Month: February 2019

Adam Davidson of The New Yorker writes, “The one thing that is clear is that any declared theory about what Mueller is up to and when he’s going to be up to it is inaccurate.” I suppose that is correct.

I don’t want to be inaccurate, so I won’t predict what Robert Mueller will do or when he will do it. I do feel comfortable saying a bit about what I think he should do and what I think the media are getting wrong.

The number one error people are making is not understanding that the Office of Special Counsel has been tasked with investigating what the Russians did in the 2016 election and that everything else is secondary to that. There are other nations that may have played a role in helping Donald Trump get elected. It appears that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also played roles. I’m sure China was not entirely passive, although I’ve seen no signs that they had a preference about who would win. In any case, this has been primarily a counterintelligence investigation from the beginning, and under ordinary circumstances we do not get to see the results of counterintelligence investigations.

Robert Mueller has indicted 37 people on 199 different counts, but throwing people in prison wasn’t the point of appointing a special counsel. The Russians who were indicted were brought up on charges because they messed with our election, but bringing them to justice was and is less important than learning what they did. The rest of the people who have been charged have run into problems less because they’ve committed crimes than because they did not want to cooperate. Some of them have been charged with perjury or obstruction of justice, others have been nailed for committing frauds of one type or another. But these crimes were charged foremost as a means of pressuring them to help investigators learn what they actually want to know.

A counterintelligence investigation is meant to protect the country, and sometimes the best way to do that is to prosecute some folks. But we really need the Office of Special Counsel to do three things:

1. Uncover all the ways foreign powers (especially Russia) intervened and interfered in our election, and what help they may have had from Americans, including from people working on or with the Trump campaign.

2. Discover who may have been recruited or compromised by a foreign power (especially the Russians) and whether or not they are currently in a position to harm or undermine American national security.

3. Provide this information to people in government in a position to act on it.

Now, I think Donald Trump is a scoundrel who attracts other scoundrels like a magnet, so I’m pleased that people like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone are probably going to spend many years in prison. But the goal here is to protect the country.

By learning what foreign powers did to influence our election, we can hopefully better defend our future elections and avoid having a situation where a significant number of people don’t accept the results or respect the legitimacy of the process. If the people don’t buy into a representative system, that’s a recipe for civil unrest and puts us at risk for tyrannical and undemocratic governance. So, protecting our elections’ integrity is a key part of Mueller’s job.

If there are people in positions of power and influence who are compromised or worse by a foreign country, then we need to root them out. That’s what was done with Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and that’s the kind of task that counterintelligence investigations are supposed to accomplish.

In an ordinary case, a recommendation would be made to deny someone a job or security clearance. If they already have a job, as was the case with Flynn, then a recommendation will be made that the person be removed from that position. And in an ordinary administration, that advice would be heeded.

But this is not an ordinary case. In our present scenario, the FBI decided that the person who may be compromised (or worse) is the president of the United States. As Franklin Foer writes in The Atlantic, “A nation is waiting, with no clear sense of timing or resolution, to learn whether its leader is a foreign agent of a hostile power.”

The answer to that question may ultimately be qualified. Intelligence assessments are made with degrees of certainty, but rarely with certitude. What is glaringly, obviously adequate to deny someone a security clearance may not be enough to prosecute them as a traitor or spy. What we need to know is all the ways the president and members of his family and administration may be vulnerable to foreign influence or even blackmail.

It will be up to the only governmental entity with the power to protect the country against a rogue executive branch to do something with the information that Robert Mueller has accumulated. Maybe they will find it urgent to remove the president from office, and maybe they won’t. But the report from Mueller should not be a simple explanation of who he charged with crimes and who he declined to charge with crimes. That kind of report would be appropriate in a criminal investigation where all normal Department of Justice policies and protocols are followed. In that case, you don’t provide negative information about people who will not be charged and you redact names to protect the innocent. Grand jury testimony is guarded against disclosure, etc.

It looks like Attorney General William Barr wants to provide that limited kind of report to Congress, and he has some justification for that decision based on how the Office of Special Counsel law was written. But that is not what the country needs right now. It’s not what the country expects. It won’t help Congress protect our elections or decide whether or not to impeach the president or force the resignation of members of his administration.

Mueller’s report should include, first and foremost, a detailed account of everything he’s learned about foreign interference in the 2016 election, along with some guidance about how to protect against future efforts.

In addition, it should provide a counterintelligence assessment of the president’s vulnerability to foreign influence. There should be a classified version of this that is available to anyone in Congress who is willing to view it in a secure location and pledge not to reveal sensitive information that could compromise sources and methods. A declassified version should be made available to Congress and the public.

Only once these key elements are provided should we get to a discussion of what crimes the president (and others) may have committed that fall under the purview of the Office of Special Counsel. If the president conspired with WikiLeaks to disseminate stolen property, that’s one kind of crime. If he conspired with the Russians to coordinate the release of that stolen information, that’s another kind of crime. If he suborned perjury, tampered with witnesses, floated pardons, obstructed justice, lied under oath, and committed corrupt acts, those are still other kinds of crimes.

His crimes could warrant removal from office, but they’re of secondary importance. As a counterintelligence matter, we need to know if Donald Trump is a foreign agent of a hostile power. Even if he’s not, we need to know if he’s so compromised and subject to Russian blackmail that he cannot consistently act independently of Russia.

In other words, the Mueller Report should answer the key questions. If it doesn’t because attorney general William Barr says it doesn’t have to, then Mueller should provide the information directly to Congress by whatever means he deems necessary and adequate. Maybe he can do this by having his team testify to Congress, but that will only work if they are free to share their investigatory materials. If he must, Mueller should simply leak the report and dare anyone to punish him for it.

So, I cannot predict what will happen or when, but I can say confidently that the media are making things more difficult and precarious by not getting this story right. It is not about whether Trump committed crimes. It’s about protecting our elections and national security, and it’s about determining whether the president is able to act in the best interests of the country or if he’s basically captured by Vladimir Putin.

The media should be pressuring William Barr to abandon his position that the report can be treated as the kind of Department of Justice document normally produced at the conclusion of a criminal investigation. This is not a criminal investigation and never has been. From the beginning, the Office of Special Counsel took over a preexisting counterintelligence investigation of the president. The conclusions from that investigation are what we need to see.

Following are excepts from a truly brilliant dissection of the 2016 election, brought to us by the editor of Counterpunch, Jeffery St. Clair. Go read the whole thing. It will be well worth the time spent doing so.

That Magic Feeling: the Strange Mystique of Bernie Sanders

Will history repeat itself in 2020?

I sincerely hope not.

Read on.

That Magic Feeling: the Strange Mystique of Bernie Sanders

(I want to personally thank Senator Sanders for announcing this week that he’s running for president again, since his campaign will give a second life to my book on his 2016 campaign, Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes from a Failed Revolution. A lot has changed in the past two years. But, for better or worse, Bernie remains pretty much the same strange politician he has always been. Here’s the introduction. -JSC)

Out of college, money spent
See no future, pay no rent
All the money’s gone, nowhere to go
Any jobber got the sack
Monday morning, turning back
Yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go
But oh, that magic feeling…

–Lennon and McCartney, “You Never Give Me Your Money.”

Bernie Sanders had come home. Home to New York. Home to the city that fit his accent. Home to the borough that suited his cranky demeanor, his Jewish heritage, his gritty politics. Bernie Sanders wasn’t Clean Gene McCarthy. Sanders could be petulant, moody, even vindictive. A little bit of Brooklyn was still hardwired into his character. Frankly, Sanders always seemed like an interloper in Vermont. Too prickly, urban and disputatious for that verdant and mountainous sliver of WASPish New England. If more of the Brooklyn Bernie had leaked out during the campaign, things might have ended differently.

On a cool night in early April, Bernie stood on the stage in Prospect Park, facing more than 28,000 adoring fans, the largest gathering of the campaign. As he worked his way through his speech, Sanders hit all of the familiar notes–on the minimum wage, single payer health care, free college tuition, the corrosiveness of Super PACS-but he stood a little taller, his voice sounded a little friskier, he seemed fueled by the sense that he just might win the New York primary.

Could New York really be in play? Could Sanders upend the once invulnerable Hillary Clinton in her own adopted state, sending shockwaves through the System? What once seemed impossible now seemed to many Sandernistas tantalizingly within grasp.

This was, of course, the season of the improbable, the rare warping of political time when the odds were being defied week after startling week. This was a primary season in which aliens and the alienated finally featured in guest-starring roles. The mood of the country, sour and aggravated, seemed primed to embrace, for the first time in decades, a real outsider candidate, not so much because they found either of the two self-identified outsiders especially alluring, but because the electorate saw themselves as outsiders, exiles from a political system run by and for a remote and untouchable cabal of corporations, militarists and financial elites.

Nearly all agreed the system was rigged, programmed like some political malware to replicate the same results over and over again, generating torrents of booty into fewer and fewer hands, while leaving the rest of the Republic mired in debt and endless war.

Indeed, war has become the nation’s permanent condition. There seems to be a new one every few months. Few can keep up. And who goes off to fight them? Not many of us, or even people that we know. A new warrior class seemed to have taken root. We noticed them mainly from the decals on their trucks or from their wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs, rarely encountered in the check out line at Safeway.

More and more, machines were doing the war’s wetwork, killing nameless people in nameless regions on the far side of the world, hundreds of miles from any known base of operations. War has become background noise, the ambient soundtrack of our time.

It is one of the great failures of the Sanders campaign that he didn’t try to puncture some of the comforting illusions about American foreign policy. As cruelly as we treat our own citizens, Americans like to believe, in fact must believe, that our country remains a force of light and goodness in the most troubled precincts of the world. We are reluctant warriors, heroes for humanity. Sanders had a rare chance to expose America’s savage imprint on the world to his followers. With more than 800 military bases sprawling across the globe, the American military machine keeps the unruly living under a constant state of nuclear terror, each transgression against the imperial order disciplined and punished by SEAL team assassins, cruise missiles and drone strikes out of the clear blue skies.

The financial condition of the country also seems mired in a mysterious contradiction. The number of billionaires doubles every year, while everyone else is working harder yet falling behind month by month. In fact, the economy, chronically ailing for so long, finally seems to have turned malignant. Everybody knows this. Even the looters. Especially them. And the government is useless. Worse than useless. It exists not to contain the spread of economic disease or to alleviate the suffering, but to repress any minor revolt of the afflicted cells of the Republic. The evidence is all around. In homeless shelters, tent cities, food banks, and unemployment offices. Or under lock and key. One in 31 adults in America is rotting in prison or jail, or living circumscribed lives on probation or parole.  Twenty-five years ago, this rate was only 1 in 77. Police are killing a citizen somewhere on the streets of America every 12 hours or so, and every 18 hours that citizen is a black male. In fact, in the first six months of 2016, police had killed 585 people, up from the previous year’s total of 491 killed through June of 2015.

The country is out of joint. It had been for a long time. Was it really possible that the sleepers had awakened?  That Tea Partiers and Occupiers, Steelworkers and Black Lives Matter activists, had experienced a simultaneous epiphany? That some kind of convulsive change in the old corrupt orthodoxy was just around the corner? Well, so it seemed to some of us, suckers for almost any wish-fulfillment fantasy, in the crazy winter of discontent in America, circa 2016.

—snip—

But if Bernie’s blitz through New York was a time of swelling optimism for his campaign, it was also a moment of peak delusion. Bernie had lost the nomination well before he ended up losing New York, in something of a Clinton rout. In fact, the campaign had been over since Super Tuesday, when HRC marched almost unopposed across the South, racking up an insurmountable delegate lead. But the Revolution was defunct the moment Sanders elected to run as a Democrat, a decision he doubled down on months later when he rebuffed Jill Stein’s offer to the head the Green Party ticket and chose to endorse Hillary Clinton without equivocation on Prime Time TV at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia.

That fateful decision left a pall of evil hanging over the elections. A palpable evil. An evil you could smell. Even many of Hillary’s backers knew she was a force of evil. It’s why they talked so openly and frantically about the logic of lesser evil voting.

They knew she couldn’t be trusted. That whatever Faustian deal she struck with Sanders would not be honored. They knew that Clinton lies smoothly, effortlessly, and icily. That she lies about big and small matters, from her Goldman speeches to TPP, from her personal finances to Libya, from her e-mails to the DNC’s plot to get Bernie. Yes, even Democratic Party loyalists acknowledged her evil ways. But could they really be sure, deep down, that she was truly the lesser evil? What kind of complex calculus yielded the proof?

For the Democrats, the greater evil was Donald Trump, who seemed to rise like some monstrous dirigible on the same political air currents that had sent Sanders aloft. The two outsiders were in a sense alter egos, Sanders’s Dr. Jekyll to Trump’s Mr. Hyde. They spoke about many of the same issues, the same frustrations with the economic and political condition of the country, to strikingly different audiences and in different tones.  Trump prevailed because he was willing, indeed eager to burn down the Republican Party house with him. Sanders failed, in large part, because he wasn’t, even when the Democratic Party house, run with the ruthless calculation of any casino, conspired against him.

Trump burst on the scene like a character out of a Burroughs novel, a narcissistic junkie, desperate for his next fix of publicity–jittery, unpredictable, obscene, petulant and brutal. And impossible not to watch. There was a dark and dangerous erotic charge to Trump that was lacking in his rivals, especially from Sanders and Clinton, both of whom projected antiseptic and asexual personas. Trump, on the other hand, emitted the powerful pheromones of doom. At times it was hard to tell whether Trump was running a political campaign or directing a political snuff film.

—snip—

Hillary, naturally, projected the severe aridity of a tax auditor. Clinton’s foot soldiers looked like an army of grim conscripts going off to wage battle against their own villages. HRC would prevail, but even her most devoted followers knew there would be no fun in the triumph. It seemed unlikely that she could chop down Trump–and for months polls showed Sanders as the better bigot-slayer–Hillary knew all along what she really had to do was wait, wait for Trump to self-destruct. Only Sanders could trip her up and she and the DNC had that unlikely prospect pretty much fixed from the start. She didn’t need to be appealing. Clinton’s calling card was her inevitability.

—snip—

Sanders’s losing campaign, a campaign fated to lose, was not a campaign that attracted losers, not even beautiful losers. By and large, the Sandernistas were not social outcasts, not the homeless, the marginalized and the downtrodden. They weren’t black or Chicano. No. The Sandernistas were not scruffy street urchins and Bernie Sanders was not our political Dickens. They were raised in the suburbs of Madison and Denver on the white bread virtues of the old American Dream, a promise that had evaporated before their very eyes. They were educated and vested in the System, with enough social and economic status to have a credit score and acquire a mound of debt. The challenge for the Sandernistas will be to get beyond their sense of personal and political betrayal and to finally connect their movement for revolutionary change with the long-standing grievances of the American underclass.

—snip—

So…

Will the Dems surrender to “pragmatism” once again?

A “pragmatism” that considers international mass murder pragmatic? One where…I repeat:

Police [were] killing a citizen somewhere on the streets of America every 12 hours or so, and every 18 hours that citizen is a black male. In fact, in the first six months of 2016, police had killed 585 people, up from the previous year’s total of 491 killed through June of 2015.

God only knows what those numbers look like now.

Is this what we are facing?

With or without Trump in the race???

Another DNC silent coup?

In the name of “pragmatism?”

Look at what the last group of “pragmatists” brought us.

Please!!!

Especially…even if in possibly “winning” we still lose!!!???

Even if we still remain in the clutches of the .01%, whose aims have nothing whatsoever to do with anything except continued profit and the control that is necessary for that profit to continue to rise?

Let us pray not.

Thank you, and good afternoon.

Later…

AG

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the eastern shore Virginia farmhouse. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I had some technical difficulties in the form of fugitive paint, especially in the shadowed porch interior. As such, that area has been overpainted and now appears just a bit darker. The siding, lawn and roof also received some attention.

 
The painting is now finished.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Michael Cohen is furiously shoveling dirt on what he hopes will be Donald Trump’s grave. The question is, will newly confirmed attorney general William Barr put a stop to all the federal inquiries into the president’s business practices? So much seems now to depend on the integrity of one man.

Eighty years ago this week, 20,000 Americans attended a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. That was at a time when the Nazi regime in Germany was in the midst of building its concentration camps and was a mere months away from invading Poland, thus beginning World War 2 (or what historian Eric Hobsbawm referred to as the end of the 31 Years War). Don’t believe me? There’s a short film documentary of a portion of the event (A Night at the Garden) that you can view here.

The film is intended not merely as a documentary but also as a warning, according to its director, Marshall Curry (see the story in Vox for more details). There was at the time a vocal right-wing media and openly Nazi or fascist public figures who were given plenty of time to stir up hatred, and who did pose a genuine threat to the US republic.

Perhaps it is best to bear in mind that there has always been and always will be some sort of authoritarian undercurrent – some subset of our people (and this is true in other nations as well) who can be mobilized by some despot if the right set of circumstances emerges. Even a cursory reading of scholarship on authoritarianism should make that point crystal clear. Whether or not authoritarians are the product of social learning or heredity is still being debated. What cannot be debated is that this subset of humanity exists, and is at the moment plainly visible. The difference in the US between now and 1939 is that we’ve (mostly) replaced swastikas with MAGA hats. This is an undercurrent that has been gaining media exposure and influence consistently over the past three decades after several decades of containment following WWII. If you ever followed David Neiwert’s work, you’ll be well aware. Even Neiwert was never on your radar, it was clear something ugly was stirring by the early 1990s, and was almost ready for prime time by 2008 (Sarah Palin was just a few years ahead of her time).

My hope is that you will watch the video, and give it some thought. Those most likely to even be looking at this are not authoritarians. That said, complacency is not our friend. Things do in some ways seem less bleak than they did a couple years ago, but we’re still staring into the abyss.

As I am sure Sinclair Lewis would have long ago warned, it can happen here. In fact it almost did once. And while history may not necessarily repeat, we have to admit history does have one hell of a tendency to rhyme.

As above, so below.

From Newsweek. (https://www.newsweek.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-desus-mero-notorious-aoc-showtime-1340445):

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Showtime’s new late-night talk show Desus & Mero that the nonstop criticism and personal attacks lobbed her way is “validation” that she is doing something right.

During the first episode of the show on Showtime (it previously appeared on Viceland), Ocasio-Cortez, who hosts Desus Nice and The Kid Mero introduced as the “Notorious AOC,” admitted that the trolling and abuse was “heavy.”

“But in a weird way, that stuff is validation that you’re doing something real,” she said, reported The Daily Beast.

—snip—

Yup.

So…thank you once again, alla you neocentrist insult comedians.

Pile on. Enjoy your short stint in the sun, out from the rocks underneath which you have apparently been living.

You’re doing nothing but proving my point.

Plus…

The New York Democrat said she didn’t mind the online insults because many of them are “so weak.”

Yup twice!!!

Later…

AG

P.S. Looking at the neocentrist, McCarthyite trolling going on below, I guess it’s time to post my usual (non-zeroable) answer.

Sigh…

Oh well…

I wonder on what side of their mouths they will be lying once their beloved DNC is publicly proven to be as corrupt as the rest of the criminal government now in power up and down Washington DC, from the presidency straight on through to the crooked lobbyists who buy congresspeople. Diogenes would have contemplated suicide had he lived today.

Here is my usual answer to all of this claptrap.

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A group…or perhaps better, a cadre…of people on this site have tried everything in their power to discourage criticism of the Democratic Party as it stands today. They automatically downrate such posts and have endlessly attacked several posters as liars, fools, pro-Trump trolls and/or spreaders of Russian propaganda. When effectively rebutted, they simply ignore the rebuttal and repeat the same attacks. These McCarthyite tactics are intended to exhaust the patience of the attacked posters and discourage others from reading or posting similar material. It has worked on a few posters, who have simply given up. It has not worked with me. I initially answered their attacks with attempts at reason. After realizing that this was a total waste of time, I have pretty much stopped replying to them. My comments and articles on this site are my replies. Read what I have to say; consider what they have to say and how it is said, and then make up your own minds. Thank you-AG

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Long story short?

Sure.

He and his advisors are living in the present…maybe even a little into the future…when it comes to digital and personal contact with potential voters.

Why do I say that?

Read on.
From Politico (Emphases mine):

Here’s What Beto Could Unleash on Trump

He almost beat Ted Cruz. Could he take down Donald Trump? Inside the radical campaign strategy of Beto O’Rourke. By Sasha Issenberg, February 22, 2019

AUSTIN, Texas–With rain hammering outside, Zack Malitz stood in a warehouse space lit by strands of bistro lights and began to reveal the campaign strategy of Beto O’Rourke in exacting detail. Malitz, who was the field director of O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, is a tall 30-year-old with thick glasses and a haircut that over the course of an election season can drift inexorably toward mopheadedness. He laid out the exact numbers of potential voters the campaign believed it should try to reach, how many of those voters had a cellphone contact available, and–with a bit of arithmetic–a critical sum that would drive the campaign’s final push: the exact figure of volunteer phone-bank shifts he believed would be necessary to win the state.

This kind of granular campaign information is normally considered top secret, the kind of thing strategists guard behind passwords and fire underlings upon suspicion of leaking. If Malitz’s talk had resided in an encrypted PowerPoint presentation on a private server, it would have amounted to a creditable haul for a shift at the WikiLeaks home office. And if O’Rourke mounts a challenge to Donald Trump in 2020, that presentation may offer the purest encapsulation of how he might do it.

Yet Malitz was sharing it publicly, to hundreds of people who had seen an online call for supporters and decided to show up that day. It was September 15, less than two months before the Senate election, and nearly 2,000 people had registered for the stop on the campaign’s Plan to Win tour. More than 800 had ultimately traveled, through a rainstorm to a part of East Austin not known for available public parking, to attend.

“The plan to win is actually pretty simple,” Malitz said at the outset, his voice echoing from a handheld microphone. “Build a voter contact machine that enables thousands of volunteers in every single one of Texas’ 254 counties to have conversations with more voters across the state than any campaign in Texas history.”

For Democrats, that history was dismal. Malitz reminded his audience that the most recent presidential candidate to carry the state was Jimmy Carter, in 1976, and that no Democrat has won statewide office since 1994–the party’s longest losing streak in any state in the country. No Democrat running for Senate has come within even 10 percentage points of defeating an incumbent Republican in four decades. To construct a different fate in a midterm election, O’Rourke’s campaign would need to conjure 1 million votes from outside the current pool of active voters–in essence, create an entirely new electorate within the state’s borders.

This goal was so audacious that Malitz first had to convince his audience it was even demographically possible. He explained that the campaign’s data analysts had identified 5.5 million Texas voters who would be likely to support O’Rourke, but were not yet likely to vote in the 2018 election. The plan, he told his audience, was to go after every last one of them: at doorsteps, by text message and over phone calls launched by something Malitz called the Beto Dialer. All told, this would mean tens of millions of attempts to reach some of Texas’ most politically elusive citizens.

What was most radical was not the grandiosity of the rhetoric–lines about engaging everyone, especially nonvoters, are boilerplate in many Democratic speeches–but that a Texas Democrat could even have such a goal within his grasp. To meet it, O’Rourke’s campaign would need to pour fuel onto its already explosive growth, quickly adding thousands more unpaid callers, texters and block walkers to its ranks. The crowded rows before Malitz attested to the fact that O’Rourke could summon this level of volunteer manpower, but managing it all was a separate challenge. Building an organization of this scale might typically require months, even a year, of hiring and training field workers, then gradually seasoning them for new responsibilities. O’Rourke’s campaign had weeks.

“OK, so here we go!” Malitz exclaimed.

The mood swerved from TED talk to revival meeting. “If you’ve got space–a garage, your home, your business–that you’d like to donate for a pop-up, please stand up right now,” Malitz said. As people rose from their seats, Malitz summoned a round of applause–and then a dozen campaign staffers guided them to paperwork that would lock down their commitment. Then the same exercise for those volunteers who would manage a pop-up office or lead training for phone banks and block walks. Just minutes after having introduced his crowd to this mammoth project for the first time, Malitz had inducted hundreds of them into leadership roles.

At the same time Malitz was making his Plan to Win presentation in Austin, his deputy, Katelyn Coghlan, was reading from the same script in Houston to 354 attendees. Malitz had already given the pitch in Dallas and Denton, and was about to drive his Ford F-150, its backseat littered with Rockstar energy drinks and the Almanac of American Politics, to San Antonio to do it once more. Over events that weekend and the preceding one in Texas’ six largest cities, attendees committed to fill nearly 15,000 volunteer shifts.

Everything may be bigger in Texas, but when a three-term El Paso congressman set out to run for Senate the year before, there had been no reason to expect his campaign would reach such mammoth proportions. (It ended up with a staff similar in size to Donald Trump’s entire national organization in 2016.) For nearly a year, Malitz had been instilling in his team a relentless focus on growth at any cost, happy to trade away precision and accountability for scale. Along the way, they were happy to violate a number of shibboleths about how modern Democratic campaigns are supposed to operate.

O’Rourke is now on the precipice of running for president with “losing Senate candidate” as the most impressive line on his résumé. It was how he chose to run that campaign last year that sets him apart from his potential Democratic rivals. O’Rourke cast aside the hard-won heirlooms of Barack Obama’s campaigns: a vogue for data science, the grooming of a professional organizing class and a dedication to the humanism of one-on-one tutelage. Instead, his campaign followed principles that more closely resemble what Silicon Valley types call “hyperscale”–a system flexible enough to expand at exponential speed, paired with an understanding that getting big quickly can excuse and justify all kinds of other shortcomings.

In political terms, it amounted to a massive bet on a strategy of mobilizing infrequent voters instead of trying to win over dependable ones. National campaign strategists are paying close attention to how O’Rourke did it: Few candidates have committed as fully, if a bit recklessly, to the belief that a monomaniacal focus on large-scale turnout is the most powerful tool Democrats have to capitalize on their latent numerical majority in the United States.

—snip—

O’Rourke, who spent part of his 20s touring as a member of the band Foss, often spoke of bringing a punk rock sensibility to electioneering, and the valorized amateurism of the big-organizing approach fit well. The candidate spent much of his time behind the wheel of his minivan, often addressing voters live through an iPhone, a homespun form of travel that obscured a sophisticated online-fundraising chassis hidden beneath. “Driving this Dodge Caravan across Texas, it’s just us driving ourselves,” O’Rourke would say after one campaign stop in Midland. “There’s no private jet, no consultant, no pollster saying this is the message you have to say to this group or that.”

—snip—

O’Rourke dismissed his three kids to play basketball outside, killing the hootenanny vibe. Now in fireside-chat mode, O’Rourke talked a bit about the history of his El Paso home, his grounding in the “binational community” that spanned the Rio Grande to Ciudad Juárez, and the nine months he spent knocking on neighbors’ doors during his first run for Congress. “It was this beautiful, powerful, slow-building door-by-door wave that allowed us to connect with those whom we wanted to serve and represent. So I’m not going to ask you to do anything that I have not done,” O’Rourke said, as his wife, Amy, eased back into the frame. “Do not worry if you have never done this before. The days of campaign pros dictating how campaigns are run are over.”

—snip—

At the outset, Wysong planned around a modest statewide budget–“It felt like if we could get to $20 million, we could probably hang,” he said–that would require the field operation to be both very fast and very cheap. But O’Rourke’s dynamic digital presence turned out to be ideal for bringing in money. National party committees were still writing him off as too much of a long shot to fund, but small-dollar donors took to O’Rourke’s candidacy, especially as he associated himself with positions–Trump’s impeachment, abolishing ICE, likening the criminal-justice system to Jim Crow–that few other Democratic Senate contenders were willing to touch.

The campaign raised a remarkable $10 million in the second quarter of the year–more than twice what Cruz did.

—snip—

Malitz expected his field staff to sign up for volunteer shifts, instructing them “we will eat our own dog food,” and in that spirit several of his colleagues had come to the Hideaway that morning, as well. As she waited for the noon shift to begin, Emily Guzman Sufrin opened her laptop to monitor some of the conversations that volunteers were already having with voters. Sufrin’s prior job had been far from politics, as a curatorial assistant helping to put on the Whitney Biennial contemporary-art exhibition in New York, but she had grown frustrated with the small real-world impact she could have at a museum. She made plans to attend law school at the University of Texas, and while waiting to enroll, volunteered for O’Rourke’s campaign. Within weeks she was offered a job. Sixty percent of the field organizers that would be hired had never before been involved in an electoral campaign; three-quarters had not worked as a staffer on one. “We didn’t hire people with political experience,” said Malitz. “We just hired true believers who are brand-new to politics.”

—snip—

[The Cruz] strategy relied on the assumption that it wouldn’t help Cruz to mount an aggressive defense of his record. “Our entire plan was to make it about Beto as long as possible,” said Roe. “Just let the guy go.” What shocked Roe was how readily O’Rourke obliged.

—snip—

When O’Rourke’s team released his Plan to Win in mid-September, with its bold ambition to remake the electorate by drawing out a million new voters, Roe studied it long enough to know he did not need to take it seriously. The numerical goal ran afoul of a Roe axiom to distrust round numbers on activity reports. (“Always add a 12 or something to it and make it look real,” one adviser had advised junior staffers.) “I think if they would have used a number that was more realistic, it would have meant more to me,” said Roe. That one integer, in his view, obscured a more monumental grandiosity. “The theory of his case is that he has to turn out Democrats and unusual voters, and the Republicans can’t turn out,” he said. “Our theory of the case is: We need every Republican to go vote.”

—snip—

A late September appearance in Austin with Willie Nelson, during which O’Rourke joined the headliner on several songs, drew a reported 55,000 people–more than either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump were reported to have had at any of their 2016 rallies. With an impressive roster of celebrity fans, including LeBron James and Béyoncé, it was not difficult to imagine O’Rourke replicating or exceeding the Austin attendance in a number of Texas’ large cities.

—snip—

Wysong decided to take the country’s biggest new political celebrity and effectively send him underground for the biggest weekend of the year. When O’Rourke began Saturday morning by turning on Facebook Live from a phone affixed to the dashboard of his minivan, the Dallas skyline was visible through the rear windshield. But the candidate said nothing more about his destination. “The band is back, we’re in the van, and we’re gonna go do some block-walking,” O’Rourke said, from behind a pair of garishly orange sunglasses handed out by the fast-food chain Whataburger. (A total of 46,000 people ended up watching this part of O’Rourke’s day on Facebook Live.) Joined by his wife and a pair of staffers, with his children and other family members trailing in another vehicle, O’Rourke never identified where in Dallas he spent the day canvassing; later in the day he drove to Plano, and knocked on doors there.

Only at night, after the final shift of the day had ended, did O’Rourke attend a public event, a Blockwalk Celebration at a Dallas record store, where field organizers would welcome those who volunteered on Saturday and try to recommit them for shifts on Sunday and beyond. The next day he did the same thing in Austin and San Antonio. It was a perverse manifestation of the mobilization-over-persuasion dynamic that had grounded much of the campaign’s strategy since its outset. The only way for local stations to feature the candidate on their evening newscasts that weekend, typically an obsession of communications staffers seeking a last chance to reach late-deciding voters, was to use grainy, message-free homemade video of him walking suburban sidewalks.

A few people in the field room kept a muted Facebook Live window open on their computers while tending to other tasks, occasionally sharing updates with colleagues on O’Rourke’s canvassing movements. “The beauty of what’s happening now is it doesn’t have any effect on the field operation,” said Malitz, “so we can do our thing.”

When the votes were counted on election night, the final tally showed O’Rourke had lost by just over 2 points. It was a far narrower margin than most pundits and handicappers had anticipated, which gave rise to a sense both inside and outside the campaign that even in electoral defeat O’Rourke could claim to have accomplished something remarkable.

Since Election Day, Wysong has been making the rounds of Democratic Party elites to discuss the 2018 campaign and whether it represents a useful foundation for O’Rourke to mount a presidential bid in 2020.

Total turnout was above 8.3 million, a number much closer to what would be expected in a presidential election than a midterm year. (More Texans voted in the 2018 Senate race than in the 2008 presidential election, although the state has had a fast-growing population over that decade.) “Did we accomplish historical voter turnout in Texas? Yes. Was it enough to put us over the top? No,” Malitz shrugged two days after the election, as his team was emptying out its offices before leases expired. “It’s politics in the age of Trump. Historical data only means so much.”

—snip—

Like I said…real grassroots.

I think that an approach like that can win nationally, but I don’t know if it can win in primaries. Bringing out “non-voters” is one thing, but brining out…and changing the minds of…registered Democrats is another thing entirely. They would almost have to persuade large numbers of habitual non-voters to register en masse as Democrats, and do so early enough to qualify as primary voters.

We shall ee.

Personally?

I think O’Rourke’s going for it.

Wishful thinking?

Maybe.

Sometimes dreams do come true.

Later…

AG

I don’t imagine this will help the Republican Party win back any female voters, but maybe I’m missing something.

Did you need another reason to hate the New England Patriots?