As the anti-SLAPP stage of my case heads toward California’s Court of Appeals, I am happy to report that First Amendment warrior and appellate attorney Jeffrey Lewis of Broedlow Lewis LLP will be representing me in the fight against the corrupt LA Times and its collusion with LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck, and for free speech and independent journalism.
Join the fight: click here.
I’m suing the Los Angeles Times. I’m the plaintiff. I’m the one who was wronged. The Times should be defending themselves from my accusations that they fired and libeled me as a favor to a police chief.
But this is America.
Deep-pocketed defendants like the Times — owned by a corporation with the weird name Tronc and a market capitalization in excess of $400 million — are taking advantage of America’s collapsing court system to turn justice on its head. In worn-out Trump-era America, the corruption and confusion that used to be associated with the developing world has been normalized.
If you’re a big business like Tronc, you may be the defendant on paper but you have all the advantages in court. Your money allows you to put the plaintiff on the defense. You’re equal in the eyes of the law — theoretically. But it doesn’t feel like justice when the victim has to defend himself from the criminal. It’s like that song “Lola,” in which the Kinks sang “girls will be boys and boys will be girls”; the courts system is a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.
States like California passed anti-SLAPP laws to defend individuals with modest incomes (like me) against deep-pocketed plaintiffs (like the Times) that file frivolous lawsuits to intimidate and harass their critics. After an anti-SLAPP motion is filed, the case freezes until a judge decides whether the case is meritorious. If the judge says it’s frivolous, it’s dismissed and the poor individual defendant gets his or her attorney’s fees paid by the deep-pocked corporation plaintiff.
After I sued them for defamation and wrongful termination, the Times filed three “anti-SLAPP” motions against me. So if the judge decides I don’t have a good case, this middle-class individual plaintiff will have to pay deep-pocketed defendant Tronc’s legal fees. The Troncies want at least $300,000.
Talk about topsy-turvy! The legislature should fix this law but they won’t because there’s zero political movement in that direction. I may be the only journalist to have criticized anti-SLAPP laws in a public forum. Articles about anti-SLAPP feature nothing but praise.
There were three motions. I lost one on June 21st, against the individual Times employees and executives involved in libeling me. (I plan to appeal.) That loss prompted a parting of ways with my attorneys. What followed was a month of representing myself pro se (in California they call it in pro per).
I now have new lawyers, and we’re waiting to hear how I did arguing against ace lawyer Kelli Sager’s anti-SLAPP motions for the Times and Tronc in LA Superior Court on July 14th. It sucked. But representing myself gave me a full-immersion crash course in just how messed up the courts really are.
The big thing I learned was that poor people have zero access to justice.
Nor do the middle class.
After the June 21st debacle, a semi-retired lawyer friend advised me to file a Motion for Reconsideration, a request to the judge to take another look and perhaps realize that he made some mistakes. The law gives you 10 days to file.
My Motion for Reconsideration was one of numerous motions I would have to draft and file myself while pro se. It was incredibly expensive, wildly burdensome and so daunting I bet 99% of people without a lawyer would throw up their hands and give up.
I’m the 1%.
I’m a writer. I went to an Ivy League school; I was a history major so I’m good at research. I used to work at a bank, where I worked on legal documents so I’m familiar with legalese. So I researched what works and doesn’t work in a Motion for Reconsideration. I crafted an argument. I deployed the proper tone using the right words and phrases.
Most people, not having the necessary skills or educational attainment, wouldn’t stand a prayer of writing a legal brief like this motion. Mine may fail — but the judge might read it and take it seriously because it’s written correctly.
I called the court clerk to ask how to file my motion. She was incredibly curt and mean. I’m a New Yorker so I persisted, but I could imagine other callers being put off and forgetting the whole thing.
Schedule a date for your hearing on the court’s website, the clerk told me. Good luck! The site had an outdated interface, was loaded with arcane bureaucratic jargon and a design that’s byzantine and hard to navigate. If English is your second language, forget it.
Eventually I found the place to reserve a hearing date — where I learned about the $540 filing fee.
Payable only by credit card.
No debit cards.
No Amex.
Protracted litigation against a well-funded adversary like the Times/Tronc could easily require dozens of $540 filing fees. The poor need not apply. Most Americans don’t have that kind of money. And what about people who scrape up the dough but don’t have plastic?
$10 would be too much. $540 is frigging obscene.
I paid the fee, printed out the receipt as required, stapled it to the back of my multiple required copies of the motion and went to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse to file it. As I waited in Room 102 to have my motions stamped by a clerk, I studied the many working-class people waiting in the same line.
Here too, there is no consideration for the people. The clerk’s office is open Monday to Friday 8:30 to 4:30. Most people work during those hours. Gotta file something? You have to take time off. Parking? Expensive and far away.
I have a dream.
I dream of a court system dedicated to equal justice before the law — where anyone can file a motion, where there are no filing fees, where the courthouse is open on weekends, where you can file motions by uploading them online and there’s free parking for citizens conducting business in the people’s house.
But Tronc wouldn’t like that system.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall) is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
And he’s excellent. But the judge in my case against the LA Times will not allow him a few weeks to familiarize himself with my case.
So now I have to argue my own case.
If you’re in LA, please consider showing your support. Wear white, hearing is at 9 am FRIDAY 7/14 at LA Superior Court, 111 N Hill St, LA, Dept. 74.
Allow a few hours. Courts are slowwww.
If you live in or near Los Angeles and you have Friday mornings off, here’s a Save the Date: LA Superior Court, 111 North Hill Street, downtown LA. Take the elevator up to the 7th floor, to Department 74. Friday, July 14, 2017 at 9 am: be there or be square.
I’ll be defending myself against The Los Angeles Times, which colluded with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck to fire me two years ago. Personally. Pro se.
I’ll be acting as my own lawyer.
My crime? For six years my cartoons in the Times criticized the police in general, the LAPD in particular and Chief Beck personally because of his department’s deplorable history of brutalizing civilians and murdering people of color, widespread corruption and incompetence.
I don’t blame Beck, the LAPD and the LAPD police union, the Los Angeles Police and Protective League (LAPPL) for hating my guts. I’m a political cartoonist. I pissed them off. Cartoons still matter.
If LA cops were nicer and smarter, of course, they wouldn’t have gotten mad at me. They would have remembered their slogan — “to protect and to serve” — and started doing that and stopped beating up young black men. Instead, the LAPD was out to get me.
Being hated by the cops wasn’t new. In addition to the Times, I drew cartoons for Pasadena Weekly. Publisher Kevin Ulrich remembers that I was “infuriating cops, ticking off prosecutors and politicians, and regularly challenging the powers that be at City Hall.” In other words, doing my job.
“In his latest controversy, Rall suspects police officials told the Times to fire him, which would not be surprising,” Ulrich wrote in 2015. “That same request was made of me many times by Pasadena police and other city officials. If the cops in LA despised Rall half as much as did Pasadena’s Blue Crew, it is certainly believable that they would set him up for some sort of fall, just as it would probably be just a matter of time before some ‘lucky’ LAPD officer would run into him on the street.”
Indeed, that’s exactly what I learned after the Times fired and slimed me, portraying me to their readers as a liar and a fabulist in not one but two pieces. The chief of police told the Times to fire me.
So they did.
Chief Beck read a cartoon I wrote about the LAPD’s latest nasty crackdown on the phony crime of jaywalking, which disproportionately targeted working-class and people of color with $200 fines they couldn’t afford. In an online blog I wrote to accompany my toon, I mentioned that I’d been arrested for jaywalking by a mean cop in 2001. The officer, I wrote, had falsely accused me of jaywalking. He threw me against a wall and handcuffed me. An angry crowd gathered.
Beck strolled the single block between the Times and LAPD HQ and walked into the office of then-publisher Austin Beutner. Beutner, a billionaire, didn’t have newspaper experience. But he wanted to be mayor. And Beck was his only major political ally.
The LAPD had long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Times. The paper relied on the cops for tips, especially after years of slashing the budget for reporters. Cops even ate in the Times cafeteria (me, I had to sign in). But things had gotten even more lovey-dovey under Beutner.
A couple of months after Beutner became publisher, the LAPPL awarded its pet billionaire its “Badge & Eagle Award” for “their dedication to law enforcement” and supporting the LAPD “in all that they do.” Never mind the paper’s “ethical guidelines,” which state: “Awards: Staff members should enter their work only in contests whose central purpose is to recognize journalistic excellence.”
Newspaper stocks have been reliable losers for a long time. But the LAPPL viewed Tribune Publishing, the Times’ parent company, as a solid investment — in influence. As Tribune’s stock plunged, the LAPPL spent tens of millions in pension funds to effectively become the Times’ #1 shareholder. Nothing new there — back in 2009, the LAPPL bought a chunk of the San Diego Union-Tribune, then told a newspaper that that investment bought influence, influence it planned to use to force the firing of editorial writers it didn’t deem sufficiently pro-cop. That paper was the Times.
Whole lotta cozy going on.
Beck gave Beutner an audio recording secretly made by my cop back in 2001. This proves Ted Rall lied, Beck told him. It shows no angry crowd. No handcuffing. No mistreatment.
The audio was almost all static and traffic noise.
After they canned me and published their first attempt to destroy my journalistic career and send a chilling message to police critics, I had Beck’s secret audio sent to a company that cleaned up some of the noise.
“Take off his handcuffs!” one woman yelled at the cop.
People were on there, all right. And they had lots to say — angry things about police brutality — to the cop.
Did the Times admit they messed up? Nope. They doubled down, publishing a second piece — this one full of even more lies.
So I sued. Did they admit they messed up? Nope. They doubled down, filing a “anti-SLAPP” motion that — get this — argues that I censored the Times with my lawsuit. For having the temerity to try to clean up my libeled reputation, the Times is asking a judge to force me to pay their legal fees — which they say will be at least $300,000.
I lost the first of three anti-SLAPP motions. The main event, against the Times itself, is Friday, July 14th. My attorneys fired me after the first loss, so I’ll be on my own. That’s right: I’ll be representing myself in court.
If you care about a free press, please be there. I’m free for lunch after.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall) is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
POLITICAL CARTOONIST TED RALL, FIRED BY L.A. TIMES AS FAVOR TO LAPD CHIEF CHARLIE BECK, WILL PERSONALLY DEFEND HIMSELF FROM TIMES’ ATTEMPT TO BANKRUPT HIM IN L.A. SUPERIOR COURT ON FRIDAY
Award-winning nationally-syndicated editorial cartoonist Ted Rall, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, will personally defend himself against his former employer the Los Angeles Times this coming Friday, July 14th at Los Angeles Superior Court at 111 N. Hill. St., Los Angeles. The hearing will occur in Department 74 at 9 am before Judge Joseph Kalin, and is open to the general public.
Rall is suing the Times for defamation, wrongful termination and other charges related to his 2015 firing and publication of two articles which accuse him of lying in a blog post in which he criticized the LAPD for a jaywalking crackdown that unfairly targeted working people and people of color. In his blog, Rall described being roughhoused and handcuffed by a LAPD officer who falsely arrested him for jaywalking in 2001, drawing an angry crowd on Melrose Boulevard. After Rall sued, the Times said that LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck gave a copy of an audio recording that purportedly showed there was no angry crowd and that Rall had never been handcuffed to ex-Times publisher Austin Beutner. But, when Rall had the noisy static-filled tape enhanced for clarity, it showed the angry crowd and evidence he had been handcuffed. Despite being presented with evidence that vindicated Rall’s account, Times executives refused to reconsider their decision.
Rall has drawn many cartoons critical of the LAPD and several mocking Beck.
At the time, Beutner and Beck were political allies. Beutner had recently received the “Badge and Eagle Award” from the LAPPL police union for supporting the LAPD “in all that they do.” The LAPPL owned tens of millions of dollars of stock in Tribune Publishing (now Tronc), the Times’ corporate parent. The Times fired Beutner shortly after firing Rall.
Rall is the aggrieved party. His First Amendment rights were crushed by Times-LAPD collusion. His firing sent a chilling message to journalists in Southern California about criticizing the police.
High-powered Times lawyer Kelli Sager, a senior partner at a major white-shoe law firm, has filed three anti-SLAPP motions against Rall. California’s legislature passed the anti-SLAPP law to protect individuals like Rall from being harassed by litigation filed by deep-pocked corporations like Tribune Publishing. Here, the Times (part of a $415 million national media conglomerate) is abusing and perverting the anti-SLAPP statute in order to try to bankrupt Rall, a cartoonist whom the Times paid $300 per week. If the Times wins, the Court will order Rall to pay the Times’ legal fees.
This Friday morning, Rall will defend himself against Kelli Sager pro se. This is because Rall’s attorneys, Shegerian & Associates, have abandoned him at this key conjuncture in the case.
Note: If Rall is granted a continuance — normally a common courtesy — to allow himself to secure new lawyers and allow them to familiarize themselves with his case, he will not be required to argue his case Friday.
Rall will be available to answer questions and welcomes supporters and interested parties to witness the hearing.
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I need a new lawyer.
A courageous lawyer in LA? They’re hard to find. When I Googled “crusading Los Angeles attorney,” all I found were obituaries. But that’s what I need — because my lawyer dumped me days before the most crucial hearing of my case.
So if you know a great wrongful termination and/or defamation lawyer in LA or in CA and able to litigate in LA, I need to hear from you post haste. You can email me here.
In 2015 I sued the LA Times for defamation and wrongful termination. This was after they published two articles accusing me of lying in a blog post based on an audio tape they claimed to have gotten from the LAPD. In fact, the audio proved I’d told the truth — but the Times still refuses to admit they’re wrong, publish a retraction and give me back my job as a cartoonist.
Rather than do the right thing and back down, the Times hit me with three “anti-SLAPP motions” that accuses mean old me, their former $300/week cartoonist, of suppressing the First Amendment rights of sweet little LA Times, owned by a wee $416 million corporation. They want me to pay them $300,000 for their legal fees. Believe it or not, they claim in LA Superior Court that they have the right to lie and defame people because they’re a newspaper and because there’s a “public interest” in what they publish.
On June 21, the Times won the first of their three anti-SLAPP hearings, against the individual defendants: Austin Beutner, the ex-publisher who received the sketchy audio from his pal LAPD Chief Charlie Beck; reporter Paul Pringle, who pretended to investigate it; and the authors of the two libelous articles about me, Nick Goldberg and Deirdre Edgar. This can be appealed within 60 days.
I can’t get into detail about what went down with my law firm, but the basics are this: I was always super polite and nice. After our June 21 defeat, I wanted to meet with my lawyers to discuss strategy so that we didn’t get beaten again at the June 28 hearing, the main event against the LA Times and Tronc, the Times’ parent company. They said no, they didn’t have time. I asked for a more experienced litigator. They said no.
They sent me a Notice of Termination. I don’t know why.
(To any lawyer reading this and considering whether to look at my case: I’ll send you all this stuff so you can see I’m telling you the real deal.)
So here’s the deal: Unless I find a new lawyer by Friday, July 14th, I — former $300/week cartoonist — will have to appear pro se, representing myself on California’s complicated anti-SLAPP law against one of the state’s top experts in the field, a partner at a giant law firm. It will be very Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but I’m not a lawyer.
If I get a lawyer, he or she will get a few weeks to familiarize themselves with the case.
Lawyers all over California are turning me down: not enough time, too busy, on vacation, too complicated, troublesome to take over a case from another lawyer, conflict of interest. Even so, most agree that if we can get past anti-SLAPP and get our case in front of a jury, they will rule for justice and against the LA Times, which has been corrupted by the LAPD.
I knew there would be bumps in the road when I decided to take on the LA Times and by extension the LAPD, and this is a big one. I desperately need your help.
I can’t do this alone.
P.S. People are asking about the ACLU of Southern California. They are not returning my calls or emails.
There’s a scene in the movie “Idiocracy” in which a character cheers as cops blow a car to smithereens. “That’s your car!” another, less dumb, character points out. The idiot, a lawyer named Frito, keeps cheering.
I felt kind of like the less-dumb guy in Los Angeles Superior Court a week ago, when I watched a lawyer for the Los Angeles Times defame me and twist the facts to a level rarely seen outside a White House press briefing.
I was Kelli Sager’s victim. Sager, a partner at the pro-business law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, is a shark. She argued before a judge that the Times was right to knowingly lie about me in its pages, that the First Amendment meant the Times was immune from defamation and libel law, and that I should pay the Times hundreds of thousands of dollars for their legal fees for having had the temerity to sue them.
And, she was successful (for the time being). It was strangely thrilling to watch a professional — granted, a professional dissembler for a newspaper corrupted beyond belief — at the top of her game.
To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson: when the lying gets weird, the liars turn pro.
For decades, the Los Angeles Times was one of the best newspapers in the United States. It was arguably the best full-service paper — like the New York Times, LA had all the foreign bureaus and deep national and local coverage required of a great news organization, along with the features New York doesn’t carry but readers like me enjoy: comics, horoscopes and advice columns.
Every newspaper has struggled to adapt to the Internet. But the LA Times has had more trouble than most. If I were in charge, I’d rebrand it. The New York Times is the national paper of news and culture, the Washington Post is the national paper of politics, the Wall Street Journal is the national paper of business, and the Los Angeles Times ought to be the national paper of entertainment — movies, music and gaming. Instead, the LA Times is doing things the same way they did in 1997, but less so.
Things turned from bad to worse in 2000, when the Tribune Company (as in the Chicago Tribune) acquired the Times. Flailing ensued. The Times’ idiocy culminated in 2005 with “Wikitorial,” a bizarre experiment that allowed readers to add to editorial content. In 2007 Tribune sold itself to real estate mogul Sam Zell, who ran up debt, sucked money out of the company and “busted” it, declaring bankruptcy a year later. It was the beginning of the end.
I began working for the Times in 2009.
Desperate for cash, the Times turned to a sketchy Los Angeles financier and billionaire with no journalistic experience, Austin Beutner, naming him as publisher in 2014. Beutner, a political ally of the LAPD who received an award for “support [to] the LAPD in all that they do” from the LAPD union months after taking over the Times, appears to have midwifed the first known acquisition of a major American newspaper by a government agency: the LAPD union moved its $16.4 billion pension fund to a Beverly Hills investment firm called Oaktree Capital, which then became the #1 shareholder of Tribune, the Times’ parent company.
Like cats and mice, cops and newspapers shouldn’t go into business together. In 2015, billionaire Beutner fired me as a favor to his friend, the allegedly corrupt $300,000-a-year LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, whom I had criticized in my cartoons. They used evidence that turned out to have been trumped-up, and which boomeranged because it supported me, to smear me as a liar and fabulist. So, I sued them for defamation and wrongful termination. The Times then fired Beutner.
On June 21, the court heard the Times’ first of three anti-SLAPP motions against me. Anti-SLAPP motions are supposed to protect free speech, but in this case the Times — part of a $420 million media conglomerate — is asking the court to dismiss my case and charge me at least $300,000 in their legal fees.
The Times has been busy in court. They’re also fighting a pair of age discrimination lawsuits filed by a sports columnist and a Pulitzer-winning reporter who say the Times tried to save money by harassing them into quitting their jobs.
Nothing is sure in life or in court, but I feel confident than a jury would agree with me that what the Times did to me was wrong. I think Kelli Sager, the Times’ lawyer agrees. Which is why she’s been working hard to keep my case away from a jury.
On June 21, Sager fed the judge a bunch of nonsense, but two things she said during oral arguments especially blew me away.
Referencing the first of two articles which falsely accused me of being a fabulist, Sager told the judge that the Times had included links to LAPD records (they’re not really from the LAPD but that’s another story) so Times readers could judge for themselves. No, actually, they didn’t. No one objected.
Sager even brought up race. She accused me, as a white man, of falsely accusing the African-American cop who arrested me for jaywalking in 2001 of misconduct —because he was black.
The mind boggles.
As we walked down the escalator, my lawyer remarked that I had never told her the cop was black. “Because I never mentioned it,” I told her. “Because it wasn’t important.”
I’m in awe.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall) is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Sometimes what journalists don’t publish is as interesting as what they do. Yesterday I was asked to comment for a piece about my partial loss on anti-SLAPP in my case against the LA Times.
Compare what they wrote to what I sent them:
After working as their cartoonist and blogger for six years and only receiving positive reviews, the Los Angeles Times fired me in 2015 as a favor to LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck, a political ally of then-publisher, the billionaire Austin Beutner. At the time, the LAPD police union pension fund was the #1 shareholder of Tribune Publishing, the Times’ parent company. They published a piece accusing me of lying in a May 2015 blog piece in which I said I’d been handcuffed in front of about two dozen passersby by a cop who arrested me for jaywalking in 2001, stating that a secret police audio of my arrest proved those things hadn’t happened. Next I hired a Hollywood company to professionally enhance the audio, revealing people arguing with the police officer about mistreating me and a woman demanding “take off his handcuffs!”
I sent the enhanced audio to the Times. They ignored me.
Three weeks later, after the controversy spread across the news and social media, the Times doubled down, printing yet a second piece reaffirming their decision. This second article contained a number of falsehoods as well, all intended to portray me as a liar. Among other things, they misrepresented what their audio experts found.
I am suing the LA Times to set the record straight: I told the truth in that blog piece.
The Times has abused California anti-SLAPP statute, which is intended to protect individuals exercising free speech from frivolous lawsuits filed by big companies, by portraying them — part of a $420 million media conglomerate — as a victim of censorship by me, a $300/week cartoonist. In fact, they censored and defamed me on behalf of the LAPD, sending a chilling effect on reporters throughout southern California who have to worry they might be treated similarly should they publish articles critical of the police.
Yesterday’s ruling was disappointing, but I plan to continue my fight to clear my name and hold the Times accountable for its corrupt relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department.
Arguably, the gist is there.
But the audio enhancement is not. Nor is the stuff about the economic conflict of interest.
The result is, I come off like something of a kook.
And by MSM standards, this one was relatively good.
I got a taste yesterday of how Gary Webb, another victim of the LA Times’ corrupt relationships with sleazy government entities, may have felt. Here’s an update on my defamation and wrongful termination case against the LA Times:
Perhaps in order to run up her legal fees, LA Times attorney Kelli Sager split the defendants’ anti-SLAPP motions against me into three tranches of defendants, each with its own set of documents and hearing dates.
Yesterday LA Superior Court ruled in favor of the Times’ anti-SLAPP motion regarding the four individuals: fired former publisher and billionaire Austin Beutner, a political ally of the LAPD union who received a patrolman’s personal LAPD files in a secret meeting with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck that the Times refused to disclose to readers; editorial page editor Nick Goldberg, who authored a piece announcing my firing and calling me a liar, and then ignored evidence that he was mistaken; readers’ representative ombudsman Deirdre Edgar, who authored a second piece calling me a liar that itself contained multiple lies about said evidence; and reporter Paul Pringle, who failed a reporters’ basic responsibility to fully investigate the matter despite being assigned to do so.
This decision can be appealed to the Court of Appeals.
Next week, at 9 am on July 28th at LA Superior Court, the same court will consider the Times’ second tranche of anti-SLAPP motions, these for the corporate entities the LA Times and its parent company Tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing).
Anti-SLAPP was designed by the California state legislature to protect individuals expressing their free speech rights from being silenced by deep-pocketed corporations using frivolous lawsuits to intimidate them and others. Ironically, the Times — owned by Tronc, a $420 million corporation — is abusing the statute to try to destroy me, their former $300/week cartoonist.
Until anti-SLAPP is resolved, discovery is not allowed. I have to prove, without discovery, that I am likely to prevail before a jury. If the Times ultimately prevails on anti-SLAPP, I would be ordered to pay the Times’ legal fees, which the Times said last year would amount to at least $300,000.
The fight continues.
“I am not a member of any organized political party,” Will Rogers said ages ago. “I am a Democrat.”
So frustration with America’s officially-licensed nominally liberal political party is not new. Even for them, though, I can’t imagine that any party ever worked as hard to pull defeat from the jaws of victory as the Dems are doing now.
Democrats ought to be poised for great things. True, they recently suffered a shattering rout. But eight months feels like a million years ago. Trump’s disapproval rating is a whopping 64%. That’s Nixon During Watergate level — and it includes a third of Republicans, who say the president has no respect for democratic institutions. (What are the other two-thirds thinking?)
After a mere five months in office, impeachment is a realistic possibility.
And OMG the non-Trump Republicans — they’re stuck! Tax cuts for the rich and infrastructure bills are dead letters. They can’t repeal Obamacare — not their “mean,” benefits-slashing way — without pissing off the vast majority of the country. And they can’t not repeal it without pissing off the GOP’s hard-right base. “I don’t know that we could pass a Mother’s Day resolution right now,” Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said in March. They’re even more screwed now, reduced to trying to pass their secret repeal bill in the dead of night so no one notices.
Oh, to be a Democrat in an age of GOP political suicide! Except for one big problem: they’re in even more trouble than the Republicans.
Many Dems think they’re headed to a big win in 2018, dreaming of taking back both houses of Congress. After four years of Trump (or four years of Trump, impeachment, then Pence), a grateful nation will turn to the Democrats — right?
I wouldn’t bet on it.
Pundits are so focused on the civil war tearing apart the GOP that they’re missing the even wider schism within the Democratic Party. Despite leading the party to defeat, the centrist-Third Way-DLC-Hillary Clinton wing of the party still runs the DNC and the state apparatuses. They’ve never made nice with Bernie Sanders or his leftist-progressives — the party’s base and its most committed ideologues — after repeatedly insulting and marginalizing them during the campaign. To the contrary, they’re still at it.
The Clintonites blame the Sandernistas for not voting and giving us Trump; the Berners ask, what part of “we’re not just falling in line for another corporate Democrat anymore” do you not understand? (I still can’t get over the fact that Hillary sought endorsements from war criminals Henry Kissinger and Condi Rice.)
You’ve been there with a spouse or a former friend: the two factions don’t speak the same language. Cynical incrementalism versus ambitious idealism don’t mix. So, as Democrats have tried to process 2016, talking (i.e., blaming) has only made things worse.
Certainly, Democrats may pick up seats next fall. But they certainly shouldn’t feel cocky about 2020.
Even if Trump is removed from office in disgrace, my first-Pence-then-Ryan scenario would leave the Republicans with a more united party and a standardbearer (Ryan) whose relatively sane demeanor will be less likely to motivate Democratic voters to the polls to vote against him.
Which leaves the question of who Democratic voters would be asked to vote for.
The answers are not promising.
The current frontrunner is New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Once a promising charismatic upstart in the Obama vein, however, he has followed the golden footsteps of Hillary Clinton by selling out to the big Wall Street banks. Occupy Wall Street is dead but its death-to-the-banks spirit lives on among the Bernie Sanders faction of the party. As Hillary learned, Democrats can win nominations without the Bernie folks, but not general elections.
Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, a center-right operator best known as the Clintons’ personal real estate guarantor, is gearing up a proto-campaign. He has a certain charisma. But consider how The Politico describes his elevator pitch: “a popular swing-state governor with a record to run on, a business background, and more connections to donors than any first-time presidential candidate ever.” Sounds like a winner…in 1992.
True, progressive stalwart Elizabeth Warren is flirting with a run — but this political animal predicts she won’t pull the trigger. So is Bernie Sanders. But he’ll be 79 in 2020. He’s energetic, but still — odds are, he’ll stay in the Senate.
Things can and will change. At this writing, though, there is no presidential prospect left enough for the Berners to get excited about and right enough for the party leadership to allow.
You can bet the Republicans will benefit from that vacuum.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall) is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
