DCCC

I'm still in the beginning on the awesome new book by Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance. I just read a few pages every night before going to bed and then meditate on it as a lesson of the day.

If the Democrats were to win back the House in November-- and a herd of golden unicorns parading down Pennsylvania Avenue in honor of Earth Day tomorrow is more likely-- Steve Israel would be a hero and be asked to remain on as chairman for another cycle. There's no chance, not even a small one, that that will happen. Israel is the least competent DCCC chairman in history and Pelosi's unwillingness to fire him after his catastrophic performance in the 2012 cycle, is dooming America to another two years of a dysfunctional GOP-led House.

Yesterday Steve Israel was crowing on Twitter how 4 powerful senior Republican committee chairmen are retiring (Doc Hastings, Mike Rogers, Buck McKeon and, now, Dave Camp). What his tweets conspicuously left out, of course, is that Israel didn't recruit any candidates against them and actually undermined candidates who ran against Rogers and McKeon last cycle.

Steve Israel to 25 DCCC field organizers in Florida: "Get out of Dodge, STAT!"I was surprised to wake up the morning after the FL-13 debacle and find a comment by an Alex Sink field volunteer on our election night coverage post. She started by asserting that the field director "was a pompous drunk, who held no-one anymore accountable than he did himself.

Last night a dull, uninspiring centrist advocating the politics of Beltway centrism-- despite the focus-group-tested message in the ad above (the last one run by the doomed Alex Sink campaign)-- was defeated by a weak and generic Republican lobbyist. Sink was defeated on election day by poorer-than-expected turnout among Democrats and left-leaning independents, after a surprisingly decent showing in early voting. Lots of TV ads do not make up for a weak message (Chained CPI, for example) and a weaker ground game.

DCCC will never win back the House until they get Republicans like this out of Democratic seats-- but that means recruiting candidates and fighting to win-- which Steve Israel refuses to doNow that the DCCC has officially launched its Red-to-Blue program, what happened to Steve Israel's vaunted Jumpstart program and the candidates he tapped, many despite primary races back home? The program itself has been "disappeared" from the DCCC website.

Instead of interfering in primaries, Israel should be allowing local Democrats to pick their own candidates and have the DCCC concentrate on going on the offense against the Republican excesses that have brought so much pain to the country.

I don't expect lazy Beltway reporters to dig this deep, but the real story of yesterday's DCCC Red-to-Blue announcement was less about a bunch of lame recruits like Blue Dog Gwen Graham (FL) and "mystery meat" no issues candidates like Domenic Recchia (NY) and Ann Callis (IL), than it was about which candidates and which districts got left out again.

DCCC downgrades 2 of its worst recruits, Aguilar and GarrisonToday the DCCC announced its Red-to-Blue program. Not every one of Steve Israel's ridiculous Jump Start candidates made it to the Red to Blue List and two, empty suit Pete Aguilar (CA-31) and ex-CIA agent Kevin Strouse were downgraded completely.

The DCCC and the other nefarious Beltway committees encourage their candidates to burn their lists and wreck on-line fund-raising. They would much rather go back to the old model that leaves out small donor grassroots activists who they find way too independent of party bosses.