Month: September 2017

So Mitch says he did an end run on the debt ceiling deal. Why has nobody noticed?

by digby

Huh:

Senator Mitch McConnell thinks Democrats were a tad premature in exuberantly celebrating the surprise spending deal they struck last week with President Trump.

“Let’s put it this way,” Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and majority leader, said Monday in an interview for The New York Times podcast “The New Washington.” “The deal is not quite as good as my counterpart thought it was.”

The reason? Mr. McConnell said that he insisted the newly passed legislation preserve Treasury’s ability to apply “extraordinary measures” and shift money within government accounts to pay off debt and extend federal borrowing power.

That will delay the need for another increase in the debt limit well beyond the December deadline that Democrats have been trumpeting as their big moment of leverage. And Mr. McConnell said he did so over the objections of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader and aforementioned counterpart.

In fact, Mr. McConnell said, the debt limit will not have to be increased until well into 2018, taking that volatile subject off the table for the December spending talks, and eliminating the Democrats’ most dangerous bargaining chip in the first round of negotiations.

Separating the debt ceiling from the deadline to fund the government also addresses one of the main complaints of conservatives who were unhappy that last week’s legislation linked hurricane relief and the increase in the debt limit, forcing many to either cast a debt limit vote they were unhappy about or to oppose hurricane relief.

“Since I was in charge of drafting the debt ceiling provision that we inserted into the flood bill we likely — almost certainly — are not going to have another debt ceiling discussion until well into 2018,” said Mr. McConnell.

Clearly irked by the perception that he got rolled by Democrats when President Trump accepted their proposal for a three-month extension of the debt limit and government funding, Mr. McConnell, an avid college football fan, said Democrats “spiked the ball in the end zone a little too early.” Instead, he said, he used his majority leader’s position to make something of an end run.

“One of the advantages of being the majority leader is you control the paper,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to legislation. “I wrote it in such a way that it does not prevent what is frequently done, which is the use of extraordinary measures. The minority leader and his team were trying to get us not to write it that way, but I did write it that way and that is the way it passed.”

Under the scenario Mr. McConnell sketched out, the December talks will now focus on hurricane relief and other budgetary matters and the administration can tell Democrats “see you next year on the debt ceiling.”

“I think I can safely say the debt ceiling and the spending issue in December will be decoupled because the debt ceiling will not come up until sometime in 2018,” he said.

The length of the increase in federal borrowing authority was a main sticking point in last week’s White House showdown that ended with Mr. Trump embracing the Democratic approach — his first real reach across the aisle on a major issue. Mr. McConnell and Speaker Paul D. Ryan were hoping for a much longer extension, possibly past next year’s election, and were caught off guard by the president’s acquiescence.

But though they are in the majority, Republicans need Democratic votes to raise the debt limit since many conservatives simply will not vote to do so. That dynamic is what caused Mr. Trump to accept the Democratic proffer.

Democrats were hoping that the same combination of factors — expiring federal funding and a necessary debt limit hike — would play to their advantage again in December, allowing them to cut an even bigger and more favorable deal that would cover spending for the rest of the fiscal year and other issues such as bipartisan legislation to stabilize health insurance markets and the immigration fight over young, undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.

Mr. McConnell’s strategy now is to break the two issues apart and try to put Republicans in a better position in the spending talks, leaving the debt limit for 2018.

Democrats, assessing the situation, said they were not sure it would inhibit them that significantly and were skeptical that Mr. McConnell would follow through since it would put Republicans on the spot for two difficult votes.

They said Republicans would still likely need Democratic votes for both the spending bill to come as well as the debt limit hike. A spending impasse could lead to a government shutdown that Mr. McConnell has been determined to avoid while a failure to raise the debt ceiling could cause a government default — an even more catastrophic outcome. And the debt limit fight would now be pushed into a difficult midterm election year when Republicans might be even more averse.

McConnel is not the “master legislator” that people liked to give him credit for. But neither is he someone who has no game at all.

We will see how this plays out in December.

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The inexorable Law of Unintended Consequences
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by htmvalerio via Flickr / Creative Commons.

The drug company Allergan has found a creative way to skirt the limitations on its patent for an eye medicine called Restasis. Joe Nocera explained last week at Bloomberg View he had heard CEO Brent Saunders speak at a conference speak of how drug prices had gotten out of hand. His company had a “social contract” with its patients, Saunders said, sounding statesmanlike. And now?

Late Friday afternoon, Saunders and Allergan showed their true colors: The company announced that it would transfer the patent rights to one of its most important drugs, the eye medication Restasis, to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. No pharmaceutical company has ever done anything like that before.

For the Native American tribe, the deal will generate a nice chunk of change: a $13.75 million upfront fee, and $15 million a year in royalties for “licensing” Restasis to Allergan. In the news release disclosing the deal, the tribe said its entry into the patent business would help make it less dependent on its casino in northern New York.

For Allergan, the deal means that, with the patents in the hands of a sovereign entity — which is the legal status of any officially recognized Native American tribe — potential generic competitors trying to overturn Restasis’s patents at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board will be stymied. Once the transfer takes place, the tribe plans to file a motion to dismiss those proceedings on the grounds that the patent office has no jurisdiction over a tribe. Assuming this is a winning argument — and it will surely be contested — Allergan’s Restasis monopoly, which reaps in the range of $1.5 billion a year, will continue.

But this is what businesses do. As the scorpion said after stinging the frog, “It is my nature.”

Wall Street calls the Allergan deal “innovative.” Nocera calls it sleazy, plus “sneaky, unscrupulous and just plain wrong.” Worthy of a Trump business, he didn’t add.

John Lanchester offers a lengthy New Yorker review of how the history of our civilization has been shaped by non-legal innovations. Technology of the non-digital variety having existed long before science, mastering fire and soap have had longer-lasting and more profound impacts on humanity than the iPhone. Yale political science professor James C. Scott examines just how profound in “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.”

Scott revises the conventional narrative that the Neolithic Revolution in which humans shifted from being hunter-gatherers to growing crops and domesticating animals gave birth to complex societies twelve thousand years ago. A gap of four thousand years separates people living in settled communities and the adoption of agriculture and animal husbandry.

Lanchester writes:

Our ancestors evidently took a good, hard look at the possibility of agriculture before deciding to adopt this new way of life. They were able to think it over for so long because the life they lived was remarkably abundant. Like the early civilization of China in the Yellow River Valley, Mesopotamia was a wetland territory, as its name (“between the rivers”) suggests. In the Neolithic period, Mesopotamia was a delta wetland, where the sea came many miles inland from its current shore.

This was a generous landscape for humans, offering fish and the animals that preyed on them, fertile soil left behind by regular flooding, migratory birds, and migratory prey travelling near river routes. The first settled communities were established here because the land offered such a diverse web of food sources. If one year a food source failed, another would still be present. The archeology shows, then, that the “Neolithic package” of domestication and agriculture did not lead to settled communities, the ancestors of our modern towns and cities and states. Those communities had been around for thousands of years, living in the bountiful conditions of the wetlands, before humanity committed to intensive agriculture. Reliance on a single, densely planted cereal crop was much riskier, and it’s no wonder people took a few millennia to make the change.

When finally they did, civilization bloomed. And cities and states and writing. What was different about grain as opposed to root vegetables or legumes? They grow underground or ripen at different times. Grains are visible and ripen at the same time, making them easier to quantify and tax. The earliest writing was used for bookkeeping and the earliest tablets were “lists, lists and lists,” says Scott.

Lanchester continues:

It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived through it.

The Law of Unintended Consequences is a bitch.

Lanchester spends the remainder of his essay wondering if perhaps humans weren’t better off before agricultural technology radically reshaped the way we live. Hunter-gathering societies were much flatter and less acquisitive. Bushmen who haven’t yet been assimilated still live that way, with social mechanisms to prevent members from treating other tribe members as inferiors, writes James Suzman in “Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen.” They put about seventeen hours a week into finding food and another nineteen hours into domestic chores. Are our lives so much better?

We are still promising ourselves that technology will free us from the drudgery of work even as our work-weeks lengthen and our prospects shrink. Our technology, we believe, will eventually create a world where, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, “the struggle for subsistence” is over, “the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance,” and we will view the love of money as kind of disease itself. How divorced from reality that dream seems today.

Which brings us back to the Allergan corporation acting according to its nature rather than to its CEO’s words. The legal technology of the corporation, as I have argued for years,

… the corporate model, this legal technology for engaging in what Robert Nozick describes as “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” has metastasized into a system where humans serve what they created. The corporation has gone Skynet. And as in the Terminator series, there is no system core to shut down.

The “core” is now woven into our daily lives. Corporations touch every aspect of our them, as agriculture did before their invention. How long before anthropologists and political scientists are examining the radical reshaping of civilization that accompanied the Corporate Revolution?

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Game theory: Trophy (***½)

Who helped the memesters?

by digby

I’m glad to see this getting some traction. I have always thought that the Russian government targeting of certain Democrats with hacked info and now these paid Facebook ads would likely need to be done by Americans. Maybe we’ll find out that it wasn’t. But it certainly should be investigated:

Mapping the full Russian propaganda effort is important. Yet investigators in the House, Senate, and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office are equally focused on a more explosive question: did any Americans help target the memes and fake news to crucial swing districts and wavering voter demographics? “By Americans, you mean, like, the Trump campaign?” a source close to one of the investigations said with a dark laugh. Indeed: probers are intrigued by the role of Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law, who eagerly took credit for crafting the Trump campaign’s online efforts in a rare interview right after the 2016 election. “I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with, and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting,” Kushner told Steven Bertoni of Forbes. “We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch.”

Kushner’s chat with Forbes has provided a veritable bakery’s worth of investigatory bread crumbs to follow. Brad Parscale, who Kushner hired to run the campaign’s San Antonio-based Internet operation, has agreed to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee.

Bigger questions, however, revolve around Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear how Kushner first became aware of the data-mining firm, but one of its major investors is billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer. Mercer was also a principal patron of Breitbart News and Steve Bannon, who was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the Trump campaign. “I think the Russians had help,” said Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I’ve always wondered if Cambridge Analytica was part of that.” (Cambridge Analytica did not respond to a request for comment.)

Senator Martin Heinrich is leading the charge to update American election laws so that the origins of political ads on social media are at least as transparent as those on TV and in print. Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, is also part of the Senate Intelligence Committee that is tracing Russia’s 2016 tactics. “Paul Manafort made an awful lot of money coming up with a game plan for how Russian interests could be pushed in Western countries and Western elections,” Heinrich said, referring to a mid-2000s proposal Manafort pitched to a Russian oligarch. “Suddenly he finds himself in the middle of this campaign. If there is a person who I think is very sophisticated in this stuff, and runs in pretty dicey circles, that is the place where I would dig.”

No evidence has emerged to link Kushner, Cambridge Analytica, or Manafort to the Russian election-meddling enterprise; all have denied colluding with foreign agents. (Kushner’s representatives declined to comment for this article. Manafort’s spokesman could not be reached.) Yet analysts scoff at the notion that the Russians figured out how to target African-Americans and women in decisive precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan all by themselves. “Could they have hired a warehouse full of people in Moscow and had them read Nate Silver’s blog every morning and determine what messages to post to what demographics? Sure, theoretically that’s possible,” said Mike Carpenter, an Obama administration assistant defense secretary who specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. “But that’s not how they do this. And it’s not surprising that it took Facebook this long to figure out the ad buys. The Russians are excellent at covering their tracks. They’ll subcontract people in Macedonia or Albania or Cyprus and pay them via the dark Web. They always use locals to craft the campaign appropriately. My only question about 2016 is who exactly was helping them here.”

Maybe no one. Or perhaps the chaotic Trump campaign unwittingly enlisted Russian-connected proxies who were eager to exploit any opening to damage Hillary Clinton’s run. It’s also plausible that Trump’s long-shot, anti-establishment bid was willing to take on assistance without asking too many questions. “Are we connecting the dots? I’m finding more dots,” said Quigley, who recently traveled to Prague and Budapest to learn more about the history of Russian influence campaigns. “I believe there was coordination, and I’m going to leave it at that for now.”

If we can make the trains run on time it will all be worth it, amirite?

by digby

It’s all good people. Nothing to worry about. Carry on.

What could go wrong with associating yourself with the most unpopular president in history?

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) is warning Democratic leadership about working too closely with President Trump for fear that the party may cede too much ground to Republicans on key issues.

“Let’s not fool ourselves,” Connolly told Politico. “He is this person we know, and I just think there must be both political and moral limitations with how far we’re willing to cooperate with that.”

Connolly’s comments come as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) have collaborated with President Trump on several key policy issues, to the surprise of many top Republicans.

“I am asserting that our base — our rank-and-file base — and a lot of us in the caucus, want to see … or hear, periodically, that parameters are being set,” Connolly said regarding the newly forged relationship between Trump and the congressional Democrats.

“And we get alarmed at the speculation that this might be a new day dawning,” he added.

On DACA, there is no choice. It’s a humanitarian crisis and the Democrats have to figure out a way to save nearly a million people. So, I get that. But I still maintain that Ryan and McConnell were perfectly happy to let Chuck and Nancy take credit for raising the debt ceiling and funding disaster relief so they could get the calendar cleared for the odious stuff on their agenda — like this Repeal and Replace hail mary. They took a hit with Rush Limbaugh but the Freedom Caucus got to vote against it and retain their street cred. You’ll notice they really didn’t put up much of a fuss either.

But aside from all the inside baseball, the idea that Democrats are going to rescue Donald Trump, the misogynist, white supremacist, xenophobe who has turned the entire world against this country and already set back the cause of peace and solving climate change by decades is …. demoralizing.

If they want to get a big turnout in November of 2018 they’d better make sure that their base doesn’t think they want the majority in order to ensure that Donald Trump gets to pass his agenda.

It won’t take too many more pictures of Nancy and Chuck and Don grinning like jacko-lanterns and patting each other on the back for Democratic base voters to figure it won’t matter who gets elected, Democrat or Republican and stay home. After all, that pig wins either way, right?

Karl Rove always said that politics is TV with the sound turned off. What does this tell you?

All hands on deck again


by digby

This Graham-Cassidy Hail Mary to repeal and replace Obamacare is a real threat. We don’t know that it will pass but now that the Democrats helped the Republicans clear the must-pass agenda for September so they could troll Paul Ryan, they have time to make another run at it before the deadline, after which the GOP will have to get 60 votes to pass it.

It’s very bad and my guess is that the hope is that Huckleberry Graham will be able to get his bff McCain to switch. It’s entirely possible. I don’t think McCain cares about destroying the health care system. He just wanted to stick it to Trump and he did that.

Anyway, that’s all spilled milk. It’s all hands on deck again for the next two weeks to make sure this doesn’t happen. It’s very, very bad:

PSA for DREAMers

by digby

Congresswoman Karen Bass sent this to her email list and I thought it would be a good idea to post it in case readers know someone who might find it useful:

I Have DACA: How Does the President’s Decision Affect Me?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has rescinded the memorandum which established the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” policy, otherwise known as “DACA” in 2012. This rescission changes the rules on acceptance and processing of DACA-related applications. Since this policy is not formally coded as immigration law, it can be terminated or amended by the Executive Branch of the United States Government, headed by the President. President Trump and Acting Secretary Duke have created a “wind-down” mechanism to end the program, putting many DACA recipients in limbo. This guide aims to answer basic questions about the near-future of DACA as outlined by the Administration.

Common Questions

It’s my first time applying. Can I still apply for DACA?

No, applications for initial consideration are no longer being considered. The last date to submit an application was September 5, 2017.

My current status is expiring soon. Can I submit an application to renew my DACA status?

If your status expires between September 5, 2017 and March 5, 2018, you may submit a renewal application. Your application must be accepted no later than October 5, 2017. If you have submitted your application prior to this date, it will be processed accordingly. Applications accepted after October 5, 2017 will be rejected. If your renewal period does not fall in this time frame, you cannot renew your status.

My current status and work authorization expires after March 5, 2018. Am I still eligible to renew?

No. The Department has stated that it will reject such renewals.

I currently have a valid DACA status. Does this change to the policy mean that I automatically lose DACA?

No. If you have been previously given a status, this rescission does not impact your remaining validity.


I would like to travel outside of the United States as a DACA recipient. Can I apply for a travel document?

No. The Department is not accepting requests for advance parole. Current travel documents that are valid may be used for travel, but the Department has made it clear that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will decide on the document holder’s admissibility. Before any travel outside of the United States, speak to an attorney.


I have a travel document application pending (Form I-131). When should I receive my travel document?

Documents for DACA-related cases will no longer be furnished. Advanced Parolee applications under DACA will be closed, and funds paid will be refunded.

Is there a publicly available copy of the memorandum’s rescission? Where can I find it?

Yes, you can access a copy of the document online on DHS website. This document can be viewed using the following link: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/09/05/memorandum-rescission-daca

Further, you can also find a copy of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announcement online at: https://www.uscis.gov/daca2017

I still have questions about the policy, its implications and how they relate to me and my family. Can you help me?

Legal questions specific to your case are best handled by a trusted attorney. Remember, a public notary is not an attorney. My offices are unable to give legal advice, but can provide guidance, explain the updated immigration policy and serve as a resource if you have questions.

by digby

And remember: Manafort manipulated Trump into picking Pence. Wonder why.

An attorney working on the Justice Department’s highest-profile money laundering case recently transferred off that assignment in order to join the staff of the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia, POLITICO has learned.

Attorney Kyle Freeny was among the prosecutors on hand Friday as a spokesman for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jason Maloni, testified before a grand jury at federal court in Washington.

Freeny, whose assignment to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff has not been previously reported, is the 17th lawyer known to be working with the former FBI chief on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. She departed from the courthouse Friday with two other members of Mueller’s squad: former Criminal Division chief and Enron prosecutor Andrew Weissman and Civil Division appellate attorney Adam Jed, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Before being detailed to Mueller’s team, Freeny was shepherding the Justice Department’s headline-grabbing effort to seize the profits from the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” on grounds that the film was financed with assets looted from the Malaysian government.

Freeny withdrew from the “Wolf of Wall Street” case on June 26, court records show, shortly before many of Mueller’s attorneys joined his team in early July.

Lawyers for the production company behind the film, Red Granite Pictures, said in a court filing in Los Angeles Friday that they’ve reached a settlement with prosecutors. A Justice Department spokesperson said he was aware of the filing, but declined to comment.

Freeny’s work on the movie-related case and the Manafort aspect of the Trump-Russia probe appear to have some commonalities

The Justice Department billed the “Wolf of Wall Street” case as a product of the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, an effort to pursue the proceeds of foreign corruption and return such monies to the public in the affected countries.

Justice Department officials including former Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the same kleptocracy project is probing the transfer of assets overseas by Ukrainian officials, including former President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort served as a consultant to Yanukovych and his Party of Regions — work that has triggered suspicions about the former Trump campaign chief because of Yanukovych’s warm relationship with Moscow.

A Manafort firm belatedly filed a report in June with U.S. authorities disclosing about $17 million in payments from the Party of Regions between 2012 and 2014.

Manafort has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime. However, in July, FBI agents executed an early-morning search warrant at his Alexandria, Va. condominium.

A spokesman for Mueller’s office confirmed Freeny is part of the staff, but he declined to elaborate on her role or what took place at the courthouse Friday.

It’s hard to know where all this leads, but Trump himself is up to his neck in money laundering. But obviously, Manafort is the low hanging fruit and they’re targeting him first.

I do think people need to be aware that this isn’t going to unravel quickly. I suspect they know some things but are leveraging what they know to get to what they don’t know. It’s a very big investigation including foreign governments and some elaborate schemes that go back many years. Its going to take a while before we know the scope of the crimes that were committed and whether or not Trump is going to be caught in the web.

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Before moving ahead to twoness
by Tom Sullivan

A friend sent a DKos post about a new organization, It Starts Today. The group hopes to “restart the 50-State Strategy” by raising small-donor money for every Democratic House and Senate race in the country, regardless of candidate. The reason is the Democratic Party has been playing the strategic targeting game at least since after 1994 and in the process losing ground in large swaths of the country:

Every time, it made sense in the short term. And, every time, this decision to be “strategic” and “efficient” also caused us to abandon more and more districts, essentially ceding them to the Republican party. As a result, each Democratic wave—think 2008—got reversed fairly quickly, as the Republican party rallied around a consistent message and fought back. Meanwhile, each Republican wave—think 2010—became that much harder to undo, as the Democratic Party focused on an increasingly smaller pool of “competitive” districts.

If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit. It’s been shortsighted, clearly, for Democrats in Congress, for winning the presidency, and for being able to advance an agenda when Democrats win it. Mark Warner put it bluntly when he told Yearly Kos in 2006, “[W]e cannot just go after 16 states and then try to hit a triple bank-shot to get Ohio or Florida.” Yet that’s how the party plays it again and again.

So, what did I think of this new funding idea?

A good one. Bypasses elected pooh-bahs in Washington accustomed to picking local candidates for us. But still too D.C.-focused. You can’t fund viable candidates you don’t have. Or you end up funding candidates who basically aren’t viable, money or no money. Chicken or egg? Not to discount the serious dampening effects of REDMAP and “gerrymandering on steroids,” but you can’t run money itself for Congress. At least not yet. You have to run strong candidates …. with money.

Generally speaking, viable congressional or statewide candidates start at the school board or city council level, then advance to the county level or state legislature and perhaps to D.C. or statewide office. (This path has its own pitfalls, but that’s a topic for another day.) Viable candidates rarely spring fully formed from nowhere.

Plus, Washington is less relevant than state legislatures from whence come senators and congressmen and governors and a ton of legislation that affects people’s daily lives at the state and local level. They define the character of a state, control redistricting and, as we have seen in Republican hands, work diligently to restrict voting rights.

President Hillary wasn’t going to help with that. Neither was President Bernie. It’s a local problem that must be solved locally. Relying on state and federal courts is not enough. Winning seats in Congress is not enough. Anyone disappointed by what Barack Obama didn’t accomplish over eight years knows holding the presidency is not enough.

Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy was about more than winning seats in Congress. It was about taking moribund county parties in places Democrats haven’t been competitive and turning them back into functioning political organizations. It was about electing Democrats at the local level and building a farm team for advancing to state capitols and to the nation’s capital. It was about building infrastructure from the bottom up, not from the top down, and in places national Democrats ignore.

A week ahead of one congressional election, our field team leaders made a sweep through the rural counties to check on the local parties’ preparations for Election Day.

So how was it going? we asked one group.

“We’re done,” they said. “We called through our lists and put out the signs. We’re done,” they said again with confidence.

They caught us glancing at each other in disbelief.

“You mean,” they asked, “you want us to do … more?“

Yes, we nodded. And yes, they did. And yes, we won.

That was a few cycles ago. But it’s not unusual for committees in out-of-the-way, red counties. They don’t do more because they don’t know what more to do, or they assume more takes resources they don’t have and never will. Rural counties where big campaigns don’t go get little exposure to the kind of nitro-fueled, SUNDAY-SUNDAY-SUNDAY, 20-something-staffed national campaigns where they can learn what “big organizing” looks like. Yet those places are where the state House and Senate seats lie that Democrats must flip to win back state legislatures across the country and build a strong national farm team. Wellstone and other groups train candidates and campaign managers. But few state organizations teach counties the nuts and bolts of supporting them at election time. State parties may provide a local field organizer and teach counties VoteBuilder and precinct organization. But not effective mobilization and campaign coordination across a countywide slate of races.

It is gratifying that since offering the For The Win election mechanics primer here, it has gone so far to 33 states. Over half the requests are from red states; the rest mostly from red areas of blue states. A few readers who have seen the link hope it is some grand strategy for winning back Washington in 2020. It’s not. Like Dean envisioned, it is for teaching neglected, under-resourced county organizations something more basic: how to put their pants on one leg at a time and tie their shoelaces, in that order. On a shoestring, speaking of shoelaces. It’s a primer, not a comprehensive manual. We’re not asking people to master long division. That comes later. And hopefully, so does winning back state legislatures.

There has been a flood of new volunteers for #TheResistance groups that have grown in power and influence since November 8. Indivisible, Our Revolution, and others. Some volunteers are veterans, but many others are new to political organizing. Every other enthusiastic recruit who walks into our headquarters for the first time wants to do messaging because the Democrats suck at it. (And they do.) But when Democrats can’t recruit candidates even to compete for local races, much less provide them solid logistical support, messaging is down the list of their problems. And if county organizations don’t have the organizational wherewithal for effective Get-Out-The-Vote actions, they really don’t have the resources for setting a national progressive narrative.

Woody Allen once created an imaginary spring course calendar. The description for Philosophy I explains, “Students achieving oneness will move ahead to twoness.” Many of us want to skip the first part. Others don’t know there is a first part. That comes with training and experience.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Special thanks to John Moriarty.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

lulz:

“Welcome back,” Maddow said after a commercial break. “My interview with Secretary Hillary Clinton is subject to an interruption because of this important video of a sneezing panda.”