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Correct The Record Thursday November 27, 2014 Roundup:
Headlines:
“Complementing that operation is Correct the Record, a subsidiary of American Bridge that Brock launched last year to push back against misinformation about Democratic presidential candidates, which so far has meant defending Clinton constantly and consistently.”
New York Times column: Gail Collins: “Counting Benghazi Blessings”
“There are rumblings from some Senate Republicans that what the next Congress needs is a good joint House-Senate Benghazi investigation. On the other hand, the House Agricultural Committee seems to have no interest whatsoever in initiating a probe. For this, we are truly thankful.”
Associated Press: “Southern Democrats trying to recover lost ground”
“Georgia's Democratic chairman, DuBose Porter, defended Carter and Nunn as ‘world-class candidates’ who can run again. He said Democrats ‘proved Georgia can be competitive in 2016,’ but he cautioned against looking for a nominee other than Clinton. ‘She puts us in play,’ he said.”
Politico: “Political caution on Ferguson”
“So far, Clinton has kept quiet about the grand jury’s decision and the eruptions that followed, even though she has spoken about the issues raised by Brown’s death in the past.”
The Nation editorial board: “Wanted: A Challenge to Clinton”
[Subtitle:] “Even the most ardent Hillary supporters should acknowledge that Democrats—and the country—will be better served if she has real competition in the primaries.”
Politico blog: Dylan Byers On Media: “Not ready for Hillary, cont.”
“Eariler this month, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel told our colleague Maggie Haberman that her magazine planned on propping up a Democratic alternative to Hillary Clinton.”
Breitbart: “Krauthammer: Dems ‘Betrothed’ To Hillary”
“Columnist Charlies Krauthammer said that Democrats are ‘betrothed’ to Hillary Clinton on Wednesday's ‘Hugh Hewitt Show.’”
Articles:
By Michelle Goldberg
November 25, 2014, 2:05 p.m. EST
David Brock, the conservative journalistic assassin turned progressive empire-builder, is sitting in a conference room in the Park Avenue South offices of the MWW Group, a public-relations firm owned by Democratic mega-donor Michael Kempner. Fifty-two years old with a silver pompadour, and wearing round glasses with wire frames, he's barely recognizable as the skinny, dark-haired operative who, during the Clinton administration, had an answering-machine message that said, ‘I'm out trying to bring down the president.’
That, of course, was before he publicly repented, first in a 1997 Esquire article, ‘Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,’ and then in 2002's self-flagellating book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. It was before he founded Media Matters for America, which monitors the right-wing media, in 2004, and American Bridge, an unprecedented Democratic opposition-research organization, in 2010. It was before he became a favorite of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the very couple he'd spent his years as an enfant terrible trying to destroy.
Yet Brock's years in the conservative movement still mark him, particularly in how he conceives of his current mission to expose and defeat his former allies. First among the lessons he learned on the other side, he says, ‘is the idea of permanence. Ideological campaigns for our values have to be waged on a permanent basis and not only in election years.’ Further, he says, ‘you have to have the resources commensurate with your goals if you're going to hope to achieve them. Money isn't by a long shot enough, but it's a prerequisite. Something else I saw on the right, and that I've tried to apply in a different context, is recruiting top talent and trying to pay them close to what they're worth. And the last thing—and this might be the most important—is patience. Goals this big, you're not going to achieve them overnight.’
These days, Brock has moved well beyond the repentance phase of his political turnaround. He's no longer trying to ingratiate himself with the Democratic establishment—he's now a part of it, employing hundreds of people at organizations with budgets in the tens of millions. Recently, his network has been experiencing a spurt of growth—one that's likely to continue as the Democrats ramp up their efforts on the 2016 race after the disastrous midterm elections.
An avid Hillary Clinton supporter, Brock is already deeply engaged in the presidential contest. His group American Bridge captures almost every public utterance by prominent Republican politicians, using both DC-based researchers and a national network of professional trackers; it currently has people following all of the even remotely plausible contenders for the Republican nomination. Complementing that operation is Correct the Record, a subsidiary of American Bridge that Brock launched last year to push back against misinformation about Democratic presidential candidates, which so far has meant defending Clinton constantly and consistently.
Meanwhile, in the last year, Brock has expanded into law, ethics and journalism organizations, giving him multiple new fronts for political combat. In August, he took over the corruption watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, prompting fears that the progressive but nonpartisan group—which in the past has gone after members of both parties—will start ignoring the ethical lapses of Democrats. (Brock disputes this. He could, he says, imagine CREW pursuing Democrats under his watch, but he emphasizes that CREW's history shows there's simply more corruption to be found on the right.)
The same month he acquired CREW, Brock announced the formation of the American Democracy Legal Fund, which is intended to battle the GOP in the courts and has already filed fifteen complaints against Republicans and Republican-aligned groups. Also, his new journalistic grant-making organization, the American Independent Institute, will give out $320,000 this year to reporters investigating right-wing misdeeds.
When I met with Brock, he suggested that I talk with Howard Dean about the work he's been doing. Shortly thereafter, Dean e-mailed me to set up the interview. Dean had become chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2005, a year after Brock launched Media Matters, and says he quickly realized that Brock had ‘the best communications shop on the left. He had an ability to crystallize issues, mobilize people and call out the Republicans—and the Democrats to this day are still floundering over that.’
‘It never occurred to me that David Brock needed to be redeemed,’ Dean adds. ‘He redeemed himself.’
* * *
Journalists writing about Brock's growing web of organizations sometimes say he aims to be the Democratic Karl Rove. A better analogy, though, might be that he's becoming a liberal version of Paul Weyrich, an architect of the modern conservative movement who founded or co-founded the Free Congress Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, among other organizations.
‘Beginning in the early 1970s…Weyrich set out to create an infrastructure on the right—political and legal interest groups, coalitions, think tanks, magazines, and political action committees—to rival that of the left,’ Brock wrote in Blinded by the Right. Within a decade, ‘Weyrich's operation dwarfed anything like it on the left, making it possible for people like me to flock to Washington in droves and find jobs.’
Brock's early career is a testament to the power of the right's ideological apparatus to recruit and nurture new talent. Arriving at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981, he was a liberal Democrat, his politics formed, in many ways, by his alienation as a closeted gay teenager growing up in a crushingly conservative Dallas suburb. At Berkeley, though, he found himself repelled by the culture of doctrinaire leftism and swung the other way. Once he did, he was embraced by a well-organized right-wing network ready to groom smart young foot soldiers.
As an undergraduate, Brock started a neoconservative weekly, the Berkeley Journal, financed by conservative alumni, and published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, ‘Combating Those Campus Marxists.’ John Podhoretz, then the editor of Insight, the magazine of The Washington Times, noticed it, flew him to DC for an interview and gave him a job as a writer. Next, Brock moved to a fellowship at the Heritage Foundation underwritten by the John M. Olin Foundation, and then a job at the money-losing American Spectator magazine, which was primarily supported by the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. There, a right-wing heiress offered to fund a ‘special investigation’ into Anita Hill, who had accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; it eventually became Brock's scurrilous bestselling book, The Real Anita Hill.
Next, he became a key player in the campaign to bring down Bill Clinton. It was Brock who gave us the trumped-up ‘Troopergate’ story, introducing the world to a woman named Paula, who later came forward as Paula Jones. Her sexual-harassment lawsuit against Clinton—waged, in part, by the Rutherford Institute, a conservative Christian legal group—would ultimately lead to the exposure of the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky, and to his impeachment.
* * *
It took years for Democratic funders to awaken to the need to build an intellectual infrastructure to compete with the one that almost destroyed Clinton's presidency, and that later helped to put George W. Bush in the White House. In 2003 and 2004, Rob Stein, a prominent figure in Democratic politics, began showing select groups of progressive donors, politicians and activists a PowerPoint presentation that he'd created, ‘The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix,’ which laid out the internal workings of the modern right. One slide broke down how much right-wing donors were spending, as of 2002, to maintain their ideological apparatus, including $200 million on think tanks, $46 million on legal advocacy and $11 million on media monitors.
Former New York Times Magazine political reporter Matt Bai devoted a chapter of his 2007 book, The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, to Stein and his ‘Killer Slide Show.’ Bai wrote: ‘Wealthy contributors on both coasts told me that Rob's slides had awakened them, at last, to the truth of what was happening in American politics. They stumbled back onto Wall Street or Wilshire Boulevard or the Embarcadero blinking into the sunlight, as if having witnessed a revelation.’
In 2005, Stein organized about 100 of these donors, including George Soros and Peter Lewis, into the Democracy Alliance, a group that agreed to direct money toward building progressive institutions. In its first year, the Democracy Alliance brought $1.75 million in new funding to Media Matters, making up more than a fifth of its budget. (Other recipients included CREW, the Center for American Progress, America Votes and the powerful progressive-voter database Catalist.)
Donors loved Brock's conversion story, particularly since he'd been inside the machine they hoped to replicate. And Brock, in partnership with fundraiser Mary Pat Bonner—often described as his secret weapon—has turned out to be unparalleled at maintaining rich liberals' loyalty and support. ‘The two of them together are probably the most effective major-individual-donor fundraising team ever assembled in the independent-expenditure progressive world,’ Stein says.
That wouldn't matter, however, if Brock couldn't show his backers that he's effective. Over the years, Media Matters has won or assisted in a number of tangible victories, from getting Glenn Beck off cable news to holding 60 Minutes accountable for its faulty Benghazi reporting. It obviously hasn't shut down Fox News, which remains the highest-rated cable network, but Brock is persuasive when he argues that his group has been key in convincing the mainstream media to take Fox News less seriously.
‘When we started, the right-wing media were operating with total impunity, and with no consequences or repercussions for anything they said or did,’ Brock asserts. ‘And that's changed. Not to the extent that we'd like—we're still working on it—but they don't get away with what they used to get away with. I think we've had success in marginalizing and discrediting a lot of those characters.’
* * *
American Bridge was the natural next step. By means of this group, Brock took the Media Matters method—which involves monitoring virtually every word uttered by the right-wing media—and transferred it to the realm of Republican politicians. ‘There's no organization that does the level of tracking and research that we do,’ says American Bridge president Brad Woodhouse, who previously served as communications director for the DNC. ‘The parties don't do it; the campaigns don't invest in it. There's no one that has the ability to pull this type of stuff—video, news archives, our own video archives—as quickly and as cleanly to use in a rapid-response fashion as we do.’
As its archive grows, Woodhouse expects the organization to only become more powerful. ‘The true testament to this is going to be what our archive looks like five years from now,’ he says. Woodhouse is sitting in his office on the sixth floor of the DC Chinatown building that houses American Bridge as well as Media Matters—a floor that, with its high ceilings, exposed pipes and Ping-Pong table, looks more like a tech start-up than a wonky political shop. Gesturing around, he notes: ‘This whole floor will be nothing but servers at some point, full of all of our tracking footage, all of what we've captured from radio interviews, television interviews, both nationally and locally. There won't be anybody who has that.’ As of this year, American Bridge staffers can search the archives by audio, meaning that they needn't sit through hours of footage to find a particular incriminating name or phrase.
Initially, American Bridge was greeted with skepticism by Democratic insiders and journalists alike. As a devoted Clintonite, Brock had little connection with Obama's people, who were wary of independent-expenditure groups, as were some of his own donors. ‘[W]hen Brock went to his donor base and asked, it did not step up,’ wrote Jason Zengerle in a 2011 New York magazine profile. ‘For the first time in his fund-raising career, Brock didn't have the magic touch. Peter Lewis, for instance, hasn't given any money…. In the end, Brock was forced to dramatically scale back his plans.’
Reports of American Bridge's failure, however, turned out to be premature. Shortly after the profile ran, Brock met with Lewis in his New York apartment, and the billionaire agreed to become an American Bridge seed funder. More important, American Bridge would have an enormous impact on the 2012 elections, where it deployed trackers in thirty-three states. One of them was watching the local Missouri television station KTVI when Senate candidate Todd Akin opined about ‘legitimate rape’ being unlikely to result in pregnancy.
Akin's remark in many ways defined the 2012 election cycle, powering the idea that the GOP was fighting a war on women. As Paul Begala, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, points out, without American Bridge, the remark might not have made any impact at all. Akin's ‘bizarre rant,’ he says, ‘would have been a tree falling in the forest—but some nerd from American Bridge saw that. Todd Akin would be a United States senator if it wasn't for David Brock and his team.’
Begala, like Dean, is an unabashed Brock fan. He's quick to emphasize that American Bridge's value isn't limited to capturing gotcha moments. As an adviser to Priorities USA Action, a major Democratic Super PAC, Begala says of American Bridge: ‘They produced for us a 950-page book of every business deal of Mitt Romney's career. We spent something like $65 million [in the 2012 election], and I believe every single ad was in some ways informed by Brock's research.’
Unfortunately for Democrats, there wasn't an Akin moment in the 2014 cycle. American Bridge may have been a victim of its own success, as Republicans went to great lengths not to provide Brock and his allies with new fodder. ‘Little was left to chance: Republican operatives sent fake campaign trackers—interns and staff members brandishing video cameras to record every utterance and move—to trail their own candidates,’ The New York Times reported the day after the election. ‘In media training sessions, candidates were forced to sit through a reel of the most self-destructive moments of 2012, when Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock's comments on rape and pregnancy helped sink the party.’
Ultimately, relentless tracking operations—which Republicans, taking a page from Brock, are now deploying against Democrats—may portend a future in which candidates are even less candid than they are now, and the only viable politicians are those who learn to spout vapid talking points the moment they win their first State Senate race or City Council seat. Yet Brock insists that tracking will remain important. The very structure of American politics, in which Republicans must win over far-right voters in primaries before tacking to the center in general elections, ensures a degree of flip-flopping and dissimulation that Democrats can exploit. ‘It's a bit overstated that tracking is only looking for the ‘macaca' moment,’ says Brock, referring to the slur caught on camera that derailed Senator George Allen's re-election bid in 2006. ‘Tracking is very, very valuable for when candidates change their positions. It's a versatile thing.’
With a budget of more than $17 million and some eighty-plus staffers, American Bridge has grown even bigger than Media Matters, which has a staff of just under eighty and a budget of $10 million. In addition to tracking every Republican Senate candidate and plausible presidential contender in 2016, it also has people following twenty-one gubernatorial campaigns and a number of House races. Further, through its ‘Rising Stars’ program, American Bridge is tracking Republicans who aren't running for major office now, but who might one day go on to national prominence—people like George P. Bush, Jeb Bush's son and a candidate for Texas land commissioner.
‘When somebody who ran for Congress in 2012 runs for president in 2028, we're going to have an archive full of material,’ says American Bridge chief operating officer Jessica Mackler.
* * *
No matter how big his operations get, however, there are still some fundamental ways Brock can never achieve a true analogue of the right-wing network that launched his career. One reason for this—and the reason that most on the left can applaud—is simply that Brock has more integrity than his previous employers. For all the comprehensiveness of his opposition research, Brock no longer traffics in sexual innuendo or character assassination; Begala says he's never received a single morsel of personal dirt from American Bridge. The ugliness of Brock's early career, Begala adds, left him with a ‘marrow-deep aversion to the politics of personal destruction. It's definitional with David. I've been around him a fair amount ever since then, and I've never heard him say, ‘Let's go after John Doe—he beats his dog!' Nothing like that.’
But if Brock isn't as ethically unconstrained as his old friends, he's also not as passionately ideological. In the end, his political journey has taken him roughly back to where he started: he's a center-left Democrat, uninterested in any sort of radicalism. His final exit from conservatism, after all, happened after he set out to write a book trashing Hillary Clinton and came, instead, to sympathize with her. Since then, he's been transformed into a fervid Clintonite, and he doesn't hide the fact that he wants to see her elected president. Brock is interested in fighting the right, not in pushing his own party to the left.
In Blinded by the Right, he recalls how one of Weyrich's first scalps was the Republican Texas senator John Tower, George H.W. Bush's nominee for defense secretary, who was distrusted by conservatives as a pro-choice moderate. Testifying before the Senate at Tower's confirmation hearing, Weyrich said, ‘I have encountered the nominee in a condition—a lack of sobriety—as well as with women to whom he was not married.’ These rumors ultimately helped sink the nomination, even though Tower wasn't married to anyone at the time.
It's nearly impossible to conceive of Brock mounting a similar attack on a Democratic president's nominee, even in a less slimy way. He has, however, gone after left-wing critics of the Clintons. When Harper's published the October cover story ‘Stop Hillary!’ by Doug Henwood, a Nation contributing editor, Correct the Record responded with a point-by-point rebuttal of over 9,000 words. Some of it was convincing, some of it—particularly an earnest defense of Clinton's record on welfare reform—less so. Whatever you make of it, though, it demonstrated that Brock is willing to fight challenges to the Democratic establishment that come from progressives as well as conservatives.
In fact, should there be a contested Democratic primary, Brock won't swear off using Correct the Record to defend Hillary Clinton from a left-wing challenger. ‘We don't know if Hillary Clinton is running; if she does run, we don't know whether there will be a contested primary; and if there is, we don't know what that will look like,’ he says. ‘So I'd just say I'm not going to comment on anything that's hypothetical.’
It was probably inevitable that an intellectual infrastructure funded by rich progressives wouldn't be radical in the way of one funded by rich reactionaries. Guy Saperstein, a retired Oakland trial lawyer and major liberal donor, quit the Democracy Alliance in 2008 out of frustration with its failure to invest in new, boundary-pushing left-wing ideas. (The same year, he stopped donating to Brock, whom he admires tremendously, because Brock was ‘so heavily tilted towards Hillary.’) Much of his frustration came from the fact that his fellow funders seemed more committed to electing Democrats than to deep, systemic ideological change.
‘You've got to give it to the conservatives,’ Saperstein says. ‘They've really run circles around our side. They staked out ground very early on, on subjects where the political consensus would have called them crazy. Of course we need a welfare program—it's crazy that they would go out and attack the welfare system. But, you know, twenty years later, they have Bill Clinton saluting them! They just moved the whole debate, and they've done that in so many areas.’
With few exceptions—gay marriage being a big one—deep-pocketed Democratic donors have rarely shown the zeal or the patience to nurture far-reaching ideological change; they tend, ironically, to be more conservative in the small-c sense. Gara LaMarche, who became president of the Democracy Alliance last year, may begin to change this pattern. He has been vocal about the need for donors to support a progressive vision that extends beyond the next election. ‘In general, progressives have not been audacious enough,’ LaMarche says, speaking about his desire to make the Democracy Alliance ‘not a cheering section for the Democratic Party, but a place where progressives can actually talk about the long term.’
At this point, however, the Democracy Alliance is far from united in a desire to push Democrats leftward. Its membership, according to LaMarche, ‘includes everyone from people who are very associated with, let's say, Elizabeth Warren's view of economics, to people who have worked in the Clinton administration and have more of an identification with the Rubin wing of the party.’ (He's referring to Robert Rubin, the Goldman Sachs veteran and former director of Citigroup who served as Clinton's treasury secretary.)
From Brock's perspective, there is nothing to lament in the fact that liberal donors and institution builders tend to be more moderate than their right-wing counterparts. Members of the conservative establishment can empower right-wing radicals, he says, ‘because they don't have any regard for the truth of anything. They have no standards, and they're very brazen about it. It's a very different culture on the Democratic/liberal/progressive side.’ And it's within that culture—sensible, nondogmatic and technocratic—that Brock has finally found his place. ‘I don't think progressives can abandon their respect for evidence-based conversation and logic, because it's one of their strengths,’ he says. ‘I don't think you should throw that away to have a noisier machine.’
New York Times column: Gail Collins: ‘Counting Benghazi Blessings’
By Gail Collins
November 26, 2014
This year, in a break from tradition, I am giving thanks for the House Intelligence Committee’s final report on Benghazi.
Also family and friends. But I give thanks for them every year. This is our first opportunity to be grateful for the House Intelligence Committee’s Benghazi report. So let’s jump at it.
Really, you don’t get good news like this all the time. The committee spent two years conducting a bipartisan investigation into the terrible night in 2012 when four Americans, including the Libyan ambassador, were killed in a violent attack on an American compound. It found that while mistakes were made, the Americans on the ground in Libya made reasonable decisions, as did the people trying to support them. The C.I.A. was brave and effective. Nobody in the White House thwarted a possible rescue or deliberately tried to mislead the public about what happened.
Whew. You can imagine the excitement when this report was unveiled. Or, actually, quietly posted on the committee’s website. On Friday evening. On the eve of a holiday week.
The Intelligence Committee is, of course, led by members of the Republican majority. The only time Republicans don’t talk about Benghazi, it turns out, is when they report about their findings.
The silence was pretty deafening. Except for Senator Lindsey Graham, who helpfully told CNN: ‘I think the report’s full of crap.’ And Newt Gingrich, who theorized that the Intelligence Committee had been ‘co-opted by the C.I.A.’
Newt knows. (‘I’ve talked to four different people who have a real interest in this topic at a professional level. They are appalled by this report.’)
There have always been two ways of looking at Benghazi. One is as a terrible loss that might have been mitigated if the diplomatic compounds had been better protected, and that the State Department needs to rethink its traditional bureaucratic approach to overseeing security. The other, far more exciting, possibility is that this is all about Obama-Clinton perfidy. Was there a team of potential rescuers who were kept away from the fray because the administration didn’t want to admit it had underestimated the terror threat in Libya? Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, confided at a Republican fund-raising dinner that he had ‘suspicions’ that Hillary Clinton told then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ‘to stand down.’ The Intelligence Committee didn’t find any evidence whatsoever that that had occurred. But they were, you know, co-opted.
The committee and its staff spent what one Democratic member said was ‘thousands of hours’ reading intelligence reports, cables and emails about the incident. It was a heck of a commitment. Although, to be fair, surely no more than the House Armed Services Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which have been looking into exactly the same events and coming up with pretty much the same conclusions.
Still to come: A special $3.3 million House Committee that Speaker John Boehner has created to pursue what Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina says will be the ‘final, definitive accounting of the attack.’ The effort is needed, Boehner said, because the ‘American people still have far too many questions’ to let the inquiries drop now after nobody has had a chance to look into the matter except a special independent review board, the House Intelligence Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And then, of course, there’s the House Oversight Committee, under the irrepressible Representative Issa, which shows no sign of wrapping up its Benghazi investigations. Issa has already sent Gowdy a 37-page letter listing what he said were State Department efforts to obstruct his probes. But he’s required to step down as chairman at the end of the year, and his replacement, Jason Chaffetz of Utah, seems to be planning a less lively approach. The top Democrat on the committee, Elijah Cummings, said Chaffetz had shown ‘a sincere interest in working together,’ as opposed to Issa’s sincere interest, at one point, in cutting off Cummings’s microphone at a public hearing.
We give thanks for all the congressional investigations into Benghazi. Who says Congress can’t reduce unemployment? In March, the Defense Department said that it had devoted ‘thousands of man-hours to responding to numerous and often repetitive congressional requests regarding Benghazi, which includes time devoted to approximately 50 congressional hearings, briefings and interviews’ at a cost of ‘millions of dollars.’
Meanwhile, there are rumblings from some Senate Republicans that what the next Congress needs is a good joint House-Senate Benghazi investigation. On the other hand, the House Agricultural Committee seems to have no interest whatsoever in initiating a probe. For this, we are truly thankful.
Associated Press: ‘Southern Democrats trying to recover lost ground’
By Bill Barrow
November 27, 2014, 9:00 a.m. EST
ATLANTA (AP) — To rebuild in the conservative South, Democratic leaders say their party must become more aggressive advocates for the middle class in an effort to energize African-Americans and attract whites.
After the Republicans' success in the midterm elections, many say the Democratic Party should openly embrace government as a tool for lifting people out of economic hardship. They are advocating a return to party roots by emphasizing education and public works spending, stronger voting rights laws, tighter bank regulation and labor-friendly policies such as a higher minimum wage.
‘It's time to draw a line in the sand and not surrender our brand,’ said Rickey Cole, the party chairman in Mississippi. He believes that candidates have distanced themselves from the last half-century of Democratic principles.
‘We don't need a New Coke formula,’ Cole said. ‘The problem is we've been out there trying to peddle Tab and R.C. Cola.’
Even so, Cole and other Southern Democrats acknowledge divisions with prominent populists such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is expected to run for president in 2016, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
A major challenge in the South is finding candidates who can win high-profile races now that Republicans dominate the leadership in state legislatures and across statewide offices.
Georgia Democrats thought legacy candidates were the answer. But Senate hopeful Michelle Nunn, former Sen. Sam Nunn's daughter, and gubernatorial challenger Jason Carter, former President Jimmy Carter's grandson, each fell short by about 8 percentage points despite well-funded campaigns and ambitious voter-registration drives.
Arkansas Democrats lost an open governor's seat and two-term Sen. Mark Pryor. Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu led an eight-candidate primary but faces steep odds in a Dec. 6 runoff. Democrats' closest statewide loss in the South was North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan's 1.7 percentage point margin of defeat.
Exit polling suggests Democrats did not get the black turnout they needed and lost badly among whites. Nunn and Carter got fewer than 1 in 4 white votes, while Pryor took 31 percent and Landrieu 18 percent.
Should Landrieu lose, Democrats will be left without a single governor, U.S. senator or legislative chamber under their control from the Carolinas westward to Texas.
J.P. Morrell, a state senator from New Orleans, faulted a muddled message that began with candidates avoiding President Barack Obama. ‘You have to articulate why the economic policies we advocate as Democrats actually benefit people on the ground,’ Morrell said.
In Georgia, Nunn supported a minimum-wage increase and gender-pay equity, but her television ads focused on ending partisan rancor. Carter mostly accused Republican Gov. Nathan Deal of shortchanging public education. Nunn and Carter supported Medicaid expansion under Obama's health overhaul, but neither emphasized that argument in television advertising.
‘No real economic message got through,’ said Vincent Fort, a state senator from Atlanta.
Georgia's Democratic chairman, DuBose Porter, defended Carter and Nunn as ‘world-class candidates’ who can run again. He said Democrats ‘proved Georgia can be competitive in 2016,’ but he cautioned against looking for a nominee other than Clinton. ‘She puts us in play,’ he said.
In an interview, Carter focused more on tactics than on broad messaging, saying the party must register minority voters and continue outreach to whites. ‘If 120,000 people change their mind in this election, it comes out differently,’ he said. ‘But it takes a lot of time to build those relationships. ... You can't expect it to happen in one year.’
Gary Pearce, a Democratic strategist and commentator in North Carolina, said Hagan's margin in a GOP wave offers hope for 2016, when statewide executive offices will be on the ballot. Fresh arguments, he said, ‘will have to come from younger Democrats in the cities.’ He pointed to several young Democratic candidates who won county commission seats in Wake County, home to Raleigh.
Cole, the Mississippi chairman, acknowledged that any new approach won't close the party's gap in the South on abortion, same-sex marriage and guns, and said Democrats intensify that cultural disconnect with ‘identity politics.’
While the party's positions on gay rights, minority voting access, women's rights and immigration are not wrong, Cole said, ‘those people who don't see themselves in those groups say, 'What have the Democrats got for me?'‘
Unapologetic populism, he said, would ‘explain better that the Democratic Party is for justice and opportunity — with no qualifiers — for everyone.’
Politico: ‘Political caution on Ferguson’
By David Nather and Katie Glueck
November 26, 2014, 7:15 p.m. EST
[Subtitle:] As tensions flare, 2016 presidential crowd treads lightly
One by one, potential 2016 candidates are starting to weigh in on this week’s events in Ferguson — carefully.
For New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who may run for the Republican nomination, it’s all about stopping the violence. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, also a Republican, also called for calm, while adding ‘we all should be color blind.’ Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a possible long-shot Democratic candidate, says the answer is better listening and better understanding.
And Hillary Clinton? She’s stayed silent, and her aides are giving no sign that that’s about to change.
The only likely 2016er to opine at length on Ferguson is Rand Paul, a Republican who has made criminal justice reform and minority outreach part of his brand. He told POLITICO on Tuesday that the crisis in the Missouri town highlights the need to reform the justice system, a topic he expanded on at length in a an opinion piece for Time later that day.
But for the most part, the men and women eyeing the White House are sticking to generalities or staying out of it completely. Few have offered their sympathies to Ferguson residents and protesters across the country who see a grave miscarriage of justice in a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer who shot dead Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old.
There are good strategic reasons for that, political operatives and lawmakers say. While 2016 candidates will have to say at some point where they stand on the issues of race and justice raised by Ferguson, doing so now, as disruptive demonstrations continue, risks coming across as opportunistic. And just one poorly thought-out comment could inflame an already sensitive subject.
‘If Hillary Clinton, who is someone I consider a friend … called and asked me what she should do about the situation, I would just say, ‘Look, there’s a road that leads around Ferguson. I suggest you keep driving down that road,’’ said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat who is closely involved in the efforts to ease the tensions there. ‘This is a very delicate situation, and the last thing we need is political exploitation … I don’t think it would be helpful now.’
So far, Clinton has kept quiet about the grand jury’s decision and the eruptions that followed, even though she has spoken about the issues raised by Brown’s death in the past. The same goes for many of the best-known possible Republican contenders, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Rep. Paul Ryan, and Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
Christie, however, wasn’t shy when asked about the issue while serving Thanksgiving dinner at a Newark soup kitchen on Wednesday.
‘I think everyone has a right to protest, but those protesters need to be nonviolent,’ Christie said, according to The Associated Press. And in a dig at President Barack Obama, Christie noted that ‘the country has anxiety over lots of things, and the only thing that clears up anxiety is leadership and direction.’
He added, though, that ‘I’m suggesting lots of people have responsibility for that … not just the president. He’s just one of them.’
Perry also emphasized the need to prevent violence and his support for law enforcement. ‘Any time a young person loses their life it’s a tragedy, but it is wrong to perpetuate tragedy with violence. I support the rule of law everywhere in America and commend law enforcement officials who put their lives on the line to protect our families and support responsible leaders who advocate for peace,’ the Texas governor said in a statement Wednesday.
O’Malley echoed the call for less violence.
‘The only way to promote peace in the streets of our nation is to better and more deeply understand the pain that all of our fellow citizens have now experienced in Ferguson. Violence only brings about more violence,’ O’Malley said. ‘To improve law enforcement in America, to save lives, to promote peace, we must be able to better understand and listen to one another.’
Other potential 2016 hopefuls will have a hard time avoiding questions about Ferguson in the coming days, especially at public appearances. Clinton’s next such event is on Monday, when she addresses the League of Conservation Voters. Her aides didn’t respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Clinton did address the Ferguson issue in a carefully balanced speech in late August, declaring that ‘we cannot ignore the inequities’ in the criminal justice system and concluding that ‘we can do better’ — but also praising the ‘decent and respectful law enforcement officers who showed what quality law enforcement looks like.’
Staffers working for other potential White House contenders aren’t ruling out statements at a later date; a Ryan aide said the Wisconsin representative is not expected to say anything ‘until after Thanksgiving.’
But so far, the potential candidate who has said the most about the events in Missouri is Paul.
‘Michael Brown’s death and the suffocation of Eric Garner in New York for selling untaxed cigarettes indicate something is wrong with criminal justice in America. The War on Drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation,’ Paul wrote in Time.
He also declared that while he’ll keep working on criminal justice reform and restoring voting rights to non-violent felons, ‘my hope is that out of tragedy, a preacher or teacher will arise — one who motivates and inspires all of us to discover traits, ambitions, and moral codes that have slowly eroded and left us empty with despair.’
An aide to Paul said the Kentucky senator spoke out because ‘after everything that had happened in Ferguson, he wanted to say something, he wanted to reiterate what the Brown family said and channel those frustrations toward positive change.’ Paul is also expected to introduce legislation soon to prevent the militarization of local police forces, an issue he’s been working on with GOP Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
Dave Carney, a Republican strategist and a former Perry adviser, said it makes sense for Paul to take on the issue: ‘It’s going to be his brand, or part of it. He’s in a perfect position to do that.’ But otherwise, he said, politicians should weigh in on Ferguson only as part of a broader, coherent philosophy. Those who haven’t thought through their position on race relations, he said, should avoid injecting themselves into the issue.
‘If you get asked about it, you should definitely have a position,’ he said. ‘But throwing out a press release, unless you’ve really thought through this and have a framework to solve the overall issue, I just don’t know what the benefit would be to comment.’
Aside from Paul, one potential 2016 candidate who directly broached the issue of race in his statement this week was Jindal.
‘A young man is dead — this situation is truly a tragedy and our hearts go out to his family,’ the Louisiana governor said in a statement to POLITICO. ‘Some have used this as an excuse for lawlessness, arson and destroying property, but that is not the answer. The community must come together in the aftermath of this situation, not divide itself by acts of violence. I do not care what pigmentation anyone’s skin is. Justice is color blind, God is color blind, and I believe we all should be color blind.’
For most political operatives, the bottom line is that a candidate can do more harm than good by speaking out too quickly.
‘The worst thing a candidate could do is say something that could potentially inflame the situation,’ said Democratic strategist Bill Burton, a former Obama spokesman. ‘I think there will be a time to have a debate on the factors that led to Ferguson, but now is almost certainly not that moment.’
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, however, said it’s fine for presidential candidates to start to make their views known — as long as they don’t screw it up.
‘If politicians can find ways to discuss the way forward and not just try to inject themselves to sow seeds of discord or even further division, than the simple answer is yes,’ Brazile said. Like the demonstrators, she said, ‘politicians and even would be presidential candidates have the right to speak.’
The Nation editorial board: “Wanted: A Challenge to Clinton”
By The Nation’s editorial board
November 25, 2014
[Subtitle:] Even the most ardent Hillary supporters should acknowledge that Democrats—and the country—will be better served if she has real competition in the primaries.
After the dispiriting midterm elections, with the highest spending in history and the lowest turnout in the postwar era, there is a heightened sense of urgency about the 2016 presidential election. Senator Bernie Sanders feels it acutely. ‘This country faces more serious problems today than at any time since the Great Depression. We have already, in the midterms, gone through an election where there was no substantive debate about the most important issues, which is why you have, I think, the lowest voter turnout since 1942,’ says the independent from Vermont. ‘The idea that we could go through a presidential election where you have all these right-wing Republicans on one side talking about their issues, and then, within the progressive community, not to discuss issues like the collapse of the middle class, the growth in poverty, the fact that we’re the only country in the industrialized world without a national healthcare program… to discuss climate change when the scientific community tells us that we have a short window in which to address it; not to discuss these and other issues would, I think, be horrendous for this country. Absolutely horrendous.’
Horrendous, yes, but not beyond the realm of possibility.
In February, The Nation launched Project 45, a multiyear examination of the process by which the forty-fifth president will be chosen, with a ‘commitment to encourage those who will fight to prevent the hijacking of the 2016 campaign by high-powered strategists, well-heeled donors and big media outlets that are more interested in cash, and a vapid politics of personality, than in a genuine clash of ideas.’
Many will argue that in today’s politics, shaped by mega-rich donors and an intellectually disengaged punditocracy, the best we can hope for is a contest between candidates who are acceptable to the money and media elites. The first test of whether this is the case comes in the next few months, as potential challengers to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—characterized by a Wall Street executive in a Politico article as the ‘relatively tolerable’ Democrat—must decide whether to try to displace a front-runner who leads national polls and key-state surveys by more than 40 percent.
Sanders is one prospect. Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb is another; he has launched an exploratory committee to determine whether there’s room for a ‘nobody owns me’ populist run. Outgoing Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley would also like to be considered, despite suffering a setback when his designated successor unexpectedly lost on November 4. And the group Ready for Warren just launched a three-month drive to get Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to rethink her steady refusal to run. The desire for an alternative to Clinton is real: a November survey of Democracy for America members found 42 percent favored a Warren run, while 24 percent were for Sanders. Clinton was at 23 percent.
We share that desire. As we argued in February, even the most ardent Hillary supporters should acknowledge that the Democratic Party, and the country, will be better served if she has real competition in the primaries. This is not an anti-Hillary message; it’s a pro-democracy one. It is about whether the party will speak to the real concerns of voters. We need a Democratic presidential candidate with a smart, populist program untethered to Wall Street and committed to dismantling a rigged system that enriches the very few at the expense of everyone else. The appeal of progressive values and issues in the midterm elections—in which voters in red and blue states overwhelmingly endorsed referendums calling for increases in the minimum wage, paid sick leave and Medicaid expansion—demonstrates the public’s hunger for such a message, and the promise of such a politics.
The Democratic Party’s challenge today is that, in the minds of many voters, it is no longer linked with the issues it says are important. In part, that’s because big money and bad media warp our politics. But it’s also because the party is too close to corporate funders and too frequently fails to speak to the tens of millions still struggling in a weak recovery. One of the core understandings of Project 45 is that, in the process of nominating a presidential candidate, parties define themselves not merely as a reflection of the candidate, but as a reflection of the demands raised in primaries and platform fights. For this process to work, however, there must be challenges both to the front-runners and to assumptions about what is possible and what is necessary.
Bernie Sanders is right when he says there is ‘a desperate need’ for candidates who will challenge those assumptions. But he is also right that it can’t just be about candidates; it has to be about movements. Activists must be willing to do the hard work—inside and outside the Democratic Party—of building a powerful progressive movement that can redefine our politics. Only organized people can counter organized money, and because organizing takes time, the point at which to make that commitment is not in 2016. It is now.
Politico blog: Dylan Byers On Media: ‘Not ready for Hillary, cont.’
By Dylan Byers
November 26, 2014, 3:02 p.m. EST
Eariler this month, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel told our colleague Maggie Haberman that her magazine planned on propping up a Democratic alternative to Hillary Clinton. ‘We believe that there’s a kind of economic populism and an agenda … that we hope to drive into 2015 and 2016. And Hillary Clinton, because of her history, because of her team, has not been part of that wing of the Democratic Party,’ Vanden Heuvel said. ‘[E]ven the most ardent Hillary fans should understand that sometimes not only her party and the country — but her candidacy — would be better served if she has competition.’
As promised, The Nation has now published an editorial calling for such a challenger:
‘The desire for an alternative to Clinton is real: a November survey of Democracy for America members found 42 percent favored a Warren run, while 24 percent were for Sanders. Clinton was at 23 percent. ... We share that desire. As we argued in February, even the most ardent Hillary supporters should acknowledge that the Democratic Party, and the country, will be better served if she has real competition in the primaries. This is not an anti-Hillary message; it’s a pro-democracy one. It is about whether the party will speak to the real concerns of voters. We need a Democratic presidential candidate with a smart, populist program untethered to Wall Street and committed to dismantling a rigged system that enriches the very few at the expense of everyone else. The appeal of progressive values and issues in the midterm elections—in which voters in red and blue states overwhelmingly endorsed referendums calling for increases in the minimum wage, paid sick leave and Medicaid expansion—demonstrates the public’s hunger for such a message, and the promise of such a politics.’
More on progressive media's disenchantment with Hillary here and here.
Breitbart: ‘Krauthammer: Dems ‘Betrothed’ To Hillary’
[No Writer Mentioned]
November 26, 2014
Columnist Charlies Krauthammer said that Democrats are ‘betrothed’ to Hillary Clinton on Wednesday's ‘Hugh Hewitt Show.’
‘I think the Democrats are in such a swoon over Hillary...they are committed, they are betrothed, this marriage has already been set. I don't think anybody's going to give her serious trouble’ he stated.
Krauthammer added that Clinton's status as a longtime politician ‘works somewhat against her,’ but would not be fatal because ‘she's Clinton,’ and was not seen as a ‘hack politician’ like Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV).
Calendar:
Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official schedule.
· December 1 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton keynotes a League of Conservation Voters dinner (Politico)
· December 1 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton hosts fundraiser for Sen. Mary Landrieu (Times-Picayune)
· December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts Conference for Women (MCFW)
· December 16 – New York, NY: Sec. Clinton honored by Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (Politico)
· February 24 – Santa Clara, CA: Sec. Clinton to Keynote Address at Inaugural Watermark Conference for Women (PR Newswire)