National

So last week, the state Democratic Party held an informational meeting in New Castle regarding the upcoming special election in the 10th Senate District to replace Bethany Hall Long. During this meeting, several candidates spoke announcing their candidacies. They are:

Jim Ryan - Retired CWA Debbie Harrington - Retired Military, DSU Trustee Dave Woodside - 27th RD chair Stephanie Hansen - Former County Council president Maggie Jones - Campaign manager for John Walsh Harry Dudlek - Committee member, IBEW member

One name stands out among all the rest, and that is Stephanie Hansen, who is currently an environmental and land use attorney at the Wilmington law firm of Young Conaway. She is also the former President of New Castle County Council from 1996 to 2001, who had previously considered primarying County Executive Tom Gordon last year before deferring. As you can see from the picture above, she is friendly with many former or current members of the General Assembly. Out of that list above, she is obviously the Party's pick and can be expected to win the Executive Committee vote on January 3.

George Lakoff on how Democrats help Trump: “Without knowing it, many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media help Donald Trump every day. The way they help him is simple: they spread his message.” “Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.” “When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.”

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “Mr. Trump is not the first American politician with authoritarian tendencies. (Other notable authoritarians include Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.) But he is the first in modern American history to be elected president. This is not necessarily because Americans have grown more authoritarian (the United States electorate has always had an authoritarian streak). Rather it’s because the institutional filters that we assumed would protect us from extremists, like the party nomination system and the news media, failed.” “Many Americans are not overly concerned about Mr. Trump’s authoritarian inclinations because they trust our system of constitutional checks and balances to constrain him. Yet the institutional safeguards protecting our democracy may be less effective than we think.”

Josh Marshall says the DNC race cannot devolve into score settling.

It seems to me that Democrats are now involved in a pointless proxy battle between what we might call a "deep causes" explanation of the 2016 loss (strategy, ideology, candidate) and one focused on illegitimate outside interventions: Russian hacking and subversion or James Comey's week-out intervention in the presidential race. Any effort to hold these two explanations as alternatives, as though one obviates the other seems either dishonest, pointless, distracting or simply silly. […] Everybody who wants to be vindicated by Clinton's defeat won't stand for anything that doesn't place the matter 100% on her shoulders and those who supported her. Much the same applies to Clinton's historically large popular vote margin for someone who lost the presidency. There's no reason you can't trumpet the fact that Clinton was the popular choice while also noting that consequences all stand or fall by engineering wins through the math and logic of the electoral college. Which brings us to the other clarifying point. Hillary Clinton will never be the Democratic presidential nominee again. The intricacies of her emails or James Comey's decisions about the investigation into them will never be campaign issues again. Whatever you think about the Clinton Foundation will never matter again in a presidential campaign. That means that figuring out the future of the Democratic party just has nothing to do with any of those things. I'm tempted to say Russian hacking won't happen again. But frankly, I'm not so sure. They already appear to be pulling the same thing with Angela Merkel. In any case, external subversion, cybersecurity just belongs to a separate conversation and realm. The truth is it shouldn't have been close enough for these outside interventions to have allowed Trump to win. But it was. Was that because Clinton was a terrible candidate and Sanders should have been the nominee? Maybe. But I doubt it. At a minimum I don't think it is so clear as to be treated as a given. Clinton always had serious liabilities - some tied to her personally and others of historical circumstance. Sanders lacked many of Clinton's liabilities. He also had numerous other liabilities that no money or real adversary was ever put up to exploring and exploiting. But again, personalities ... I guess it's somewhat more possible that Sanders will run for President than Clinton. But I highly doubt either will.

Hear Hear! It is time to move on from this fight. I know, I am one to talk, right?

Jonathan Chait: “Donald Trump’s surprising (though not unforeseeable) election has provoked a wave of fear and anger among his opponents. But much of it has been misdirected into denial or despair rather than effective channels of political mobilization. The clearest symbol of this misplaced energy is the campaign to persuade members of the Electoral College to deny Donald Trump the presidency.” “The first thing to note about this effort is that it is utterly hopeless… Second, and more important, denying Trump the presidency through an Electoral College coup is not a procedurally legitimate response… The final problem is that the campaign to prevent Trump’s election has turned the hopeless Electoral College gambit into a substitute for political organizing.” “But there are better measures of horror at Trump and Trumpism than support for a hopeless and questionable tactic. The correct response should involve the protection and engagement of normal politics.”