Obama had it right — a circular firing squad is on the way

If Dems don't get their act together they will be responsible for 4 more years of the Trumpet. This little article should be read by all Dem leaders.

"President Barack Obama was right to warn the Democratic Party that, unless it reshapes its course, it may create a circular firing squad. Historically, just look to the Democratic Party of 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon, another controversial, polarizing president. It was both the high point of the progressive movement in the party and the low point of the party’s presidential power.

Except for a brief recovery post-Watergate with Jimmy Carter, Democrats did not come back from their 1972 record loss until 1992, and that was with a 41 percent vote for President Bill Clinton, aided by the entry of independent Ross Perot into that year’s presidential race. Even with that help, it took a return to the center to reignite the fortunes of the Democratic Party and we got 49 per cent in 1996.

Last November, Democrats made significant gains in the House of Representatives, adding a total of 40 districts and taking the majority. Most of those were suburban districts that voted for Republicans Mitt Romney or Donald Trump in the past. They are not districts that could ever be won by an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), or any of the leaders of the new progressive wing of the Democratic Party. These districts’ voters were concerned about health care, saw the Trump administration as out of step with their more centrist concerns, and gave low marks to a Republican House led by then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that seemed fractured and ineffective.

Since the midterms, Trump continues to enjoy strong ratings on the economy and for combatting terrorism, two issues of heightened importance in family-oriented suburbs. In addition, he has been cleared by special counsel Robert Mueller of the charge of colluding with the Russians. Women still have grave doubts about him, but he has proven a tough competitor, defying the odds.
But what have swing voters been hearing from Democrats, since switching their votes in the midterms over to the Dems? Socialism, anti-Semitism, resistance, more investigations. Not exactly a platform for re-election.
And the congressional Socialists led by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez are even threatening mainstream Democrats with primaries. Yup, replacing moderates in swing districts with left-wing democratic socialists is surely the way to expand the majority. Suburbanites are clamoring for them. Higher taxes is just what hard-pressed suburban voters with lots of responsibilities are seeking.

The public face of the party today is far removed from what created a solid group of freshmen in suburban districts. And they have been bombarded with a lot more than just slogans. Ocasio-Cortez, who pulled down about 15,000 votes in a Democratic primary in a safe district, is world-renowned now for the Green New Deal — just a little program to nationalize the energy industry while promising guaranteed incomes for all; its price tag has been put at $93 trillion. It’s Ocasio-Cortez who drove Amazon out of New York, not understanding that the tax breaks for the company would have come from 10 times the tax revenue that the new jobs would have created, or that their absence blows a $27 billion hole in future budgets. Comically, she thought you could spend the $3 billion on other things.

The other new face of the party has been Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who spread her anti-Israel positions by expressing anti-Semitic tropes about how Jews in America have divided loyalties and how Jews have bought support for Israel with “Benjamins.” Despite most voters believing Omar should be off the House Foreign Affairs Committee with these views, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has kept her on this prestigious assignment while passing over moderates.

Let’s not forget the daily voices of Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). They get media coverage (to a shrinking audience) on how there really is evidence of collusion and make escalating demands for the tax returns of Donald Trump and his associates. Nixon had an enemies list of people he was going to audit — and these folks are attempting to revive the practice. It didn’t work out that well for Nixon.

The Democratic House and Senate leaders apparently decided that resistance to the Trump administration — rather than true deal-making — makes the most sense, holding out for a presidential victory in 2020. That strategic decision, unless soon reversed, might be their undoing. Had they opted for deals, they would have made a DACA-for-border-security swap, moved on infrastructure, and partnered on tax cuts to provide much more deductibility of state and local taxes. They think no deal is a better deal. Americans may — or may not — think so.

While Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) have been given outsized power, the newly elected moderates — the ones whose victories empowered the other Democrats in the House — have been largely shunted to the side. They have been castigated from all sides, protested against in their town hall meetings, denied plum committee assignments, and had to accept a watered-down resolution condemning anti-Semitism.

On top of all of these discordant voices in Congress are the 15 or so Democratic presidential candidates, many of them vying for the ultra-left sliver of Democratic activists and media who are far removed from the life of the everyday Democratic voter. Many are backing the Green New Deal, immigration policies that approach open borders, and are united in their desire to raise taxes for new spending.

Joe Biden, a potentially moderating influence on all this, has been temporarily set back with charges that his glad-handing was too intimate, and he has been tied up in knots explaining his behavior even before getting to the starting gate. Another potential moderate on economic issues, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, has decided he would not have a chance in this New Democratic Party. That leaves Starbucks founder Howard Schultz in the center and, since he is running outside of the party, he is more likely to be a spoiler than to convince more Democratic candidates to move to the center with him.

If there’s not a change of course here in the next year, Barack Obama is right that 2020 is shaping up to be more like a circular firing squad than a march to victory. If someone in the leadership of the House or among the presidential candidates does not stand up and reset the emerging positioning, the party will be painted as running on a platform of socialism, $93 trillion for global warming, anti-Israel policies, open borders, a government takeover of the health care system, and raising taxes to boot.

The course to Democratic victory in 2020 is responsible free enterprise, not socialism; the center, not the left; and policies based on reality, not tens of trillions of dollars. This was true in the past — and I believe it holds true for the future.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/437969-obama-had-it-right-a-circular-firing-squad-is-on-the-way

Mark Penn is a managing partner of the Stagwell Group, a private equity firm specializing in marketing services companies, as well as chairman of the Harris Poll and author of “Microtrends Squared.” He also is CEO of MDC Partners, an advertising and marketing firm. He served as pollster and adviser to President Clinton from 1995 to 2000, including during Clinton’s impeachment. You can follow him on Twitter @Mark_Penn.

Excellent article. Dems should have at least censured Rep. Omar after the second of her outrageous statements. There's no difference in hating Jews or hating African Americans. Ms.Omar is a racist, and doing nothing about it doesn't help the Democrats keep the high ground.
We've got about 15 or 16 candidates out there right now and only one or two of them could actually appeal to mainstream Americans. (Don't ask me to name them either, not since Corey Booker started talking about reparations too.) As a Whole, they are not realistic and they are also not qualified.
It worries me, because I'm not believing that the Dems will ever decide to impeach Trump. Without impeaching him, they'll never get to see the entire Mueller report, or his taxes, or any of the rest of the stuff this country needs to see become public very soon.

bigdog wrote:Excellent article. Dems should have at least censured Rep. Omar after the second of her outrageous statements. There's no difference in hating Jews or hating African Americans. Ms.Omar is a racist, and doing nothing about it doesn't help the Democrats keep the high ground.
We've got about 15 or 16 candidates out there right now and only one or two of them could actually appeal to mainstream Americans. (Don't ask me to name them either, not since Corey Booker started talking about reparations too.) As a Whole, they are not realistic and they are also not qualified.
It worries me, because I'm not believing that the Dems will ever decide to impeach Trump. Without impeaching him, they'll never get to see the entire Mueller report, or his taxes, or any of the rest of the stuff this country needs to see become public very soon.

Horse manure...Both the article and the idea that Ilyan Omar should be censured for telling the truth.

Former Clinton Adviser Mark Penn Arrives at His Inevitable Destination: Trump’s GOP

By Ed Kilgore

I first encountered pollster and political strategist Mark Penn in 1995, when I was running a training program for members of Congress for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Penn had recently been brought into the Clinton orbit by Dick Morris (himself brought into the White House by Hillary Clinton); together they were orchestrating the president’s 1996 reelection campaign. Fittingly, Penn accompanied Morris to the DLC session, though for the most part he sat on the dusty floor in his suit while Morris regaled the Members with an intensely cynical rapid-fire presentation on what they should embrace and avoid in the world of policy (“Medicaid managed care — goooood; Medicare managed care — baaaad!”). When Morris left with Penn in tow, I turned to the person next to me and said: “Do you smell the brimstone?” And I was one of the duo’s political allies.

Morris was famously ejected from ClintonWorld right as the 1996 general election was getting underway after a prostitute disclosed he was giving her access to confidential White House information, and even letting her listen in to conversations with the Big Dog. Penn got to stick around for the campaign and the rest of the Clinton presidency, where he often battled with liberals and counseled his boss on how to appeal to culturally conservative voters without compromising his Democratic support. I also recall attending a 1997 House Democratic Caucus retreat in which Penn showed up conspicuously late for a panel and performed diffidently at best. He clearly didn’t care; his only client was in the White House.

His polling (for major corporations before he got into politics) was sometimes innovative and insightful, but wasn’t very transparent, and often seemed aimed at getting politicians to focus obsessively on narrow categories of swing voters and promote equally narrow policies to appeal to them. Indeed, in a mixed but somewhat positive review I wrote in 2007 about a book he published, I called him the “strategist of small things,” which probably wasn’t the best reputation for someone seeking to guide a party looking for a bold progressive challenge to the Bush presidency and Karl Rove’s GOP.

Soon afterward, Penn was the “chief strategist” and often the public face of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. The Guardian subsequently made this assessment of the job he did:

As the Clinton bandwagon shudders to a halt and the blaming begins, Penn has been blamed more than anyone: for being arrogant and complacent, for urging Hillary to run as the “inevitable” winner, for failing to see the electorate’s hunger for change, for devising a victory plan based on elementary misunderstandings of the voting system, and for hubris in refusing to give up his lucrative lobbying work while masterminding her candidacy. When the New Republic magazine asked Clinton staffers to explain, off the record, why her campaign went so wrong, one responded with a list: “1. Mark Penn, 2. Mark Penn, 3. Mark Penn.”

Returning to his very lucrative polling for the corporate world, Penn probably laughed all the way to the bank. But even before he was barred from participation in HRC’s 2016 campaign, his tenuous ties to the Democratic Party seemed to steadily fray. As my colleague Jonathan Chait noted in 2011, Penn almost parodied the Clintonian triangulation strategy Morris promoted back in 1996:

Penn’s idée fixe is that the Democratic Party’s fate hinges upon currying favor with the rich. His latest column consists of him, naturally, expressing deep horror at Obama’s proposals to raise taxes on the affluent as part of a long-term deficit-reduction plan, which he decries as “class warfare.” Penn uses the column to set out his version of modern political history, in which the Democratic Party’s political fortunes rise in direct proportion to their disavowal of the horrors of class warfare.

In addition to his drumbeat of attacks on “class warfare,” Penn offered an increasingly more conservative revisionist history of the Clinton presidency as a guideline to latter-day Democrats. It’s hard to know if this was a conscious preparation for his later defection to the other side, though as I noted (also in 2011) the path to apostasy was clear enough:

How many Clintonistas like Penn and Doug Schoen or Fox Democrats like Pat Caddell will be able to bring themselves to stop attacking today’s Democratic Party as an aberration from its proud past, and start attacking their own heritage and their own former bosses?

Penn did manage to avoid any real public criticism of Hillary Clinton in 2016. But once she was defeated, his movement into friendship toward and then advocacy of Donald Trump was steady and unmistakable. In a column for The Hill and then on Fox News, Penn quickly became a sycophant, as (again) Jonathan Chait tartly noted just before the 2018 midterms:

Penn’s latest paean to the greatness of Trump offers a disturbing window into the vacuous mind of one of the worst people to work in Democratic politics in the last generation …. Penn’s thesis is that, despite the predicted wave election he faces Tuesday, Trump has brilliantly outmaneuvered all his enemies. “His political survival after two years in office,” gushes Penn, “is a modern-day miracle.”

After the midterm, Penn’s mendacity reached new lows when he co-wrote a column predicting flatly that his former boss Hillary Clinton would run for president again in 2020, as a leftist, and would “easily” win the Democratic nomination, presumably before succumbing again to the brilliant and successful Trump. It’s as though Penn had to deny even Hillary Clinton’s claim to “Clintonism” so that he could deem it ruined and abandoned.

Well, now Penn seems to have reached his inevitable destination. After repeatedly attacking all of Trump’s foes, including the threat represented by the Mueller investigation, Penn got to visit the White House once again, as the New York Times reports:

Mark J. Penn, one of the primary architects of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, met briefly with President Trump in the Oval Office last week, according to two people in attendance.

The face-to-face meeting, the first between Mr. Trump and a onetime loyal adviser to the Clintons, marked what some saw as the inevitable conclusion of Mr. Penn’s long-running political metamorphosis.

So far as we can tell, Trump didn’t offer Penn a job, and Penn didn’t ask for one. But he’s now so clearly a former Democrat that he may have trouble trading on his service to the Clintons any longer.

In his journey to Trumpland, Penn has again followed his mentor Dick Morris, who became a fixture on Fox News before making such a fool of himself in predicting a massive 2012 Romney landslide that even that precinct of conservative spin got rid of him in embarrassment. Morris billed himself as a regular adviser to Donald Trump in 2016, though his day job was as “chief political commentator” for Trump’s friends at National Enquirer.

Both Morris and Penn have validated all the negative leftist stereotypes of Clintonism being a cynical corporate-serving, poll-driven scam aimed at moving the political system to the right. These two men should be struck by lightning for any further boasting of their association with the 42nd president and his first lady. And wherever they go, we can still smell the brimstone.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/former-clinton-advisor-mark-penn-turns-his-coat-for-trump.html

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2 peas in a pod...make that watermelons. Disgusting.

There's a difference between being racist against Jews, and criticizing Israel. I have some Jewish friends who are critics of Israel's policies, while most certainly agreeing with Israel's right to exist. There's a lot about Israel's policies that's worthy of criticism. And Omar -- though perhaps stating it clumsily -- was basically criticizing Israel, not Jews. I don't think her statement means she's racist.

This guy explains things pretty well: