What? No Labels is enabling the GOP? Say it ain't so!
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| What else is new? |
by digby
The Daily Beast reports that the "centrist" organization No Labels thought the GOP's vilification of Nancy Pelosi was something they wanted a piece of for themselves:
As incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi works to consolidate votes for her leadership bid, a group of largely centrist House Democrats have remained holdouts. Publicly, they’re pushing for tweaks to House rules once Democrats take over the chamber in January. But behind the scenes, a leading advocacy group that has helped organize this coalition of moderates has been itching to make life hell for Pelosi.
Internal communications reviewed by The Daily Beast show that early this year the group No Labels, a centrist advocacy organization, contemplated a plan to kneecap Pelosi’s political standing. In one exchange, a top official with the group even laid out the pros and cons of turning the California Democrat into a “bogeyman.”
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Emails obtained by The Daily Beast show that No Labels leadership contemplated a campaign to attack Pelosi aggressively after the primary campaign of centrist Rep. Dan Lipinski, who faced a primary challenge this year from Marie Newman, a progressive political neophyte. Lipinski’s pro-life stance had alienated a number of Democrats, but he was a proud member of the No Labels-backed House Problem-Solvers Caucus, and the group worked through a network of allied super PACs to support his reelection bid.
“Nancy, I have been thinking about our using Pelosi as the chief bogeyman in our messaging post-Lipinski,” began one email, subject line: “Pelosi as bogeyman.”
Pelosi had endorsed Lipinski. But No Labels leadership was convinced that her support was a fig leaf. Jacobson, according to a source familiar with the group’s internal deliberations, was convinced that Pelosi had secretly tried to scuttle the congressman’s reelection and proposed publicly attacking the Democratic leader in the run-up to the midterms.
“We were trying to figure out, assuming we got a positive result [in the Lipinski race], which we did, what would be the comms strategy afterwards,” said the source. “Nancy Jacobson’s immediate answer was, ‘I want to make Pelosi the bogeyman.’ She wanted to make it all about Nancy Pelosi and how she was going after incumbent dems. None of that was true.”
According to the emails, No Labels chief strategist Ryan Clancy appears to have tried to talk Jacobson down. A direct confrontation with Pelosi would blow back on the group’s congressional allies, he explained. It would also be unprecedented; No Labels had never engaged in similar campaigns against congressional leaders of either party. Clancy instead proposed to make Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) the object of the group’s criticism. Unlike Pelosi, Sanders had actually endorsed Newman; had no procedural power to wield against members of the Problem-Solvers Caucus; and wasn’t even a Democrat.
“This is us, in effect, declaring war on Pelosi,” Clancy warned. “No Labels has never identified a party leader as ‘the enemy’ before. We didn’t do it with Obama or Trump. We haven’t done it with Schumer, Ryan or McConnell. If we do this, we should consider some very real downsides.”
At the end of his memo, Clancy conceded that, “at some point,” No Labels “is probably going to go to war with Pelosi. And it probably should.” But “I don’t know that now is the time to do it, especially when we have a perfectly good villain to use in Bernie.”
They went with it. Which proves beyond a reasonable doubt exactly where they fit into our political eco-system.
And since Democrats won back control of the House this month for the first time in eight years, No Labels has egged on lawmakers—including Lipinski—to withhold their support for Pelosi’s speakership bid in an effort to extract some procedural concessions.
Though it all, No Labels insists that Pelosi is not the “boogeyman” its leader had contemplating portraying after Lipinski’s primary victory. “No Labels is not against Nancy Pelosi or any other speaker candidate,” the group claimed over the weekend. “We are FOR rules changes that empower members in both parties who want to work across the aisle to find solutions and prevent the fringes – in both parties – from perpetuating endless gridlock.”
Yeah, they didn't get their GOP members to hold up Paul Ryan for such "rules changes", undoubtedly knowing they would laugh in their faces.
They are actually a perfect organization for the Trump era. Self-serving liars who genuflect to the right and oppose the left. Nothing new there either.
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