Archives for 2024

John Avlon, formerly a CNN reporter, was the Democrat who ran for the NY-1 House seat and lost.  Here’s his report from the trenches:

That’s why the core message of my campaign was a commitment to “rebuild the middle”—both the middle of our politics and the middle of our economy. These things are directly connected. It’s not a coincidence that the middle of our politics has been hollowed out at the same time that the middle of our economy has been hollowed out. Until we rebuild a strong middle class, our politics won’t have the ballast needed to steady the increasingly intense partisan swings.

The irony is that Democrats ran on this. Joe Biden consistently warned about the dangers of the middle-class squeeze since it accelerated during the Reagan era, when American manufacturing began moving overseas. He was more of a pro-union president than any other occupant of the White House in recent memory.

And while no one wants to hear this right now, President Biden’s record also included landmark legislation that over time—if it is not repealed out of partisan spite—will do a lot to rebuild the middle class through the re-shoring of essential manufacturing and through historic infrastructure spending. While inflation spiked early on his watch, America’s economy is “the envy of the world” in the words of the Economist.

But President Biden was hobbled by legitimate perceptions of reduced vigor while Democrats were denied credit for the bipartisan legislation they passed during his presidency. At stops at diners while on the campaign trail, I noticed that Biden’s age was a punch-line offered up by kids while their parents offered a pox-on-both-houses assessment of the two parties, often mentioning things like defund-the-police.  There was pervasive anger at Albany for bail-reform laws, despite the fact that violent crime has fallen under Biden.

Talking with those voters, I was often reminded of one of my favorite quotes from the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” The results of this election show that collective reasoning around common facts in hopes of finding common ground is an increasingly rare quality.

NY-1 is eastern Long Island.  It was recently redistricted and is supposedly R+3, but it went for Trump by solid margins in 2016 and 2020, and Avlon got beat by 11%, and Trump won by 11% in 2024, so I think R+3 is going to be revised upwards.

Also, AOC is having a AMA on Bluesky and it’s pretty good.  Hit the “Replies” link to see it.

On the Ground ReportPost + Comments (68)

One of the places were Democrats didn’t perform as well as expected was the cities (certainly in swing states). This has sparked discussion about the housing crisis and NIMBYism hurting our chances there and in the future.

In 2004, Dan Savage, then-editor of the Seattle alt newspaper The Stranger, commissioned a piece on the role of cities in the future of the Democratic Party.  It likened cities to an “Urban Archipelago” — “islands of sanity, liberalism and compassion”:

For Democrats, it’s the cities, stupid—not the rural areas, not the prickly, hateful “heartland,” but the sane, sensible cities—including the cities trapped in the heartland. Pandering to rural voters is a waste of time. Again, look at the second map. Look at the urban blue spots in red states like Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico—there’s almost as much blue in those states as there is in Washington, Oregon, and California. And the challenge for the Democrats is not just to organize in the blue areas but to grow them. And to do that, Democrats need to pursue policies that encourage urban growth (mass transit, affordable housing, city services), and Democrats need to openly and aggressively champion urban values. By focusing on the cities the Dems can create a tribal identity to combat the white, Christian, rural, and suburban identity that the Republicans have cornered. And it’s sitting right there, on every electoral map, staring them in the face: The cities.

So, obviously, a maximalist case for Democrats catering to city voters.  Anyway, Dan was interviewed by David Roberts for his podcast Volts:

David Roberts

Well, to once again draw a parallel, like Biden’s whole administration was devoted to policy meant to revive precisely those red areas of the country that have been hollowed out by globalization, et cetera, et cetera, minimum wage stuff and care stuff. Like Biden fought for those people and in response, they hated him. You know, like the working class in those areas, the white working class in those rural and exurban areas hated him like Satan. Even though on any sort of like tangible policy level, it was the most sort of like, you know, most working-class-friendly Democratic administration in years.

Dan Savage

And imagine, imagine if the same sort of investment and prioritization had been targeted at cities, not just during the Biden administration, but the Clinton administration, the Obama administration. There’s this constant sense that, well, these people out there in rural areas will come around if we just shoot enough ducks and pour enough money into their communities, and we can take for granted — one of the lessons, I think, from this, what we’re looking at from 2024 is that it was a mistake to take for granted the urban vote, which is also a way of taking for granted the votes of black and Hispanic people, queer people. Although LGBT people were one of the few sort of bright spots in this election where the Trump vote among LGBT fell from 2020, where it was an appalling, I think, 27% to just 12% in this election.

So, good on my fellow queers for recognizing the threat. But imagine if we had had the same campaign, not just of funding for the cities, building the cities, building public transportation in the cities that can alleviate people not of the freedom to own a car, but the burden of having to own a car, which is a form of anti-freedom, and building housing and poured money into the cities and encouraged in cities an identity among voters of “This is what Democrats do.” Democrats build big things and cities are big things that Democrats have built and are going to continue to build. And we haven’t done that.

One of Savage’s key arguments is that any kind of urban density leads to more Democrats: “you live in a very dense place and you get an immediate and very real sense of how interconnected we all are and reliant on each other we all are.”  If you accept that, then the last 20 years of urban non-development in cities has hurt Democrats.  Savage’s diagnosis:

The problem in cities is these twin pinchers between which our political “leaders” have been captured, which are these NIMBYs who tend to be white, tend to be wealthier homeowners who don’t want anything to change, who want to pull up the ladder behind them, who want to benefit from living in the city but never pay the price of living in a city, which is living with a certain amount of change and ferment and dynamism. […] But also the left, which misidentified development as the driver of gentrification and displacement, when it’s actually scarcity that is the driver of gentrification and displacement, that you can have density and development without gentrification and displacement if you don’t have scarcity. We have scarcity because that’s what the NIMBYs want, because it drives up their property values and it locks their neighborhoods in as these unchanging, frozen in amber Mayberry blocks like we have in Seattle, like the one I live on.

He thinks the cities are so far gone that the only way to get more housing is for states to cram multi-family housing laws down the throats of cities.

Worth a listen if you’re interested in the maximalist case for the role of cities in the future of the Democratic Party.  Also, related to the discussion of podcasts in this morning’s post, this one is packaged up the way it should be:  with a transcript.  I didn’t even listen to it, just read it.

Urban ArchipelagosPost + Comments (141)

Amid all the noise from Nancy Mace about trans folk in the bathroom, some people might not have noticed the latest about Trump’s stellar cabinet picks.

First, more details were released about the accusations against Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense nominee.  Basically, it sounds like he (allegedly) spiked a woman’s drink and raped her at a Republican women’s event.

Second, RFK Jr’s ex-babysitter (for his kids) shared the details of how the then 46-year-old groped and harassed the then 23-year-old.

Nothing new about Matt “Venmo” Gaetz that I’ve heard today, but it’s still early.

Anyway, if you want the science on who’s really at risk in bathrooms when trans folks are there, it’s mainly the trans folks who are the victims. Also, the overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse is committed by family and close acquaintances.

All accusations are projections from these people.

Edit:  Betty reminds us in the comments that Linda McMahon is named in a lawsuit by former “ring boys” in the WWE who alleged sexual abuse by a predator  (not Linda or Vince) when Vince and Linda ran WWE.

Edit2:  I guess the Venmo update is that Gaetz is out:

I had excellent meetings with senators yesterday. I appreciate their thoughtful feedback – and the incredible support of so many. While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.

There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as attorney general. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1. I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.

Note that Vance is the person who took Gaetz to meet Senators, so another win for JD, too.

Predator UpdatePost + Comments (229)

As part of my media diet change, I subscribed to a couple of paid Substacks (Apple wants to auto-correct that word to “substances” which might be more on-point than I want to acknowledge) and also subscribed to some free ones.  Dan Pfeiffer’s MessageBox was one of the free ones, and his newsletter this morning poses the question Do Dems Need to Break Up With Legacy Media.  It contains this graph of the median age of audiences for different types of media:

Anyway, I generally don’t like email newsletters because they’re hard to link in blog posts, but I’m going to give it a whirl.  I’ve always thought Brian Beutler was pretty good, and I subscribed to his paid Substack.  Here’s a gift link to his latest piece on the fight against Trump’s cabinet secretaries.

Relevant to the latest anti-trans hate in the House, Zooey Zephyr is an openly trans representative in the Montana state legislature and her fiancé, Erin Reed, has a Substack.  Here’s her take on Sarah McBride’s decision to abide by the Speaker’s new bathroom edict.  Zephyr and Reed are contributors to Assigned Media and here’s their rundown of post-election pieces trying to keep hope alive in the trans community.  Assigned is free as far as I can tell, but I donated anyway.

Another freebie that I’ll probably end up paying for is James Fallows’ Substack.  Here’s his post-election piece on disinformation.

One of the reasons I was reluctant to dive into Substack is because all those subscriptions add up.  It’s just not scalable to subscribe to everything that’s worth reading. Also, Substack as a platform has its issues. It’s owned by TechBros with an agenda, and like a lot of VC-funded startups, their valuation is crazy.  Anil Dash has a thread on this.

So, please feel free to recommend any of your media diet changes, Substack or not.  Standard disclaimer that I don’t agree with everything in the pieces that I’ve linked, but I think they’re worth reading for the perspective.

(Since it might come up in the comments, a note on Reed’s take on McBride:  when Pelosi put up a metal detector in the House after 1/6 because some R’s wanted to carry handguns onto the floor, the fines were $5K for the first offense and $10K for the second.  Presumably this would be the kinds of sanctions that McBride would be subject to.   One of the first questions of how she could fight the bathroom ban is how she can do it without going broke.)

Substacks and SuchPost + Comments (104)

Yesterday didn’t start off well at all.

I’ve developed the habit of scanning the flooded part of the yard from the porch for water moccasins and alligators small enough to have filtered through the fence before letting the dogs out in the morning. As I was peering through the porch screen at first light, I was startled to see a snake inside the screen, lying on a crossbar about a foot from my chin.

I yelped and stumbled back, hastily exiting the porch and slamming the sliding glass door shut behind me. It wasn’t a big snake, maybe a foot and a half long and skinny. I took a picture of it through the glass and sent it to Bill so he could identify it. He assured me it was a harmless ribbon snake, a “good guy,” according to Bill, which he promised to repatriate to the wild when he got home from work.

***

I couldn’t stay home and monitor the snake through the glass because I had a morning hair appointment. I was severely dreading it. Chemo didn’t make all of my hair fall out, but I lost a lot through excessive shedding, and the new growth coming in combined with the remaining longish strands made my head look like a big stupid dandelion. The only recourse was to cut it all to one length — short.

I hadn’t had a really short haircut since second grade. It had to be done, and the stylist did a good job, especially considering the limited material, but I fucking hate it. I feel indignant about it, like a shaved cat.

For hours, I complained to any friend or family member who would listen. They kindly assured me I have the bone structure to pull off the evil Cersei Lannister wine mom look, which cheered me up a little.

Ah well. It will grow back. Meanwhile, there will be plenty of opportunities to take grim satisfaction from watching shit blow up over the next four years.

***

Anyhoo, after the shearing, when I was coming home on our horrible washed-out dirt road that even the USPS is still avoiding, something got caught on my right front tire. It made a ka-chukka ka-chukka ka-chukka sound all the way to the damn gate. When I parked and examined the wheel well, I saw a piece of metal protruding from the tire, which was hissing as it deflated. FUCK!

Back upstairs, I noticed that the snake had not moved at all since I first spotted it hours earlier. I concluded it was having an even worse day than I was since it was probably dead. Fuck it, I thought — I’m not going to let a deceased snake keep me off my porch.

So I went out and settled in my comfy chair to observe the waterfowl. The snake, which was very much alive, chose that moment to revive and slither along the crossbar, causing me to scurry back inside the house. “Harmless snake” my ass — it caused me to bash my knee painfully on the door frame during my panicky retreat.

To pass the time, I experimented with hairdos using gel, creating a faux hawk and a flattop. I still fucking hate it, but I have to admit my current style has more entertainment value than my customary bob.

Bill finally came home and gently escorted the snake outside. Then he dealt with the tire and told me my hair looks cool, so I should stop worrying about it so much. Unlike the snake, Bill is definitely a keeper.

Open thread!

Of Shearlings and Serpents (Open Thread)Post + Comments (127)