Ongoing Dem Debacle Thread: Commander will kill us all

[MHBDemon]

Why would that make it an irrelevant exercise? The problem with certain folks on the left is that you're either all in with everything they support, or you're completely out. Not possible to message to them unless it's completely in lockstep. But, whatever, tired of having this same argument. Enjoy your weekends!

So if you lived in an over-policed community and your life was constantly in danger from police violence, would you vote for a party that was continuously committing to funding more police?

 

[Strickland33]

This is BS - I consider myself progressive. I have been critical of the dumbasses on the left who didn't vote for Hillary -- that's it. And whoever decided to call it "defund the police" because that was dumb as shit. Show me where I've used the word progressive as an insult.

If you think that you're supportive of progressive issues on this message board (or board leftists), then there's probably nothing that I can say that will convince you otherwise.

But the fact that the poster that everybody associates you with is ChrisL based on idk five years of increasingly frustrating interactions that posters who have nothing in common politically otherwise commiserate about seems like proof enough.

Anyway, if you're into progressive politics and consider yourself a progressive, then let's actually talk about the issues instead of re-litigating shit. Deal?

 

[dartsndeacs]

FTR, until y'all started getting in a pissing match the past month or two I considered shoosh to be the most leftwardly loon of all of ya. Methinks you've gone off the deep end if he isn't progressive enough.

 

[Strickland33]

FTR, until y'all started getting in a pissing match the past month or two I considered shoosh to be the most leftwardly loon of all of ya. Methinks you've gone off the deep end if he isn't progressive enough.

I would say that you should spend more time in the Tunnels, but nobody should spend more time in the Tunnels.

How do you feel about the LA political landscape, palma?

 

[dartsndeacs]

I would say that you should spend more time in the Tunnels, but nobody should spend more time in the Tunnels.

How do you feel about the LA political landscape, palma?

I'd be happy with either candidate for mayor. With my rent up 10% this month after being relatively flat for the past few years, I think things are about to get a lot worse very fast. $3,300/mo for a 2BR in a not terribly desirable part of town is nuts, mixed with high gas prices for those that have to travel in.

There's just too much red tape in getting anything built in LA, that's why I think a developer would add some significant value. And Bass is also impressive.

 

[Strickland33]

Ongoing Dem Debacle Thread: We finally tackle the Trolley Problem

I'd be happy with either candidate for mayor. With my rent up 10% this month after being relatively flat for the past few years, I think things are about to get a lot worse very fast. $3,300/mo for a 2BR in a not terribly desirable part of town is nuts, mixed with high gas prices for those that have to travel in.

There's just too much red tape in getting anything built in LA, that's why I think a developer would add some significant value. And Bass is also impressive.

I’m pretty sure Bass is gonna roll in November. Caruso spent so much money and Bass didn’t do much, and she dominated him once the votes were tallied.

Sucks about your rent… My spot is rent controlled so I’ve got at least a year before my rent gets gouged, depending on when the city lifts its COVID emergency.

You’re right though that the coming crisis is going to be a disaster.

 

[dartsndeacs]

I also got indicators from two places this week that say that this coming year healthcare costs are going to skyrocket 15-30% on premiums. They've been relatively flat the past few years as people weren't having procedures due to COVID

 

[PhDeac]

I completely missed that Bass took a lead over Caruso. That's good to see.

 

[Strickland33]

I completely missed that Bass took a lead over Caruso. That's good to see.

The national media was so excited to announce the death of progressivism that it didn't realize that most voters in California vote-by-mail and "day of" tabulations meant virtually nothing.

The real story is that Bass crushed Caruso while spending a fraction of what his vanity campaign spent ($176/vote when it's all said and done). Furthermore, more people voted for the DSA-backed Controller, Kenneth Mejia, than Rick Caruso.

In total, three former DSA organizers knocked off anti-homeless incumbents in City Council (Hernandez over Cedillo and Soto-Martinez over O'Farrell) and Controller (Mejia over Koretz) races. Also, a solid liberal (Young-Yaroslavsky dominated Yebri, an anti-homeless, real estate shill). There are going to be a few close races (namely Darling v Park), but progressive candidates dominated city, county, and state elections in CA.

Increasingly, the political story in this country is that centrist Dems need to start ceding power to the new guard of millennial and Gen Z politicians whose lives have been utterly destroyed by the Boomer/Gen X status quo. Most people simply don't pay attention to what's happening beyond what they watch on cable news or read in national newspapers (or, more accurately, in tweets about national newspaper articles).

(Before y'all say that LA is just a city, its city council and board of supervisors, not to mention state senate/assemblymembers, manage budgets and jurisdictions bigger than entire states.)

 

[dartsndeacs]

The national media was so excited to announce the death of progressivism that it didn't realize that most voters in California vote-by-mail and "day of" tabulations meant virtually nothing.

The real story is that Bass crushed Caruso while spending a fraction of what his vanity campaign spent ($176/vote when it's all said and done). Furthermore, more people voted for the DSA-backed Controller, Kenneth Mejia, than Rick Caruso.

In total, three former DSA organizers knocked off anti-homeless incumbents in City Council (Hernandez over Cedillo and Soto-Martinez over O'Farrell) and Controller (Mejia over Koretz) races. Also, a solid liberal (Young-Yaroslavsky dominated Yebri, an anti-homeless, real estate shill). There are going to be a few close races (namely Darling v Park), but progressive candidates dominated city, county, and state elections in CA.

Increasingly, the political story in this country is that centrist Dems need to start ceding power to the new guard of millennial and Gen Z politicians whose lives have been utterly destroyed by the Boomer/Gen X status quo. Most people simply don't pay attention to what's happening beyond what they watch on cable news or read in national newspapers (or, more accurately, in tweets about national newspaper articles).

(Before y'all say that LA is just a city, its city council and board of supervisors, not to mention state senate/assemblymembers, manage budgets and jurisdictions bigger than entire states.)

So reading up on Hernandez over Cedillo, first thing I clicked on was her housing policies and the first thing she referenced was Cedillo approving a 725 unit complex in chinatown with no affordable units. This site is adjacent to the metro, directly across the street from where I live, and my company designed it. It's been in the permitting process now for a good 6 years. My rent's up $500 this year in large part because these 725 units across the street are being delayed by a decade.

This is happening all over LA, progressives delaying building of units over minor affordable idealistic goals, and increasing rent for everyone else by 25% in the process. Progressive politics unintentionally are creating the housing crisis.

 

[Strickland33]

this the article that I'm referring to, btw:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/us/politics/california-voters-democrats-crime.html

The funny part of this is that Goldmacher is from California, so presumably he knew that this was ideological bullshit when he filed it (again, it takes like 2 weeks to figure out CA election results bc so many people vote-by-mail) and he published it anyway.

My favorite part is that there isn't even a retraction or update, or anything.

Final Tally:
Bass: 43% (278,511 votes)
Caruso: 36% (232,490 votes)

The election in November will probably get more than 20% of the electorate to the polls and I can't imagine anybody is going to vote for Caruso who hasn't voted already.

Also, the Gascon recall didn't collect as many signatures as folks thought they might, so it's a pretty open question of whether it'll make it to the ballot in the first place. Regardless, I doubt we'll see a repeat of what happened in SF because it won't be tethered to a low-turnout primary election.

 

[ChrisL68]

Bass was endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and James Clyburn. The establishment is clearly troubled by this result. lol

 

[Strickland33]

Bass was endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and James Clyburn. The establishment is clearly troubled by this result. lol

I know that you're not a read the article kind of guy, but in this case you really might want to read the article first before hitting Post Quick Reply and laughing out loud.

 

[dartsndeacs]

So it looks like the Gascon recall may fail if they throw out over 20% of the signatures as being invalid?

 

[dartsndeacs]

I don’t like how Villanueva has become so openly political. Hoping for him to lose.

 

[dartsndeacs]

Fucking bikes

 

[Strickland33]

So reading up on Hernandez over Cedillo, first thing I clicked on was her housing policies and the first thing she referenced was Cedillo approving a 725 unit complex in chinatown with no affordable units. This site is adjacent to the metro, directly across the street from where I live, and my company designed it. It's been in the permitting process now for a good 6 years. My rent's up $500 this year in large part because these 725 units across the street are being delayed by a decade.

This is happening all over LA, progressives delaying building of units over minor affordable idealistic goals, and increasing rent for everyone else by 25% in the process. Progressive politics unintentionally are creating the housing crisis.

That isn't why your rent is up $500 this year, but LA definitely has a supply crisis!

Cedillo was in charge of the city council's housing committee, which was implicated in a lot of pay-for-play dynamics and two past members are now in federal prison. I'd argue that intentionally creating a bottleneck to increase payouts form developers did a lot more to cause the housing crisis than somebody who isn't even in office yet but YMMV.

Hernandez will be fine.

In general, progressives don't halt construction. Most of the time, neighborhood councils, which trend conservative or centrist, are the ones invoking CEQA and showing up to planning commission meetings where these decisions are made. These aren't progressives making these public comments, sending these emails, and blocking new development. These are liberal, moderate, and conservative homeowners, by and large, and usually older folks at that (since young people can't afford to buy million+ dollar homes in LA).

The only development that progressives typically block are that don't adhere to mandatory inclusionary zoning minimums for affordable units. (LA doesn't have the same aggressive left-leaning NIMBYism as the Bay Area, imo). The 725 unit complex across the street should have 73 affordable units, which would actually do a lot to alleviate the supply crisis in lower segments of the rental market. If you come to my side of town, I can show you a lot of new construction that has added upwards of 1000 units of affordable housing to the rental market over the last few years.

The narrative that you're embracing sounds a lot like what I hear from developers, but, speaking as a subject-level expert in this area, I really don't think that it's true. Happy to discuss more over PM, but if you're actually interested in addressing the housing crisis and not just in embracing reactionary politics, then you should take a look at the United to House LA ballot measure and the Our Future LA coalition, which represent, in my opinion, two incredibly hopeful moments in an otherwise pretty depressing field of supply-side housing policy.

 

[Strickland33]

So it looks like the Gascon recall may fail if they throw out over 20% of the signatures as being invalid?

yeah, i'm not an expert on ballot measures, but consultants on campaigns that I've worked on say that these recall elections are likely to have 30%+ invalid signatures because of the incredibly sketchy signature-gathering efforts. while people in SF really seemed to dislike Boudin, nobody in LA really cares much about Gascon outside of fascist reactionaries

I don’t like how Villanueva has become so openly political. Hoping for him to lose.

did you see that the board of supes is gonna put formally removing him on the November ballot? what's wild is that he was a legitimate democrat who ran on a reform platform in 2018. now, he's probably our Trumpiest local pol in SoCal, which is saying something

 

[ChrisL68]

I know that you're not a read the article kind of guy, but in this case you really might want to read the article first before hitting Post Quick Reply and laughing out loud.

I don't have a subscription to the New York Times.

 

[Strickland33]

I don't have a subscription to the New York Times.

here you go:

LOS ANGELES — Progressive Democrats were knocked on the defensive in their own party over crime and homelessness on Wednesday after voters in two high-profile California races delivered a stark warning about the potency of law and order as a political message in 2022.

The landslide recall of a progressive prosecutor in San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, and the strength of a Republican-turned-Democratic mayoral candidate in deep-blue Los Angeles, Rick Caruso, who ran relentlessly as a crime-fighter eager to clean up the streets, showed the extent to which voter anxieties about public safety have taken hold — even in some of the most progressive corners of the nation.

The results offered fresh evidence of the depths of voter frustration in major American cities about quality-of-life issues. They were also the latest signs of a restless Democratic electorate that was promised a return to normalcy under President Biden and yet remains unsatisfied with the nation’s state of affairs.

On Wednesday, the day after the California elections, Mr. Boudin’s ouster and Mr. Caruso’s strong showing — he is currently the top vote-getter — were being parsed and picked apart by the Democratic Party’s moderate and liberal factions, as the party tries to hold together its fractious coalition in an increasingly brutal 2022 political environment.

“What’s clear is that Californians want the streets to look differently than they look today,” said Anne Irwin, founder and director of Smart Justice California, a criminal justice advocacy group. But she disputed the notion that the results were a rebuke for progressive policies. “We will lose battles here and there. That doesn’t mean we’re losing the war.”

For Democrats, the issue of crime and disorder exposes the party’s racial and ideological divisions, threatening to drive a wedge between some of the party’s core constituencies: Some voters are foremost demanding action on systemic disparities while others are focused on their own sense of safety in their homes and neighborhoods.

“People walking the streets, in many cases, feel themselves in danger, and that’s got to be dealt with,” said Willie Brown, a Democrat who is the former mayor of San Francisco.

But Mr. Brown said too many Democrats did not want to talk about “what cops do” for fear of crossing the party’s activist class and offending “A.O.S. or A.O.C. or whatever that woman’s name is,” he said dismissively of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the influential progressive.
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In 2019, Mr. Boudin’s victory was hailed as a watershed moment for the progressive prosecutor movement. A former public defender who had switched sides of the courtroom, he became a symbol of success as he vowed to shrink racial disparities, curb mass incarceration and more aggressively hold police accountable. He promised then that “the tough-on-crime policies and rhetoric of the 1990s and early 2000s are on their way out.” Instead, he is.

In Los Angeles, Mr. Caruso, a luxury real estate developer, spent $41 million to advance to a runoff against Representative Karen Bass, a Democrat and former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Two elections in two cities, of course, do not fully capture the dynamics of an issue as complex as crime politics. And even on Tuesday, the left did not only suffer losses in prosecutor contests but scored a few victories. But the sheer fact that fears for public safety were central drivers in such heavily Democratic bastions is an ominous sign for the party in November, strategists in both parties said.

“If the Democratic primary electorate is showing a shift toward the middle on police and crime issues, then it is an even larger concern when thinking about the November general elections,” said Jefrey Pollock, a pollster for Mr. Caruso who also works for at-risk Democratic congressional candidates in other states.

Progressives blamed the media, outside money, Republican politicians and Mr. Caruso’s wealth — he outspent Ms. Bass 10 to 1 — for the setbacks.

But there was also introspection about the backlash.

Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the leader of the House Progressive Caucus, said multiple factors led to the urban anguish: soaring housing costs that have exacerbated homelessness, shuttered storefronts in downtowns that have not recovered from pandemic lockdowns, lawlessness to a degree and the perception of rampant criminality stoked by Republican politicians.

She also suggested that the “defund the police” phrase had oversimplified the Democratic message.

“I don’t in any way want to dismiss the concerns that people have around public safety,” she said, adding, “We should not be putting all of this at the feet of law enforcement. We should be supporting efforts to address public safety that go to the root causes — and we should be holding law enforcement accountable.”

Another test could be looming: George Gascón, the progressive district attorney of Los Angeles who moved to eliminate cash bail and impose greater leniency for low-level offenses on his first day, is also facing a potential recall. Signature gathering to qualify for a vote is well underway.

Centrists and former law enforcement leaders hailed the successful San Francisco recall as a crushing blow to progressives, while more liberal activists and members of Congress dismissed it as an only-in-San Francisco phenomenon that said more about Mr. Boudin’s missteps, money or the peculiarities of the recall.

“It’s clear that the toxic Defund the Police movement is dead and is being replaced by a movement of ‘Defund the Progressive District Attorney,’” Bill Bratton, the former New York police commissioner and former Los Angeles police chief who had endorsed Mr. Caruso and appeared in ads for him, wrote on Twitter.

Whitney Tymas, president of the Justice and Public Safety PAC, which spends heavily in district attorney races on behalf of progressive prosecutors, strongly disagreed.

“Rumors of the demise of the movement to support forward-thinking prosecutors are greatly exaggerated,” she said, citing the success in another Bay Area race on Tuesday. In that race, the Contra Costa County district attorney, Diana Becton, who is currently the state’s only Black prosecutor, was far ahead of a tough-on-crime challenger, Mary Knox, a deputy prosecutor who is white.

In another Los Angeles contest, the county’s tough-on-crime sheriff, Alex Villanueva, was forced into a runoff after winning little more than one-third of the vote.

The criminal justice landscape has been fast changing.

In the two years since George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, the initial “defund the police” rally cry has since become so politically toxic that it is now more often used by Republicans as an epithet than earnestly by Democrats. The once-crusading energy for police reform has waned, too, as political strategists say that voters — especially in major cities— feel less safe, an emotional reality far more powerful than any crime statistic.

“People are not in a good mood, and they have reason not to be in a good mood,” said Garry South, a Democratic strategist in Los Angeles. “It’s not just the crime issue. It’s the homelessness. It’s the high price of gasoline.”

In a sign of how crime can divide the party in unusual ways, public and internal polling showed how the crime-and-homelessness campaign of Mr. Caruso, who is white, helped him make inroads with a large swath of Black men, even as he ran against Ms. Bass, who is Black. In one internal survey from May, Mr. Caruso was performing more than 30 percentage points better among Black men than women.

Mr. Caruso found traction in the heavily Democratic city despite being a longtime Republican who then became an independent and only joined the Democratic Party just before running for office. He ran a campaign promising to “clean up” the city and hailed Tuesday’s results as “a great awakening.”

Steve Soboroff, a Los Angeles police commissioner who himself ran for mayor in 2001 and endorsed Ms. Bass this year, was unimpressed, given the vast spending. “Caruso hit a glass ceiling made of Waterford crystal,” he said.

The results in California are not exactly a wake-up call in Washington. Top Democrats have been scrambling for months to address potential vulnerability on crime.

House Democrats raised local and state law enforcement funding by more than $500 million in this year’s appropriations package, delivering Democratic lawmakers a talking point to rebuff “defund” attacks from Republicans.

And at the White House, Mr. Biden has made a point of outright rejecting the most severe rhetoric embraced by the activist left.

“The answer is not to defund the police,” Mr. Biden said in February when he visited New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams, who won in 2021 primarily on a crime-fighting message, has been held up as an example of how to approach the issue.

Republicans say the issue represents a deep vulnerability for Democrats — on par with inflation and the economy.

“There are voters in the suburbs and exurbs all across this country — they’re seeing what’s happening in cities,” said Dan Conston, who heads the leading super PAC for House Republicans, which has already reserved $125 million in television ads this fall. “They’re both aghast and concerned for their communities.”

For months, the party’s tensions between the progressive left and law enforcement have been particularly acute in San Francisco.

The city’s mayor, London Breed, who sparred with Mr. Boudin, announced plans last month to boycott this month’s Pride parade after organizers had banned law enforcement uniforms. The ban on uniforms was eventually reversed, and so was the boycott.

Across San Francisco, anecdotes abound of break-ins, encampments, street fires. During the pandemic, drug overdoses have been deadlier in the city than Covid-19.

Shortly before Mr. Boudin held a news conference south of Market Street on Sunday with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a passer-by carrying bags on a bicycle crashed. A small hand ax he was holding clanged on the ground. He quickly gathered his belongings, jumped back on the bike and pedaled away.

In an interview that day, Mr. Boudin did not deny the woes facing the city. But he said his opponents had tried “to scapegoat me for problems that exist in every single city in this country — and that have existed in San Francisco for decades.”

Mr. Jackson, the longtime civil rights activist and former presidential candidate, said the recall campaign was part of a Republican campaign to stop progressive change. “There is no case against him,” Mr. Jackson said in a brief interview. “It’s ideology.”

Representative Ro Khanna, a San Francisco Bay Area Democrat, conceded that Democrats needed to rethink the way they talk about crime and urban violence as part of a broader messaging recalibration to avoid sounding elitist to voters whose three favorite television programs are “Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football.”

“We need to be nonjudgmental and show we love the things that the people love,” Mr. Khanna said.

Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who oversees the political arm of House Democrats, said it was imperative for the party to figure out how to navigate the tricky politics of crime.

“We need to not fall victim to a false choice between public safety and criminal justice,” Mr. Maloney said. “We better do both.”

For fans of political theory, this article a pretty great look into how ideological hegemony works.