Drawing Conclusions, Inferring Motivations from Campaign Contributions

A Democratic candidate for the New Hampshire 1st U.S. Congress seat is getting a lot of attention for saying that New Hampshire's two Democratic senators sold out to the bank lobby when they voted for a change (gutting/repealing/repairing--depending on your point of view) of the Dodd Frank Act which was supposed to protect Main Street from Wall Street after the near catastrophe of the financial meltdown of 2008.

Terence O'Rourke says their votes to "gut" Dodd Frank were a betrayal of core Democratic Party principles and the reason for their votes was simple: They are in the pay of the banking industry lobby.

Barney Frank, in his youtube video begs to disagree:
He is the author of the law which the Senate voted to change and he says 95% of the law was left intact by the changes, so it was hardly an evisceration of the law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NUlVA8dT5A

He explains that the American banking industry has 3 components: Big banks with over $250 billion dollars (often trillions) in assets, which if they fail could start a chain reaction in the economy.   Middle size banks which hold between $10 and $250 billion and "community banks," small banks which played no role in the financial crisis.

The changes would exempt all but the banks with over $250 billion from federal government stress tests to be sure they are not going to fail.

Community banks, the little guys have complained that a law intended to discipline the big boys has instead been thwarting the health and vitality of the little guys and they want that fixed.

That's what Senators Shaheen and Hassan voted for. 

Responding to inquiry from Mad Dog, Senator Shaheen said, "As with most broad reform legislation, time reveals improvements that need to be made. Main street lenders did not cause the financial cris, but many small banks and credit unions located int New Hampshire were unnecessarily burdened by the Dodd-Frank Act. I have heard directly from many community banks and credit unions in New Hampshire."

So she argues, she was responding to her constituents and as often happens with complex fixes, the fix has to be adjusted later.

O'Rourke says this is poppycock, that both senators have received money from the banking industry and that's why they voted to change the law.They were bought off.

Looking on line the two biggest contributors to both senators seem to not be banks but something called, "Emily's List" an pro abortion organization. O'Rourke does not argue the senators are pro choice because of this.

The next big contributors to both is something called "J Street" a pro Israel lobby.

Then there are "law firms" and "real estate" which might be banks.

But let's suppose Mad Dog's internet research is wrong and both have received money from the banks. Does that mean we must conclude that money bought their votes on this particular bill?

It is hard to prove the money did NOT buy their votes, but they are getting money from all sorts of sources and what might be banking interests looks small enough that if they never got another cent from them, it wouldn't make a big dent.

What O'Rourke may be saying is that with our current system, we've got legalized bribery.  We give you money. We are banks. Legislation comes up which we tell you is good for us. We expect you to vote our way. We expect a return on investment.

O'Rourke says he won't take money this way and he faults the senators for participating in the game as it is currently played because it looks like their votes were bought, or might have been bought or at least influenced by campaign contributions.

When Hillary Clinton tried to explain those $250K "speaker's fees" from Wall Street firms, she basically said, "Everyone does it and it didn't ever affect the way I voted."

Donald Trump was able to label her "Crooked Hillary" because she could never make that appearance of being bought look like good clean fun. 

Apparently our two senators are in the same position now. O'Rourke is making essentially the same claim Trump made about Clinton: The optics are bad.

But the difference is the magnitude. They got some money, but compared to the money they had coming from other sources, chump change.

Mad Dog really does not believe either Senator is corrupt, or bought. He does believe they responded to the "community bankers" pressure, but isn't that their job?

One man's legalized bribery is another man's redress of grievances.

Barney Frank has said Democrats should not throw the baby out with the bath water. He says senators who voted to amend his law were violating no core principles; they were just trying to survive.

O'Rourke says this has to change. 

Mad Dog suspects both senators have clear consciences about their votes. 
How are you going to run if you don't solicit and receive campaign contributions? But if you do, then how are you going to convince your constituents your vote on legislation was not influenced by the money?

Lambs to the Slaughter

There are the issues:  How do we approach the opioid crisis (which is not just one problem but several); guns (ditto--many problems wrapped in a single cloth); healthcare (again); income inequality; endless war; abortion (oh, God); immigration; globalization; climate change.

And then there is the personality: When Democrats face a strongman (or, really, a phony strongman) Trump and all his Lilliputian disciples and henchmen, how do you respond? With whom do you respond?

Much as we may be inspired by him, Gandhi would have been on a fast train to Auschwitz and never been heard of again, had he faced Hitler instead of the English crown and parliament.

England needed a tough guy to rally around, a Chruchill who could growl, belittle and inspire. 

He was a man for his time, but remember, the British electorate threw him out of office promptly after the war ended.

I'm not saying we can never look for another Obama, but really, how would even Obama be able to respond to Trumpism? In fact, is Trump not the inevitable reaction to the cool, informed, careful Obama?

We have 8 candidates for Congress for the New Hampshire first. 

Among them are some real prospects: Mad Dog counts three who he thinks could stand up against the thug Republicans, maybe four.

But when he talks, briefly, with his comrades in arms, he is confounded, confused and mystified by who they gravitate towards.

It is really apparent that Trump fans tend to fall into two or three easily defined categories:  the dull, the rich and the pathologically resentful. 

Democrats come toward selecting representatives from all sorts of angles: Is he kind to gays and transgenders? Does he embrace immigrants? Is he appalled by guns? Does he appreciate the importance of women's rights? And on and on. 

Every Democrat has his or her own burning issue and required personality profile for the candidate.

The only thing which unifies Democrats now is Not Trump.

The New Left? Muscular Liberalism and Terence O'Rourke

Terence O'Rourke spoke at the Hampton Dems meeting tonight and Mad Dog thought he was wonderful.

It did not bother Mad Dog one bit that O'Rourke launched a blistering attack on both New Hampshire's Democratic Senators for voting to gut Dodd Frank, even when he asserted Shaheen and Hassan voted with the banks because the banks contributed heavily to their campaigns.

This annoyed some longtime connected Dems in the audience.
"You don't come to a Democratic party meeting and diss other Dems," one said.

Jefferson: A Fire Bell In the Night

Mad Dog disagreed. We ought to be making heads roll in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party got clobbered on November 8, 2016 but we still have Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Ray Buckley. 

Dems should have cleaned house. 

O'Rourke says we have endless war because it's good for business. Money is being made. Hard to prove that. Hard to disprove it. If you're going to say that, you have to get specific about who is making money from those military actions and how those interests have outweighed anti war interests.

Mad Dog hardly blinked when Mr. O'Rourke said the Senate would not flip because of Gerrymandering. Of course, you can't Gerrymander a Senate seat, which is always statewide and at large. But that the more generous Dems let pass--the man was speaking fast, on a roll, a little over excited. Details, details.

What he is selling is indignation, anger and determination not to back down.

It Didn't End Here: See Iraq

Mad Dog likes that. 

Bernie Sanders has been tweeting we cannot win the upcoming elections with same old same old. We need new candidates from the actual left, not the mostly left, most of the time left. 

Eliminate the cap on Social Security tax rates; create a National Health Care like England's; stop endless war by insisting Congress authorize acts of war; repeal the Trump Tax bill; fund public education and reject assassination of the public schools by voucher; reject candidates who do not have issues listed on their websites; pack the Supreme Court.

O'Rourke's description of the Iraq war, of how the United States laid waste to that nation, killed it's people, destroyed its armed forces and its infrastructure was stark. "We were the bad guys in that one," he said. 

Mad Dog is  looking forward to hearing from him again. 

Tribalism: Is It Just Too Deep Seeded?

Tessio: I understand thirty thousand men enlisted this morning.
Sonny: Yeah, bunch of saps.
Michael: Why are they saps?
Connie: Sonny, come on. We don't have to talk about the war.
Sonny: Hey, beat it--you go talk to Carlo, alright? (Leaning menacingly toward Michael) They're saps because they risk their lives for strangers.
Michael: Now that's Pop talking.
Sonny: You're fucking right that's Pop talking.
Michael: They risk their lives for their country.
Sonny: Your country ain't your blood--you remember that.
MIchael: I don't feel that way.
Sonny (taunting): "I dont' feel that way." Well, if you don't feel like that why don't you just quit college and go into the Army?
Michael: I did--I enlisted in the Marines.
--"The Godfather"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=435mkg6_eGQ


And I gladly stand up
Next to you and defend her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land
God Bless the USA.
And I'm proud to be an American 
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died 
Who gave that right to me.
--"Proud To Be An American"

The Sunday Times carried an article about two brothers who opened a restaurant in Sri Lanka where a Facebook posting claimed Muslims were plotting to sterilize Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority. A Singhalese patron found something in his plate he thought was a sterilization pill and the brothers were beaten and their restaurant set  aflame and a riot ensued. One of the subtitles of the piece was "The Thrill of Tribalism."  Various authors and academics have made hay on this concept, that tribalism is deeply rooted in human nature.

When I was an undergraduate, one of the most popular events on campus were the "anthro flicks" put on by the Department of Anthropology. This was before the National Geographic channel and youtube and even before computers, so the novelty of seeing how other people lived in cultures far away and vastly different drew pre medical students, engineers, math majors, philosophy majors, a wide swath of students from all over the campus. 

One of the favorites--they showed it every year--was "Dead Birds" about two warring villages  in New Guinea. Periodically, a war party consistenting of all the men (and some boys) from each village marched out onto a field between the villages with spears and shields and they shouted threats at each other and launched spears and arrows and battle ensued until the first villager was killed. Then, the villagers gathered up the dead, in this case a ten year old boy, and carried him back to the village and the fighting ended. The villagers staged a ritualistic funeral, and the dead boy was seated in a chair and carried about before being immolated. 

After a time, the villagers would go at it again. Usually, the next fatality was suffered by the village who had not lost the last time. In this way, the war could continue, because neither village lost too much and balance remained.

The moral of the story, as I got it then, was that human beings are tribal, and they must have conflict. It's in our DNA.

When we see the Republicans appealing to all this, when President Trump tells us some of those Neo Nazis in Charlottesville are "fine people," we see an appeal to that sort of butt naked tribalism. 

The wonder to me has been, how you ever get a population as diverse as ours, with so many "tribes" to coalesce into a nation. How do you get mothers willing to give up their sons for this idea of country?
One way, of course, is if those mothers do not have much to lose. If you are a family like the one depicted in "Hillbilly Elegy," which is to say, a failing family, barely able to meet the rent, barely scraping by, well then the Army seems like the best deal out there. And if you are an ambitious young man from a wealthier family, fighting might be one way to created a story for yourself. 

When you watch that scene from "The Godfather" where Sonny explodes at his brother for placing country above family, you see the force of the idea of family, which is really nothing more than tribe. 

That the Lee Greenwood anthem, "Proud to be an American" resonates with the least wealthy, mostly white population, says something too. The people who tear up listening to this song are very much what Sonny had in mind: Saps. Trump chumps. But for them, what else do they have? They live paycheck to paycheck. They are often fighting with their own family. They are isolated, alienated, and then there is this sappy song, calling them to a higher purpose, enobling them. They can't make enough money to take their family out to dinner; their parents and grandparents are living with them in the same rental; they are one payment away from having their cars repossessed. But at least they are free. Freedom's, indeed, just another word for nothing left to lose. "Stronger Together" has no appeal for them. 

Marc Short & The White House Frat Boy Style: Going all Bernie Sandinista

Marc Short, Trump's White House Director of legislative affairs, was on the PBS News Hour tonight smirking like Martin Shkreli.

The PBS News Hour is hosted now by a set of journalists who seem to live every moment in terror that something they may say or show on air might damage the delicate sensibilities of any viewer out there in TV land, as if their imagined audience is a vast community of pre pubescent children who have been raised by nuns.

Today it was not Judy Woodruff doing the interview with Short, for which Mad Dog was grateful.  Woodruff is a lovely person, but she is just so solicitous and her voice often drops into a deep pond of empathy, where the frogs apologize to the lily pads for disturbing their quietude. The interviewer today was reasonably persistent asking about the objections which have been raised to the nomination of a CIA official to be head of the agency, a woman who had tacitly approved of water boarding and other methods of torture. The interviewer asked:  "We understand your point: she did not break the law, but of the agency head, is it not fair to ask about a person whose defense is, 'I was just following orders?' Is she not required, as head, to have a moral compass?"

That got Short's dander up and that's where he spread his full frat boy wings and launched into a condemnation of the Democrat Party--Trump and company, every Republican from Mitch McConnell on down insist on referring not to the Democratic Party but to the DemocRAT party--and Short said, "Well, it's only that Bernie Sandinista party of the left wing Democrat party that thinks that way!"

White House strategist 

Mad Dog was listening on radio, but he could just see that smirk on Short's face, unleashing that "Bernie Sandinista" thing.

It just sounded so pernicious and ultra left wingy.

Who were  the Sandinistas, anyway?  Professor Google instructs it was the revolutionary party which fought and ultimately overthrew the murderous Somosa family which terrorized Nicaragua for years. And yes, the Sandinistas were socialists, which makes Bernie Sandinista sound doubly treacherous and funny.

You could just see Marc sitting with his feet up on his desk at the White House trying "Bernie Sandinista" on his co workers, holding his UVA mug, and grinning like he'd just pulled Bernie's pants down in front of a carload of sorority pledges. 
Oh, I just DESTROYED that sucker, Marc was saying. I'm so ridiculously sick. Nobody can touch me. High fives!

Who do we have, as Democrats who can smack this playground bully upside the head and stomp a foot on his neck until he cries for mercy?
Chris Pappas?

Maura Sullivan?

Mindi Messmer?

Yup.

One more Bronze Star than Marc Short

Maybe somebody who has actually had a shot fired at him in anger--a real actual shot, as in a bullet, something Marc Short  never experienced swilling beer on the frat house porch down in Charlottesvile. Short, Heel Spurs, these are the phony tough guys. We got the real article now, on the Democratic side.

O'Rourke for Congress,McEachern for Senate, Lincoln Soldati for President

Here's the way I'd arrange things if I were running the DNC.

Fire Down Below 

Every weekend a rally somewhere in New Hampshire, big venues, big arenas. 
Pack 'em in, lines stretching around the block. Manchester, Nashua, Salem, Portsmouth, Hampton, Rochester, Dover, Durham. You name it. We are there.

These are big rallies, connected to a NACAR event one weekend, a Woodstock reunion the next. Whatever brings 'em in.
Give the Granite State bread and circus on an ongoing basis. 

Get Terence O'Rourke out there to stoke the crowd up; bring on McEachern to charm them, and then bring the hammer down with Lincoln Soldati.

President Soldati

All of them are currently running for Congress, but you couldn't tell from this road show. 
They all say, hey, the important thing is we get a Democrat in there to keep this country from going to Hell in a handbasket.
We got to get the House, the Senate and the Presidency.
Then we pass a law which does not require a Constitutional amendment: Add justices to the Supreme Court, two a Presidential term. Or, if we take O'Rourke's formula, just add 6 new justices. Bye, Bye Scalia's court. No more ruling by the dead. A new day in America. Sunrise finally after the long dark tempest of the soul. 

Senator McEachern 

In 2018 we elect O'Rourke to Congress.
In 2020 we elect Soldati President. "It's time for another Lincoln in the White House."
In 2022 we replace Maggie Hassan in the U.S. Senate with Deaglan McEachern.

So, is this what it's all about?

Now, if I could just get Tom Perez on the phone.

Do Ideas Matter More than Money In Politics?

Here's the hypothesis:  The reason Donald Trump won the White House and the reason the Republicans swept into power in both houses of Congress was not because they had the upper 1% and all the money but because they had the ideas. They have been the party of ideas--terrible ideas, granted, but ideas nonetheless which appealed to enough people who voted.

See What Sticks

Reading "Dark Money" and a variety of other tomes and sources about the Right, the Koch brothers, Fox News the most striking thing, to Mad Dog at least, is how they invest in ideas, in think tanks, in people who will air their ideas and refine them. 

Right Wing Intellect

Comics do this sort of thing: Seinfeld, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, air "new material" out on small audiences in basement brick-walled night clubs before they take their routines to nation wide audiences. 

Rush Limbaugh, every day, runs various tropes by audiences and, in some way, gets feedback on what of all that stuff he has thrown against the wall, sticks.

Thunder from the Left: The Man with Ideas

Democrats do not do this. They do not assume, as many Neo Nazis and Freedom Forum and Tea Party types assume, that what they are putting out is offensive, or possibly even wrong. Democrats speak from deep conviction; their gospel is received Truth, and they have the self righteous posture which conveys that.

Republicans, at least some, know their bile is offensive, is wrong in the eyes of others and they work on it and refine it. 

Showed Something: The Man is a Pro

New Hampshire Dems held a very useful and well orchestrated forum in Portsmouth last Wednesday. It is a seminar which should be studied by all the local Democratic party groups throughout the state, because it did get at the thinking of at least some of the candidates. Well, actually, what it got at was how well they could present the tropes. To examine real thinking, you have to allow for hard questions. 

It did not do this more than superficially, but it was a start.

Ray Buckley and Co. did not want to allow control of the event to slip from their hands, so they did not allow questions directly from the audience of 150, but they required questions be written down on cards, which they then selected and edited.

Deaglan McEarchern

What Mad Dog would like to see now is a more bare knuckles, slashing approach to the thinking of these candidates.  For example, candidates were asked if they supported a woman's right to choose and Deaglan McEachern, who got the original question said, "Yes, 100%." Every other Democrat echoed his words.

But Mad Dog has asked McEachern the following question, in another setting, "So, you Democrats always say that this abortion question is about the right of a woman to control her own body without anyone else interfering. But what about the baby who is coming down the birth canal and you have a doctor there with a scalpel to meet it's head? Are we now talking only about a woman's right to control what happens to her body? Is there not another body, another person now to consider? Suppose I say life begins at conception? It is not a choice, it's a life."

There is an effective answer to that, but McEachern had not worked it out. He asked Mad Dog for Mad Dog's answer and hearing it, he smiled and said, "Ask me that question again sometime. I think I'll have a better answer for you."

Is this Race Over? If Maura has no ideas, does it matter?

In the setting of the forum at Portsmouth, he did not have the time to get into the deeper answer. Nor did any of the others, but they will have to do this when they debate Republicans.

But maybe, none of this matters. Maybe all that matters is who has the most money. That's who will become the nominee. 

Sad to say, that nominee may then go down to defeat by a Republican who has more ideas, better answers.

Looks Like Hillary: All the Money, Playing it Safe

Hillary Clinton outspent Trump in many of those Rust Belt counties, in some places 9 to one, and yet he won those counties. 

We had better ask ourselves, as Democrats, why?


 Looking at that bar graph, to Mad Dog's eye at least, there is an almost perfect inverse correlation between the height of the graph, the size of the money and the quality of ideas held by the candidate. Terrence O'Rourke, who has more ideas, better thought out, has barely enough money to register; Maura has a ton of money; not so much in ideas.

Are we headed down that same old path as Democrats? Rushing to the person who draws in all the big bucks and shoving aside the guy who has the big ideas?