Blue Dog/New Dem Adam Schiff, like Levin, is a client of crooked operative, Parke Skelton who has made all his easily corrupted clients endorse ultra WEAK, WEAK, WEAK candidate Mike LevinLast week, establishment political commentator Matt Bai wrote in regard to the Democratic Party that "last time out, the party’s governing apparatus rallied fiercely to the side of the establishment favorite and actively sought to marginalize resistance. Look where it got them. Democrats have concluded, reasonably, that there’s a lesson to be learned from the last war, which is that the establishment can no longer dictate choices to the electorate and expect to win." As we tried pointing out yesterday, much of the California Democratic establishment has not learned that lesson and is busy attempting to clear the field of progressives in order to advantage corrupt New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. In disgusted, Bai mentioned how "untested politicians and zillionaires" are jockeying to be contenders in the 2020 presidential race.Look at the California congressional races where the DCCC is just drooling over super-rich joke candidates in district after district, including clowns like "ex"-Republican lottery winner and carpet-bagger Gil Cisneros (who has been buying endorsements with his lottery winnings from grotesquely corrupt politicians), an absurd Qualcomm heiress, Sarah Jacobs, who seems to think politics is about buying elections (encouraged in this by political grifter Achim Bergmann), stem cell Canadian entrepreneur Hans Keirstead and half a dozen others, each one more absurd than the other, and each one eager to squeeze out legitimate policy and public service-oriented candidates like Katie Porter, Laura Oatman, Katie Hill... Oh year, I forgot to mention that the right-wing imbecile the DCCC sent to California to take over, Kyle Layman, doesn't think women should be in politics above the PTA level and tells women candidates who approach him to go talk to EMILY's List.In his post Bai was fretting about the Democrats "overlearning" the lesson of shoving Hillary up the asses of Democratic voters.
Start with this: Why did Donald Trump win the Republican nomination, and why did all of his adversaries look so small and feckless in comparison?...Trump won the war of attrition because the rest of the more conventional field was so impossibly fractured and muddled that having an unshakable 25 or 30 percent of the vote behind him was enough to get him through. And there are structural reasons it happened this way.In years past, if you were a governor or senator who wanted to become president, you generally wouldn’t just declare yourself a candidate and dive in. The limited base of supporters in your own state, where people knew you, wasn’t enough to bankroll an entire campaign.If you were serious about winning, you needed to convince a bunch of other governors or senators to swing their support behind you, thus tapping into their supporters, too. Which is why we never saw more than a couple of governors running for president at the same time; the rules had a way of naturally winnowing the field.But then came the advent of the so-called super-PAC, with unlimited contributions. Now, if you had even one wealthy supporter who was willing to write you a series of checks, or if you had that kind of fortune yourself, you could afford to run for president whether anyone other than your spouse thought it was a good idea or not....The lesson is this: When a field is divided 20 different ways among a bunch of candidates who cancel each other out, the candidate who makes a loud, emotional or even outrageous appeal can incite enough of a disenchanted plurality to win.Now, I know what Democrats are going to say to this, which is that their electorate believes in governing experience, and they don’t have a candidate who is as odious as Trump. No one’s going to solidify a quarter of the Democratic vote by preaching bigotry and failing to demonstrate even a passing knowledge of policy.
True enough, but in the congressional races what you have are a lot of conservative-leaning establishment candidates from the Republican wing of the party preaching a GOP-lite message that flies in the face of the zeitgeist and the energy that stokes the all-important enthusiasm gap between the Democrats and the Republicans. (Democrats have been winning special elections because of this gap.)Probably the dirtiest campaign in California is the one transplanted DC slime-bucket Ira Lechner is conducting for his worthless candidate Mike Levin for the San Diego/Orange County seat Darrell Issa is fleeing from. Issa is fleeing because he doesn't want to face Marine Col. Doug Applegate again. Applegate's out of the blue campaign last cycle was the last congressional race to be decided. That's because it was so close. Despite being outspent $6,275,754 to $2,041,091, Applegate nearly beat Issa:
• Issa- 155,888 (50.3%)• Applegate- 154,267 (49.7%)
During that race Levin sat on his hands, raising money for Hillary Clinton but pointedly never saying a word about Darrell Issa or doing anything to help Applegate, perhaps angry that Applegate was a Bernie Sanders supporter while he backed the status quo candidate of the Democratic establishment. Below is the poisonous memo the Levin campaign sent out to pre-endorsement delegates and members of Congress last week, something that flies right in the face of a poll that shows Applegate with almost 4 times the support from CA-49 votes than the 9% that goes to Levin, who is trying to get the establishment forces to clear the field (of front-runner Doug Applegate by dragging up Issa's discredited talking points from 2016):
Issa not seeking re-election has made the 49th a lot harder, not easier, for Dems. Two strong Reps (Assemblymember Rocky Chavez and BOE member Diane Harkey) will take almost all of the GOP vote and split it fairly evenly. With 4 Democratic candidates in the race, there is almost no way to keep the general from becoming a Rep/Rep runoff. Under the top two law, no one can run as a write in in the general. The seat would be lost. The Dem Party must unite behind the strongest candidate-- and there can be no more than 2 strong Democrats on the ballot.• Mike Levin is the strongest candidate.• Mike has raised over $1.225 million. 11,000 donors averaging just over $100.• Strong field campaign, already called and walked through entire district• Outstanding endorsements: a dozen local Democratic Mayors and City Councilmembers, National Organization for Women, DFA, PCCC, Congressional Hispanic Caucus• Already has good support in CA delegation (Barragan, Cardenas, Gomez, Schiff)• Best candidate profile.• Mike is the ONLY candidate who can get a CA Democratic Party endorsement. No one else is close. A united Party is the best way to limit the field and consolidate Democratic votes. He is only 3 votes short of the number needed with 7 undecideds. A strong signal from the CA delegation could secure this.• Applegate is very weak.• Not raising money. His COH increased by just $500 last period. Not working hard.• Campaign in chaos, CM and Field Director resigned• Negatives against him are devastating: Domestic violence restraining order, went to court to try to cut his child support payments by 75%, tried to get out of paying for health care for his kids; unethical practices as lawyer, shady mortgage lending business during the housing melt down, multiple FEC violations since 2016 election.• Applegate as nominee will put the seat in jeopardy.• Jacobs is weak.• 28, has not lived in district since high school.• Just 2 years of work actual experience.• Claims to be a former State Department official when, in reality, she worked for just over a year for a company that had a contract with the State Department• No significant endorsements in district or campaign structure• Solely dependent on wealthy family• Just got into race. Last in, first out makes sense.• Negatives on Mike are weak and easily answered.• Countrywide: As a young lawyer at a big law firm, ML was assigned some cases involving Countrywide foreclosures. All were suits brought by an unethical lawyer who was defrauding desperate homeowners (he was later disbarred) and all suits were thrown out. (State Sen. Ben Allen was also a lawyer at the same firm and handled a few of the cases as well) Mike’s father was foreclosed on by Countrywide.• Exxon. Mike’s clean energy firm installed carbon recapture technology on an Exxon plant to help reduce carbon emissions. Mike never “worked for Exxon.”
Levin spent his career as a lobbyist and has sorely tried to hide that, calling himself, when someone asks, "a Director of Government Affairs," a polite way of saying a lobbyist, in his case lobbying for "clean coal" and a Russian energy company. But what Levin is most freaked out about-- as he should be-- is his role in the Countrywide scandal, which he downplays and poo-poos.