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- Updates on A Couple of Things
Unless you guys want me to go all John Cole and detail what I’ve been doing around my kid’s house, it’s going to be omnibus posts for a few days. I’m not much of a handyman, but I can do the basics, and there are a few basics needed around here. For example, YouTube and I are going to fix a dishwasher, and also mount some exterior lighting.
Anyway, I’ll start with Kat Abughazaleh, who’s running for House in IL-09. I haven’t gotten an email from her since August 11. However, she’s still active on socials:
From Instagram: “Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures.”
And she’s doing things like participating in protests for ICE:
What she’s thinking will be revealed in the fullness of time, but right it looks like she’s stopped fundraising. She’s got $630K cash on hand as of July 2, so we’ll see what her Q3 fundraising looks like, but if you pledge to not do TV ads and to not hire consultants, at some point you stop asking for money.
Now we’ll move on to the cleverest boy in class, Ezra Klein. Today in the Times (according to what I see on BlueSky) and in his podcast, he’s cottoned to the fact that Democrats need to shut down the government. Josh Marshall got there a while before young Ezra Klein:
[…] But as I say in the headline to this post, for the moment, we’re living in Trump’s world. And Democrats need to operate within it.
What that means as of right now is not simply that policy wins are not enough. They’re not enough because, as we discussed yesterday, Trump is operating outside of the constitutional order and Democrats need to make at least some progress pushing him back within it. But there’s an element of this standoff that transcends any particular. Democrats need to hand Trump a loss. They’ll know they’ve won when they see him lose. Take away something he really wants, something he feels he needs. Make it hurt. Make it visible.
This is a tall order given the fact that even with the continuing resolution fight, Trump has most of the power. But not all of it. This isn’t esoteric or emotional. If one doesn’t grasp the importance of this one simply doesn’t understand the symbolic economy of the political world we currently live in. People see constant spectacles of Trump’s power. Sometimes they’re simply fake. But usually they’re quite real. Those spectacles build his power. Each one adds to it. This is among many reasons why the whole idea of “spending political capital” is nonsense. Successfully asserting power builds power. Trump’s constant displays of untrammeled power clothe him in something like the mandate of heaven in the public consciousness — not support for him but the perception of his power and even invincibility. It’s one of the reasons elite political opinion so far takes remarkably little account of how unpopular he’s become and so quickly. For them the assertions of power make up for it.
Democrats need to hand him a loss. The specifics of what that loss includes are important too. But the loss, with its symbolic power, is important all by itself.
Marshall has been very vocal that the ask that Democrats seem to have settled on — restoring Obamacare subsidies — isn’t enough. Republicans know that taking away those subsidies was a bonehead move. Giving them back would be “the sleeves of a vest” in negotiator parlance. So, we need to ask for more. We need to shut down the government just to show that we have some power and will fight.
Schumer and Jeffries don’t understand this, for reasons we’ve discussed here ad infinitum. At some point they may realize that just sitting around and waiting for res ipsa loquitur to happen might not be a complete political strategy for beating Republicans in 2026.
Welp, those door stoppers won’t mount themselves, so back to the grind.
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