Podesta, Huma Abedin, and the rest of the DNC hacks that got hacked.

We learned that they hacked into 39 states' voter databases -- or tried to, and succeeded in getting into perhaps just one, Illinois.  Alex Ward at Vox has it, with a link over to the original at Bloomberg, and previously and briefly referenced by yours truly in the second half of this aggrepost.

While this is indeed alarming, I still find voter suppression via photo ID and partisan gerrymandering to be greater threats to our republic.  Paper ballots with verifiable paper trails -- something like the Scantron-style electronic voting machines Denton County has just adopted -- would resolve the  Russian problem, but nothing short of a blue tsunami will fix the other two, and unless they can find something to run on besides "Trump is evil/Russia/Impeach",  2018 isn't going to be the cycle the Donkeys are looking for.

(*Ed note: let me pause here and acknowledge my friend Brad Friedman's lasting concerns about anything machine count-related.  Experts appear to disagree on the hackability, or at least the ease thereof, of scanned ballot counters.)

For the benefit of my conspiratorially-minded Democratic friends, let me point out -- as I have repeatedly in the past -- that the key to cracking the Russian code lies not in tracing election hacking attempts but in Trump's still-concealed tax returns.  Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Felix Sater, and the rest of that ilk are the threads special counsel Mueller should be -- and hopefully is -- pulling on.  And if Trump, or Jeff Sessions, or Devin Nunes, or any Republican in the administration or the Congress is found to be obstructing that investigation, then the walls will come tumbling down.

Focusing on the wrong Russiagate is starting to show up in polling as a loser for Democrats.  It's a winner for the corporate media and ratings, however, especially MSNBC.  Before Mika B's facelift became an atrocious but ultimately distracting Tweet -- even Tucker Carlson thinks so, by Jeebus -- Trump usually didn't give half of one solid shit about the other liberal media news channel; he's mobilized his base to destroy CNN, and now even Julian Assange is piling on.

I would like to also point out that the Democratic Party has bigger fish to fry than continuing to demonize Jill Stein, but I'm convinced that unhealthy obsession has become part of their DNA.

So with all that, plus 1) Kris Kobach, 2) a Texas Legislature poised to over-reach once more with a photo ID law that will require a couple of years for the courts to once again nullify, and 3) gerrymandered congressional and statehouse districts thanks to Tom DeLay almost fifteen years ago, as Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker reminded us in his comprehensive and compelling piece "America's Future is Texas"... why are you more worried about what Russian hackers may or may not be doing in the next election cycle?  Your vote barely counts for anything as it is.

On a more positive note, here's an easily attainable goal for those of us in Harris County: #FireStanStanart and replace him with Diane Trautman, and then push the mostly Republican county commissioners to approve and purchase paper ballots for 2020.  Because if Democrats can actually win some elections -- particularly this one -- in 2018, those GOPers will be forced to do so, due to the caterwauling from their base about Ill Eagles voting.

See how easy this is?  Just requires a little focus on the proper thing.

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