Posted on 02/02/2018 8:26:09 AM PST by Signalman
The Democratic National Committee had a rough 2017, plagued by leadership troubles, internal squabbling, and unflattering reports. To top it off, the party ended the year "dead broke," says The Intercept's Ryan Grim.
The Democratic Party is carrying more than $6 million in debt, according to year-end filings — and has just $6.5 million in the bank. Do the math, and the party is working with just over $400,000 overall. Meanwhile, the Republicans are swimming in pools of money. The Republican National Committee had raised $132 million by the end of 2017 — about twice as much as the DNC — and entered 2018 with almost $40 million to spare, with not a penny of debt.
The DNC's rebuttal, The Washington Post reports, is that they raised more money in 2017 than they have in previous non-election years and were operating at something of a disadvantage given the "rebuilding job" undertaken by first-year chairman Tom Perez. While the DNC claims it is not borrowing money to pay the bills, Grim notes that the party would be operating at a financial loss if not for its borrowing.
If there is any cause for Democratic optimism, it's that individual Democratic candidates seem to be doing well for themselves even as the national party apparatus struggles. NBC News reported Thursday that nearly 50 non-incumbent Democrats running for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections outraised their Republican opponents in the last quarter of 2017. Kelly O'Meara Morales
The never-Trumpers should take note!
And it will only get better....
Piffle.
The HildiBeast spent 3/4 of a BILLION dollars on her failed attempt to size power. (For those in Rio Linda this is $750+ Million, not counting found (free) media coverage)
$40 mil is chump change in National politics.
The DNC can get their money from the Clinton Foundation… right? Cause you can bet Hillary and Bill stole what they have from the DNC, just like they stole from EVERYONE ELSE!
How much did they spend defeating Judge Moore?
NOW do you understand their desperation to import illegals?
I have frequently heard Rush say, we need to CRUSH the Rats whenever we get the chance - maybe this is the year ...
Doesn’t make sense. DNC should be raking in the bucks from all those hardworking Dreamers and super-productive BLM folks.
The DNC keeps calling my house begging for $$$ and I keep telling them I am so frustrated that they used my donations to pay for an illegal Russian dossier that I will never give to them again. (Have never given them a dime but they don’t know that.)
Maybe mother Hillary can arrange for a loan...
As terrible as this sounds, I will be so elated when they are both dead and burning in hell.
The Long Fall of Debbie Wasserman Schultz
The Democratic chairwoman had few supporters—but clung to her post for years, abetted by the indifference of the White House. / MOLLY BALL / JUL 26, 2016
PHILADELPHIA—As Debbie Wasserman Schultz made her unceremonious exit as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, what was most remarkable was what you didn’t hear: practically anybody coming to her defense. The Florida congresswoman did not go quietly. She reportedly resisted stepping down, and blamed subordinates for the content of the leaked emails that were released Friday, which clearly showed the committee’s posture of neutrality in the Democratic primary to have been a hollow pretense, just as Bernie Sanders and his supporters long contended.
She finally relinquished the convention gavel only after receiving three days of strong-arming, a ceremonial position in the Clinton campaign, and a raucous round of boos at a convention breakfast. Few Democrats will miss Wasserman Schultz, who was widely seen as an ineffective leader.
She was a poor communicator whose gaffes often caused the party headaches; a mediocre fundraiser; and a terrible diplomat more apt to alienate party factions than bring them together. “Only Donald Trump has unified the party more,” Rebecca Katz, a Democratic consultant who supported Sanders in the primary, told me wryly.
“The emails just confirmed what we already knew,” Lis Smith, a former aide to primary contender Martin O’Malley, told me. “She was not an honest broker in this process. She should have been gone long ago—she did the party a huge disservice.”
The litany of Wasserman Schultz’s offenses during the primary was familiar to supporters of Sanders and other Clinton rivals: scheduling debates at odd times, shutting Sanders out of the party’s data file, stacking convention committees with Clinton supporters.
But her tenure was rocky long before that—in fact, within a month of her being named in 2011 to finish the term of Tim Kaine, who had left to run for Senate, Democrats were starting to grumble about her. When her term ended after Obama’s reelection, there was more sniping about her leadership, and Obama’s advisors urged him to bring in someone new, but Wasserman Schultz made it clear she wouldn’t go without a fight, according to reports at the time and my sources inside the DNC. And so the White House chose the path of least resistance and kept her in.
“Good fucking riddance,” one former top DNC staffer during her tenure told me of Wasserman Schultz’s ouster. “But she was convicted for the wrong crime.” Critics charged that Wasserman Schultz treated the committee as a personal promotion vehicle, constantly seeking television appearances and even urging donors to give to her personal fundraising committee.
A different former staffer went so far as to compare her personality to Donald Trump’s, describing a “narcissism” that filtered everything through her personal interests.
The larger issue, many Democrats told me, was the White House’s lack of concern with the health of the party, which allowed the DNC to atrophy. “There’s a lot of soul-searching and reckoning to be done going forward about the role of the party,” Smith said.
Obama won the nomination by running against the party establishment, and once he got into office converted his campaign into a new organization, Organizing for America. It was technically a part of the DNC, but in reality served as a rival to it that redirected the party’s organizing functions, effectively gutting its field operation. The weakened DNC bears some of the responsibility for the epic down-ballot losses—in Congress, state offices, and legislatures—that have occurred during Obama’s presidency.
“The president doesn’t give a shit about the DNC, and he’s the only one with the leverage to do something about it,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic consultant and commentator who has advised the DNC. “Barack Obama made it abundantly clear that he didn’t care about the DNC, so why have that fight?”
When Wasserman Schultz finally surrendered the gavel Monday, the prevailing mood among Democratic insiders was relief that the long-running saga was finally over. “It’s great that she stepped down, because she sensed that she would become a distraction,” Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan, told me. (Granholm was considered for DNC chair when Wasserman Schultz got the job and has been mentioned as a possible replacement, but she told me she’s not seeking the position now.) “She saw that the convention would be disrupted if she stayed on.”
The irony to many of Wasserman Schultz’s critics was that if she was, in fact, trying to “rig” the primary for Clinton, she didn’t do it very well, and by antagonizing Sanders supporters she might have even helped power Clinton’s opposition. “She had lost trust from every corner of the party,” said Mo Elleithee, a former communications director for the DNC under Wasserman Schultz. “Congressional Democrats had lost trust in her, the White House had lost trust in her, the Clinton campaign was rapidly losing trust in her. So once she started to lose the grassroots, which was her only strength, she had nothing left.”
Wasserman Schultz wasn’t totally without fans. “I love Debbie, and it took a lot of courage to do what she did,” a Florida delegate named Jack Shifrel told me. “She could have blamed others, but she fell on her sword.” I asked Shifrel, a Clinton supporter, if he thought the Sanders people were right that Wasserman Schultz was secretly rooting for Clinton. “Oh, sure!” he said. “I don’t think she needs to apologize for that. Everybody’s for somebody, and she’s been friends with the Clintons for a long time.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/the-fall-of-debbie-wasserman-schultz/49301
It is not enough to elect people in R jerseys if they are Bush League Republicans hell bent on amnesty for 30 million new Democrats.
Mitch McConnell spent $30 million.
Odungo stole it....before Clinton could
$40 mil is chump change in National politics.
That is what I was thinking.
Who knew that peddling perversity was a losing issue...
Don’t get excited.
The DNC is just one nice juicy Check away from hitting the Lotto from Soros or Steyer.
Hillary funded the DNC and ran it dry at the end. She did this intentionally. The plan was to take Gov’t Funds after she won. That didn’t happen. Now they can’t pay off the stooges. Hillary is not going to help anyone but herself.
Recall when Obama ran. He lefgt debts pile up for utilities and events. Never paid. They wiped off the bad debts for tax benefits. IIRC N. Carolina electric bills were in the Hundreds of Thousands of $. Never paid. Why would they pay now when they need legal funds?
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