Shop-worn uninspiring eyes. Looking for nails that stand up to be pounded down.
From the Intercept's title you know it will be a recitation of disheartening bootstompings one after another; peasant rebellions being the worse of any mood of dissatisfaction.
From the item:
Stephen Lynch, a House Democrat from Massachusetts, was elected in 2000 after a competitive primary. In 2013, he ran and lost a Senate special election against Ed Markey, with the party squarely behind Markey. “It’s challenging,” he said. “There were leaders in the Democratic Party that were discouraging people from donating to me.”
Lynch now faces a primary challenge from Brianna Wu, an engineer famous for taking on the “alt-right” in the GamerGate affair. In general, he said, the party should stay neutral.
“You’d rather have an election than a selection. Sometimes it actually makes our candidates stronger to have competition. I understand the parties are more concerned with the resources spent in the primary. Obviously if you have an uncontested primary, you save a lot of money, but I think from a leadership standpoint — small “l” leadership — you might develop a better candidate if they have a challenger early on.”
If money isn’t necessarily the best path to victory, that smart Washington-based operatives continue to make it the key variable regardless raises the question of what other motivations may be in play. For Lynch, the answer is simple: It’s a racket. “The Democratic and Republican parties are commercial enterprises and they’re very much interested in their own survival,” Lynch said. “The money race is probably more important to them than the issues race in some cases.”
The Intercept asked Lynch if the commercialization he referred to was for the benefit of the officials working in and around elections. “How much of the focus on fundraising,” we asked, “has to do with pumping money into this ecosystem of consultants and everybody else?”
“That’s what I mean,” Lynch said. “It’s a commercial enterprise.”
[...] In order to establish whether a person is worthy of official backing, DCCC operatives will “rolodex” a candidate, according to a source familiar with the procedure. On the most basic level, it involves candidates being asked to pull out their smartphones, scroll through their contacts lists, and add up the amount of money their contacts could raise or contribute to their campaigns. If the candidates’ contacts aren’t good for at least $250,000, or in some cases much more, they fail the test, and party support goes elsewhere.
Asked about the process, Kelly, the DCCC communications director, said, “Our support for a candidate is not based on the amount of money that their personal network can raise – in fact there are many strong candidates that we support with a limited ability to raise money from people that they know.”
That emphasis on fundraising can lead the party to make the kinds of decisions that leave ground-level activists furious. Take, for example, the case of Angie Craig, a medical device executive who ran for Congress in Minnesota’s second district in 2016 and has thrown her hat in the ring again.
The medical device industry is huge in Minnesota, and its outsized lobbying power is felt acutely in Washington. Despite spending $4.8 million, Craig lost by 2 points. That narrow defeat, though, belied the true failure of her campaign. She was, objectively, the least inspiring candidate up and down the ballot: Craig underperformed Clinton by 4,000 votes and even underperformed Democratic state Senate and House candidates by 13,000 and 2,000 votes, respectively. In 2012, the previous presidential cycle, congressional candidate Mike Obermueller spent $710,000 for a nearly identical level of support.
Jeff Erdmann thinks he knows why Craig lost. He was a volunteer for her in 2016, phone banking and going door to door. That spring, a voter asked him a question about Craig’s position on an issue that he couldn’t answer, so when Craig held a Q&A with the volunteers, he asked her if it was OK to direct voters to the website for an answer. “No, not really,” Erdmann recalled her saying, “because we haven’t developed our website yet because we don’t want the Republicans to know where we stand, and we haven’t seen end-of-summer polling yet.”
Later, he said, he was phone banking and asked a supervisor what message he should tailor to the rural part of the district, since the script seemed aimed at city dwellers. “Just tell them the trailer-court story, they’re not big thinkers out there,” he said he was told, referring to Craig’s childhood in a trailer home.
This time around, Erdmann decided to run himself, and he has the backing of the People’s House Project, a group founded by former congressional candidate Krystal Ball to back working-class candidates. Michael Rosenow, Erdmann’s campaign manager, said he and Erdmann reached out to the D-trip but had a hard time getting through. When they learned about a gathering the organization was hosting at an adjacent congressional district, they decided to crash it.
Erdmann has the kind of charisma you’d expect from someone who has coached high school football — and has had remarkable success in that role for more than two decades in a state that cares deeply about the sport. He has also taught American government for 27 years, but all of that had not prepared him for the conversation he was about to have with Molly Ritner, the midwest political director for the DCCC, at a hotel bar in Minneapolis called Jacques.
“It’s been weird for Jeff,” said Rosenow, who was there for the July 10 meeting. “The first question out of her mouth was, ‘How much will you raise?’”
They had raised $30,000 by that point, a figure that Ritner deemed unimpressive. (By the end of December, the campaign had raised around $115,000, according to Rosenow.)
“That’s not very much,” Rosenow recalls Ritner saying. “Really all we care about is, the more money you raise, the more you can get your message out.”
Erdmann tried to jump in, beginning to lay out his backstory, hoping to make the case that getting your message out doesn’t matter if voters don’t like the message. “He seems like he was grown in the tank for this district, but they didn’t care at all,” Rosenow said, “All she wanted to know was how much money he could raise.”
Ritner had been Midwest fundraising director at the DCCC in 2013 and 2014, before taking a break to run the campaign of the Democrat who lost the Vermont governor’s race to a Republican in 2016. She noted that Craig had ran an “amazing campaign” last cycle and asked if Erdmann had any big funders ready to get behind him. “Jeff laughed. He said, ‘I’ve been a teacher my whole life, how would I have big funders behind us?’” Rosenow recalled.
DCCC Chair Ben Ray Luján, a Democratic representative from New Mexico, was in his hotel room upstairs, Ritner told them, but he didn’t come down for the meeting. A DCCC official denied Erdmann’s account, saying Luján had already left the hotel for the airport at the time of the meeting.
Erdmann estimated the meeting lasted eight minutes. “She ordered a pop, got it, drank it, threw the number out that we had to hit, and left,” he said. On her way out, Ritner put $2 on the table. The check came to $2.26, before the tip. “I looked at Mike and said, ‘That is why the Democrats lose,’” concluded Erdmann.
Enough about Erdmann/Craig, you get the drift; medical device money talks, progressive thought walks. Born in a trailer could not beat a third rate talk show host, so run Born in a trailer again? Support a proven loser if there's the smell of money to the machine? What?
There is the money quote, sidebar grist earlier, then in the flow:
“They don’t want to talk about the civil war in the party, but when you treat us like hill people when we come up here, what do you expect?” concluded Rosenow.
Craig, fresh off her “amazing” 2016 race, is back again. Ritner, according to Erdmann and Rosenow, said the DCCC would remain neutral in the primary, but that didn’t last long. In November, the DCCC endorsed Craig, joining EMILY’s List and End Citizens United, the trio of groups that represents the party’s central authority. Last week, she picked up the backing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC.
[link in original] There is astroturf. It never did look like rooted grass, but never mind, it can be bought by the square yard:
End Citizens United, an ostensible political reform group, was founded in 2015 by three consultants from Mothership Strategies, all veterans of the DCCC. End Citizens United has since paid Mothership Strategies over $3.5 million in fees, according to Federal Election Commission records. In its first few years, other campaign finance reform groups grew suspicious of the PAC, which they referred to as a “churn and burn” group dedicated to raising money by blanketing email lists with aggressive solicitations, a hallmark of the DCCC’s own email strategy.
[links in original] Continuing:
End Citizens United’s entry into the Minnesota race is particularly odd, given that Craig, while at the medical device company St. Jude Medical, directed the firm’s political action committee in the 2012 election cycle, after spending the previous six years on its board. The goal of the St. Jude PAC was to buy influence with Republican and Democratic leaders, as well as members of the tax-writing committees, in pursuit of repealing the medical device tax that was a key funding mechanism of the Affordable Care Act. The effort eventually met with significant success.
While she ran it, the PAC spent heavily on Republican politicians, directing funds in the 2012 cycle to Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell, Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch, Scott Brown, Mike Enzi, Richard Burr, Bob Corker, and John Barrasso. Then-Speaker John Boehner and presumed-future-speaker Kevin McCarthy, as well as the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, all got money from Craig’s PAC.
This, then, was the résumé that earned the support not just of the DCCC and EMILY’s List, but also of a group publicly committed to campaign finance reform.
[...] A DCCC official, asked about Craig’s time running the corporate PAC, said it was unfair to accuse a married lesbian raising a family of being part of the political establishment, and that her business success was an asset, not a liability.
[...] “All Jeff talks about is political reform, so that was a shot to the heart,” said Rosenow, Erdmann’s campaign manager, on losing the endorsement. “If your goal is to get money out of politics, how in the fuck — I’m sorry, how in the hell are you backing someone who ran a corporate PAC?”
Such a rhetorical question then being image answered by The Intercept - click that link, check it out.
There is roughly another half to the item, so hit the link, read on, after that image-answer.
The remainder of that post is not Minnesota-centric, but the excerpt - longer than a Trump tweet, but then more truthful, nuanced, and not dumbed down. Good story telling is always in the details.
BOTTOM LINE: Something in the good story telling surely makes me want to see Jeff Erdmann whomp Angie Craig by a tidal wave margin. He could easily whomp Jason Talkshow, but he has to get there first. May the stars align favorably. Others may react differently to the good story. But then I'm at the gate, not defending it.
_______________UPDATE________________
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| A worthwhile image deserves a link |
https://peopleshouseproject.com/erdmann/
The item behind that link tells Erdmann's story, his outlook, and links to his campaign site:
https://erdmannforcongress.com/
Bookmark that site, since it tells you where to send the campaign money where my suggestion is do it in $27 increments, which I shall be doing - Jeff, the check will be in the mail.