Lots of Cheese With These Political Wine Caves
Picture by Kiwibirdman via Wikimedia Commons
Team Warren and Team Pete go to war over wine cave fundraisers. Hilarity Ensues.
During Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren went after South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg over his fundraising practices. Specifically, Warren slammed Buttigieg for hosting a donor event in a Napa Valley “wine cave.” That’s why it raised a few eyebrows when the Associated Press looked back to last year, when Warren held her own big-dollar fundraising event in June 2018, featuring Melissa Etheridge and a souvenir wine bottle to anyone who gave at least $1,000.
Turns out when Warren was a senator she wasn’t so strict about who she received money from and she took $10 million from her Senate reelection campaign to seed her presidential bid. David Axelrod, the chief strategist of Barack Obama’s campaign, wrote that Warren’s insistence on pushing the fundraising issue made her vulnerable to attacks along these lines about her past actions.
This was the danger in the @ewarren “wine cave” attack on @PeteButtigieg. Her own past fundraising practices were pretty much in line with his, including even some of the same high dollar sponsors. She invited stories like this. Unforced error.https://t.co/OpO7U9avP3
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) December 21, 2019
When asked about the fundraiser while she was campaigning in Iowa, Warren defended herself by saying that she “saw how the system works” and decided to change things around when she ran for president. “I decided when I got in the presidential race that I wanted to do better than that,” Warren told reporters Saturday night. “And that’s why I just quit doing it. I don’t sell access to my time. I don’t call high dollar fundraisers. I’m out there raising money grassroots all across this country, because I want to move this in the right direction, we can’t be a country that just keeps getting worse and worse.”
Even if it weren’t for her own wine cave shenanigans, Warren lost by going after Mayor Pete in the first place. The man standing in her path is not the dude polling 10% nationally with 0% support among African Americans.Report
Completely agreeReport
I think that might be the best statement concerning the entirety of the Dem party.Report
Generally correct though her frustration is understandable. Warrens best shot at Biden was getting Iowa and New Hampshire then fighting him out and hoping it came down to a her vs him fight. Bernie is hemming her in on the left and Pete is cutting into her base from the center. Berniacs and their candidate aren’t going anywhere short of Bernie keeling over dead prior to the convention so she’s attacking the one she perceives as being beatable.Report
Wasn’t there a dig during the debate when Warren was going on about how rich people influence too much politics, and Pete was all, “I’m the only person up here who isn’t a millionaire.”Report
Pete said it best:
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huh?Report
I think he was talking about rich people versus poor people.Report
huh?Report
Memento mori, maybe?Report
On that 90’s show “Just Shoot Me”, David Spade played a prank on the dimwitted ex-model played by Wendy Malick, where he replaced her Word-A-Day calender with sophisticated sounding nonsense words, and let her go on a radio interview spouting them and making a fool of herself.
I think someone replaced Mayor Pete’s Aphorism-A-Day calendar.
My money’s on Biden.Report
I used to wonder why Warren was using bullets on Buttigieg rather than Biden (and vice-versa) until I realized that THEY’RE BOTH CAMPAIGNING FOR VICE-PRESIDENT.
And now it makes sense.Report
That is a toughie. Warren would be the first Women Veep but she’s gone pretty far left, is a coastal liberal and would be replaced by a republican Senator. Pete would be the first gay veep and is a midwesterner but it’s dubious he’d bring his state with him. Personally I’d still bet if Biden wins his veep would be someone else. Maybe Amy or a gifted African american politician.Report
Hey, there are a dozen people who would make *GREAT* VPs for Biden. (I also heard a rumor that he was only going to go for one term so his VP would be the presumptive nominee come 2024.)
There are a lot of people who will be fighting for the position of #2… but the best way to *NOT* get it is to shoot your bullets at Biden rather than at say… ooh! look! It’s the person in the #3 spot!Report
The scuttlebutt is that Harriss is still in the running for a Veep pick. Though even if Biden was throwing darts at her face on a wall if his campaign was run by anyone with brains (which it clearly appears to be) then of course they’d still SAY she was in the running.Report
Hrm… How about an African American woman who used to live in the White House, or would that introduce too many complications for him, since everybody would say “Barack is back in charge!”? He doesn’t really need to shore up his minority support compared to the rest of the current field, but he might greatly benefit from boosting their turnout back to Obama’s 2008 and 2012 levels.
In that regard, if he goes for Warren or Buttigieg he’ll probably get no effect from it, or even a negative effect, as their image as ultra-white elites clashes his “aw-shucks Obama luvs me” routine.
Once Biden has the nomination sewn up (a given for us to consider his VP picks), he might not benefit at all from picking Bernie or Warren because I don’t think he’s pissed off their supporters (unlike Hillary).
They’re not going to stay home or flip to Trump. He’ll need to target the middle of the electorate in the battleground states, where someone like Klobuchar or one of those boring also-ran governors might bring dividends.
The other problem Biden is having is very weak fundraising. I’m not sure that the people digging into their pockets for Buttigieg, Biden, and Sanders would be as inclined to shift that money to Biden, but I can’t think of a pick that would change things for him, above just having him as the only way to stop Trump.
Of course the most interesting pick, one that might make a few heads explode, is Hillary Clinton. Of course if that ticket won, the Secret Service would have to keep Biden on a suicide watch for four years, and never let her stand behind him at the top of the stairs.Report
I take it, then, George that you are throwing in the towel on your fond hopes that HRC will run for the nomination herself? I distinctly recall you feeling it was a certainty.
I deeply doubt Biden would select either Obama as Veep and I doubt even more deeply that either would accept if he did.
Money isn’t going to be a problem if/when he gets the nod. He’ll have plenty and as HRC showed in 2016 once you meet a certain baseline of financing money over that level has relatively little power to move votes.
I think Klobachar is a pretty good bet for a Veep nod. It’ll depend on how she does over all I guess.Report
Man, a contested convention, then Biden introducing Michelle Obama as a stunning surprise Veep pick, to the thunderous cheers of the ecstatic crowd, and they go on to a LBJ size landslide victory.
That’s an Aaron Sorkin season ending moment right there.Report
For sure, and yet another reason why we can be confident it’ll never happen.Report
David Hogg weighs in:
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There is a point to be made about access. Wine caves are inherently not bad. The natural coolness of caves makes them a great place to store wine. People have been doing it for thousands of years. There is also nothing wrong with having a wine cave double as an event room but bring a jacket. But if running for office requires holding these kind of really well-off people fundraisers it does damage democracy. How are people of more moderate means supposed to get access and their concerns heard? There seem to be huge industries for ass-kissing the vanities of the rich from TED talks to Sun Valley. FWIW Warren admitted to doing fundraisers like this earlier in her career and admitted they were mistakes:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/12/wine-cave-attendee-defends-event-warren-says-learned-fundraising-mistakes.htmlReport
Of course she says that, she has enough name recognition and following that she doesn’t need to hold fund raisers in wine caves.
She has become so privileged she can afford to eschew her privilege.Report
Well, the way regular working class people get their concerns heard is to go to a Trump rally in some giant sports arena, where he pulls them up on stage and turns the microphone over to them.
I think Warren and Buttiegieg both lost a lot of ground on their wine cave spat because the working class knows they don’t have a prayer of ever attending such an event. Such underground millionaire events are bound to remind people of Hillary’s constant ultra-rich fundraisers as she campaigned in Martha’s Vineyard, and then Hollywood, and then Martha’s Vineyard some more, as if the country only had two or three zip codes. It also has shades of Samuel L Jackson’s villain in Kingsmen: The Secret Service, where the billionaires partied in an underground bunker while they tried to blow up the world to reduce the planet’s population, eliminating all the non-elite working-class deplorables.
This is where Joe Biden’s experience shines, because he goes to union halls instead of secret crystal caves. One the downside for Joe, he promised to ban fracking and seemed gleeful about throwing hundreds of thousands of blue-collar Americans out of work. The resulting return to $4.00 or $5.00 a gallon gas would severely impact millions more who don’t have wine cave money to blow. With that one unforced error he risks a whole scale shift of blue-collar industry workers to Trump, turning the Democrat’s blue wall into a red wall. Running too far to the left in the primary can potentially cause 2020 to go like the UK election, with Labour’s bedrock industrial districts voting them out.Report
“And here on stage tonight, we have a regular working class guy, lets bring up Norm, a drywall contractor from New Jersey.
Good to meet ya Norm, everyone’s talking about you, the best the very best- I know drywall, its terrific stuff; Obama didn’t want you to eat it, but we all know that’s a lie.
Anyway, Norm, what’s on your mind?”
“Mr. Trump, when are you going to pay me? It’s been ten years already.”Report
If you watch his rallies, he pulls audience members up all the time. He is a master entertainer and in sync with ordinary people, most of whom make no bones about being despised by Democrats. The left is going to have major problems with working class people viewing them as class enemies, but too many progressive can’t help but denounce regular folks as ignorant racists, and denounce Black Trump supporters as Uncle Toms. That’s a recipe for alienating union workers, moderate Democrats, minorities, and independents. As I’ve warned, the lunge to the left risks turning the party into a regional coastal party with enclaves of support in dense urban centers and college towns.
I think at least a party of the change is due to changes in party leadership. Democrats firmly held onto the hearts of many working class people from FDR’s day up through the 2000’s. Looking back at Congressional leadership might offer a few clues.
Back in the 105th Congress – which was seated in 1997, the Democratic leadership was:
Senate President Al Gore (TN)
minority leader: Tom Daschle (SD)
minority whip: Wendell Ford (KY)
House minority leader: Dick Gephardt (MO)
minority whip: David Bonior (MI)
In the 106th Congress, seated in 1999
Senate President Al Gore (TN)
minority leader Tom Daschle (SD)
minority whip: Harry Reid (NV)
When the Democrats took the Senate the president pro tem was Robert Byrd (WV), the leader was Harry Reid (NV) and the whip was Dick Durbin (IL). Along with them were such stalwarts as Fritz Hollings (SC), Ted Kennedy (MA), and others, representing a good cross section of America.
But in the House, Nancy Pelosi took charge. Saturday Night Live made fun of her bringing “San Francisco values” with her. At the time she was considered quite radical, and a risk for Democrats. The fear was that the ascendancy of coastal elite values would alienate vast swaths of the American heartland, in places where Democrats had enjoyed a virtual lock on power since the Great Depression. Combine her with Chuck Schumer and you have a recipe for a party getting trapped in a coastal elite bubble, unable to identify with miners in Minnesota, steel workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, or farmers in Nebraska.
This risk was perceived as quite real, and heartland Democrats spent the Obama years screaming that the coastal elite policies were destroying them, as a thousand state government seats flipped to the Republicans. Their 2020 campaign should focus on reversing that trend instead of reinforcing it with a mad rush of virtual signaling, but I am doubtful they can change course.Report
The Democratic rallies are made up of ordinary working class American coastal people, who make no bones about being despised by the Russia-loving alien cultural values of the Trump supporters.
Really, the elite Trumpists in their gated suburban enclaves should worry about being unable to identify with real Americans, like the farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley or home health care nurses in Seattle. Not to mention the fact that half of the American troops, those proud warriors fighting for freedom, hate Trump and all he stands for because the Trumpists are the ones spitting on them and robbing their charities.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Trumpists have never met a real American worker and frankly, don’t understand their values that power the American Dream.Report
Glee is cancelled.
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Meanwhile, in Bloombergia:
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