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Friday, February 09, 2018

Sidebar updating is a sporadic thing, subject to whim and fancy.

Check out the new and fancy top-of-sidebar changes. Timeliness is next to godliness. Trying to stay timely, but not losing eyes on a prize.

UPDATE: Down the sidebar, some deadlinking was found and fixed. In the course of fixing it, read an item longer than needed to make the case for proportioning superdelegate voting as a pro-democracy step while not removing superdelegate privilege of attending a national convention - doing so with no giant thumb on the scale as was the 2016 situation. There is value in laying out detail, so read it and see how it registers with your outlook.

Also, there is this editorial analysis from days after the November 2016 election, with these ending paragraphs:

Hillary Clinton’s loss does more to hasten Democrats’ resurrection than to delay it. A Republican president in office will tarnish the brand of blue-state Republican parties, making it easier for Democrats to regain ground in their own turf. At the same time, the absence of a high-profile national Democratic leader will make it easier for state parties in more conservative regions to build up independent identities.

But while Democrats shouldn’t be left for dead, it’s also the case that resurrection takes work and specific action. Party leaders who a week ago were confident they were leading the blue team to yet another presidential victory are going to look around and realize they didn’t just lose, they got essentially annihilated — even though the presidential election itself was close. They’re going to have to start doing something different. In particular, something that takes note of the fact that whether you think the constitutional system is fair or not (I don’t, personally), the existing setup simply doesn’t allow you to run up the score in California to compensate for weakness in the Midwest.

More broadly, the Obama-Clinton style of liberal incrementalism promised that while it wouldn’t deliver utopia, it would deliver wins and concrete results. And for a while, it did. But no strategy can guarantee an uninterrupted series of presidential election wins. And the withering of the down-ballot party paired with the failure to create entrenched policy accomplishments means much of Obama-era policymaking will have vanished without a trace within six months.

To make its comeback, what’s left of the Democratic Party establishment — not just its elected officials but the leaders of its aligned institutions and its major donors — need to recognize that a strategy they believed was working as recently as Tuesday afternoon has in fact failed quite badly.

Again, read it to see if that rings true to your viewpoint.