As already posted here, the Minnesota Dem primary is between a conservative AIPAC supported candidate and a progressive, Peggy Flanagan, a Native American Ojibwe activist serving as the 50th lieutenant governor of Minnesota since 2019. A
member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, Flanagan served
in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019. Flanagan grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. She is a citizen of the White Earth Nation. She is endorsed by Bernie and AOC.
The conservative has the big money advantage, the war chest to spend and spin. Grassroot support belongs to Flanagan, and the question is whether money or grassroot legitimacy will win the primary. Either way, the DFL is likely to win the Senate seat in the general election, replacing Tina Smith, who has endorsed the progressive. Amy Klobuchar is running for Governor and a likely winner, who will then vacate her Senate seat that she's held since the Big Bang, or it seems so.
The pediatrician running now against Lindsey Graham's sister in South Carolina might win the general election against the Republican, but the odds are uncertain. A good - indeed superior - candidate against a state that went Trump in 2024. That is a pivotal election. That race is discussed in the below post.
Michigan is in play. The Republicans are running whoever, I care not to discuss that, and the Dem candidate Crabgrass favors is a progressive endorsed by Bernie and AOC, as Guardian reports -- Abdul El Sayed, a physician, seeks a primary win to become Democratic Party general election candidate. (He is not AIPAC endorsed.)
The Michigan primary is days away.
Quoting Guardian from the subheadline onward:
Abdul El-Sayed may be buoyed by a younger, anti-establishment coalition as he runs against an establishment candidate
El-Sayed, running in Michigan
to be the Democratic candidate for US Senate this November, is trying
to strike a delicate balance between policy wonk and performer – capable
of detailing the mechanics of the proposed Medicare for All system of
universal healthcare one minute and delivering a punchline the next.
At
a moment when American politics has become conspicuously humorless, he
is an unusual political persona. And in a matter of days, on 4 August,
Michigan Democrats will decide whether he’s their type to send him to the United States Senate.
El-Sayed
faces the more moderate representative Haley Stevens, who has the
backing of the Democratic party establishment. The duo are virtually
neck-and-neck at the polls – raising the prospect of the party’s
grassroots voters again defying the wishes of its leaders.
While a string of socialist victories
across Democratic primaries in recent months has boosted the left of
the party, El-Sayed rejects the label. He just wants capitalism that
works.
El-Sayed, 41, has tried, and failed, to
win office before: in 2018, he lost the Democratic gubernatorial race
in Michigan. Has the younger, anti-establishment coalition he now
represents grown larger than the one that rejected him eight years ago?
El-Sayed believes it has.
“I think people are
sick and tired of the establishments on both sides of that, and I think
we are having success because we’re speaking to that frustration,” he
said. “And politics doesn’t have to suck, and you can build a politics that doesn’t suck.”
That quote seems to summarize a view of his establishment opponent's brand. Given how Schumer, Gillibrand and Cheyenne Hunt shook a me-too to derail Platner in Maine, it appears they don't have one to shake at El Sayed. Which is fortunate. Surely you'd expect they've searched for one.
Following an image of El Sayed rallying with Bernie and AOC, Guardian, writes:
Next month’s Michigan primary will test whether
that coalition is now large enough to nominate one of its own as a
Democratic candidate for Washington.
El-Sayed
insists he didn’t plan to run in this year’s US midterm elections.
Heading into 2025, he said, “I thought I was going to keep doing what I
was doing” – running Wayne county’s public health department, trying to
keep key programs and health centers afloat as Donald Trump’s
administration wielded the axe.
“The straw
that broke the camel’s back was when they froze federal funds,” El-Sayed
recalled in an interview. “I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to
flow programs like [nutrition support initiative] Wic and federally
qualified health centers and vaccines, and meanwhile we’re watching our
tax dollars get sent abroad to drop bombs on other people’s kids.”
Throughout
his campaign, El-Sayed has frequently tied the Israel-Gaza war, which
he unflinchingly calls a genocide, and other conflicts involving the US
to affordability at home. “Every time you want to put glasses on kids,
people ask you: ‘Doctor, how are you going to pay for that?’” he said.
“Nobody asks the general how he’s going to pay for the next war.”
Repeating, he is not the AIPAC favored candidate, that said, back to the text:
The
roots of this worldview long predate this campaign, and run through
Egypt, where El-Sayed spent childhood summers with his father’s family.
He
describes the country as both “glorious”, because of the fullness of
family and social life, and “painful”, because of the strict political
order surrounding it, and the role that decades of US military support
helped play in sustaining it.
[...]
El-Sayed credits his grandmother, whom he calls
the smartest person he ever knew, for teaching him that, while talent is
distributed widely, opportunity is not.
“I’m
playing with house money, man,” he said. “Put all the chips back on the
table and try and do something new. I was supposed to be a cab driver in
Egypt. That’s not my life.”
Instead, as a
student, he was a starting defenseman on the University of Michigan
lacrosse team, vice-president of its Muslim Students Association and, in
2007, the university’s first Rhodes scholar in years. He studied at
Oxford, attended Columbia medical school and eventually entered public
health, rather than private practice.
“He
was always the smartest guy, the awesome guy who can work the room,”
said Mohamad Issa, a head and neck cancer surgeon in Ohio who knew
El-Sayed during his college years. “The first person there. The last
person to leave.”
Issa remembers approaching
El-Sayed after a game of basketball as a nervous freshman, having earned
disappointing grades in his first science classes. He had been told by
an adviser that medicine might not be for him.
El-Sayed,
then a student athlete, spent months mentoring him, offering study
strategies that Issa says transformed his academic career. Two decades
later, Issa says, he still teaches those same techniques to students he
mentors today.
“He’s a bro,” Issa said. “That’s all you gotta know.”
After
years of research and being an instructor, El-Sayed led Detroit’s
health department after the city’s bankruptcy, then took over Wayne
county’s, where he helped cancel roughly $700m in medical debt affecting
300,000 Michiganders.
“He almost has an
idealistic pressure in his mind about wanting to live fully, in a way
that is admirable,” said Dr Sandro Galea, dean of public health at
Washington University, who has known El-Sayed for more than 20 years.
“It comes from a sense of wanting to do right by people, wanting to help
in a better world for people.”
Clearly, again, he is not AIPAC's horse in the race. Shunning a "socialist" label, Guardian reports El Sayed's thinking:
His critique of the economy is not that markets
can never work, but that concentrated corporate power has prevented them
from working as advertised. “If the markets actually worked the way
they’re supposed to, you might have some efficient movement of money,”
he said. “The problem is, we don’t live in capitalism, we live in
oligopoly.”
El-Sayed points to universal
healthcare. Private insurers make money from people when they are
younger and healthier, he says, before handing them to the government at
65, when their care becomes more expensive. A rational system would
spread those costs across a lifetime, according to him, rather than
privatize the profitable years and socialize the costly ones.
For
El-Sayed, the question is ultimately the same one he absorbed in Egypt,
at school, in his research and from his grandmother: who is permitted
to benefit from the institutions around them – and who is expected merely to endure them?
With
that message, he has gained ground inside the Democratic electorate,
with rallies attended by hundreds of eager Michiganders from across the
political spectrum, though
the party establishment has been considerably slower to follow.
Chuck
Schumer, the US Senate minority leader, and retiring senator Gary
Peters have backed Stevens, reflecting the party leadership’s preference
for the more conventional candidate. El-Sayed, meanwhile, has assembled
a different coalition, winning recent endorsements from the likes of
progressive representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders.
The divide reflects a broader disagreement inside the party over what will help it win.
Grossman, [a pundit] at Michigan State University, does not believe the concern driving
figures at the top of the Democratic party to oppose El-Sayed is
primarily ideological. It is, he said, more about what a victory by
someone to Stevens’s left would signal nationally.
That national signal being that the people can have a voice which Schumer and Gillibrand cannot bend and control, a signal that pair would sooner shun immediately than look at and reflect upon It's power, and money management of U.S. politics at stake, and Schumer et al. don't want to give up what Pelosi eventually gave up because she was older than sin. More from Guardian:
“The concern from Washington is more about the
long-term image of the Democratic party and whether someone closer to
El-Sayed’s politics would make it harder to hold the seat in future
elections,” said Grossman. “I don’t think Abdul will suffer a major
penalty for ideology in this election.”
El-Sayed has faced unusually determined resistance.
Not
everyone inside the party embraces his offering. Lon Johnson, a former
chair of the Michigan Democratic party who supports Stevens, argued
El-Sayed’s politics could ultimately cost Democrats one of their best
opportunities to retake control of the US Senate. “There is real concern
that Abdul would not be able to beat [Republican Mike] Rogers and then
potentially lose us a majority possibility in the Senate,” Johnson said.
Outside
groups, led by the pro-Israel lobbying network Aipac and its affiliated
political funds and committees, have poured roughly $30m into the race
on behalf of Stevens, making Michigan one of the most expensive
Democratic primaries in the country.
While
El-Sayed continues to speak out about Israel’s destruction of Gaza, ads
have leaned heavily on domestic issues, highlighting Stevens’s
experience working with the Obama administration’s auto rescue in 2008.
Yeah. Obama bailed out Wall Street and GM and let Main Street face big time forclosures, so what, yea for that? Hardly. Latest news about GM, they have been selling Buicks made in China, and given tariff things from Trump, they will move part of that game to the U.S. That linked USAToday thing:
GM intends to sell the Buick Envision vehicles
assembled at Fairfax to the North American market, the company
confirmed. This means production in China may continue for sales to
other, non-U.S. markets.
This is the latest
change for GM after regulatory shifts and slower-than-expected consumer
demand of electric vehicles roiled its production plans during President Trump's second term.
In
the meantime, production of the Buick Envision in China has not been
disrupted, and GM will continue to ship the Envision to the U.S. from
China. GM said additional product and timing details of the new Buick
will be shared closer to launch. GM sold 41,924 Buick Envisions in 2025.
So, yeah, Obama bailed out GM and as a thank you GM in turn used Chinese labor, not U.S. autoworkers, until the tariff war changed their mind That is representative of the thinking of the establishment Dem Party in DC, and change would be welcome.
Try search = gm saic joint venture's future -- That will show a story of history from Obama's bailout to now. Learn or already know facts.
The Obama bailout of the corporation, not the workforce but the firm, is on the rocks.
GM is still a Schumer-like firm, a failure, but happily entrenced and making rich folks richer until a hammer may fall. Using the U.S. auto industry as an example of anything suggested as good for the masses from establishment Dems runs into ownership greed being serviced in DC.
Try search = ford family control of voting stock and prospering however the market goes
Tesla is doing okay, Elon managing it in non-traditional ways, while the others arguably show us a stinking example of has been. And when an Establishment Dem trots out "Obama GM bailout" to engage autoworkers, are the unions that clued out?
Unlikely.
Don't expect clean thinking rather than slanted spin propaganda from establishment Dems like Schumer and Gillibrand. It's not in the DNA. Which is why an evolution is afoot. Gross economic inequality favoring the class war the rich are waging on everyone else is being called into question. There are better candidates than others. That's fortunate.
But it is an evolution. The inertia mass of incumbent Democrats will hold the line until enough progressives get win after win, so there is hope, while the establishment seems to not mind playing trans-issue crap with the GOP while both embrace a status quo loving money. Concentrated money, donorship elite paying dues to those running both Parties.
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It grew into a rant. I could say, "Sorry about that." But no. I am not at all sorry. People every so often need a good rant.
