2017: Whither Democrats?

Man, if California Dems can’t even successfully navigate a known system like that, my hopes for the 2018/2020 success of the party just took a big hit. How difficult can it be to apply basic political strategy at the party level?

Exactly. There’s not much to be done, short of the party putting its finger on the scale for one candidate over others, and that always bears strong, strong risk of unintended consequences.

I’m not sure what the fix is, or if its even something you can blame the state or national party on. This is something that probably benefited the Democrats in 2016 for Kamala Harris’s election to the senate (when she beat Lorretta Sanchez, also a Democrat)…but carries with it all kinds of “Oh boy, didn’t expect that to happen.”

I mean, this is a mess that came out of the Party saying “We hear you, and we’re going to try to stay away from ‘The Party Decides’ stuff, so at the grassroots an energized Left can organically push its own candidate up.” And giving their base in the state what they wanted – a laissez faire party keeping its hands off – has resulted in the grassroots left with their inability to compromise coming up with an absolute horror show.

And to be entirely fair, that same grassroots movement on the Left in California did push up the candidacy of some strong candidates, like Jess Phoenix in the CA-25. She looks like a pretty reasonable bet to at least make things interesting for Steve Knight.

So maybe I’m painting with too broad a brush in pointing the finger at an uncompromising grassroots. Northern California Democrats appear to have their shit together. :)

Our primaries here in MD aren’t until the end of June, but I wish the Dems would start getting some word out. With the way Hogan tightly controls all the word out of State Govt, he makes sure there’s no bad news going around. Plus just signing the bill to give MD students $5,000 a semester for community college starting this fall, its going to be hard to get him out I fear.

And one of the top third of the candidates in the primary to up against Hogan passed away suddenly this morning from cardiac arrest.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/md-democratic-candidate-for-governor-dies-hours-after-candidates-forum/2018/05/10/3a9f04f6-543d-11e8-abd8-265bd07a9859_story.html?utm_term=.116782efce2a

Criminy, at 60 years old? Sheesh.

Lost my dad to a heart attack when he was 49. Lost my stepdad to a heart attack when he was 55.

Both guys were athletic, active, and seemed healthy until the days they died. Heart attacks are a bitch.

Sounds genetic.

I think this opportunity being a surprising thing for the democrats probably caught them off guard here. The dem trying to beat Nunes here seems to be getting more traction than normal, but I think in many traditional republican districts it will take more than just an anti-Trump feeling to get people to vote dem.

No, not really. The great recession lived up to its name, in fact more people lost their homes in the great recession than in the great depression, although unemployment statistic were far worse in the depression.

The recovery under Obama was slower, (I don’t know if was the slowest ever as the Republican claim,) but job and wage growth in 2010-2016 was far below average. About the only part of the economy that recovered reasonably quickly was the stock market.

By 2016, unemployment was low, the stock market was doing well, housing had rebounded to above 2007 level, but wage growth was low, and labor participation was below peak periods.

The economy under Trump has continue to expand. It has hasn’t been particularly robust, but the longevity of the expansion is at record levels. So slow steady growth. As much as I had to give Trump credit for anything, I do believe that stock market has fared better under Trump than it would have under Hillary, due to the corporate tax cut rates.

The budget busting nature of the tax cuts, is bad but it is probably years if not decades before that will have an impact on the economy, so it might as well not exist for politically purposes.

A ways out yet, but something to consider.
(Who am I kidding? The outrage, outrage! from beltway pundits alone makes this an untenable strategy:
IOKIYAR and IACIYAD. )

An accurate statement is, “More houses were foreclosed upon during the Great Recession than the Great Depression.” But that doesn’t mean quite what you’re statement conjures in terms of the relative severity of the two events. Here’s some context:

  • The population of the US in 2010 was 2.5 times of what it was in 1930. So it’s also true to say that more people didn’t lose their houses during the Great Recession than during the Great Depression, just because there’s way more people around.
  • House ownership was vastly more widespread in 2008 than 1929, thanks to changes in the financial system that happened after WW2. So to see the impact of the Great Depression on homelessness, you would also have to look at renters. (There are actually no good records on foreclosures or overall homelessness during the Great Depression because governments didn’t track those things at the time.)
  • Most importantly, the 2008 recession was a real estate bubble. When you think of it, you think of a mostly-empty subdivision of newly built flippers.
  • Whereas when you think of the Great Depression, you think of Hooverviles - shanty towns of shacks built on scraps of land by people who were so poor they had nowhere else to go.

The shanty towns and mass homelessness that characterized the Great Depression didn’t happen during the Great Recession, despite predictions in some quarters, both because it was a milder event and because of the safety net that was put up in its wake (that Republicans are now trying to destroy, but that’s another rant.)

While I’m not disputing that the Great Depression was a much worse event, at least in Portland, Oregon, we’re getting ever more homeless camps. Rents and housing prices have gone bananas. I thank my stars that I bought in '97 (nowhere near a bubble) and that I’ve got stable (and decently remunerative) employment.

The homeless problem has been escalating like crazy even here in Salt Lake City. I used to work downtown up until just a few years ago and drove down there daily without issue, despite a homeless shelter being just a couple blocks away. For the past few years I haven’t had to commute downtown but not long ago I had to drive through there. I was shocked at what I saw, the whole area looked like some sort of refugee camp. Just city block after city block of this:

image

There was a crackdown recently, which scattered the homeless out of that area. It just moved the problem, though, which was evident when they did a sweep through the Jordan River Trail that cuts through the metropolitan area and flushed out literally hundreds of little homesteads out in the brush.

Sad times.

All good points. I’m not saying the Great Recession was nearly as bad as the Great Depression because it wasn’t. Not even close for all the reasons you point out. But the nationwide crash in real estate prices was something that really hadn’t been seen before and the near collapse of the financial system in 2008 was something the country hadn’t experienced before since the Great Depression.

What I take away from the Great Recession and the slow and quite uneven recovery is that it had more profound psychological on folks in Red States than especially the coastal blue states

Interesting platform plank, putting Internet access in the public sphere. Makes lots of sense if you’re anyone except the big cable/mobile providers. Which means most candidates won’t support it, of course, too much campaign donation money coming from those companies.

Honestly, I firmly believe that should be a big part of any infrastructure improvement plan this country draws up in the next decade or so. If we are building/repairing roads, highways and bridges, there is no reason we can’t lay miles and miles of fiber cable next to/under them while we’re at it. Giving internet infrastructure back to the people is the only way we’re ever going to connect both large cities and rural towns to a high speed internet that could bring life changing opportunities to both. Access to high speed internet provides for better educational opportunities, better employment opportunities, access to government and private services and even impacts the quality of healthcare available in an area. America should be taking a page from South Korea’s government and taking a more involved role in data infrastructure going forward. Although given the recent flip-flop on net-neutrality, I’m not sure I trust our current government with such responsibility.

So I was in New York last week where Cynthia Nixon of “Sex in the City” fame is challenging sitting Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic nomination. A long-time observer of the NY political scene gave this succinct summary of her platform: “The Governor’s an asshole.”