Offering asides, recommended links, blogworthy quotations, and more, In Brief is the Northwest Progressive Institute's microblog of world, national, and local politics.
“Dozens of voting members of the Democratic National Committee met Friday to organize a new voting bloc to push for changes to the internal governance of the national party and send more money to state party groups,” The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer reports.
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Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg writes: “The Republican threat to America’s constitutional experiment has led me to ask: What is our plan to save it? Here’s mine.”
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“The reality is that politics is complex and somewhat unpredictable — with a lot of voters who are regularly changing or just forming views on issues and also changing who they vote for or whether they vote in the first place,” Perry Bacon Jr. writes.
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“The neoliberal order seems to be collapsing. A generation of young activists is trying to insure that it’s replaced by progressive populism, not by the fascist right,” Andrew Marantz writes for The New Yorker.
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The move signifies that Biden is a team player committed to the Democratic Party. In 2009, Barack Obama and his advisers chose to keep campaign data in the hands of a semi-separate outfit called Organizing For America.
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“Increasingly the Democratic Party is divided into two camps: those who favor the ideas of Warren/AOC/Sanders now, versus those who will favor these same Warren/AOC/Sanders ideas in 3-4 years, when those ideas are more in the political consensus,” Perry Bacon Jr. writes.
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“Twenty-nine Democratic National Committee members have joined a call for structural reforms to increase transparency and ensure fairness in the nominating process,” David Moore writes.
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Writer Edward-Issac Dovere takes a look at the Democratic Party’s plan to win the Wolverine State in 2020 after losing to Donald Trump by less than 11,000 votes in 2016, which emphasizes facets of big organizing and local control.
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A Slate columnist says that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is taking an increasing number of progressive positions, aligning himself with Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and Ron Wyden, and going further than Joe Biden has in embracing policy directions we need.
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“Expect to understand more about the best in modern political campaigning, and a chance to hear some inside stories from this year’s campaign.”
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Republican consultant Stuart Stevens: “Trump was the moral test, and the Republican Party failed… It’s an utter disaster for the long-term fate of the Party. The Party has become an obsession with power without purpose.”
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“A revolution of policy or a renaissance of humanity cannot happen without participation in and access to the process — and we all will lose that access if we do not move in concert right now.”
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Today, President Barack Obama received the Paul H. Douglas Award for ethics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During his acceptance speech, President Obama returned to the political arena, blasting Donald Trump and the Republicans for their toxic politics of division.
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Democrats will not defeat Trump and his increasingly fanatical, revanchist party by promising the restoration of what came before him; the country is desperate for
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It does feel very much like 2010 reversed to me right now. — Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee, the head of the Republican Governors Association,
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“Taking inspiration from Virginia, Democrats are finally running to win in the states,” writes Joan Walsh. “But will the party make room for a different kind of candidate?”
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“Too often, liberal candidates write off red states. But their policies could find a willing audience there,” writes Ivy Bashear.
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Columnist Danny Westneat calls out the Washington State Republican Party and its legislative caucuses for their divisive, counterproductive Seattle-bashing, which they’ve said they intend to do even more of in 2018, even though it hasn’t worked for them in the past.
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The New York Times examines the Democratic Party’s candidate recruiting successes and concludes the party is doing a good job of returning to the fifty-state strategy championed by Howard Dean.
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“How did the Democrats lose a once progressive and populist hotbed like Wisconsin?” The Nation’s Sarah Jones asks.
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The Democratic Party is on its way to finding its way out of the wilderness thanks to a willngness by elected Democrats to listen to the grassroots, writes David Atkins.
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