Almost a year ago I blogged a series on the Eurozone and what was happening to the Greeks and what that means for us:
Good Bye Representative Schultz:
I imagine you have mixed feelings about your role as Democratic National Chair. On the one hand, you've been trashed and subject to contradictory expectations. At the same time the job you've been doing as Chair was one of two full time jobs with built in conflict of interests between doing both excellently at the same time. You are also a Representative from Florida. The DNC chair should go to someone not holding a current elective office. One of your jobs is protecting the competitiveness and integrity of Democratic primaries. That means making sure that the party is not an "incumbent protection machine." As an incumbent your wearing those two particular hats looked bad all along.
Nevertheless, Up until the 2014 election I made donations to the DNC when I had the funds, and supported you 100%. After the election I with-held support for you. I think you could have done more to vigorously elect a house and senate for Obama. And you did things that didn't help him.
There are two DNC strategies. One involves trying to use scientific calculations to pick which folks are going to win and support them; while writing off "losers." The other involves using a different kind of strategy, long term propaganda and is known as the 50 state strategy.
You gave lip service to the 50 state strategy while pursuing the "invest where one is most likely to succeed" strategy. I thought that was and is counterproductive as we humans are fickle and if we write off populations we guarantee losses. But we can never guarantee wins. So the long term strategy will get us solid majorities and the short term thinking so prevalent now will guarantee us minority status.
I also didn't like the way you took your time with some IT projects and similar. Those also are related to the 50 state strategy. So I'm glad you are stepping down and wish you'd done so on Nov 10 2014.
Your conflictive relationship with the Bernie campaign just illustrates the feckless way you've done your job at times. In some areas you've done well. But you didn't seem to even get the importance of managing party functions in a way that brings people in, give an appearance of openness, and let us Democrats have a say in how our party is run. I don't agree with the Bernie campaign's efforts to make our primaries open, but we do need to improve our primary process and make our party more open to participation.
Open primaries as Bernie envisions them would just lead to mischief from Libertarians, Republicans, the far left and big money. Democracy is in participation. Not simply the forms. And our role as democrats isn't only to vote for you and send you money. This is our party too. This is also how we defeat the corrupt Citizens United Decision. If the party provides a neutral vehicle for candidate selection and a powerful tool for the general election, we can't be beat. That tool is two way communication and quality reporting. It can be provided by volunteers if the party provides the resources.
We win elections when we have consensus. And we get consensus by getting involved. So I can't blame you for the Bernie-bots or Russian infiltration of our system. But we can do much better! We need a two way system and more participation. We get that through involving people in the internal operations of the party, by electronic voting and polling. We don't get there by being treated as subjects.
I never could figure out why my leftie friends were so anti-Hillary and so anti-Democratic until I started really listening with my mind, and not just my heart, to what they were saying. Then one day I figured it out! They think we are possessed by demons! They are as fictional, demagogic and delusional as the Right wing! They sound like the preacher in a tent revival! You can see the exaggerated and strident rhetoric on display right now as Bernie endorses Hillary and the "Busters"/far lefties, start bashing him just as they turned on Elizabeth Warren and most of the Democratic "establishment" during this election cycle.
Christopher Hedges is the ???Best??? example of this. He wrote in Truthdig back in February:
"The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no interest in genuine reform. They are wedded to corporate power." [Truthdig]
If he said "some Democrats" or "some of the Democratic leadership", or similar I probably would have agreed with him. I probably read this article around then and didn't take it too seriously because of my partial agreement. But this was around the time I was experiencing the "Bernie or Bust phenomena" and starting to realize I was dealing with something broader than simple "Hillary derangement Syndrome", which I'd often seen on the right but hadn't experienced much on the left. Naivety I suppose.
On October 31st 1990 this article appeared in the Washington Post about Brunswick Maryland:
"Voters in this former railroad town on the Potomac River ousted their mayor today in what was apparently the first-ever successful recall election in the state's history." [WashPost]
The Mayor was Susan V. Fauntleroy. What was she recalled for? The report says she was attacked for:
"increased spending and water rates that skyrocketed under an effort to modernize an antiquated system." [WashPost]
What she had done was to fix Brunswick's water supply and sewage system. She also had committed the crime of being a woman who was a "relative newcomer:"
"Fauntleroy, who had attributed the recall move to her sex and her status as a relative newcomer, said in the statement she had prepared in case of defeat that she was sorry that "prejudice has arisen in Brunswick and that it has overcome, for now, the progress of good government. I regret that I will no longer be involved in charting the future of our town."
I guess no good deed goes unpunished.
