Our readers who are Hillary loyalists don’t like when I write about the disaster of her campaign last year and the mess that is the Democratic Party.  Like it or not, though, the criticism is true, and I’m not the only one.  Tim Dickinson wrote a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone this last week that talks about how the party got hollowed out during the Obama years especially during Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s term which set a low watermark for corruption and plain ol’ incompetence.  Even Tim Kaine, Hillary’s running mate and former DNC chair, got into the act and was quoted in the piece saying, “That congresswoman had no idea what she was doing.”  And that was the polite criticism.  Rather than grow the party, she actually used her position for self promotion to launch a campaign to land her in House leadership.  That blew up and she dug in when even Obama tried to oust her from the job.  We all know how that story ended.

It gets worse, especially for Hillary’s campaign.  An unnamed Democratic strategist described her candidacy in blunt terms:

“And she was really surprised by how strong Trump was – and part of it was she just sucked. At a really fundamental level we gotta get people to acknowledge what a f*****g piece of sh*t her campaign was, because Donald Trump should not have won this election.”

Well, OK, then.  That’s about as blunt as it gets (even more blunt than me).  The rest of the article speaks of how Tom Perez is trying to un-fossilize the party, recruit new candidates, and resurrect the money machine that it became under Howard Dean and Barack Obama during the very successful 50 state strategy in 2006 and 2008.

However, the job is not a simple one.  During the Obama administration, Democrats lost all over the country in state and federal elections due to simple neglect (and DWS’s incompetence).  No one, including Obama, was in charge during that time, and his staff had no national plan except to get him re-elected in 2012.  There’s now a huge deficit to make up for all that neglect, and Trump is certainly leaving a huge opportunity for the Dems to hoover up if only they don’t blow it…again.

This Rolling Stone article is a sobering read, and will certainly piss off loyalists.  But truth is truth, and facts is facts. This chapter is long from over, and the sooner progressives recognize what a complete disaster 2008 to 2016 actually was, the sooner they can fix it.

Ya’ll, I am at the SDEC meeting in Austin today.  This afternoon all five candidates for DNC chair will speak.  I’m headed to it because I want to hear what they plan to do about party building.

For the past 8 years the DNC has been a miserable disgusting failure at party building.  We have lost all the gains we made with Democratic governors and state houses.  What good does it do us to have the presidency when we lose both houses of congress for a stalemate and then face states with Republican governors and state house who won’t impliment programs we somehow manage to get passed?

The DNC doesn’t need tweaking.  It needs a bonfire. As we should have learned by now, dammit, money alone won’t win anything if you are spending that money with consultants who haven’t learned any new tricks since Elvis died.

I will take good notes but you probably won’t hear from me tonight because Ole Bubba and I are going to Marble Falls to see the Christmas lights.

People who are thoughtful are (or should be) facing the inauguration of Cheeto Jesus (CJ) with fear and trepidation.  So far, he has seemed impervious to any rules of decorum or morals, and has publicly announced that rules don’t apply to him. He tweets like a hormonal 14 year old embarrassing the nation with every insulting screed. This administration is already promising to be one that lurches from crisis to crisis, likely 100% self inflicted by the only person that I can imagine would be a worse president since Bush II who’s record I thought couldn’t be surpassed for cheesiness and corruption.

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