Finally

It appears that some members of the  Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are beginning to realize that the consultants who have been running the party's political operations are not working for the party, they are working for themselves.

Well, knock me over with a  GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb.

After spending well over a billion dollars, and a significant chunk of that change ending up in consultants pockets, you are just now noticing?

Candidates vying to lead the Democratic National Committee have found a common enemy: the D.C. consultant.

In the first DNC-sanctioned forum in the body’s low-profile race for chair on Saturday, DNC candidates channeled their frustration at the “D.C. insiders,” whom New York state Sen. James Skoufis vowed to “kick to the curb.” Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin pledged the “D.C. consultants” will “be gone when I’m there.” And Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler promised he’d go into 2025 “with no commitments to anyone who’s been on a campaign payroll before.”

It’s a sign of the times for a party that burned through some $1.5 billion in the final months of the campaign, only to come up short against President-elect Donald Trump. As the party still searches for answers to its devastating losses in 2024, consultants became the punching bag while the DNC candidates largely avoided sparring with one another. They all agreed that the party needed to reground its identity with the working class and commit to a permanent campaign infrastructure across the country. But any light attacks — of which there were a few — came without names attached.

That $1.5 billion was spent in about 15 weeks, and as near as I can figure (unsurprisingly the numbers are incomplete and confusing) a least ⅕ of that went to various consulting firms.

This happens again, and again, and again, and nothing seems to be done about it.

One does hope that the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will finally do something about fixing this problem.

Funny That

You may recall that the Senate failed to appoint a new chair for the National Labor Relations Board.

They could have, but Kamala Harris did not make it to the Senate in time to cast the tie breaking vote.

So...Kamala Harris coulda broken the tie on the NLRB vote, but she wasn't there to cast the vote, and her brother-in-law is the chief counsel of Uber, which has tangled with the NLRB. https://t.co/CwYJlnedeo

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 8, 2025

Time for me to don a tinfoil hat, but her brother in law, Tony West, took an outsized role in her campaign and fought tooth and nail against anything that might inconvenience the. "Great malefactors of wealth."

When Rep. Khanna suggests that Harris was somehow just out of pocket and unavailable, he is likely being far too charitable.

Not a Surprise

The impact on Michigan voters was more notable pic.twitter.com/8siEur6Fn9

— Polling USA (@USA_Polling) November 22, 2024

It turns out that Kamala Harris's campaign tour with Liz Cheney actually made people less likely to vote for her.

Hell, it made me less likely to vote for her. (I did anyway)

This non-partisan centrist fetish is, to quote (not) Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, "Worse than a crime, it was a mistake."

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is deeply and profoundly incompetent.

As to whether or not the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is more corrupt or more incompetent, that exercise will be left up to my reader(s).

Radical centrism is a disease.

Headline of the Day

Trump Gets Unhinged, Even for Him, Over Kamala Harris ‘60 Minutes’ Interview

—The Daily Beast

It's that interior clause, "Even for Him," that makes this headline.

If Trump is so upset over this, he could give the interview that the news magazine program has requested.

Donald Trump—who agreed to an interview with the CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes before backing out—has gone on the warpath at Kamala Harris for her performance on the show.

“The Interview on 60 Minutes with Comrade Kamala Harris is considered by many of those who reviewed it, the WORST Interview they have ever seen,” he wrote, in a Tuesday morning post on Truth Social. “She literally had no idea what she was talking about, and it was an embarrassment to our Country that a Major Party Candidate would be so completely inept.”

If the interview were as bad as he claims, and he implies a Razorfish level of fail, he would be happy, not irate.

………

Trump seemingly wants no part of that level of scrutiny. The Republican nominee for president accepted an invitation to a similar sitdown interview on the storied program, but his campaign later “decided not to participate,” a CBS spokesperson told CNN. 

I've not seen the interview, but it appears that it touched a nerve.

Headline of the Day

When Odious Foreign Policy Elites Rally Around Harris

— Responsible Statecraft

When Dick Cheney endorses you, you are doing something wrong.

Efforts to bolster the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris by the D.C. foreign policy establishment kicked into overdrive over the course of the past week with the near simultaneous release of two open letters signed by hundreds of former U.S. national security officials.

It is an accelerated version of previous campaigns in 2016 and 2020, where ex-officials and military officers on both sides of the aisle vocalizing major opposition to Trump offer to give national security cred to the Democratic candidate — in this case Harris. For their part, the candidate virtually ignores that many of these endorsements are in many cases coming from odious individuals, including architects of wars and interventions that Democrats have openly criticized as stains on recent American history.

………

Critics of course point out that many of these people are the same Washington creatures who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited from them for 20 years straight — and until this day support cruel, authoritarian dictators when convenient to U.S. policy. They are not wrong.

………

Yet for the most part, the letter carried with it the odor of the consensus minded War Party, if not 9/11-era neoconservatism. In the past this would have been a problem for traditionally liberal and progressive outlets, but Mother Jones and the New Republic were quick to applaud the letter as a “win” for the Harris campaign. Not surprisingly, only The Nation has called out their fellow liberals and progressives for making common cause with the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom have also endorsed Harris in recent days (except for columnist Joan Walsh, who found Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris "strangely moving," writing, "Liz, I told you we could find common ground. Let’s have a cup of coffee. Or even a beer?"

………

The second letter, boasting 700 signers and released on September 22 by the group National Security Leaders 4 America, is a more serious effort if only because the caliber of people, whether you agree or disagree with them, is far higher.

………

While the signatories were mainly retired generals, flag officers, and diplomats, the letter boasted its own share of armchair militarists, very much including the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The inclusion of a number of the most reckless and irresponsible civilian national security leaders of our time only serves to dilute the seriousness of the message — any letter featuring John Brennan, Victoria Nuland, Michael McFaul and Leon Panetta is one that can and should be safely ignored.

 One hopes, in private at least, that Harris is embarrassed.

My First (and Last) Post on the Veepstakes

Kamala looking for a VP pic.twitter.com/iV258CuAXY

— Connor Ewing (@ConnorMEwing) July 21, 2024

The usual suspects

We are seeing dozens of reports of different people being vetted as a potential VP for likely Democratic Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

But for the fact that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez turns 35 in October, and so could be Harris' running mate, (not gonna happen) none of the usual suspects inspire me one way or the other on an ideological level.

My guess is that she and the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will go with an "safe" choice who will turn out to be a net liability.  (Think Tim Kaine or Joe Lieberman)

I don't expect to be pleased by her choice, and I sure that once they are announced, I will complain. 

It's in my nature.

Another Update on the Democratic Presidential Nomination

J.B. Pritzger and most of the Illinois Democratic Congressional Caucus have endorsed Kamala Harris.

Meanwhile, Illinois's most prominent political figure, Barack Obama, has come out in favor of an open convention. 

The most charitable assessment that I con offer for this, and I have never been inclined to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, is that he wants to play king-maker at the convention, because he wants to make sure that what he sees as his legacy, including the increasingly dysfunctional PPACA (Obamacare) is preserved.

Considering the fact that the only person even briefly making noises right now about challenging Harris for the nomination is ex-Democrat Jim Manchin, though only for about 18 hours.

As it stands now, it appears that Harris might get sufficient delegates pledged to her to put her over the top in the next few days.

I expect the proverbial fat lady to sing some time in the next day or so.