The Secretive Democracy Alliance’s Secret Is Out: Some of its members are elitist, racist and self-serving.
Clarification appended below.
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[David] Brock, a former “right-wing hit-man”-turned-top-big-money-Democratic-operative, is part of a behind-the-scenes campaign to convince donors it’s OK to attack the Koch brothers for spending millions of dollars while doing the exact same thing for the left.
“You’re not in this room today trying to figure out how to rig the game so you can be free to make money poisoning little kids, and neither am I,” Brock told donors this month at a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to someone who attended the conference, but who declined to be identified because it was closed to the press.
“Subscribing to a false moral equivalence is giving the Kochs exactly what they want: keeping us quiet about what they’re doing to destroy the very fabric of our nation,” added Brock, whose deep-pocketed nonprofit groups are leading the charge to make the conservative megadonors Charles and David Koch an issue in the 2014 midterms. …
But Brock’s pitch … isn’t sitting well with some major liberal donors and operatives, who worry the anti-Koch strategy could backfire big time. It has not yet been proven effective at motivating key Democratic voting blocs like unmarried women and minorities, and liberal critics also worry it risks undercutting more important issues, smacks of class warfare and opens themselves up to hypocrisy charges.
“The Democrats’ problem is off-year turnout, and I’m not clear how emphasizing the Koch brothers gets more black and brown folks to the polls,” said Steve Phillips, a member of the secretive Democracy Alliance club of major liberal donors. “My sense for voters of color is that the issues of income inequality, housing, education, immigration reform, health care and criminal justice reform would resonate more.
— “The existential crisis of the liberal millionaire,” Kenneth P. Vogel and Tarini Parti, Politico, today
And since voters of color are too stupid to recognize that the issues of income inequality, housing, education, immigration reform, health care and criminal justice reform would have, maybe, a little something to do with legislative and executive-branch policy on the issues of income inequality, housing, education, immigration reform, health care and criminal justice reform, it definitely would not resonate with them to point out that the Koch brothers are among a tiny group of billionaires and multi-millionaires who actually write legislation for their bought-and-paid-for elected officials to enact.
Black and brown folks are just fine with Citizens United and McCutcheon, if they’ve even heard of those Supreme Court rulings. It’s only white people who know about the rulings and understand such complexities, like dot-connecting. Well, white men and white married women do, anyway; white unmarried women don’t.
Got it!
I’m glad the Democracy Alliance is secretive. Rather than, say, openly demeaningly elitist, racist and maybe even manipulatively self-serving.
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Dan has asked me to clarify that this post is sarcastic. So: This post is SARCASTIC. REALLY. It’s SARCASTIC.
Yiiiikes. (And I’ve corrected the typo, too.)
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I wrote in the Comments thread, in response to reader Cindy K, who said she’s glad I clarified that this post is sarcasm:I actually thought the title alone indicated satire, sarcasm. Silly me, I guess. As I told Dan in an email last night, I guess I’ve been reading too many Alexandra Petri and Gail Collins columns.
Updated 6/25 at 2:21 p.m.
Thanks for mentioning that the post is sarcastic. I almost missed a beat on reading it first time.
I think those rich who are concerned about beating up the Koch’s as motivation may have it a bit correct though I’m not sure their reasoning is correct.
If the Dem’s would actually state and promote and show action toward actual policy that fixes the concerns of those who don’t turn out and THEN relate the current results to the Koch’s you might actually have some motivation. But, being that the people have been voting regularly and regardless of which way they vote, policies that help the people first vs triangulating aren’t materializing…well it takes a certain kind of person to keep pushing on.
I mean, even hope was used as a theme to simply win an election and not too much more.
My intended point, Yves, was that harping on the IS harping on the issues that would motivate voters, like more jobs, better access to housing and education. Steve Phillips, et al., think that only white men and married white women are smart enough to understand the connection between politicians’ financial benefactors and those politicians’ proposed legislation and attempts to block legislation. I think Phillips is wrong.
The failure of the Obama administration–courtesy largely of Tim Geithner and of Obama’s weird infatuation with him throughout Obama’s first term, but also to Obama’s laconic, detached, I’m-a-centrist! persona–to propose and then fight for substantial Keynesian fiscal policies and for other progressive policies–is not, say, Nancy Pelosi’s, or Dick Durbin’s, or Sherrod Brown’s, or Tom Harkin’s fault.
And, yes, the very last thing that the Dems need is yet another presidential nominee who’s never had an original policy idea in her life; who almost never takes a policy position that actually leads rather than follows (and in the one instance in which she did–drivers’ licenses for unauthorized immigrants–scrambles and backtracks at first sign of political harm to her; who spends her time posting to a silly Twitter account and trying to enhance her personal persona rather than ever, ever, ever actually thinking about and offering specific domestic policy proposals; and who apparently can’t function without the constant presence of an entourage of her “people,” i.e., her devotees.
How many other Secretaries of State had a constant go-fer? How many other FORMER Secretaries of State brought along that same constant go-fer after leaving office? How many couldn’t manage without one?
I keep wondering: Is anyone under the age of 40 “ready for Hillary”? Best as I can tell, the answer is, no. What people ARE ready for is a politician–like Durbin, Harkin, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, the former two who are too old to run for president, the latter two who don’t appear interpeted in doing so–who doesn’t have a Twitter account, or a personal entourage, or a daughter whose parents thought it was a good idea for her to sell her celebrity name (and nothing more) to a network news program for a huge amount of money, and talked their daughter into doing that. Someone, in other words, who’s not famous for just being an ‘icon’, but who has built a mostly-quiet career as an economics populist in Congress or academia.
And, Daniel, I still cringe, as I did in 2008, at a campaign run almost entirely on a promise of Hope and Change, the substance of which the candidate never specified because he himself had no particular person convictions or policy ideas. We don’t need another such standard bearer–not even one who replaces Hope and Change with WOMEN! WOMEN! WOMEN! One Dem presidential candidate, and Dem president,of that ilk is more than enough, thank you very much.
Daniel, I think you and Yves have it backwards. The Dems can’t show progress in policy, BECAUSE of the billionaire-controlled campaign-finance system.
I actually thought the title alone indicated satire, sarcasm. Silly me, I guess. As I told Dan in an email last night, I guess I’ve been reading too many Alexandra Petri and Gail Collins columns.
Third Party, Folks. The major two are screwing YOU.
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they believe. All the time go after your heart.