But first…a definition of “Dem Fairytale.” My own term; my own definition. Take it or leave it.
Beginning with the Clinton I presidency, continued by the Obama presidency and pretty much ended in any practical way by the Clinton II “public position/private position/deplorables/GET RID OF BERNIE!!” debacle, the Dem Fairytale’s lifespan was as follows.
We’re on your side!!!
You.
The people!!!
Those other guys?
Those Republicans?
They only represent the rich.
Vote for us!!!
We’re the good guys!!!
But of course…as is plain to see now by anyone who is not totally blinded by the leftiness and neocentrist media…they were owned by the same corporatist forces that owned their supposed “opposition.”
The controllers’ position?
Simple.
Vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee, fools. We really don’t give a fuck. It’s all a win/win proposition for us!!!
Thus Clinton I’s NAFTA bullshit and his PermaWar efforts.
Thus Obama’s bailout of the very financial interests that were guilty of causing the 2008 economic breakdown and his own PermaWar/PermaGov actions both internationally and…at the very least in terms of universal surveillance…domestically.
But Trump broke the political duopoly mold, at which point many elected Republicans swore fealty to him in sheer self-interest while the rest of the rotten bunch formed an alliance with their erstwhile partners in the UniParty scam to get the fuck rid of him as soon as possible.
Which tactic also…so far, at least…doesn’t seem to have worked very well. I mean…he’s still there isn’t he? In the White House? Dominating the headlines, pro and con? He’s still packing the house at his rallies, right? Whatever jive polls to which you may subscribe aren’t showing his numbers seriously tanking, are they? As Booman has so plainly illustrated in his last several posts, that so-called “Blue Wave” that the leftiness media so gleefully hyped is looking extremely suspect in terms of its height, depth and carrying weight, isn’t it?
So…following a midterm election that probably doesn’t pan out to make any truly effective difference in the legislative governing numbers (Like say…taking the House and the Senate?), what are the prospects for the ongoing success or failure for the Democratic Party as a real “party of the people” instead of a hyped-up controllers’ party?
Read on.
Door Number One:
How the Mueller fairy tale ends (<http://theweek.com/articles/802798/how-mueller-fairy-tale-ends>)
Perhaps the best argument I have seen in favor of repealing President Trump’s pointless tax cuts is the superabundance of disposable income American liberals apparently spend on things like Robert Mueller bobble-head dolls, “Mueller is Coming” and “It’s Mueller time” T-shirts, Mueller “prayer” candles, and even children’s books featuring a super-buff bare-chested but tie-wearing Mueller lookalike hero. Turning the affectless head of a special counsel investigation into some kind of badass comic-book character who is going to rescue America from the nefarious clutches of — I wish I were making this up — “President Ronald Plump” could not be more childish. Goodness knows how many adults really believe all this stuff.
I feel bad for them, in the way that I feel bad for kids who are about to discover that the Tooth Fairy is fake. After 17 months of appending compound adjectives (“Russia-linked,” “Kremlin-backed”) to the names of an increasingly obscure cast of characters accused of things like sending spam emails and holding pointless meetings that went nowhere, it looks like we are finally getting close to the end of the Mueller probe. A report in Politico suggests that what skeptics have argued for more than a year and a half is true: namely, that Mueller and his team have not found any smoking-gun evidence of “collusion” between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government because no such collusion took place.
It’s going to be a letdown. Not only is it likely that the final report will not reveal that the president has been a KGB agent since the late ’80s, as at least one mainstream liberal columnist fantasized. It is also possible that it will never even be released to the public, at least not in full. Unless they are granted permission to review them under various conditions that will be imposed by the Department of Justice, not even members of Congress will be able to read Mueller’s findings. For reasons that have as much to do with Mueller’s own personality and style as they do with the sensitive nature of the material, the text itself is unlikely to be the sweeping anti-Trump manifesto that the president’s fiercest liberal critics are longing for. There is every reason to believe that it will be a straightforward, minimally expansive document that does not volunteer information that is not absolutely relevant to the main findings.
The fantasy of a piece of paper that would explain away the painful reality that a buffoonish television host beat a former secretary of state and senator in the 2016 presidential election simply by running a better campaign is not coming true.
—snip—
We are now a mere 469 days away from Democrats’ 2020 Iowa caucuses. It is time for them to give up on fairy tales and find a candidate who can actually beat this guy.
Behind Door Number One lies the Democrats’ 2020 Iowa caucuses and those that follow.
Hmmmm…
And who do you suppose…given the current state of things…will control those caucuses and the monies spent on various campaigns to secure the nomination?
Yup.
The DNC Gatekeepers/Doorkeepers…basically the same people who foisted HRC on us a scant 2 years ago. Please see my February 2017 post (Still front paged on this site!!!) “Perez now chairman of DNC. Oh Well…There Goes THAT Idea!!!” (<http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2017/2/26/02638/3076>) They may make a cosmetic change once again…probably more identity politics, if that’s even possible…but the good ol’ DemRat boys and girls who gave us Trump by failing to provide a scintilla of honesty in the party will still be in power unless something changes drastically and soon in the Democratic Party apparatus. Bet on it.
Or…
Door Number Two: (And I am not in any way implying here that the following particular example promises to be a game breaker, I am simply saying that people like him are appearing all over the Democratic Party’s candidate list these days…Ocasio-Lopez, Beto, Randy Bryce etc. People who are running against the Republicans and the DNC-chosen DemRats.)
Ojeda: Out of Appalachia pain, a tough-as-nails Democrat emerges. (<https://www.yahoo.com/news/ojeda-appalachia-pain-tough-nails-democrat-emerges-021152477.html>)
Part GI Joe, part steadfast advocate for West Virginia’s working poor, Richard Ojeda is pursuing the near-impossible: flipping one of America’s most conservative congressional districts and reclaiming corners of Trump country for Democrats.
Impoverished Appalachia is a culturally conservative bastion on edge, ground zero in an opioid abuse crisis that has devastated families, and where wages are stagnant, health care costs are rising and the coal industry is gasping for air.
Two weeks before midterm elections that will determine which party controls Congress, tough-talking Ojeda is urging voters in West Virginia’s third district to swallow a dose of the economic populism he preaches.
“I have no problems making some noise when they’re not doing right by the working-class citizens of this state,” Ojeda told AFP in a recent interview in Huntington, where his insurgent campaign is based.
“We’ve been absolutely duped and abused for far too long.”
Something about the campaign, which he likens to a “combat deployment,” is resonating; polls show him narrowly trailing his Republican opponent for the open US House seat, Carol Miller.
Ojeda’s no-fuss campaign attire is a beige pullover, khakis and combat boots. At a political roundtable at Marshall University, he clashes with a Republican delegate over abortion legislation.
After 24 years in the military with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the muscular 47-year-old father pulls no punches when it comes to lambasting Republicans including Trump, for whom he voted in 2016.
Trump, campaigning for Republican foot soldiers during a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, branded Ojeda “stone cold crazy.”
Ojeda’s response? Bring it on.
But he reserves his harshest criticism for those in his own party, which had dominated West Virginia politics for decades until Republicans snatched the legislature in 2014.
Two years later, Trump won Ojeda’s district by nearly 50 percentage points, among the largest margins in the country.
“The reason why the Democratic Party lost power was because the Democrats sucked,” Ojeda said.
“That’s the truth. We have people that were in office for 30, 40 years,” he said, pointing to establishment politicians “sticking their hand in the cookie jar.”
—snip—
“We got kids that go to bed hungry at night, we got elderly people cutting their meds in half, we got an opium epidemic ripping apart our community and that has killed thousands of our people, and we don’t have nobody that’s got the guts to stand up against big pharma,” he said.
Ojeda decided to act, and ran for state senate in 2016. Weeks before the election he was nearly murdered when a man struck him in the head with a metal object.
Ojeda recovered, and won.
Shortly before marching in a homecoming parade, he fielded calls from fans, including one who told Ojeda he would volunteer for his campaign if he ran for president.
Ojeda insists that for now, his focus is on helping West Virginians.
“At the end of the day, if nobody steps up, I’m not scared at all,” he said about a run for higher office. “I have no problems doing that.”
Hunter King, an 18-year-old son of a coal miner, says he will likely cast his first-ever ballot in November, for Ojeda.
“He’s the person who has made me feel most like I have a voice,” King said.
—snip—
If an appreciable number of these types of Dem candidates win…despite the possible overall results of the midterms, Blue Wave or no Blue Wave…perhaps the Democratic party will be forced to either switch to a more truly “people’s party” orientation or just give up the ghost to an increasingly Trump-dominated Republican Party.
We shall see in about two weeks.
Won’t we.
Let us pray.
Or continue to be preyed upon.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
P.S. I recently heard a radio ad on a sports talk station…Trump country about 80% of the time, even in the NYC area…that was aimed precisely at disaffected, working class Republicans. A guy who sounds like John Wayne on steroids identifies himself as a veteran military officer with recent combat postings. He starts talking about how badly many of his men have been harmed by by “payday lenders”…you know, the payday hustle with huge interest rates? Then he pivots to how well he “knows Bob Stefanowski”…the Republican candidate for governor in Connecticut…and how deeply disappointed he was when he found out that Stefanowski ran a payday lending company. He follows with a blurb in favor of the Dem candidate, Ned Lamont and then Lamont himself says that he “authorized this spot.”
Very effective, I think. I don’t know that much about Lamont, but somebody involved in his campaign has their finger on the pulse of Trump-type voters.
Encouraging.
