Ecch (Tweet) of the Day

Feels like the kind of thing your GOTV teams might recoil at less than a year out from Election Day, but hey, I’m not a strategist!

— Ghost of Toyotathon Sales Event Past (@PanasonicDX4500) December 18, 2023

(BTW, I love this guy's Ecch [Twitter] handle.) 

This is a manifestation of the Iron Law of Institutions. which is, as I have noted many times, "The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution." 

This is why you routinely see this sort of behavior.  Even if this tactic loses elections, it pushes the left out of positions of power and positions that might eventually lead to power.

The proximate cause of all of this, or my finding this on Atrios, where he calls this, "Going the Full Sinema," and points us to Will Bunch's editorial excoriating Fetterman's recent go along to get along conversion:

“We have started a progressive movement here in Pennsylvania. It’s not going away. This isn’t over. This is not how our story ends.” — John Fetterman on April 26, 2016, after finishing third in a Democratic U.S. Senate primary.

This is how that story ended last week, more than seven years later. Now having achieved his dream of election to the U.S. Senate, and after becoming a leading national figure in the Democratic Party, Fetterman flatly declared in an NBC News interview: “I am not a progressive.”

And the man who once anointed himself leader of the Keystone State’s left-wing movement he now rejects has been busy gathering the receipts to back up that statement. In the same interview. Fetterman — who burst onto the state political scene in 2016 with bold pro-immigration statements, backed by the story of his wife Gisele’s coming to America as a young undocumented migrant from Brazil — said he now supports restrictions on the flow of migrants.

………

All this after Fetterman, who started his rise as the mayor of tiny Braddock in Western Pennsylvania, introduced himself to statewide voters by openly comparing himself to left-wing icon Sen. Bernie Sanders in that 2016 race and then telling progressives again as he successfully ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 and for a year or two after that he was one of them.

“Chip in whatever you can to help us take this progressive momentum all the way to the ballot box on May 15,” Fetterman asked supporters on Twitter, now X, during that 2018 race. That was one of a number of times he explicitly said he was a progressive or endorsed progressive policies or values. In return, core Democrats fueled his decadelong rise from obscurity to Capitol Hill with thousands of small donations, or by knocking on neighbors’ doors.

Now, some of those early supporters say they were betrayed, or even feel lied to. I tried to reach Fetterman this weekend by direct-messaging him on X/Twitter, but have not heard back, at least yet. I wanted the senator to tell me if he’s changed, or if he thinks times have changed — or if something else inspired last week’s declaration. For now, I’ll have to cite his top aide Adam Jentleson, who insists Fetterman “is just being consistent. He spent the entire campaign” — referring to 2022, when Fetterman adopted some more centrist stances like support for fracking — “telling people he wasn’t a down-the-line lefty.”

There is a saying, "Republicans fear their base, and Democrats fear HATE their base."

It could not be more true.