Thursday, August 09, 2018

Swamp critter Tad Devine. However facts evolve, it does not reflect well on Bernie. We need facts. [UPDATED: Ending with a simple question of fact, one that is surprisingly unclear.][

This websearch. It is troubling.

Mueller seems more adept at swamp drainage than any bloviating promisor, (i.e., compared to Trump's embracing the swamp once campaign promising was over).

In other times and contexts, was Mueller a swamp jockey? Is he one still? He's been a DC lawyer for all his life, cradle to now, and will stay so, now to the grave. Or that's the appearance of things.

_______________UPDATE______________
From the websearch link, a Summer 2016 item, stating toward the end:


Tad Devine did not return a call from Slate seeking his comment on this story

Another vendor, Revolution Messaging, received disbursements of over $28 million from the Sanders campaign for digital consulting and ad buys. Technology experts debate how much digital strategy should be kept in-house, but most agree that it makes sense to contract out some functions to innovative firms. But a leader of a New York–based, pro-Sanders volunteer group (who asked for anonymity because he was still working with the campaign) told Slate that its tech operation wasn’t as impressive as some reports have suggested. [...]

The organizer, who said he spent almost a year working full-time to promote Sanders’ movement, told Slate, “The extent to which this campaign was not innovative, but actually did the traditional kind of campaigning … that’s kind of the hidden side of things.” He said that the campaign failed to take full advantage of the grass-roots “revolution” it sparked. One of the myriad volunteer groups that sprang up across the country, People for Bernie, which was organized by veterans of the Occupy movement, claimed to have generated more than 2.5 billion engagements online. People for Bernie said activists organized over 150 events “around the country before the official campaign had an events tool,” and that “the people from those events formed the backbone of volunteer run efforts across the country.”

But after the New York organizer and his team spent months canvassing, they went to the campaign with their voter data—which Sanders’ paid staffers didn’t integrate into their own database. “Not only didn’t they have staffing in place in most states until like three or four weeks before [the vote],” the organizer said, “but they also didn’t have staffing at headquarters who were in charge of dealing with the massive grassroots energy that was taking place in states. So, OK, maybe you haven’t hired staff in New York three months out, but at least have someone for us to talk to, so that we can be coordinated and seamlessly transition from a volunteer-based operation to working closely with paid campaign staff. And I would say that was a point of failure for the campaign not just once, but again and again.

Hillary Clinton wound up winning the New York primary by an unexpectedly wide margin, and afterward the Sanders campaign took on a funereal air. Asked what he thought of consultants like Devine making a small fortune on the campaign, while he and his fellow volunteers toiled for nothing, the organizer said he had no personal regrets. But it did make him wonder about certain, ah, structural inequalities in the system: “This is [a] situation where the average donation is less than $30, yet there’s a consultant making [millions]. I think the question has to be posed: How many $27 donations went to Tad Devine, and do those people think that was worth it?”

Bernie Sanders proved that you can raise hundreds of millions from small donors and run a competitive campaign against a well-financed opponent who enjoys incumbent-like support within the party. But running a national campaign is a big, inherently institutional affair, and it turns out that it’s easier to run against the establishment and rail about its perfidy than it is to escape the habits of its campaign apparatus. The Sanders insurgency democratized fundraising in such a way, and to such an extent, that he could forswear the usual compromising relationships with super PACs and major donors. This was the nature of his revolution. But a presidential campaign, like any American institution, has structures in place to preserve the status quo. In this way, the Sanders campaign itself was a parable about the country it was trying to change.

Perhaps the Occupy movement was put down so forcefully, efficiently, and heartlessly because it threatened more of the status quo than Bernie's political small-donor proof of concept. With this Tad fellow showing up, millions going to beltway consultancies as was the tradition being kept the tradition, a fair question - Who owns Bernie's mailing list?

It is the crown jewel.