Joe Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States of America but not without any costs. Biden’s electoral theory as many warned was not watertight and while he was able to notch a convincing victory nationwide, Democrats down ballot were not so lucky. The majority in the US House of Representatives has been greatly diminished after leadership all but guaranteed an expanded majority. The balance of power in the US Senate will now be decided by a double-barreled runoff election in Georgia, a state trending purple which Biden won but only within a recount margin. The news was worse in non-federal elections where candidates for statewide office and state legislatures were defeated handily. This is all to say that this election simultaneously served as a rejection of Donald Trump and the Democratic establishment.

Much ink has been spilled about what went wrong for Democrats including a patronizingly racist campaign to Latinos that assumed monolithic political attitudes, tens of millions wasted on consultants like the Lincoln Project who failed to materialize GOP support for Democrats (Trump won a higher share of the GOP vote than 4 years ago), the disappearance of in-person direct voter contact, and of course another campaign about Donald Trump’s vulgarities as opposed to uplifting policy. What has not been discussed is what opportunities lay ahead for the Democrats, especially those on the populist left if they are willing to do the work.

The reduced House majority came exclusively at the expense of centrist Democrats, progressives were consistently able to win re-election. Rep. Katie Porter whose district is +3% GOP leaning, won re-election after endorsing Medicare-for-All. So did Reps Josh Harder, Ann Kirkpatrick, Matt Cartwright, Mike Levin, Peter DeFazio, Jared Golden (endorses in 2018), and Susan Wild who represent districts that are more GOP leaning than the nation as a whole. Meanwhile in less GOP leaning and even Democratic leaning districts, like FL-29, FL-27, IA-01, and NY-11 Democrats lost. The center has attempted to blame activist rhetoric about “Defund the Police”, even though nearly 80% of Americans understood the actual meaning of “Defund the Police”. Whatever the reason for this disparity, we know progressives in swing districts won re-election more often than not.

The Left has found themselves in a position not too dissimilar to that of the Tea Party in 2012. Their candidate of choice had twice been denied the Presidency in favor of more establishment candidates. Huckabee in 2008 and Santorum in 2012 for the Tea Party, Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 for the Left. It was clear that their policy positions were the majority view of base voters even as their candidates of choice failed to capture support. They were ridiculed and written off by party elites, the mass media, and academics who claim to have turned politics into a science. However, what the Tea Party had then is what the Left has now, enough members to block legislation, a mastery of social media where most Americans get their news, and a dedicated base of reliable donors and voters.

The House majority is narrow, so narrow that the newly expanded squad (welcome Reps. Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Marie Newman, and Ritchie Torres) can torpedo legislation that is insufficiently progressive. John Boehner too faced this problem with the Freedom Caucus (a spiritual successor to the Tea Party caucus) and eventually became so ineffective at holding his coalition together that he resigned. The defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor by Tea Party professor Dave Brat in 2014 too was then appropriately seen as the beginning of a new era in GOP party politics. The same should be recognized by the defeat of Joe Crowley by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. The Left will and should challenge the party consensus, it is the only way to maintain relevancy and voters deserve a choice as opposed to an echo.

The reason the Tea Party was and continues to be so successful in its takeover of the Republican Party is simple. We can look at white cultural resentment or economic anxiety and that has its place, but what separates the Tea Party from the establishment in either party is that they consistently materially reward their voters with wins on issues they care about and they are unapologetic in the fights on these issues. The Tea Party voters wanted a hardline immigration policy, deregulated gun laws, restrictions on abortion, tax cuts, and for their politicians to actively fight the culture war. With every election they achieved more of those goals by replacing the old guard in primaries and abandoning old party affiliations and after 6 years, the Tea Party elected the obvious heir to their movement in Donald Trump and the takeover was completed. The Left with its ability to stall the Congress and extract concessions should focus on materially rewarding it’s voters too because while making peace with the establishment might make the Left more popular in Washington, the real battle is in every city and suburb outside of the beltway where the base desires more.

Some argue this comparison of the tea party and the Left is not perfect, first because they say the tea party was devoid of true ideology and was simply a bad faith movement inspired by racial resentment towards the first black president. However, the Tea party was meaningfully different from the establishment Republican party, and those differences extended beyond race and materialized in policy from trade to education to infrastructure. Another argument against this parallel is the Tea party came of age as an opposition party, and the left is about to find themselves with a Democrat president. I challenge that with a simple question, was Mitt Romney of the Tea Party? I should say no he was not, and had he been elected those on the right still would’ve seen themselves in opposition as they were opposed to his candidacy for the nomination and ambivalent about him as a general election candidate. This is also true of the Left which makes no secret of their distaste for Joe Biden who many see as a marginally less worse alternative to Donald Trump in terms of temperament and policy. The Left may not be the opposition party for the mainstream Democrats, but they are a opposition party and that has become clear in the post-election rhetoric from party elites. Finally, some will say “oh but what of the moderates and the middle class?”. I say that these people are the rearguard of political movements and historically have been very mailable in their beliefs and have already begun to conform to new party dynamics as they are not organized or aggrieved enough to challenge the Left or the Right.

The Tea Party very quickly gained an appreciation for the power of grassroots organization and how that can translate into electoral success. The Tea Party also was patient and persistent, withstanding hard loses but staying uncompromising in their policy goals essentially forcing the rest of the party to move towards them or continue to lose influence. We can see this most clearly in the 2012 US Senate race in Missouri compared to the 2018 race. Todd Akin failed where Josh Hawley succeeded, and it wasn’t because those candidates had any major ideological differences or radically different views on gender. Josh Hawley won because the grassroots infiltrated the party and voters had a sense of ownership and buy-in and therefore were self-motivated enough to ignore the obvious shortcomings of their new candidate. The Tea Party’s greatest achievement was convincing its voters that the old neoconservatives and country club moderates were not just in disagreement but an active roadblock that needed to be disempowered. That is the task ahead of The Left, showing its voters that their interests are not the interests of Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer and that those leaders cannot be pushed. It’s going to require a hard-nosed approach and seemingly being everywhere in terms of organizing but it can be done. Democrats won 80 seats in 2018 categorized as “Urban” or “Urban-Suburban”. The Tea Party saw the immediate path of least resistance through rural districts, the Left must recognize their opportunity in cities using Rep. Cori Bush as a model.

The Left can learn from these successes, but it should also learn from the consequences. Yes, the conservative movement is at its most successful, dominating rural states and creating a multiracial coalition of politicians and voters. We are living through a political realignment that will last for a generation if not longer. However, it has also activated the worst of our country and elevated a lunatic demagogue who has irreparably damaged our country. Militant vigilantes march through American cities and gun down protesters while law enforcement passively looks on. True believers are present at every level of government but their commitment to democracy and equal justice is sometimes little to nonexistent. A critical mass of people has become unreachable, so detached from reality that they live and breathe conspiracy. Meanwhile a media ecosphere has developed where propaganda is reported as fact and dissenters are labeled traitors. In this age of ideology defined by twin crises of income inequality and coronavirus, Americans will become more desperate in their genuine desire for relief. The Left must be careful to not let themselves be totally consumed by these illiberal elements who always appear in populist movements. This will be difficult as grift can often be subversive and some popular figures can be credibly accused of being pretenders. There’s also the matter of moral relativism, we’ve seen a leftist state house candidate in Kansas be elected despite admitting to revenge porn. Values matter if we say they do, and there will be something permanently lost if we decide that they don’t.

I don’t know if the Left can succeed in this country and I don’t know if the same fervor that carried the Tea Party can be recreated. What I do know is neoliberalism is one the way out and if the Democrats cannot reorient themselves and do it soon, we will be left behind as we’re lapped by a charismatic but destructive force that will remake America in its image. Those are the stakes of this decade, and god willing the Left will rise to the occasion.

The post What the Left Can Learn from the Tea Party appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I have run for Congress twice as a Democrat, but I might as well have run as an introvert. You may have heard of me had I won, but it’s important to note that the real reason that an introvert like me got the Democratic nomination was because nobody else wanted to run in a strongly Republican district (which fortunately is changing now and may turn blue this November).

I am passionate about politics. I find it very troubling that in the United States we leave millions of people behind. For many, it is economically. For others it is socially; still others, educationally. You know the drill: There are a myriad of ways to be left behind in any society.

I became more aware of this around the time that I was seven years old. Many Sundays I would go to St. Louis Cardinals games with my father in what was the first of three iterations of Busch Stadium. I knew that something was wrong by what I saw as we walked the five blocks to the stadium from where we parked. North St. Louis was different from the suburb where I had grown up. Virtually everyone was African-American, most of the homes were in disrepair, and the looks on many faces were ones of despair. Why was this so? I wasn’t sure, but I knew that somehow, some way, when I “grew up,” I would try to do something to in some small way remedy the unfairness in our society that I was experiencing for the first time.

I first visited Washington, DC when John F. Kennedy was president and then became even more committed to wanting to be a positive agent of change. My career choice was teaching, because (a) it was an opportunity to try to provide empathy and support to young people, and (b) by teaching in inner-city St. Louis, I was exempt from the draft, and this was during the Vietnam War.

I have teaching almost all of the time. However, by 2010, I wanted a larger platform from which I could address national and global issues. But I was scared to run for office. I did not think that I belonged. There were things that were absolutely abhorrent to me, fund-raising for example. As a person who largely sees himself as an introvert, I could hardly think of anything worse than asking another for money. Let me count the ways: (a) I don’t want to be beholden to anyone else, (b) the person I am asking may well need the money far more than I do, and (c) what gives me the right to argue that giving money to me or my campaign is a worthy endeavor?

Public speaking was something in which I had experience. It’s hard to teach without doing it. But there was never  a day of teaching when I wasn’t anxious about getting in front of the students.  Even more unnerving was my time as director of an independent school, when I had large audiences of, can you believe this, adults.

So in 2010, when I first ran for Congress in MO-02 (against the infamous Todd Akin), I wanted to reach voters, but I didn’t want to have to do it by reaching voters. Does that sound familiar to any introverts? Fortunately for me, the expectations were low. As far as party Democrats were concerned, the only thing worse than me running would have been for there have been no name on the Democratic side of the ballot. I limited myself to three or four campaign appearances a week.

Nobody endorsed me, but that was fine because it would have meant standing on a stage and saying disingenuous things about the endorser as he/she did likewise about me. There were no rallies to attend, because the Dems were very weak in the ‘burbs of St. Louis (as I said, fortunately that is changing now). There were “meet-and greets” and gatherings at voters’ homes. While those were never easy, they were small and contained. I had chances to recharge my batteries both before and after.

I like to say that I ran a campaign with integrity. I say this with reservations, because it strikes me that integrity is like honesty and courage, where there is no clear sense of what it is and what it is not. But let’s use the term integrity as a handle to describe what I was trying to do.

Attempting to run with integrity meant that I did not force myself to do “stupid human tricks,” the sorts of things that so many politicians are forced to do. I’m talking about mindlessly waving at everyone at a parade, kissing babies who might most of all want distance from a stranger, and dressing up in team colors, regardless of where one’s loyalties might lie.

I had the freedom to run this way, with a certain reckless abandon. Had I been in a competitive district, that would not have been the case. The Democratic Party would have cast me aside and gone with the traditional candidate, the one who is an extrovert and does not mind, perhaps even enjoys, the silly things that politicians have to do, including asking others for money and turning that cash around to run misleading or excessively self-promoting commercials.

Those of us who see ourselves as introverts often think that we have a special wisdom. I feel trepidatioud about saying that I would prefer that introverts have different kinds of insights from people who live more of their lives as extroverts. But introverts’ preferences for quiet, for space, for thought and small group conversations strike me as entryways for those who run for public office to communicate clearly with voters. They can resonate with voters in a way in which substance takes precedence over image. There is room for give-and-take about the issues that our society faces and to explore ways to try to solve them.

The more candidates running for office let their inner introvert out, the more politics will be acceptable, perhaps welcoming, to the 25 to 50 percent of people who fall on the introverts end of the intro-extro scale. I contend that this would be a very good thing, not only for introverts, but for the country at large.

I have just published a book, Political Introverts: How Empathetic Voters Can Help Save American Politics. A basic premise is that our electorate does not seem to be up to the task of providing the country with the quality of leaders  we need. It fascinates me that, in 1968, the country elected Richard Nixon, and forty-eight years later Donald Trump won a majority of the vote in the Electoral College. During those intervening forty-eight years, we have reformed our educational system to presumably give us a wiser electorate. But no matter how much standardized testing we do, how many AP courses students take, how credentialed teachers become, we did no better in 2016 than 1968. So, my book advocates three types of change:

1. Make politics more welcoming to introverts. What do we have to lose? Introverts are frequently more thoughtful, deliberative and empathetic (not always, but enough to make a difference). How do we make politics more introvert-friendly? Partly by making it easier for introverts to run for office, but also to downplay “silly politics” like rallies, and give greater importance to thoughtful conversation. Another big step would be to drastically shorten the length of campaigns, because two-year campaigns make it virtually impossible for introverts to recharge their batteries. In England, campaigns are generally six weeks long.
2. Acknowledge that changing schools is the gateway to changing politics. We need to make it easier for “natural teachers” to get into the classroom. Forget the credentials; look for individuals who are primarily concerned about the well-being of each student, individuals who communicate well, who have a sense of humor, particularly the self-deprecating kind, and who most of all are empathetic.
3. Promote structural change in American politics, such as eliminating the Electoral College. Get rid of gerrymandering and voter suppression. The houses of Congress should not be fiefdoms in which a Mitch McConnell can stifle not only the will of the minority, but also of the majority. Distribute the power equally among all members of Congress. The electorate will be more interested in government if they sense that it operates fairly and logically.

Change has to be thoughtful and deliberate. That’s how introverted people operate. So, everyone like me who spends much of their time on the introverted side of the continuum, consider trying to find ways to engage in politics and still be in your comfort zone. It’s not easy, but I think that that the county would be better off by letting introverts in to the political process. Let’s try to work our way in and concurrently maintain our dignity. It’s not easy, but well worth trying.

The post Running for Congress as an Introvert appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The average American lost big in the midterm election yesterday when their last, best, if imperfect, hope, the Democratic party, was, in legislative terms at least, buried. There’s lots of reasons why that happened, but we’re already on the case for 2016 and will, with some luck, resurrect our party and, maybe, undo some of the harm we can expect to experience over the next two years. As TPM’s Josh Marshall notes, it’s likely that “the Democratic party’s future is bright. More importantly […] its central goals remain in the ascendent.”

But meantime, I’ve been obsessively reading what my preferred progressives have had to say about why we lost and what we need to do about it. Their comments seem to have three distinct foci: (1) strategic Republican obstructionism paid off big-time; (2) Democrats failed to stand tall and represent when it came to their core values and principles; and, in more specific terms, (3) Democrats failed to craft a coherent economic message at a time when, despite general prosperity, the middle and working class is hurting.

Several progressive writers bitterly noted that obstructionism and negativity have worked spectacularly for Republicans who have been more than willing to take advantage of the fact that few Americans will take the time to really understand the issues, and are, hence, easily fooled by whatever noise the GOP and its media mouthpieces make:

Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog:
When there is no accountability in a political system, there is no incentive for even well-intentioned policymakers to behave responsibly. It seems quite twisted: an unpopular party with unpopular ideas failed miserably at basic governance, and was rewarded handsomely for its efforts. The process isn’t supposed to work this way, and yet we now know it works exactly this way.
The resulting precedent is more than a little discouraging. When failure is rewarded, it encourages more failure. When obstruction is rewarded, it encourages more obstruction. When radicalism is rewarded, it encourages more radicalism. When a refusal to compromise is rewarded, it means politicians will be led to believe they, too, should refuse to work on bipartisan solutions.
It’s not a recipe for sound governance.

Josh Marshall of TPM;

. . . it is much easier to break the government and reap the benefits of doing so if you are not the party of government. This is obvious when you put it this way. But it’s worth considering what a central reality this is.
We should also remember that this is exactly what Republicans did in 1993 and 1994. The script was identical. The difference is actually a good one for Democrats in that they got a lot more accomplished in 2009-10 than the more entrenched Democratic majority of 1993-94. Still, the strategy was identical and it had a similar result – the difference being needing three cycles to finally grab the Senate.

Jonathan Chait at New York News & Politics:

Liberals may still own the future of American politics, but the future is taking a very long time to arrive.
So what happens now? In the short term, nothing. The newly minted Republican leaders are mouthing the requisite platitudes about cooperation. But Mitch McConnell did not become the majority leader by cooperating. His single strategic insight is that voters do not blame Congress for gridlock, they blame the president, and therefore reward the opposition. Eternally optimistic seekers of bipartisanship have clung to the hope that owning all of Congress, not merely half, will force Republicans to “show they can govern.” This hopeful bit of conventional wisdom rests on the premise that voters are even aware that the GOP is the party controlling Congress. In fact, only about 40 percent of the public even knows which party controls which chamber of Congress, which makes the notion that the Republicans would face a backlash for a lack of success fantastical.

Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast:

But what about Obama? He’s done as far as any new initiatives are concerned. He probably can’t do this immigration reform-by-fiat now. They’ll impeach him for sure. All he can do now is try to protect health care and try to make this ISIS war work. There might be some opportunities on trade and tax policy, but those will exist about 75 percent on Republican turf. And emphasis on “might”: The Republicans, McConnell’s pretty speech to the contrary, won’t want to work with Obama on anything. Their interest, as ever, is in pushing the perception that Washington is dysfunctional. It works for them. It worked Tuesday night. It worked in 2010. They want Americans to perceive Washington as broken, especially heading into 2016. There’s no better simplistic argument for “change.” Obstruction has just been rewarded, in a huge way. You expect them to change?

David Edsall at The New York Times quotes political scientist David Legee to explain one crucial mechanism of the GOP success: diminishing the president. Republican opportunism cannot thrive when people really believe in that “hopey-changey stuff,” and reducing the perception of the President and his ability to inspire hope and effect change was a key goal:

Bi-election year 2014 was the final chapter in making the president small. The immediate aftermath of 2008 was that Americans had finally conquered their racial aversions. The election of Barack Obama was a victory both for renewed national hope and long-awaited democracy. Obama was big, a star, a voice to be reckoned with, a mind to be taken seriously.

By 2014 Obama was small, a punching bag, easily bullied, the one to whom small politicians could talk tough, abusively, the one whose ideas were ignored, the one whom his fellow partisans would come to avoid at all cost. How could this happen in six short years?

Some commentators were not content to chronicle the success of the GOP chaos-machine that has been operating full-bore over the past four years, but also called out the Democrats who let them get away with it:

Jeff Schweitzer, former White House Senior Policy Analyst; Marine biologist and neurphysiologist, writing at the Huffington Post:

This story highlights the major failure of the left. Democrats have not defined the agenda or narrated the story. This capitulation creates a void of reason such that absurdities like McConnell’s claim can take hold without everybody doubling over in laughter. Like frightened children Democrats run from Obama’s record, as defined by the right, rather than championing his amazing successes as defined by fact. Much to the credit of the Republican political machine, and with equal shame to the Democrats, the far right has been able to convince the public that everything bad is Obama’s fault, but that Obama is responsible for nothing that is good. When that does not work, they create the illusion that what is good is bad; health care comes to mind.
Democrats have ceded the territory of reality to Republican fantasy. . . .

Still more commentators took the blame directly to the failure of Democrats to articulate a bold economic agenda although none have, at least that I have read so far, attempted to answer the question of why that has been the case:

Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly states the issue the most directly and simply:

In the end, a vote is a vote. And while Democrats hope to restore their 2008-12 margins among young and minority voters in 2016, and turn them out, if the Donkey Party ever wants to get back into a position to govern and not just block Republican extremism, it’s going to have to develop an economic message that resonates with white voters who now view government rather than corporate elites as the chief obstacle to their aspirations.

Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast does not believe that Democrats actually lack a viable economic agenda, but simply that, once again, they have failed to communicate in terms that are meaningful to the voters they need to persuade:

I’m not going where you (especially if you’re conservative) suspect I’m going with this-the standard liberal moan that working-class white people are voting against their interests. That’s something Democrats have to get out of their heads and stop saying. People don’t vote against their interests. They vote for their interests as they see them. And right now, working-class and blue-collar whites think the Democratic Party is just implacably against them.
Of course I don’t think it’s true that the Democratic Party is implacably against them. I think they just think the Democratic Party is implacably against them, and part of the reason-not the whole reason, but part of the reason-they think the Democratic Party is implacably against them is that Democratic candidates in red states have no idea how to tell them they’re on their side.

Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect gets closer to the heart of the issue when he suggests that no Democrats other than Elizabeth Warren has had the intestinal wherewithal to address the politically privileged status of financial elites. Of course, the thread leading from this insight to the role of money in running the entire political system, a fact that itself likely accounts for the economic timidity of the Democratic party, isn’t explicity stated:

But the Democrats’ failure isn’t just the result of Republican negativity. It’s also intellectual and ideological. What, besides raising the minimum wage, do the Democrats propose to do about the shift in income from wages to profits, from labor to capital, from the 99 percent to the 1 percent? How do they deliver for an embattled middle class in a globalized, de-unionized, far-from-full-employment economy, where workers have lost the power they once wielded to ensure a more equitable distribution of income and wealth? What Democrat, besides Elizabeth Warren, campaigned this year to diminish the sway of the banks? Who proposed policies that would give workers the power to win more stable employment and higher incomes, not just at the level of the minimum wage but across the economic spectrum?

I agree with everything that these pundits have written – aside from a few quibbles – but, ultimately, to me, it all comes down to Citizens United, the Supreme Court and the power of money in politics. Until we disable the political greenback, we cannot expect the best from our Democrats – or from our Republicans. If big money essentially running the entire show, Republicans are their lapdogs, eating big off the table leavings. Democrats, the strays huddled at the back door, if they want to survive, have to make nice to get a few of those crucial table scraps; they might shuffle and growl a little when the oligarch opens the door, but don’t expect them to bite the hand that feeds them.

The post RIP Democratic Party: The best of the 2014 election post-mortems appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Almost all of the analysis of the election results is over-complicated at best and wrong at worst. This professor has it exactly right, in an article on Huffington Post called, “2014 and the Strategic Demise of Governance.”(And I’m not just saying that because he’s from GWU.)

The Republicans set out six years ago to purposely, strategically, knowingly, deliberately, by design, pre-meditatively, and completely, with malice aforethought, stop government in its tracks and totally block it from functioning, knowing very well that: 1) the person in the White House would get the blame; while 2) they could laugh all the way to bank.
That’s all there is to it.

And, as Matt Ygelsias writes in an article called “Mitch McConnell May Be the Greatest Political Strategist in Contemporary Politics.”

To prevent Obama from becoming the hero who fixed Washington, McConnell decided to break it. And it worked. Six years into the affair, we now take it for granted that nothing will pass on a bipartisan basis, no appointment will go through smoothly, and everything the administration tries to get done will take the form of a controversial use of executive power.

It’s been ugly. But in most voters’ mind, the ugliness has attached to Obama and, by extension, Democrats. It was a very counterintuitive strategy, but it was well-grounded in the best political science available. And it worked

Obama could have done many things better, but it would not have mattered if he was Abraham Lincoln. A Congress that is determined to break government completely and not allow the president to do anything will get away with murder and be rewarded for it.

The post Don’t overthink it: What happened in the 2014 election is simple appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What the hell are democratic clubs good for, anyway? I received an email recently from the one in my area, imploring me, as a member, to help get out the vote for “our candidates.” Then came the list of candidates I’m supposed to work for. Five dandy, local candidates, from state representative and state senator to county tax assessor. But there was one glaring omission: the Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress. They must have made a mistake, right?

So, I called the president of the democratic township club, noting that the Congressional candidate’s name had been omitted. The answer I got spoke volumes about what’s wrong with our local democratic party organization—and maybe yours, too.:

“We talked about him and decided not to include him, because he’s not a serious candidate. He can’t win, and he probably won’t even get 20 percent of the vote,” he said. “He’s not raising money. He’s in a district completely gerrymandered for the Republican. I don’t know why he’s even running: The only reason to file for office in this district is to draw resources away from your opponent—to make her spend time and money opposing you. He hasn’t accomplished that. Also, we never heard from him: He didn’t contact us to make an appearance at our meetings.”

Whoa. Let’s take those “reasons” one by one:

“He’s not a serious candidate.”

By “serious,” of course, he means amassing large sums of money from fat cat donors, lobbying groups, corporate contributors and PACS—the kind of “serious” that has wrecked our political system; the kind of “serious” that makes lawmakers employees of their donors, not their constituents; the kind of “serious” that undermines the democratic principles that the Democratic party supposedly stands for.
And, by the way, he received the endorsement of our not-insignificant metropolitan newspaper this morning. I think one might call that “serious.”

“He’s not raising enough money.”

See above. But be aware that this particular candidate is running a low-dollar, limited contribution campaign by design. He’s trying to make a point, people. His per-person donation limit is $10.10—a number that is symbolic of the proposed Federal Minimum Wage, which he supports. If the democratic committee people had read any of the candidate’s literature, they would have understood that he is running on principle—a principle that you’d think the democratic party would applaud.

“I don’t even know why he’s running…”

So, according to this small-time, narrow-thinking political hack, the only reason to run for office in a gerrymandered district is to make mischief for your opponent? Would the democratic party in my state prefer that a Republican run unopposed, simply because she has the advantage of representing a district drawn to favor her party? What about the notion that opposing views need to be aired—you know, that democracy thing. The Congressional district is NOT 100 percent Republican: Democrats deserve the opportunity to vote for someone who represents their views—even if they are in the minority.

But, if you insist on looking at it strictly from the narrowest, lowest political viewpoint, what if the Republican candidate pulls an Akin or does something idiotic to make her candidacy implode—and what if there’s no democratic candidate in place. How would that feel? I am exasperated by the decades-long defeatist attitude of our state democratic party regarding this Congressional district: Should we roll over and automatically cede it to whichever Republican comes along, and not even bother to field a candidate?

“He can’t win. He won’t even get 20 percent of the vote.”

Okay, he probably won’t win. I’ll concede that. But it’s not reasonable to predict that he’ll get less than 20 percent of the vote, because he got 29 percent of the vote when he ran in 2010, and the district, as redrawn after the 2010 census, includes more democratic-leaning areas than before. Our esteemed democratic-club president didn’t know that, of course, and countered that point with “Well, even 40 percent would be a wipeout.” So, even if a Democrat could get 40 percent of the vote, it would be a waste of time?

And please note, sir, that the Republican candidate is so sure that she is going to win in a landslide that she is not even campaigning in her own district. She’s spending her time, and her money, campaigning for candidates in other states. Two words: Eric Cantor.

At the end of this exasperating conversation, as a way of trying to be a problem-solver, rather than just a complainer, I suggested that the club send out a correction to its letter, simply saying that the Congressional candidate’s name had been “inadvertently omitted” from the GOTV list. “Well, I didn’t make the decision,” said the president. “I’ll have to confer with the board about this. But sending out another email is a real pain, because my email server only allows me to send out 50 at a time, and I’ll have to divide the list up again, and that’s a lot of work.” Really: Boo hoo.

So, that’s how the conversation went, and that’s why my blood pressure spiked. The committee supposedly representing and working for Democrats dismissed a highly principled candidate because they decided that he isn’t “viable.” I might accept a democratic club ignoring a candidate who sounds like a lunatic, with way-out-there fringe-y ideas. But this guy is not like that—not by a long shot. But the issues didn’t even factor in. The fact is that the committee intentionally left him out, making it clear that this was a decision, not an accident—solely based on their perception that he couldn’t win.

I think it’s reasonable to expect the democratic club to be pro-active on behalf of a candidate who has taken the initiative—and the risk—to put his name on the ballot on behalf of the Democratic party—when the party itself has made no effort to recruit anyone.It’s simply unconscionable. Isnt’ it bad enough that Republicans have a powerful propaganda network [Fox News], the Koch Brothers and Citizens United working on their behalf? For democratic organizations to behave as this one did–and be complicit in our own demise as a politial force–is shameful and unconscionable.

Is this how other local democratic organizations operate?I hope not.

Update: After I spoke with the group’s president, and after I convinced a political friend of mine to call the committee-man, the club sent out another email with the corrected roster of GOTV candidates. In the end, they did the right thing, but only after we backed them into it. Sigh.

The post My local democratic club doesn’t cut it. How’s yours? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Standing in the rain outside a polling place today, touting my spouse/candidate for U.S. Congress–Arthur Lieber– I struck up a conversation with a young guy doing the same for two other Democrats–Tracy McCreery and Jill Schupp. His name is Rasheen Aldridge, and he was a ray of sunshine on a wet Election Day.

We talked for more than an hour, only stopping when the occasional voter showed up. It took only a few minutes for me to realize how remarkable this 20-year-old really is. And, if there are a lot more young people like him, a cynical old liberal like me can feel some renewed hope for the future.

We covered a lot of territory in our conversation. I learned that Rasheen has been fascinated by and engaged in politics for a long time. His mother ran—twice—for a seat on the City of St. Louis’ Board of Alderman, but lost. As a young teenager, Rasheen knocked on doors for her and helped out at the polls. I learned that, when he was just 8 or 9 years old, he found himself fascinated with vote counts, public-opinion polls and statistics that revealed political trends. By the time he was a teenager, he was already a political wonk.

More recently, he has helped organize minimum wage protests among fast-food workers. Last year, he lost his job at Jimmy John’s sandwich chain—presumably, he says, because of his political activism. He was fired for being three minutes late to work—an infraction that is not supposed to result in termination, unless you’ve been written up for similar violations three times, he noted. People rallied around him and staged protests to try to get Jimmy John’s to reinstate him, and that’s when he met one of the Democratic candidates for whom he was poll-watching —Tracy McCreery, who stood by him at one of the protests. “That meant a lot to me,” he said

Now, his early obsession with politics is evolving into a course of study: He’s a student at St. Louis Community College, where he’s working toward a major in—naturally—political science. He’s conversant with a lot of political issues: We talked about Claire McCaskill, Todd Akin’s 2012 “legitimate rape” gaffe, the sad prospect of a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate, and the unfair, biased coverage of Barack Obama’s presidency.

“I think some people think Ebola is just another name for Obama,” joked Rasheen.

He gets it. He gets what politics is about, and what voting is about. He gets it in a way that too many younger citizens don’t, and that older activists—as much as we hammer away at it, have trouble getting across—because we’re….old. He’s working the polls, said Rasheen, because “politics has an impact on our lives,” adding that the people we elect make laws that affect everything we do—and too many people just don’t see that.

I love hearing that from a young person.

But what really got me about Rasheen was what he told me about his engagement in local issues—specifically, the situation in Ferguson, MO. He doesn’t live in Ferguson. But he cares, and he’s doing something positive about it. He told me that he has been in Ferguson for almost all of the 80 days since the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson incident, attending peaceful demonstrations and trying to raise awareness of the injustices of the current police and courts system.

He’s president of a group called Young Activists United, which is trying to get African-American students engaged in the political process. Right now, in anticipation of whatever announcement comes out of the St. Louis County grand jury’s investigation of the Darren Wilson case, he’s leading the group’s effort to stage peaceful demonstrations after the announcement. As we spoke, he took several phone calls from people wanting to know where the next meeting was, how to get the word out, and what the next step was going to be. [Yes, I eavesdropped a little. Sorry.]

Spending that hour or so with Rasheen was the best part of my day. I can only hope that there are a lot of other Rasheens out there, doing the political trench-work, not giving up, staying engaged, using their considerable energy, intelligence and talent to effect change, encouraging others to join up, and pushing for a better system. My generation tried, but from the looks of things on Nov. 4, 2014, essentially failed.

Rasheen’s story tells me that the torch has been passed and is in good hands.

The post A young activist just made my Election Day appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Perhaps the Democrats will be able to avoid losing the Senate tomorrow. I hope so, because if they don’t, we are in for a terrible two years. (Although I think we will probably be in good shape for a better four years following that.)
But even if the Democrats hold on in the Senate, things don’t look good for the House, governorships, and state legislatures. What a contrast to just six years ago, and to a lesser extent even just two years ago. What happened?

I don’t always agree with President Obama, and on some things I strongly disagree with him, and in some areas I think he has been a disappointment. But I also think he has done a lot of good things. His approval numbers have been low, but I think that is mainly because of a combination of the old six-years-in-office jinx, and an economy that although better, has not greatly improved for the working and middle class. If the economy were better, his approval rating would be at least ten points higher, all other issues not-withstanding.

If the Republicans sweep tomorrow, I believe the lesson can be taught in two words:
OBSTRUCTIONISM WORKS.

It has long been known that the GOP determined even before Obama took the oath of office that they were not going to allow him any legislative victories, and were not going to even compromise with him, much less actually give him anything he could take credit for. In stark contrast to the conservative All-American mantras of “Do what’s best for the country” and “Support our president In times of war,” Republicans have done every single thing they can to disrespect the office of president and deny him any credibility. This started, of course, with Republican leaders giving a nod and a wink to all the baloney about Obama’s birth certificate and him not being American born and not even being eligible for the office. GOP leaders did nothing to stop the Limbaugh-Fox Machine from blatantly lying about Obama and saying the most racist, disgusting, and in the case of Michelle, sexist, things imaginable, the Office of the Presidency be damned.

And in both chambers of Congress, the GOP game plan has been clear: obstruct obstruct obstruct. Lie about legislation. Don’t allow votes. Threaten filibusters (because now you don’t actually have to pull it off) and require everything to get 60 votes to pass the Senate. Make up wild conspiracies and scandals and hold endless hearings. Put “holds” on nominations, even if you originally forwarded the name. Block nominations for sub-cabinet posts, agency directors, ambassadors, and judges, no matter how well qualified and even if it is clear they would be confirmed if allowed to come to a vote. And then when there’s a problem at the department, blame Obama’s lack of leadership.

Even in foreign affairs, criticize everything the president does. Especially when it comes to war. And even if you actually either agree with him, or don’t have the slightest idea what you would do differently. It doesn’t matter. Call him weak and incompetent anyway.

And here is the real key: Don’t ever, under any circumstances, actually propose an alternative. Forget constructive criticism. Don’t allow compromise. Moderation is evil and extremism is to be rewarded. Don’t even admit there is a problem.

The Republicans are not there to help most Americans– and certainly not the middle and working classes or the poor– or move the country ahead. They are there for the sole purpose of making government so bad, that people will get mad at government and vote for the people who say that government is the enemy. (All with the goal of protecting the upper 1% while keeping the rest of us down, of course.)

Republicans can do this because they know the mainstream media is irresponsible while cocooned in their little echo chamber, and scared of being labeled “liberal.” No matter how obvious it is that the Republicans are blocking everything and taking obstructionism to unprecedented levels, the media will continue to report that “both sides do it” and “this is typical Washington politics.”

And in the absence of hearing the truth, when the country is on the wrong track, people will blame the president, even when the president is at least trying to set it right and it is Congress that is making any progress—even compromised little steps forward—impossible.

One more thing: do not try and tell me that Democrats do this too. That is absolutely false. There is no question that the obstructionism the GOP has employed against Obama has reached unprecedented levels many orders of magnitude above anything ever done before.

From now on, in high school American government classes and college political science courses, the major lesson to be taught must be: If you want to win elections and don’t care about the country, OBSTRUCTIONISM WORKS.

The post Obstructionism works appeared first on Occasional Planet.

With all the talk of raising the minimum wage, there is one state that shouldn’t have any trouble at all doing just that. Why? Because it’s the law. The minimum-wage law for the state of Wisconsin includes some very interesting language:

104.02  Living wage prescribed. Every wage paid or agreed to be paid by any employer to any employee… shall be not less than a living wage.
History: 1975 c. 94; 2005 a. 12.

104.03  Unlawful wages. Any employer paying, offering to pay, or agreeing to pay any employee a wage lower or less in value than a living wage is guilty of a violation of this chapter.

Recently, 100 people with salaries ranging from the minimum wage of $7.25 to as high as $15.05 filed a complaint with the administration of Gov. Scott Walker, telling him why their wage was not a living wage and therefore it violated the state statute. With a lie bigger than the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, Walker’s DWD (Department of Workforce Development) was quick to respond that $7.25 met the requirement for a living wage.

They did not call any of the 100 complainants. Despite being told over and over again that these people, who work full time, often had to decide between paying rent, buying food, or buying medicine (unable to afford all three and sometimes, could only afford one of the three), the DWD somehow felt that the respondents were living in the lap of luxury off of those princely sums. Unbelievably, part of the reason was that government assistance was considered enough extra income to meet the standard. That means food stamps bumped minimum-wage earners into the leisure class in the eyes of Walker’s government – the same government that provided the food stamps. Were they to simply raise the minimum wage, they would no longer have to provide food stamps for countless numbers of at risk workers.

Although Wisconsin Jobs Now vows the fight is not over, I am finding myself unable to get past the inhuman decision from Walker’s administration.

More justifications of this untenable decision had to do with “stuff” that the poor people owned. That old, tired, and insulting idea that if a poor person owns a refrigerator they are somehow living the life of Riley needs to die a quick and painful death. Some people used to have money and now have none. They may have owned things from that former life, like an aging iPhone or a battered car. (Yes, those who owned cars were considered living well above need. However, were any of those cars to break down there were no funds to repair them.) They may have realized that being able to buy food in a grocery store and keep it in a refrigerator saved a lot of money in the long run over eating out. Many apartments include a refrigerator in the furnishings. Most people consider it as essential as a stove or oven. The only people who appear to think of a refrigerator as a sign of abundant wealth are the kind of people who have never wanted for anything in their entire lives.

Regardless of the erroneous fantasies held by those with piles of money in the bank, this particular statute is there to protect the people who work hard and cannot make food and rent at the same time. The law is there to make sure that government fatcats and corporate masters value the workers who are such a huge part of any industry. Naturally, business interests are screaming that a higher minimum wage would immediately make them flee the state. Walker even cites some bogus study that says the more you pay your workforce, the more jobs are lost. This has been proven incorrect. In Seattle, WA, the minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour and their job figures have been steadily climbing ever since.

It’s an easy equation even for someone who is not an economics major. If you put more money in the pockets of your workers, they will immediately pour that money into the economy of the state. They don’t hide it in offshore accounts. They use it, because they have to. They use it paying rents, buying food, clothes, and the occasional birthday cake. They spend the money on their kids, buying them school supplies and a new wardrobe for their growing bodies. They buy health insurance and gas for their functioning car. If you keep paying them too little to survive, there is only money for necessities. They pay their rent, or get some groceries, or maybe they decide to buy some much-needed medication (Walker did not accept Medicaid expansion, so a lot of poor people here have no insurance at all).

I am hoping that the battle for a living wage continues. The law is on the side of the underpaid. We just need to find a way to get our ridiculous little homunculus of a governor* to listen. Judging by all of the John Doe investigations into him and his administration, he’s not a big fan of laws. We need a miracle – like Mary Burke winning the Governor’s election next month.

*Ordinarily, I am not a fan of name-calling. I make an exception in Walker’s case because it’s an accurate description.

The post The minimum rage: Wisconsin edition appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Unaccustomed as I am to writing about sports, I beg for indulgence just this once. I’m still breathless from this evening’s amazing come-from-behind win by my local team, the St. Louis Cardinals. But as caught up as I have been for the past three hours in the play-by-play, the strategic moves, the psychological analysis and my city’s sense of reflected glory lived through a baseball team, I can’t resist turning this into a political story.

It’s pretty simple, really: The team with the most money lost.

The Dodgers play in one of the top media markets in the U.S. Their revenue from cable rights and advertising has been reported at about $293 million per year. The Cardinals, in a much smaller media market, reap much less from media–$28 million– and they must rely on ticket sales for the rest of their operating budget. Of course, that means that the Dodgers, whose annual payroll budget is $243 million, can pay huge salaries to baseball superstars and pre-empt most other teams when the best players become free agents. The Cardinals have an annual payroll budget of $107 million, and have to be much more strategic in assembling a team.

Today’s upside-down result [the Cardinals beat the Dodgers 3 games to 1 in the best-of-five division championship] is a victory for financial underdogs. And this is where, for me, the political parallel kicks in.

It has become axiomatic in politics that, without a huge campaign treasury, a candidate cannot be competitive-just as in baseball, the lower-budget teams start every season at a competitive disadvantage.

But that assumption has had a negative effect on the political game. Candidates, as well as political parties, have bought into the idea that money is everything—and they act accordingly. In the frantic pursuit of campaign contributions, ideas take a back seat to money. Fundraising events take precedence over meaningful contact with constituents—even cutting into the time elected officials spend on the floor of the legislative bodies to which they are elected. In the endless money chase, politicians see fundraising as their day jobs, and reelection—for the sake of retaining power—as the primary goal. Their patrons—wealthy donors, corporations and lobbying groups—use the power of the dollar to buy the loyalty—and votes—of their dependent candidates and incumbents.

At this point in American politics, it’s a financial free-for-all, and, as a result, American democracy is in free fall.

In politics, money is ruining the game. In baseball, a limited form of revenue sharing has narrowed the income gap among teams slightly [pro football has a much more robust revenue-sharing system]. In American politics, the only way to achieve financial parity would be to institute a system of publicly financed elections, with spending caps. The chances of that happening in the near future are dim, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. [There was, of course, that little glimmer of hope in 2012, when Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS Super PAC spent upwards of $400 million and yet still failed to elect Mitt Romney to the presidency.]

So, when the lower-income St. Louis Cardinals beat the extremely wealthy Los Angeles Dodgers today, and when the notoriously free-spending New York Yankees didn’t even make it to post-season, upending all the financial assumptions of the baseball world, I feel hopeful. I’m going to take it as positive indicator, both for baseball and for the political realm: Money can’t buy everything.

The post The team with the most money lost today: Cardinals vs Dodgers–a political parable appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Ever since the election-changing Presidential Debates between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, American voters have come to expect debates between candidates.

More recently, however–and particularly this year–campaign debates have gone into a state of decline: It’s becoming harder and harder to get political opponents to appear together live to discuss issues. [There’s also an accompanying decline in the level of discourse at debates that manage to make it to prime-time, but we’ll discuss that later.]

Here’s an example: In St. Louis, Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District, incumbent Republican Ann Wagner is opposed by Democratic challenger Arthur Lieber. Lieber assumed that the the local chapter of the League of Women Voters would arrange a debate, because of the importance of a Congressional race. He assumed wrong. Contacting the League, he learned that only when a candidate requests a debate does the League spring into action. In this case, Lieber’s request triggered an attempt by the League to schedule a debate with Wagner–but her campaign said that she couldn’t participate, because she would be in Washington DC on the proposed dates. [A disingenuous answer, of course, because Congress has exactly zero days in session between now and the Nov. 4 election.] The League–and Lieber–are still waiting for a response to some alternate dates.

And that’s how it’s going everywhere: Candidates are ducking and covering, reneging on debate promises, cancelling scheduled debates, and using every excuse in the book to avoid face-to-face debates, or even lower-key public forums. It’s happening on the right and on the left, in red states and blue states, in Congressional races, governors’ races and mayoral contests.

It’s an epidemic of what some have called “political truancy.” And it’s robbing voters of something they deserve: a forum where candidates must face the public live, demonstrate their command of the issues, and allow themselves to be challenged on their ideas, unprotected by scripted advertisements and sanitized press releases.

Debate ducking

In Ohio, for the first time in 36 years, there will be no formal debate between the candidates for governor, incumbent John Kasich and challenger Ed FitzGerald, says the Columbus Dispatch. “The candidates blamed each other for a breakdown in negotiations. The last time  Ohioans experienced a gubernatorial campaign without a debate came in 1978, when Gov. James Rhodes wouldn’t debate Democratic challenger Richard F. Celeste.”

Similarly,  Colorado’s CBS 4 television outlet reports, “For the first time in CBS 4 history [30 years], an incumbent U.S. senator has declined to debate his opponent live on air. In fact, Sen. Mark Udall isn’t doing a debate on any of the four major network television stations in Denver.” One CBS 4 staffer commented:

Live debates are the one opportunity voters have to see candidates go toe-to-toe without a media filter, see the clarity of their vision and courage of their conviction; how they think on their feet and respond under pressure. We’ve been trying to schedule this debate for more than two months.

In Michigan, Republican Terri Lynn Land and Democrat Gary Peters are vying for the open seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat. Land, who has been running a low-visibility campaign dubbed “stealth” and “invisible” by some news reports, notoriously flopped during a primary debate, reportedly saying, “I can’t do this,” and later acknowledging that she was not comfortable with public appearances. She offers a classic case of debate avoidance. US News recently reported that:

[Land’s] refusal to debate might be the strategic decision that marks the beginning of the end of her long-shot hopes as the fall campaign veers into focus. Her political truancy is beginning to draw wider attention.

On Monday, the local NBC affiliate in Land’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was forced to cancel its scheduled debate because Land’s campaign team never agreed to terms. In order to highlight her absence, Peters stole a page out of Clint Eastwood’s 2012 Republican National Convention playbook, propping up an empty chair and debating it in front of a gathering of his own supporters.

Michigan’s candidates for governor exhibit the same reluctance to debate. Incumbent Republican Governor Rick Snyder has, so far, declined all invitations to debate his Democratic challenger, Mark Schauer. Snyder is opting, instead for a series of town hall-style meetings with voters. Schauer’s camp calls this tactic an evasion. “A carefully scripted town hall with a partisan Republican audience is not the same as a statewide televised debate,” said a Schauer spokesperson recently.

The incredible, shrinking debate schedule

Even when candidates agree, in principle, to debate their opponents, they’re agreeing to fewer debates, balking over the rules, the venue, the time, the moderator, etc., and some even cancel previously arranged sessions, with little time for rescheduling. In Hawaii, for example, the democratic candidate for governor dropped out of a scheduled debate over the host organization’s intention to record the debate and post it, unedited, on its website. In Texas, the candidates running for governor–Greg Abbott and Wendy Davis–have scheduled, cancelled and then re-scheduled debates several times as they wrangled over the format of the meetings.

On Aug. 30, 2014, Montana’s Flathead Beacon reported this scenario:

With little more than two months to go before the general election, the only U.S. Senate candidate debate that had been scheduled in Bozeman by Friday was in question. …[Congressman Steve] Daines can’t attend on Oct. 4 and more coordination is needed before details would be confirmed. Other debates are in the works in eastern Montana and towns including Missoula, Kalispell and Helena. [Daines’ opponent] Ryan Zinke has declined to participate in debates in Great Falls and Billings.

Debates over debates are common in high-stakes political campaigns, says Michael Bitzer, professor of history and political science at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. The 2014 race for a U.S. Senate seat there features an intensely watched race between incumbent U.S. Senator Kay Hagan and her challenger, North Carolina Speaker of the House Thom Tillis. Hagan has agreed to three debates. Tillis wants more:

In the Louisiana race for U.S. Senate between Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu and Republican challengers Bill Cassidy, and Rob Maness, one debate has been scheduled [Oct. 14]. But while Landrieu and Maness have agreed to multiple dates, Cassidy has yet to commit to more than the Oct. 14 event. Both campaigns appear to be trying to jigger the schedule and the locations for maximum political advantage. The jockeying for political advantage is a bit dizzying, and it probably typifies the kind of calculations being made in other contests: . Here’s a glimpse of what may be going on, according to the Times-Picayune:

Campaign frontrunners generally want to avoid debates because they pose more a risk than an opportunity for leading candidates…Cassidy could be steering clear of debates if he thinks he is currently ahead of Landrieu in the election.

Of course, Landrieu isn’t necessarily pushing debates because she thinks she has fallen behind Cassidy and needs the exposure. The Democratic Senator may just believe her debate skills are superior to the Republicans…

The Republican congressman is likely reluctant to commit to more debates because the candidate perceives he has more to lose than his opponents, according to experts. It’s an unusual situation. Typically, incumbents like Landrieu turn down debates and challengers like Cassidy push for more of them.

Why is it so hard to get candidates to stand up, face-to-face in front of an audience of the people they hope to represent? Maybe it’s all political–not wanting to say something embarrassingly uninformed, not wanting to give an opponent the opportunity to look good at your expense, or simply not wanting to let people see who you really are without a script. Or maybe the problem is the format of debates themselves–a forum in which debate skills–the ability to outshout your opponent, overtalk him or her, or recite an unbroken litany of memorized facts–are valued more than thoughtful discourse. For most candidates, it’s simply easier and safer to share your image and a few pithy soundbites via the much safer method known as advertising.

Whatever the reason, the diminution of this aspect of political campaigns is, bottom line, a loss for voters and for democracy.

The post The sad state of campaign debates: 2014 edition appeared first on Occasional Planet.