Blaska is in Beast Mode
With all the attention given apostate Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, Republican dissension is more about Trump’s style (count me in) than substance. If Trump could just stop the schoolyard name calling, his presidency would be much more successful.
Our Democrat(ic) acquaintances, on the other hand, face an existential crisis. What does it mean to be a Democrat? (The Policy Werkes asks: Who are these people and why are they so bothersome?) Having been routed in statehouses across the nation in elections having nothing to do with The Donald, they now hold sway in only 6 states to 25 held completely (both houses of the legislature and the governor) by Republicans, including newly beet-red Wisconsin. America has not been so Republican since Cal Coolidge.
Tuesday’s election for Virginia governor will tell us whether Democrats will go oh-for-five in off-year elections since November 2016. (They will.)
The New York Times Magazine this Sunday called Democrats “a party in search of itself.” The yarn begins with Nancy Pelosi insisting, in a conference call with demoralized Democrats the day after the Hillary wipeout, that their problem was “messaging.”
Democrats were not out of touch, she said. they just hadn’t make their case clearly enough to voters — or, as she put it, “We have to get out there and say it in a different way.”
Or maybe they keep losing because voters understand that they’re packaging the same old neo-socialist tripe. Because their party is fundamentally corrupt (just ask Donna Brazile), hypocritical (just ask party rainmakers like Harvey Weinstein), contemptuous of fly-over country “Deplorables,” and inauthentic — a polite word for PHONY!
A mustache and a hard hatWhatever can be said about Donald Trump (and we have said it!), the man never pretended to be something he was not. In fact, he reveled in being politically incorrect.
So the party of my youth is searching for authenticity. (It’s always the last place you look.) “The party is struggling to find an identity,” says the Times Magazine. Democrats think they’ve found him in one Randy Bryce, aka “Ironstache,” a three-time failed candidate for local office who is challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s First District.
A Hollywood celebrity endorsement from Chelsea Handler! Can’t miss connecting with the Deplorables! Worked for Hillary!
The Times Magazine article labels Bryce “the undisputed breakout star of the 2018 cycle so far” with a social media announcement that, it says, has attracted millions of views.
The YouTube video was limned by a Washington D.C. pro who has worked for such non-deplorables as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand.
Bryce, mustached, is almost always pictured in a hard hat which, it must be said, he comes by honestly as an unionized iron worker. Otherwise, there is little to distinguish him from the run-of-the-mill Madison-Manhattan-Hollywood progressive-socialist Democrat.
Randy Bryce is Bernie Sanders in a hard hat.
Or, if you prefer, Hillary Clinton with a mustache.
- Bryce is running against that reliable progressive-socialist voodoo doll, corporations.
- Takes issue, as Hillary did, with the other scapegoat, “The Gun Lobby.”
- Calls for Bernie Sanders-style “single payer” health insurance for all.
- Backs Bernie’s $15 minimum wage.
- Free college for all you race and gender study majors.
- Wants someone else to pay for birth control.
- Would make taxpayers pay for political campaigns.
- Backs abortion for any reason or no reason at all. Which is why Randy has NARAL’s endorsement.
Despite wishing to represent Racine-Kenosha, our Big Labor iron worker opposes FoxConn. Takes the party line in bashing the Republican Congress’ middle class tax cuts ($1,182 on average), and fought Act 10 along with Thistle and Segway Boy. All of which gets the always reliable barometer John Nichols (always reliably wrong) to blow his socialist bullhorn in The Nation. Don’t know yet if Bryce is “hands off Cuba” yet but he is promising material.
The Times Magazine notes:
The party faces a conundrum in its pursuit of Trump voters whose anxieties aren’t just economic but cultural as well. Prevailing in some red districts may require at a minimum, tempering the party’s progressivism on social issues. “When anybody talks about a so-called litmus test for candidates, that upsets me,” Rep. Cheri Bustos told [author Robert Draper].
Despite the well deserved free fall of Hollywood hypocrites, “Ironstache” is tight with the glamorous set, people like Whoopie Goldberg and Chelsea Handler. And hard-Left actors like ActBlue, Salon, MSNBC, DailyKos, and The Guardian.
Stacking the deck one more timeAs if Democrats had learned nothing from stacking the deck — as Trump maintained all along — against Bernie, the party appears all in for Bryce even though another Democrat is running, one Cathy Myers, a unionized teacher.
“For all progressives’ talk of loathing “coronations” during the 2016 primary, many seem quite content to coronate Bryce the Democratic candidate for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional district …” a well researched article at Progressive Army reported in September, well before the Donna Brazile bombshell.
If there were no readily identifiable differences between the two candidates, perhaps this would not be such a big deal. But there are clear differences, and they are not insignificant.
“Progressive Army” wonders whether “Bryce [is] setting himself up to be another Ossoff?” the latter being the Democrat annointee on whom an unprecedented $23 million was spent in that Georgia special election but who still lost to a nondescript Republican. Paul Ryan wins his races with 65% of the vote and Donald Trump beat Hillary in Wisconsin’s First District by 10 percentage points.
The NY Times notes that Bryce is not even ranked among the DCCC’s 80 targeted seats. Seems you just can’t put a hard hat on a socialist and call it macaroni.
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