LINK - Posted with the aim of helping Minnesota Sixth Congressional District voters become better informed about things. The headlined question, Crabgrass guesses, NO.
Excerpting:
As the scope of the Democratic Party's 2024 election loss sunk in and the inevitable recriminations began, the so-called "consultant class" emerged as the most unifying target of blame for a party otherwise divided on ideology, policy and personal quarrels. In a forum sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee for the national chair race in January, nearly every candidate pledged to scrutinize the DNC's contracts with consultants, with the stated goal of pruning the organization of those who have for decades helped guide the party's leaders and candidates in an era marked by embarrassing defeats and narrow victories that fell short of expectations.
The winner of that race, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair Ken Martin, said at the time that “D.C. consultants” will “be gone when I’m there.” [...] Martin gets to decide whether to follow or break with that precedent. According to a DNC spokesperson, he intends to stand by his pledge, pending a close review of who on the payroll is worthy of staying or being thrown out.
[...] James Skoufis, a fierce critic of the Democratic Party's cozy relationship with those consultants, also ran for chair before dropping out and endorsing Martin. [...]
"Many of these contracts, which can be seven or eight figures large, were not earned through honesty and value they bring to campaigns," Skoufis said. "They were instead earned via relationships within the DNC, for knowing a friend of a friend of a congressman, or another consultant, or the right people within the organization."
[...] Skoufis, who sometimes refers to those consultants as being part of the "cocktail circuit," defined them more specifically as mercenaries who earn lucrative contracts by "drifting from campaign to campaign, administration to administration, cable contract to cable contract, and advise the party’s political hub and candidates, and are often rewarded with more contracts and campaigns," even when the party loses.
For her 2024 campaign, former Vice President Kamala Harris spent hundreds of millions of dollars on consulting and media firms run by Democratic Party insiders, including those who worked for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 campaign. It all amounts to a giant waste of money, Skoufis said, because their advice, [...] was not rooted in reality, is "totally removed from the desires, needs, and motivations of working class and middle-class voters."
In this criticism, Skoufis appears to share common ground with a number of consultants and staffers largely from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Those people, many of whom supported the insurgent campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and were once blacklisted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, are quick to distinguish themselves from the much-derided "consultant class."
"They exist largely to protect their own power and keep making money," Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a group that supports progressive candidates, told Salon. [...]
One Democratic Party-aligned polling firm that has consistently appeared on the DNC payroll, Global Strategy Group, was paid by Amazon in 2022 to help the company suppress a union election at a Staten Island warehouse. [...] Although the DNC publicly floated a proposal to ban party consultants from engaging in union-busting in response to backlash, they never clarified if the proposal was actually put into effect. Such a proposal would have, in theory, barred the DNC from paying $12 million to Wilmer Cutter Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, a law firm that advertises "union avoidance strategies," during the 2023-2024 cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
[...] SKDK, another popular Democratic Party firm and a co-creation of former Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn, recently registered as foreign agents for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, even as the party is already facing widespread censure over its support for a country that has been accused of committing genocide.
[...] The most recent failed presidential campaign provides an ideal case study for critics of business as usual. While Harris entered the campaign with some tentative appeals to economic populism and acknowledged that the cost of living was "still too high," she and her surrogates increasingly relied on well-worn arguments about Trump's authoritarian tendencies [running as not Trump but not much else either] and bumbled over how tightly to embrace the Biden-era economy in the face of widespread discontent. By the fall, earlier proposals or promises to crack down on price gouging, expand the child tax credit and impose more taxes on the wealthy had been watered down, while rhetoric against moneyed elites gave way to more neutral appeals like "job creation" and "opportunities for the middle class" — much of this, apparently, at the direction of Harris advisers with corporate ties, according to reporting by the New York Times. [a/k/a bullshitting for the donor class with a belief they could still win just posing as NOT Trump]
One of those advisers, Karen Dunn, was serving as lead trial counsel for Google in a Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit at the same time she helped Harris prep for her debate against Trump; two others, Obama campaign alum David Plouffe and Harris' brother-in-law, Tony West, have seats on Uber's senior management team. West reportedly played a key role in convincing Harris to tailor her economic message to be more business-friendly and campaign more with surrogates who could ostensibly provide cross-party appeal, like billionaire Mark Cuban and former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney.
[...] "People in the Harris campaign decided that maybe we're going to hit some people that we don't want to hit right now, we don't want to look so anti-corporate. That was clearly a dumb decision," Tobias said. "David Plouffe, Tony West, Jen O'Malley Dillon and the rest have been on podcasts giving 1,000 data points about why the decisions they made with the right ones, so you can't prove that they're secretly trying to help themselves get rich off other corporate clients. But they do have those clients too, right? It really belabors trust with voters who already don't trust Washington in general when these people are the ones with the most influence over the party."
Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist and former Harris senior adviser, [...] acknowledged that Democrats in general struggled with "talking like regular people" and moving beyond an excessively curated, focus group-verified approach to politics in large part because of a lack of class and geographical diversity among consultants.
[...]. "We won highly-educated people in this country and people who make over $100,000, but we're getting killed with working class people. And I don't think we're elevating enough working class people in the party, people who didn't go to college, people who have a different way of thinking about the world because they have a different lived experience."
[...] The party's preference for consultants from well-heeled firms over union organizers or community activists, they say, is a symptom of a Democratic Party unwilling to break ties with the corporate world or eschew fundraising with billionaires, and the symptom will not go away until they cure the deeper sickness.
[...]
Closing with separate headlines from DWT items - again from a month ago:
We're Lucky They Stopped Using Kamala Harris And Liz Cheney!
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| https://www.downwithtyranny.com/post/who-can-speak-for-the-heart-soul-of-the-democratic-party-not-elissa-slotin-not-gavin-newsom |
and -
The Democratic Party Won't Fix Itself— It Has To Be Forced On Them
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So, two images that show the good, and the bad and ugly, sequentially.