David Sirota said he “boldly did what so few Democratic politicians are willing to do: he told the truth about the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council” Charles P. Pierce at TAPPED called it “the best argument yet made against the DLC by someone not named David Sirota.”I was naturally curious to read what motivated all this gushing, and discovered a rather peculiar rant by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) to a group of Wisconsin reporters that blamed the DLC for all the sins of the Democratic Party in the last decade or so.I was particularly interested to learn from Feingold that the DLC “came up with the health care plan with the Clintons that was so complicated nobody could understand it.” Gee, I seem to remember that the DLC actually opposed the Clinton Health Plan. “They are the ones that coalesced with the big corporations to pass unfair trade agreements that hurt America.” Funny: I thought maybe this guy named Bill Clinton–following the tradition of every Democratic president going back to Martin Van Buren–had a bit more to do with, say, NAFTA than anybody at the DLC. And here’s my favorite “bold” attack: “Feingold said DLC consultants ‘instill fear in Democrats’ by saying opposition to the war would be taken as not supporting the troops…. “It’s the DLC that has cut off our ability to say things like, ‘Let’s get out of Iraq because it’s a bad idea.”Until now, I had no idea what vast powers we exercise around here. Al From or Bruce Reed or somebody gets quoted in the papers, and Democrats fall silent in terror. And the stuff about “DLC consultants” is beautifully vague. Unless I’m forgetting something, the chief political consultant for the last two Democratic presidential candidates was named Bob Shrum, whose relationship with the DLC is about as warm as Ned Lamont’s with Joe Lieberman.Look, folks, what the DLC does is to write policy papers, hold conferences, publish a magazine, and network among state and local elected officials. Three of us do blogs. Our staff is small by Washington think tank standards; our budget is a fraction of CAP’s. Democrats are free to take the DLC’s advice or leave it. It’s hilarious to be told that attacking us represents some sort of profile in courage; it seems to have done wonders for the career of David Sirota, whose willingness to spit venom at the DLC has helped make him a quote machine in both the blogosphere and the mainstream media.So why the gratuitous outburst from Russ Feingold? It’s not like many actual voters have ever heard of the DLC; hell, it took my own family about five years to internalize the fact that I worked for the DLC rather than the DNC. You have to figure Feingold was sending a signal to the segment of Democratic activists, old and new, for whom those three letters “DLC” have come to represent a sort of Unified Field Theory of recent Democratic electoral losses.You probably know the rap: soulless, poll-driven centrists in Washington sold out their principles for corporate cash, blah blah blah, lost Congress and the states, blah blah blah, spend all their time on Fox News defending Bush and attacking Democrats, blah blah blah, denied Gore his victory and “took down” Howard Dean, bark bark woof woof. It takes a lot of words, and maybe a few actual facts, to say all that, so just intoning “DLC” and hearing the instant cheers is a nice shorthand, and less politically risky than, say, frontally attacking Bill Clinton. The fact that this sort of code and the lurid narrative it signals makes the messenger sound a bit like a Larouchie off his meds is, I suppose, a small price to pay for the message it sends to listeners eager to hear it.The odd thing is that Russ Feingold is actually pretty popular here at Centrist Conspiracy HQ. He’s usually refreshingly direct, and willing to be unorthodox in all sorts of different directions. But there’s nothing in Democratic politics today more tediously orthodox than DLC-bashing. I do offer one suggestion to other bold, brave politicians out there: if you’re going to do this, try and get the basic facts straight.
TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
-
June 18: Mass Deportation Now Officially a Partisan Weapon
Keeping up with the norms being violated by the second Trump administration is tough, but I did write about an important one this week at New York:
Donald Trump and Stephen Miller have an arithmetic problem with their mass-deportation initiative. They appear frantic to ramp up deportations. Miller reportedly chewed out ICE brass (“Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?”) on the numbers not long before the agency launched its fateful raids in Los Angeles. But at the same time, the administration has been getting major heat from certain industries — particularly agriculture and hospitality — that going after their workforces would be a really bad idea. Indeed, according to the New York Times, Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins lobbied her boss to ease up on farmworkers. Then, suddenly, Trump was expressing a change of heart on Truth Social. He wrote on June 12:
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace. In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
This wasn’t just loose talk. While border czar Tom Homan denied that any policy change on deportation targeting was underway, ICE itself took the hint, as Axios reported:
“Tatum King, a senior ICE official, sent an email to agency officials nationwide, telling them to ‘please hold on all worksite enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meatpacking plants), restaurants, and operating hotels.’”
So what’s the focus now? Trump made no bones about it in a Truth Social post on June 15:
“[W]e must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!”
There you have it: The president of the United States is very clearly telling his deportation shock troops to wage partisan war on cities that are the “Democrat Power Center,” based on the hallucinatory idea — a MAGA staple — that “Radical Left Democrats” are herding millions of undocumented workers to the polls to “cheat in Elections and grow the Welfare State.” It’s all a crock, but reflects a distinctly Trumpian mash-up of the “great replacement theory” and crime-wave myths. And the targeting of blue cities seems to have already taken place, Axios recently reported, especially in red states where state law-enforcement officials have encouraged maximum cooperation with ICE:
“Efforts to arrest and remove unauthorized immigrants appear most aggressive in five southern states with Democratic-leaning cities, while deeply red, rural states are seeing less activity, according to an Axios analysis. …
“[L]ocal law enforcement agencies in Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia have been most cooperative with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through deals known as 287 (g) agreements. There are 629 such agreements now in place across the country. About 43% of them are in Florida, followed by 14% in Texas and 5% in Georgia.
“The GOP-led state governments in Florida, Texas and Virginia also have made a point of pushing local agencies to partner with federal agents, leading to a series of high-profile, mass raids in those states.”
In effect, Republican state administrations are working with the Feds to come down on Democratic-run cities to scourge immigrant populations. And in blue states like California, the mass deportations feel more like all-out partisan war. Certainly the federalization of National Guard units and planned deployment of Marines to Los Angeles — a place Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called a “city of criminals” that the administration would “liberate” from its “socialist” elected leadership — signaled an armed takeover more than any sort of law-enforcement initiative. And now Trump is making the partisanship behind it all too explicit for anyone to miss or deny. While this overt politicization of mass deportation may please Trump’s MAGA base, it will likely erode his popularity more generally.
For now, Trump-friendly industries in Trump-friendly parts of the country need not worry so much, but all those radical-left hellholes better prepare for the onset of fire and ICE. After all, Stephen Miller has quotas to meet.