The Perez wing, which is not hostile to Bernie Sanders, seems ready to discuss class oppression.
Tom Perez and Bernie Sanders at an April rally in Mesa, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore / Flickr.
The Hill, which is widely read by Washington politicians and is rather centrist-liberal in character, reports on the split at the link just below.
This angry split within the Democratic Party is basically between the Hillary Clinton/Debbie Wasserman Schultz/corporate media wing of the Dems and, on the other side, the new DNC leadership wing led by Tom Perez, which is not openly hostile to Bernie Sanders (that would be hard, since Bernie is now the most popular US politician). The Perez wing seems to be ready to discuss class oppression issues, to some degree.
DNC allies incensed by Clinton criticism
Irritated Democrats say Hillary Clinton is wrong to cast blame on the national party for her loss to Donald Trump.
Allies of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in particular were incensed by Clinton’s criticism of the party apparatus, saying she mischaracterized the committee’s work while needlessly stoking internal divisions.
“This is all about the last campaign. And really, what Democrats should be focusing on, and what I think Hillary Clinton should be figuring out, is how do we empower the DNC to have the best data resources to win races this year, in 2018 and 2020,” a former DNC aide said.
“Having hard feelings about the data that you may or may not have received in 2016 ultimately is not the reason why we lost.”
Clinton surprised Democrats on Wednesday when she complained that she inherited “nothing” from a “bankrupt” DNC after becoming the nominee.
Another recent DNC official was a little more blunt about Clinton’s blindness to her own shortcomings.
Democratic Operative Says Hillary Clinton’s DNC Claims Are “F***ing Bulls***”
Andrew Therriault, who served as the DNC’s director of data science until last June, said Clinton’s claims were “f—ing bulls—” in a series of tweets that have since been deleted.
Therriault accused Clinton’s team of ignoring DNC data that warned of a close race in the three states that, by narrow margins, ultimately handed Trump his Electoral College victory: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“All that said, irony of her bashing DNC data: *our* models never had mi/wi/pa looking even close to safe. Her team thought they knew better,” Therriault wrote.
Trump and Sanders both talked about class oppression and Trump won, and Sanders nearly won. Meanwhile, Hillary essentially ran for Obama’s third term and supported corporate domination as usual, and lost due to her own hubris.
Bernie Sanders went to Britain applauding labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, while stopping just short of an open endorsement, which would have been criticized as interference. Britain has its own labor party bureaucrats in Parliament, who are as unwilling as the DNC was last year to talk about class issues and a democratic revolution.
Bernie Sanders praises ‘courageous’ Jeremy Corbyn for ‘revitalising democracy’
He said: “What Corbyn has tried to do with the Labour Party is not dissimilar to what some of us are trying to do with the Democratic Party, and that is to make it a party that is much more open and inviting for working people and young people and not have a liberal elite making the decisions from the top down.
“I think what Corbyn is doing is trying to revitalise democracy, bring a lot of new people into the political process and I think that’s an excellent idea. That’s what we need in countries all over the world and certainly what we are trying to do in the United States.”
Clinton managed to lose to Trump because of her widespread unpopularity and bad poll numbers, and despite her solid support by the corporate media — by nearly every U.S. newspaper. Trump won by appealing to U.S. nationalism, and talking turkey about how U.S. workers are getting shafted, while promising to bring back jobs to the rust-belt industries, jobs that were outsourced to China for decades under both parties.
The fact that coal jobs are not coming back, and that building the Mexican border wall provides no real job benefits was not important compared to Trump making endless promises, and at least seeming to be sincere.
Where is this headed? The lessons should be obvious. The USA is currently politically dominated by the GOP on all branches of federal government, and this reality is not easily or rapidly reversed. The Dems can’t make a comeback unless they start talking about class oppression by the 1%, the bankers, and the billionaires, as Trump and Sanders both did. Even widely respected Democratic ex-president Jimmie Carter voted for Bernie, as he recently disclosed.
Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.
[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Alliance and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. ]
Ditto. As outsourcing and automation accelerates its incumbent upon the D Party to address income inequality/class oppression lest the party continue its precipitous slide into irrelevance.
This whole meme is also sponsored by Koch Bros., Rove’s Crosshairs GPS and Vlad Putin. Look who gains if Democrats split in half? You guessed it; all of the above. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decades developing their divide and conquer campaign and articles like this, unwittingly or not play right into it. Just like a bird, it takes both wings. to fly. Unite the party to win in 2012 and elect a Liz Warren sort in 2020. Then settle scores with residual Blue Dogs and corporatist once we have the real Fascists out of control of the government.