Jon Ossoff’s Loss Should Be a Lesson to Corporate Democrats

Darth Omar said:
They poured big bucks into it and still lost to a mediocre republican in red district that isn't exactly Hyper Red.
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For all the monies they are pouring into losing elections one would think the progressives would be more concerned about putting those monies into what they preach. Charity, offsetting the cost of the poors healthcare, helping the homeless,etc. You know, practice what they preach.
 
Buckly J. Ewer said:
A historically republican district where the incumbent, Price, has always won by at least 20 points was won by a republican ...
That is not news...

The margin of victory was a mere 3 points ...

That is fucking news.
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The news is that it was a tremendous waste of money and resources. Ossoff doesn't even live in the district, and instead of democrats wasting tremendous resources trying to flip republicans, how about spending that time and money trying to shore up the democratic base .. much of which didn't show up in 2016.

Instead of democratic candidates trying to pass themselves off as republican-lite, how about standing for the core values that democrats believe in?
 
blackascoal said:
The news is that it was a tremendous waste of money and resources. Ossoff doesn't even live in the district, and instead of democrats wasting tremendous resources trying to flip republicans, how about spending that time and money trying to shore up the democratic base .. much of which didn't show up in 2016.

Instead of democratic candidates trying to pass themselves off as republican-lite, how about standing for the core values that democrats believe in?
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I applaud the common sense here.
 
blackascoal said:
Not sure why more democrats aren't posting in this thread.

Introspective is a wonderful thing.
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Don't think you were posting on this board at the time but during the primaries there were multiple proclaimed Bernie supporters here but almost no threads as to why Dems should support Bernie over Hillary.

For what ever reason there is very little to almost no Dem vs Dem discussion on this board
 
blackascoal said:
I woke up to news this morning that Jon Ossoff’s failure to flip Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District will “come as a crushing emotional blow to Democrats.” Well, not this Democrat. And not just because, as I wrote back in April, “an Ossoff victory would represent a repudiation of Trump, but not our broken politics.”

The 30-year-old political novice announced his campaign with the invitation to “make Trump furious”—an aim impossible to resist, if not exactly difficult to achieve, since “furious” and “smug” seem to be the Trumpster’s only working gears. And though Ossoff’s decision to run an issue-lite, centrist campaign aimed at wooing moderate Republicans and disaffected women might have been a questionable tactic, the army of fired-up Georgia women who answered his call—and who told my colleague Joan Walsh that they intend to stay involved in politics—should remind progressives that local knowledge matters. What works just fine in Manhattan might not fly in Montana, or in Cobb County, Georgia.

Even in local terms though, there were problems with Ossoff, whose failure to actually live in the district he wanted to represent made it easier for the Republicans to attack him as an “outsider.” Still, he would have been a huge improvement over Karen Handel, a perennial Republican candidate whose main previous claim to fame was her effort, as vice president of the Susan G. Komen cancer charity, to defund Planned Parenthood.

My own reservations about Ossoff were about strategy, not tactics. As we were reminded time and again by the media, an Ossoff win would have also been a victory over the left. It would have been trumpeted as vindication of “a decidedly un-Sanders-like vision of the future” and cited as proof that Democrats who “want to win” should follow his model and explicitly rule out raising taxes on the wealthy and firmly oppose “any move” towards single-payer health care. It’s tempting to argue that wasn’t Ossoff’s fault. After all, it was former Clinton aide Brian Fallon, not Ossoff, who came up with the “Panera Bread strategy”—essentially a rationale for appealing to suburban voters in swing districts rather than spending time or money trying to expand the Democratic party’s base among working-class voters, minorities, or millennials—which is really just a new name for the kind of triangulation that put Bill Clinton in the White House. As the career of its current master Rahm Emanuel suggests, that kind of politics can still be effective. But it was never progressive, and not even the backing of Daily Kos or the Working Families Party—who both worked hard, and effectively, on Ossoff’s behalf—can change that.

Nobody forced Ossoff to dismiss single payer, or held a gun to his head and made him use dog-whistle language about “both parties in Washington” wasting taxpayer dollars. Those messages weren’t aimed at Georgia voters; they were aimed at funders, like the supposed pragmatists at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who stiffed James Thompson in Kansas and spent a paltry $340,000 on Rob Quist’s race in Montana, but lavished millions on Ossoff’s equally doomed campaign.

So no, I’m not sorry he lost. The Tea Party didn’t take over the Republican Party—and rise to national power—by celebrating the victories of its adversaries. And in the struggle for control—or if you want to be poetic, for “the soul”—of the Democratic Party, we need to be clear not just on what we stand for, but on who stands against us. Corporate Democrats and the whole corrupt culture of consultants who suck the life and drain the principles out of any progressive movement need to be fought, not “friended”—even on Facebook. We don’t all have to agree on everything—our diversity is a source of strength, not just demographically but also in the issues we lift up and the tactics we use. But we have to agree on some core set of issues that includes racial justice, environmental justice, economic justice, access to health care—including safe and legal abortion—as well as access to higher education, the freedom to practice solidarity at work, and the right to love whomever we choose.

That is what liberation means. And as the activist Waleed Shahid points out, it is also smart politics. After all, the opposing strategy was summed up succinctly by one of its chief architects, Chuck Schumer, who last July infamously boasted, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” We saw how that worked out.
By “repeating the mistakes of 2016 and expecting different results” says Shahid, Democrats risk turning off the vast majority of the party base who failed to turn out last November. Jon Ossoff’s defeat is just the latest evidence that simply being against Donald Trump isn’t enough. To win Democrats need to tell voters what they’re for—and to do that effectively, they need to stop running scared and let progressives, who don’t need focus groups or consultants to know what we’re for, take the lead.
https://www.thenation.com/article/jon-ossoffs-loss-should-be-a-lesson-to-corporate-democrats/

I couldn't agree more.
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Some good points.
But, holy Hell, the best the Democrats could do was to put up a 30 year old neophyte?

I haven't been in a professional job in my life that would trust a 30 year old to be in charge; it is exceedingly rare rare they have the life experience, the temperament, the gravitas, and the wisdom gained through a long series of successes and failures to be considered for a leadership position of any complex entity, business, or bureaucracy.
 
blackascoal said:
Not sure why more democrats aren't posting in this thread.

Introspective is a wonderful thing.
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Yeah, what's up with that? Same that is happening nationally. It's all about Trump. Fox News rating down because of Trump. We are a second tier nation implied that it's because of Trump. Trump this, Trump that.
 
cawacko said:
Don't think you were posting on this board at the time but during the primaries there were multiple proclaimed Bernie supporters here but almost no threads as to why Dems should support Bernie over Hillary.

For what ever reason there is very little to almost no Dem vs Dem discussion on this board
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*eh hem*
I did multiple threads on why Bernie was a worthy candidate, especially compared to Clinton

>end hijack<
 
Thing1 said:
The only lesson for Democrats is that they shouldn't pour that kind of money into a district that they just can't win.
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but the polls showed he could..most of the polls (RCP) had him winning up to the very last ...poll.
Also this was considered a referendum on Trump - and Trump only won that district by 1%.

It was looked at as a harbinger of being able to take back the House in Districts Hillary won-
which wound up going to Trump
 
anatta said:
but the polls showed he could..most of the polls (RCP) had him winning up to the very last ...poll.
Also this was considered a referendum on Trump - and Trump only won that district by 1%.

It was looked at as a harbinger of being able to take back the House in Districts Hillary won-
which wound up going to Trump
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No Democrat had ever come within 30% of that Congressional seat. It was a local election.

Read whatever you want into it. Dems won the 1st 7 special elections after Obama took office, and then it didn't go so well.
 
Thing1 said:
No Democrat had ever come within 30% of that Congressional seat. It was a local election.

Read whatever you want into it. Dems won the 1st 7 special elections after Obama took office, and then it didn't go so well.
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"all politics are local"..
except when it's fueled by national media, and YUGE contributions saying it's not.

Moe interestingly is what are the Dem's gonna do ? ( the point of the OP)
are they going to go full court progressive or try to match the districts?

From what I know that was the campaign Ossoff ran. Centrist for a conservative district.
BAC is advocating ( not putting words in his mouth) that they go to their base -progressivism
 
anatta said:
"all politics are local"..
except when it's fueled by national media, and YUGE contributions saying it's not.

Moe interestingly is what are the Dem's gonna do ? ( the point of the OP)
are they going to go full court progressive or try to match the districts?

From what I know that was the campaign Ossoff ran. Centrist for a conservative district.
BAC is advocating ( not putting words in his mouth) that they go to their base -progressivism
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I don't care about the $$$ they poured into the district. It was a mistake; it doesn't mean anything, because they never had a shot there.

I don't think there is necessarily a national strategy for taking back Congress. I think Trump will do a lot of the heavy lifting for Democrats over the next year, but they should keep the focus local. There are areas where they'll want to run liberal progressives, and areas where centrists make more sense.

People try to oversimplify everything.
 
Cypress said:
Some good points.
But, holy Hell, the best the Democrats could do was to put up a 30 year old neophyte?

I haven't been in a professional job in my life that would trust a 30 year old to be in charge; it is exceedingly rare rare they have the life experience, the temperament, the gravitas, and the wisdom gained through a long series of successes and failures to be considered for a leadership position of any complex entity, business, or bureaucracy.
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That's true .. but I'm not sure the district was worth the money and energy spent. It's solidly republican .. and much of it sits in a black county that people in that district hate, thus intensifying support for Trump. Ossoff worked for the black Congressman in the neighboring district.

Democrats would have been better served spending time and money throughout Atlanta shoring up reluctant democrats who won't for republicans, but aren't too enthusiastic about democrats either.
 
Thing1 said:
The only lesson for Democrats is that they shouldn't pour that kind of money into a district that they just can't win.
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I disagree.

There is still far too much Clintonesque centrist corporatism in the message.

Ossoff was a prime example of that.
 
aloysious said:
Yeah, what's up with that? Same that is happening nationally. It's all about Trump. Fox News rating down because of Trump. We are a second tier nation implied that it's because of Trump. Trump this, Trump that.
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You beat me to the punch.

JPP democrats are the national democrats in microcosm. They want to talk about Trump and Russia or Trump and obstruction or Trump impeachment or the latest Trump twitter outrage.

Unless you live in the anti-Trump bubble you're tuning it out.
 
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