I will admit up front that I am automatically skeptical about anything that comes from the lefties of Wisconsin, especially if it comes out of Madison, that skepticism rising with the level of association to the University located there. So when I looked up Jennifer Epps-Addison after reading her demand made from the presidency and co-executive directorship (?) of the Center for Popular Democracy, which I have to say, after a lifetime of encountering very, very similarly named lefty groups in their scores if not hundreds, past and present, I can't recall anything about, and saw she was a product of The U of Wisconsin, I had my back up. The "Center for Popular Democracy" which I also looked up doesn't look like a particularly large, strong or especially active group or, rather a "federation".
Her article in The Nation is a demand that whoever Joe Biden picks as his VP choice (and why have we not made THAT subject to the democratic process, I ask) it not be a former prosecutor or police professional, clearly that targets several of the named possible candidates - including Kamala Harris and one of those who has greatly impressed me, Val Demings as well as several others. I would wonder what she would cite to back up her accusations against, especially, Congresswoman Demings. I don't disagree with everything she said in it but I wonder why she or even her group would consider themselves to have the standing to blackball these women who have something that such lefites almost never bother to try to get for themselves, the endorsement of voters, some of whom might be part of the loose federation that the "CPD" seems to be made up of - it's a bit vague in their online presence exactly who is part of it, I would guess that all of their combined membership would not equal the population of the state that sent Kamala Harris to the Senate, I would wonder if they had as many members who agreed with the position taken in that article as who voted to send Val Demmings to the House of Representatives.
The most important thing about the exercise in making that demand on Biden is that it is a manifestation of the same thing that has defeated Democratic candidates when the game of making demands becomes helpful to Republicans, that has been a long running game played among the most lefty of the lefty and the suckers who can be swayed by them. And it has never produced anything good, not even when they get their way in the quadrennial idiocy of drafting that albatross that parties hang around their own necks, the anachronistic "platform" that, instead of people standing on, they typically have to run away from.
Reading her piece in The Nation this morning, I think I might have named something I sensed, a part of the never-ending, never getting anywhere, game of those who vie for the title, "Most Lefty Of The Left" of competative statements of demands, the most demandy of the lefty, the most up-to-date-pure-and-most-demandy demands gets some piddling attention for the person making it, their demands might be listened to by a fringe which will then do something stupid like writing in some never-would-win-in-a-life-of-the-universe play candidate and help get a Trump or a Bush II in office. It's an old game that I've seen played for virtually the entire time I've read lefty magazines, going on rounding out six decades of it. I suspect it might get the player a presidency and a concomitant co-executive directorship of some still piddling but perhaps triflingly larger group or "federation." I do have to wonder what such a "federation" means to the individual groups that are considered to be confederated into it, I wonder if the members of those confederated groups have ever heard of the group that, most likely, they never voted individually to join.
I think the pros who go from one position in "leadership" to another, to another at these small groups which can always count on getting outsized attention when they slam a Democratic presidential or vice-presidential candidate use that tactic to enhance their position in the small world of such "leadership" lefties. I don't especially trust them as a group, though some are less bad than others. I will say they've got to convince me with either good evidence or with more credibility that they actually have a significant followership instead of a tiny, sometimes cult following. Sometimes that cult is as tiny as the granting apparatus of foundations which, I suspect, appealing to is job 1 in many of those organizations. I wonder if Black Lives Matter - which is an actual organization as well as a movement that is certainly larger than the organized entity - would reject Senator Harris or Congresswoman Demings as vice president. I wonder how you could poll the BLM movement on that question. I wonder if the certainly much smaller Center for Popular Democracy bothered to ask the members of its federated entities to poll their membership on the issue.
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