Headline of the Day

Dems to David Brock: Stop Helping, You Are Killing Us

I am not surprised. He raised a huge amount of money, and much of it went for lavish parties and an army of paid trolls.

He's been selling it as fighting Koch-sucker fire with fire, but it's not: The Koch's have been trying to destroy America, Civil Rights, and Democracy for decades, and they don't go all ADHD humming bird every Presidential year.

I get that every political movement has its share of grifters, but David Brock's tale of conversion from the right wing has passed its expiration date:

As David Brock attempts to position himself as a leader in rebuilding a demoralized Democratic Party in the age of Trump, many leading Democratic organizers and operatives are wishing the man would simply disappear.

Many in the party—Clinton loyalists, Obama veterans, and Bernie supporters alike—talk about the man not as a sought-after ally in the fight against Trumpism, but as a nuisance and a hanger-on, overseeing a colossal waste of cash. And former employees say that he has hurt the cause.

………

During Trump’s inauguration weekend, Brock held a conference for activists, politicians, and donors at a resort in South Florida to pitch his grand vision. All but one of the candidates currently running to chair the Democratic National Committee attended, conspicuously missing the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday.

Meanwhile, many Democratic grassroots activists and campaign alums have been giving his proposed plans some stern side-eye.

“His ability to produce wins for Democrats is nonexistent,” Jeff Weaver, former campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run, told The Daily Beast. “He does not have the kind of understanding of what kind of coalition you have to bring together to win national races—that’s his fundamental problem.”

………

It’s clear why Brock has acquired a long list of enemies on the more progressive corners of his own party. Brock’s political evolution is well-known: the former anti-Clinton right-winger who starting in the late 1990s transformed into a relentlessly pro-Clinton Democratic operative.

But the friction between Brock and Democrats is not merely limited to its more progressive faction—many alumni of Obama’s campaigns and White House, as well as Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 run, say they want Brock to stay far away from the Democrats’ future plans.

 ………

Another senior 2016 Clinton aide, who asked not to be named because the ex-staffer did “not want to deal with Brock’s bullshit,” described Brock and his organizations in 2016 as “useless—you might as well have thrown those [tens of] millions of dollars down a well, and then set the well on fire.”

………

“I met with him a couple times—he’s f%$#ing weird,” a former Obama administration official, who also requested anonymity, told The Daily Beast. “I felt like I was meeting Mugatu from Zoolander… I don’t know what the f%$# [Brock’s network] did besides raise a ton of money, and I don’t think the after-action report on 2016 says we need more David Brock. Probably the opposite is true.”

You know things are weird when a discussion of political operatives invokes Zoolander, but weird I can handle, weird, self-absorbed, and incompetent is another thing entirely.