How can a guy locked in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for years know the problems on the ground in Pennsylvania better than do officials at the Democratic National Committee?
Type the word “lunch” into the WikiLeaks email search page, and you get 527 hits.
My car mechanic, Chuck, has problems in life, some of his own making.
He’s been in and out of work, at times he’s been homeless, and he’s even been jailed for a variety of offenses, like driving under the influence, and then driving with a suspended a license.
DNC headquarters in Washington
Chuck’s life is unstable, and hand-to-mouth. He has medical conditions that he can’t afford to treat. A few months back I visited him at the garage and found him writhing in pain on the concrete floor, his hands blackened with car grease. Should I call an ambulance or take him to the emergency room? I ask.
No, Chuck moans. He explains he can’t afford to take time from work to go to the doctor. If he were to take weeks off from his job to go to the hospital for the surgery and recuperation he needs, he intimates, he won’t be able to pay fines and costs from his previous arrests, and he’ll be sent back to jail. Several of his co-workers appear to be in similar straits.
They’re all barely hanging on.
I asked Chuck last Friday who he’d vote for come November.
There’s no way for me to convey the depth of Chuck’s anger without using his own words, expletives included.
“I want to fu*k these guys the way they’ve been fu*king me,” Chuck says, his head down. “I’m voting for Donald Trump. I hope Trump gets in there and throws all them guys out in Washington, throws them all out on the street, and I hope it’s just a start.”
Notice that Chuck doesn’t politely say he wants to “send a message” with his vote, or that his will be a “protest” vote.
No, Chuck makes no bones that he hopes to hurt people and totally upend the system with his vote, and toss the DC insiders away, the way he feels he’s been hurt in life, and tossed away.
I have no doubt that Chuck is only one of hundreds of thousands in Pennsylvania, and millions across the U.S., who feel the same way.
This was driven home to me last Friday, the same day I spoke with Chuck, when WikiLeaks released some 20,000 emails and attachments from top figures inside the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The leadership at the DNC, the emails show, seems to bother themselves little, if at all, with Chuck or his angry friends in Pennsylvania.
What do the leaked emails show that the DNC officials care about?
Call a plumber: leaks threaten the DNC
They spend most of their time chasing money, and donors, and making fun of their own loyal contributors by calling them “clowns” when they don’t cough up cash fast enough. They spend a lot of time closely watching network television shows, currying favor with television producers and anchors, tinkering with news stories and manipulating media bigwigs. Those media sycophants, meanwhile, seem to equally enjoy being romanced and manipulated by the party leaders.
The DNC officials spend a lot of time, literally, out to lunch.
Type in the word “lunch” in the WikiLeaks email search page, and you get 527 hits.
For example, someone sends an email to Clayton Cox, regional finance director of the DNC, to inquire what he and an aide want for lunch.
“We will take one Salmon Filet over Julienne Vegetables with Dill Vinaigrette and one Tuscan Grilled Chicken Breast with Oregano & Fresh Lemon please,” Cox responds.
(My mechanic friend Chuck, when I last visited him, was eating a cold fast-food sandwich given to him by a sympathetic customer.)
Elsewhere, DNC execs seem every bit as out to lunch over other matters important to Pennsylvanians.
DNC officials received emails about the long-running budget and debt fiasco crippling Pennsylvania government, damaging its schools, and threatening the political career of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.
“Pennsylvania faces fiscal cliff,” an email from the Pennsylvania Democratic committee to the DNC reads. But, unlike the lunch menu, nobody seems to care, or respond.
That debt thing’s a bitch, one imagines them thinking at the DNC while they munch their Julienne Vegetables with Dill Vinaigrette. Hey, we’ve got our own cash cows to chase.
DNC staffers are equally aware, emails show, that their counterparts in Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee a few months back gave U.S. Senate hopeful Katie McGinty millions of dollars in TV ad money to bludgeon into oblivion fellow Democrat Joe Sestak in the Pennsylvania primary.
But DNC officials don’t raise a ruckus, or even seem to care, about the millions thrown into the airwaves to out-shout and drown Joe Sestak.
Instead, they engineer even more fundraising appeals on McGinty’s behalf, in the name of President Obama and other top Democrats.
Like this email, apparently sent to the DNC for perusal, from Virginia Senator Tim Kaine’s campaign committee this May 19:
McGinty is “running for the U.S. Senate so she can create jobs while protecting our environment,” Sen. Kaine writes. “Katie is running an extremely close race in Pennsylvania, where polls show her only one point down from her Republican opponent. Chip in to elect Katie now …”
Sen. Kaine, the team player that he is, this week was chosen by Hillary Clinton as her running mate. (Kaine was also chairman of the DNC from 2009 to 2011.)
DNC operatives aren’t even sure who’s sending the avalanche of media ad money to candidates, and why.
An email to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda concerning a news story that the DNC and state parties are funneling $2 million to Hillary Clinton in key battleground states elicits this befuddled question from another DNC staffer: “the money is coming from the DNC, not Clinton, correct?”
But where did that spigot of cash come from? WikiLeaks thoughtfully provides a leaked spreadsheet showing the names of all the DNC’s important donors.
But forget, for a minute, if you can, the money.
The emails suggest, at bottom, that these guys at the DNC care mostly about themselves, and their own petty little world in the DC media bubble.
Assange This Island Earth: How can a guy locked in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for years know the problems on the ground in Pennsylvania better than do officials at the Democratic National Committee?
These folks, sadly, give little indication in their emails that they think much at all about real Americans out there who are struggling to get by.
Of course, we now know, it wasn’t just Pennsylvania’s Joe Sestak that the Democratic Party kneecapped this primary season.
The leaked emails suggest the extent to which Democratic Party bosses were biased against presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and worked to undermine him. Emails reveal DNC officials belittled Sanders, and churlishly questioned his religious beliefs.
But that’s hardly the worst of it.
Less discussed is how party officials undermined Sanders’ platform, and worked against his proposed reforms of student loan debt and education; opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement; and a renewal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which limited banks from making risky investments, and other issues important to Sanders and millions of his supporters.
As we might suspect from all this high-handed misbehavior, it’s not only Sanders, and Sestak, and all their supporters that DNC officials are ignoring, and fighting, or laughing at.
Even as Democratic Party leaders prepared for their presidential convention in Philadelphia, DNC leaders went about their business as usual — ignoring the everyday concerns of Pennsylvanians.
The emails make abundantly clear there’s a yawning disconnect between party high rollers in DC and everyday people on the ground, like my mechanic friend Chuck.
At the same time Chuck was writhing in pain on the floor of his garage a few months back, the disconnects at the DNC were concerned about their usual priorities: raising money, doling out choice seats at luncheons to allow big donors to rub elbows with President Obama, and spinning news coverage with name-brand media outlets.
Those national media outlets, like their media counterparts in Pennsylvania, are just as disconnected from the realities of everyday Pennsylvanians.
From his self-imposed exile in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange this week drew attention to the close ties between U.S. corporate media and DNC officials.
Assange says the ties between big media and DNC chieftains are so pervasive that WikiLeaks couldn’t trust the media to partner with the DNC email leak release, as in past stories.
“We knew,” Assange says, “…we didn’t need to establish partnerships with The New York Times or The Washington Post. In fact, that might be counterproductive, because they are partisans of one group or another.”
“There’s a lot of emails about the close relationship between the DNC and the media,” Assange says by video. “The Washington Post (was) involved in a co-fundraising party — an obvious co-fundraising party for the DNC. (DNC officials are) calling up MSNBC in the middle of a program and saying, ‘Pull that segment now!’ (DNC Chair) Debbie Wasserman Schultz (is) calling up the president of MSNBC in order to discipline Morning Joe. That’s of course something that we’ve all suspected happens, but this is concrete proof.”
Chuck this must stop! email from Debbie Wasserman Schultz to NBC’s Chuck Todd.
“Chuck, this must stop,” reads one May 2016 email from Chairwoman Schultz to NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, when she doesn’t like what the reporters are saying.
This of course is what happens when big money and big media play too large of a role in our politics. The DNC pays too much attention to big media, to the exclusion of all else, and forks over tons of advertising money, while the media guys return the favor with fawning coverage.
Who can they be forgetting?
Democrats have speculated that these latest WikiLeaks emails were stolen by hackers working for the intelligence service of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and leaked by Putin to help Donald Trump.
They say we should be concerned about that.
Some complain that Russia is injecting itself into U.S. politics.
If so, the Russians have a pretty damn sophisticated understanding of us, and our own disaffected citizens, like my friend Chuck.
If so, the Russians miraculously understand Chuck and his friends in Pennsylvania, and their anger, better than do the free-lunch crowd at the DNC.
The real wonder is that Assange, holed-up as he has been in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for four years, knows the problems on the ground in Pennsylvania, and other states, better than do the hapless operatives at the DNC.
The Russians should butt out of U.S. politics, American party officials are yelling.
But the real issue isn’t whether the Russians should butt out of U.S. politics.
The real issue is whether the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee should inject themselves into U.S. politics.
The issue is whether the DNC, and the RNC, should come down from their detached and lofty golden perches long enough to actually do something to help people like Chuck and his friends to improve and stabilize their lives.
This is about much more than just working against Bernie Sanders, and the democratic establishment working against the people. Good job.
Good read. I don’t think we need Candidate debates on mainstream media as much as we need REGULAR citizens on TV sharing their reality and ideas. Real people have been eclipsed.
An excellent piece written by one of my personal heroes, the journalist, Bill Keisling. Great perspective.
Maybe we should help by pushing for Gary Johnson to have a chance in Pennsylvania. Don’t choose either of them. If enough of us take a stand, we could make big changes.
Chuck has made many, many bad life decisions. He is just making one more, because there is no one on the Right that cares about law breaking, poor, sickly people like him. And the Left cannot undo all the bad choices he made in his life that have put him where he is.
As for the financing of candidates and elections, the Republican congress has had seven years to institute campaign funding reform and have accomplished nothing except redistricting voters to ensure their retention of local offices. Is what the Democrats did wrong? Without a doubt. Was it something new? Not at all for both parties. Will it help get anyone elected that will change the system? Not until independents can start winning and filling seats from the lower level elected officials and moving up.
But Trump is not the answer to anything unless you expect and want a dictator rather than a president. Because the president does not make law, congress does.