026 The Erickson Report for November 25 to December 8, Page 2: Listen Up!

The Erickson Report for November 25 to December 8, Page 2: Listen Up!

I only have a few minutes left and I'm going to spend them expanding on a rant from last time on the efforts of the establishment Democratic Party to use progressives for voter turnout but otherwise dismiss them.

And just to be clear: The term "establishment Democratic Party" refers to the DNC, the party leadership in the House and Senate, and the party's Congressional and Senate Campaign Committees

Okay. I said last time that the establishment Dem Par was looking to blame progressives and progressive causes for the party's down-ballot failures - that is, in the House and Senate - rather than even considering their own roles. That hasn't let up, it wasn't just that one notorious post-election conference call. AP has joined the fray with an article which could barely get past one tepid criticism of party strategy before rushing on blame Medicare for All and the Green New Deal and criticisms of police racism and violence.

You want to know how unpopular Medicare for All is? According to a November 3 exit poll by Fox News, 72% of voters favored a "change to a government-run health care plan." 112 co-sponsors of Medicare for All were on the ballot in November. All of them won.

You want to know how unpopular the Green New Deal is? That same Fox poll found 70% of voters supporting “increasing government spending on green and renewable energy.” There were 98 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal on the ballot in November. 97 of them won.

Bernie Sanders said it well:

The lesson is not to abandon popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, living wage jobs, criminal justice reform and universal child care, but to enact an agenda that speaks to the economic desperation being felt by the working class - Black, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American.

That is a desperation to which the establishment Democratic Party did not speak in its campaign. Yes, I know all about the Heroes Act and I know all about the intransigence of Fishface McConnell and the rest. But the establishment Democratic party figured that the public distaste for Tweetie-pie so great that laying real hardball on COVID economic relief was a good political course. They were wrong. And instead of recognizing their failing to make that very GOPper intransigence a centerpiece of their campaign, their answer is to blame progressives - and to do as much as they can to shut them out from decision-making roles.

Which brings me to what really prompted this renewed rant. News is emerging of who Joe Blahden wants in his administration and the trend is not encouraging.

Michael McCabe is a former consultant to DuPont who lead its successful campaign to head off regulation of a highly toxic chemical called PFOA. He's been appointed by the Blahden transition to its review team for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Rep Cedric Richmond is joining the administration as a senior adviser to serve as a liaison with the business community and climate change activists. Richmond is a darling of the oil and gas industries, having gotten more donations from them than nearly any other Democrat.

Blahden is nominating Antony Blinken as secretary of state. Blinken supported the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Libya and has spent his recent years as a partner in a consulting firm with a secret client list drawn from the tech, finance, and arms industries.

A leading candidate for defense secretary is Michèle Flournoy, Blinken's partner in that consulting firm. Among his other achievement, Flournoy supported the wars in Iraq and Libya, thought Obama wasn't tough enough on Syria, and helped craft the surge in Afghanistan.

Those two are likely why defense executives have been boasting about their close relationship with Biden and expressing confidence that there will not be much change in Pentagon policy.

Perhaps worst of all, it's reported that Blahden is considering Bruce Reed for director of the Office of Management and Budget. Reed is a deficit hawk who was a lead architect of the destructive 1996 welfare "reform" law and was executive director of the Obama-appointed Bowles-Simpson Commission, which became known as the Cat Food Commission because its central proposal was to slash Social Security. Appointing someone like that to direct OMB in the midst of an economy-wrecking pandemic is just insane.

So far, I am neither impressed nor encouraged.

But in closing I will say there is one thing on which I agree with the critics of progressives: The slogan "defund the police" - which has got to be the worst political slogan in the history of campaigning. My central principle for effective communication is that what you say is not as important as what the other person hears. On that score, "defund the police" is a miserable, abject failure. Not only does it not express what supporters want it to, it positively invites people to misunderstand it.

The idea of "defund the police" in a nutshell is to stop expecting police to deal with things for which they have neither the training nor the competence- such as mental health crises and drug issues - cases where their intervention so often leads to tragedy, and instead direct those resources to agencies and personnel which do have the training and competence. But if people hear "defund the police," they think - reasonably - that you want to zero out the budgets, to dispense with police altogether. An effective slogan depends on a previously-existing, widespread understanding of its meaning. "Defund the police" doesn't have that - which is why it's a failure.

I don't have a devastatingly better alternative, but I will say that my preference would be for "demilitarize the police" which I think would not only cover what "defund the police" means to address, it would expand on it and without making it so easy to misunderstand or willfully distort.