Progressive Candidates-- Abandoned By The DCCC

By Howie Klein — October 22, 2018

In the last few days Randy Bryce debated Paul Ryan's cutout candidate to replace himself, corporate lawyer and job outsourcer Bryan Steil. Randy kicked his ass so badly that Steil, teary-eyed, ran from the building without even consoling his small contingent of deflated supporters.

A day or two earlier, Kara Eastman shamed incumbent Donald Bacon in a debate. According to the Omaha World Herald "On climate change, Eastman described it as the 'No. 1 moral issue facing our kids right now. We are leaving this to them to clean up, and it is a disaster.'... [Bacon] questioned how much of climate change is caused by human activity but said 'regardless of where that ratio is at, let’s keep making our planet cleaner.'"

Both Randy and Kara have raised the money they need to stay competitive. Eastman raised $2,028,178 to Bacon's $2,363,497 but needs DCCC help to offset Speaker Ryan's shady SuperPAC, which has already poured in over a million dollars of negative ads against her. The DCCC has spent ZERO in the district. Randy Bryce has outraised Bryan Steil by a mile-- $7,390,769 to $1,664,276 but Ryan's SuperPAC has spent or reserved $4,000,000 in the cycle's ugliest smear campaign anywhere. The DCCC responded with: ZERO.

Both campaigns have polls that show the races are essentially tied. But the DCCC has refused to counter-attack the barrage of negative ads flooding the airwaves the way they are doing for New Dem and Blue Dog candidates from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

If the Republican agenda is to crush the middle class, it seems as if the DCCC's doesn't differ all that much. The elitists who run the congressional wing of the party are not working people. Working people clean their toilets and they don't want them in Congress. How many decision-makers in Congress made a living with their hands? The problems is that these elites don't want working people crashing their party. How many of them understand what it's like to get up and go to work every day and to come home physically exhausted-- and then worry about paying the bills?

Standing in their Christian Louboutins or Guccis with a cocktail, they shudder when they meet a man in work boots holding a beer. Screw them in their Louis Vuitton shoes; screw them because, whether they know it or not, they're conservatives and they are the enemy of working families everywhere. The DCCC needs a Testoni or a Diciannoveventitre right up the ass.

This week, Politico mentioned that Corry Bliss, the executive director of Ryan's sleazy SuperPAC, had told them that he DCCC was "abandoning" Nebraska 2-- "the more progressive candidate that the DCCC did not endorse won the primary, which operatives believe pushed the seat to the GOP." Moron operatives. That candidate they supported was defeated by the GOP and that's why NE-02 has a Republican today. Try a progressive that the local Democrats support? NOT.A.CHANCE! Not this Pelosi-controlled DCCC.

Kara doesn't seem that concerned that the DCCC won't be running their negative ads against Don Bacon. She doesn't want non-issue-oriented ads in the district, regardless of which party runs them. "The ads CLF are running for my opponent," she told us this week, "embody everything that is wrong with politics today. These ads are designed to scare people, to divide people, and to discourage people from getting involved in politics. Nebraskans deserve better, which is why I am committed to running my campaign with integrity and will continue to put people first."

As Erik Gunn wrote at The Progressive recently,

"Bryce has been an ironworker, building projects ranging from parking garages to some of Milwaukee’s most recognizable landmarks. While serving also as political coordinator for his union local, he emerged as an outspoken advocate for labor in his community. When Walker took office as governor in January 2011 and soon after introduced his plan to strip teachers and most other public employees of their union rights, Bryce joined the tens of thousands of public- and private-sector workers who staged massive protests at the capitol building in Madison."

At one of those protests, Bryce was arrested though not charged.

That arrest may be a badge of honor, but now it has become part of a coordinated multi-million dollar smear campaign Ryan's PAC is running against him-- a smear campaign Pelosi and the DCCC refuse to answer.

Just one day after Bryce launched his uphill campaign against Paul Ryan, he raised $100,000 "and within a week stories about Bryce had appeared in publications from the Washington Post to Politico. The New Republic interviewed Bryce, and Esquire writer and acerbic political blogger Charlie Pierce flew out for his kickoff rally at Kenosha’s United Auto Workers union hall."

He was everyone's hero-- and then the DCCC pulled the plug. Or tried to. Let's not let that happen.

We're getting towards the end of the long hard slog-- for Randy and for Kara. Both had been added to the DCCC's Red-to-Blue list, only to be denied any substantive help from an organization that essentially looks at working class men and women as... aliens.