Time For a Leadership Shake Up: Take Action!

[RtHonLordBob]

So, the lesson from this election should be pretty clear: if a Democratic candidate refuses to argue up for Democratic principles, and a Republican candidate argues for Republican principles, then the Republican base will be fired up and the Democratic base won't be, and the Democrat will lose. Or as Bill Maher likes to put it, if you run a Republican-lite against a Republian, the Republican is going to win. Democrats do best when we have candidates like Barack Obama in 2008, who at least paid lip service to Democratic/Progressive principals.

The problem is that our current batch of politicians are cowards. They remember the "culture-war," when liberal was a curse word, and their reflex whenever challenged is to back down and be moderate. We need to knock this reflex out of them. If we do this, and we get politicians who run on progressive principals, then elections will be true contests between opposing ideas and we'll have a decent chance of winning.

How do we do this? A politician's first and foremost goal is always to keep his/her job. Therefore, we make them stop believing that they keep their jobs by being cowards and make them believe that they keep their jobs by standing up for our principals. Obviously, the most effective way to do this would be by taking a page from the Tea Baggers and primarying the cowards. But, that's a long-term, resource-intensive strategy.

There is a short term strategy available to us, however. We must force a shake-up of the Democratic leadership. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman Schultz aren't the true leaders of the Democratic Party's future; they're politicians' politicians. We all know who the true leaders of the Democratic Party's future are: people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

We have the right to have people like them as the leaders of our party. Replacing the current crop of "leaders" with progressives would have several effects. Firstly, it would require a tremendous outcry from grassroots progressives (see bellow), and the notion that even the most powerful politicians can be dethroned by us would make cowardly, job-loving politicians quake in their boots. It would send a clear message about the direction of the future of the party. Potentially, it could be the start of a progressive equivalent to the Tea Party.

So, here's the plan. At the start of the next Congress, the politicians will meet to elect new leadership. As of now, the politicians seem intent on retaining the same failed leadership. Between now and the start of the next Congress, we must organize and rain down pressure upon our politicians, tell them that the current "leadership" is unacceptable and to chose progressives. Probably the most effective way of doing this would be to involve a well organized political group. The existing organization that is most likely to be interested in organizing this type of pressure campaign is Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

So here's what I think we should all do:

Contact your Democratic Representatives and Senators. Tell them that you don't believe the current leadership represents the future of the Democratic Party and that you want more Progressive leadership.
My Suggestions would be:
Elizabeth Warren for Senate Minority Leader
Jarred Polis for House Minoirty Leader

Tweet/email a link to this thread to the PCCC (@BoldProgressive / [e-mail])

Encourage Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC Chair

These are trying times for the party, and we can't survive with corporateist, careerist, wet rags like Reid, Pelosi, and Wasserman Schultz at the helm. This loss provides an opportunity for Progressives to press hard to change the whole leadership, but it wont work unless we all get involved and really do press hard.

[Recursion]

1. Our only two pick-ups were conservative Democrats in conservative districts

Not sure why you think we need to run away from that model.

[RtHonLordBob]

3. Becuase

Because of all the winnable seats that we lost because we ran Republican-lite candidates, because of all the incumbents we lost because they refused to stand for anything, because of all the Democrats who didn't show up because we refused to stand for anything. Because we ran a candidate who was too much of a coward to say who she voted for.

[Recursion]

4. It's possible Grimes would have won if she admitted to voting for Obama. It's definite Graham won

She got us ground.

[RtHonLordBob]

5. What?

You're talking about a House race? So of all the Southern House non-incumbent candidates who tried this strategy two won, the rest lost, and it cost us a bunch of Senate seats. You're aware that we lost a bunch of seats in the House too, right? Honestly, you have to be delusional to think that our strategy in the last election was smart. How the Democrats think they can get their base to turn up and win independents while apologizing for what the voters know to be the Democrats core positions is beyond me.

The Republicans have embraced their principals and they're winning elections even though a lot of their positions poll worse than ours, because they at least fire up their base. You must be for SOMETHING in order to turn out voters. The Democrats can blame their constant mid-term turnout problems on demographics all they want, but if they fire up their base by believing in SOMETHING, they can win mid-terms, we saw that in 2006.

[Segami]

2. Flashback...

“I think we’re going to hold the Senate and the reason that we’re going to hold the Senate…is because we have a ground game that, I know [RNC Chairman] Reince [Priebus] would take ours over theirs any day of the week. …Rick Scott is going to go down to defeat on Tuesday.”

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/11/dnc-head-predicts-democrats-will-hold-senate-because-of-strong-ground-game/

[RtHonLordBob]

6. They're terrible

Yeah. This actually highlights something that I should have talked about in the original post: that the incontinence of the "leaders" contributed to our defeat. The Democratic establishment seemed to have consigned itself to defeat (which contributed to the inability of candidates to stand behind our principals and policies) when the election was still months out and then right before the election they broadcast odd insincere optimism.

They deserve to be thrown to the curb not just so we can get more representative leadership, but because they're not capable of leading the opposition in congress. Mitch McConnell is a professional player of dirty tricks, and Harry Reid isn't remotely tough enough to deal with the shenanigans that are going to thrown his way. It took him forever to take any drastic action to deal with obstructionism while he was in the majority. Nancy "Off the Table" Pelosi is demonstrably not tough enough to provide any counterweight to Bohner. And, Wasserman Schultz seems to be pathologically incapable of doing anything to help the party.