This is why I won’t give money to the DCCC, the DSCC, or the DNC, from a Down with Tyranny post about the DCCC courting Blue Dog candidates:
A problem for progressive voters is that few Democrats run as Blue Dogs. They mouth the words normal Democrats say and then when it’s too late, when they’re in office, they take off the masks and expose the ugly truth. Chances are good that if the DCCC is backing a candidate in a primary, they’re backing either a Blue Dog or New Dem. Chances are going when someone claims to be a “centrist” (like Dave Min in Orange County or Andrew Janz in the Central Valley) we’re talking about Blue Dogs or New Dems not Democrats. Be careful– and everyone on this list you get to by hitting the Blue America thermometer on the right is a progressive and not a Blue Dog and not a New Dem. And one more thing to remember, if an anti-Trump tsunami elects a batch of slimy Blue Dogs in 2018, they’ll all be defeated in 2022 when their constituents realize they got tricked by the DCCC again.
Read the entire post. This is the main theme of the DWT blog, but it is an unfortunate fact that their posts are generally spot on. While the Republicans have been moving ever rightward, the Democrats have been following them, and have for years been actively recruiting candidates who are indistinguishable from Republicans. Why should people vote for a party that’s selling Republican lite, when they can get the real thing?
I’ve been around quite a while now, and I’ve been interested in politics since I was 14 or so, and I remember a few things. The most left wing radical Democrats, the Sanders, Frankens, et. al., are themselves indistinguishable from the run of the mill Democrat of 1968. “Left wing” proposals, such as single payer, increased social security benefits, raising the social security tax cap, etc., poll well. Yet our party has never gotten behind them, because at its center, it is controlled by Wall Street. It’s a kinder, gentler version of the Republican Party, and the more Republican it gets, the more it loses. And as soon as, in rare cases, it wins, it throws away its victory by doing nothing. As much as I support the current effort to prevent the Republican evisceration of Obamacare, the fact is that it’s nowhere close to being the program it should be. As Paul Krugman has repeatedly noted, it is entirely derived from a Republican healthcare plan, and the only reason the Republicans opposed it, and still oppose it, is because it was proposed by a black Democratic president. Had John McCain been elected, and had he pushed for a healthcare program as he promised, it would probably have been much like Obamacare. We lost in 2010 because we adopted a healthcare program no one understood or really liked, and a stimulus package designed to get the vote of a single Republican Senator from Maine, that did nothing more than prevent things from getting worse. That was the result of Republican lite and we are going in that direction yet again.
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