The #FiveWhiteGuys Are Offering a Sucker's Bet to Anti-Pelosi Democrats [View all]

[octoberlib]

Shoot enough sodium pentothal into Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, and he likely would tell you that he'd have been infinitely better off if every member of the Freedom Caucus had been dropped down a well. This analogy is being applied to the new, young, leftish members of the incoming majority. But they're not the real threat, as we shall see. The real threat was encapsulated on the electric Twitter machine with the hashtag, #FiveWhiteGuys.Alas, it is my painful duty to report that the #FiveWhiteGuys are led by Seth Moulton, congresscritter from the Sixth Congressional District here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), and a man who has been farting higher than his own arse ever since he got elected in 2014. Moulton ran a strong campaign. He ousted an endangered incumbent who was all tangled in so much family corruption that a Republican pickup of that seat was a distinct possibility—or, at least, as distinct a possibility as was ever enjoyed by a Massachusetts Republican. Almost immediately, Moulton signed on to the challenge to Pelosi's leadership mustered up by the anti-charismatic Tim Ryan of Ohio. Almost immediately, and most spectacularly, Moulton began spending a lot of time in Iowa. This is a fellow who thinks a great deal of his own inherent political gifts.


Now, it seems, they've gotten the band back together again. The #FiveWhiteGuys are Moulton, Ryan, Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, Kurt Schrader of Oregon, and Bill Foster of Illinois. The driving forces remain Moulton and Ryan, with the latter the putative leader. After an election in which the Democratic Party continues to elect a demographically and politically diverse collection of new House members, Ryan is still insisting that the party needs to "reach out" to angry white men in places like Ohio when, in fact, if the midterms proved anything, it is that the Democratic Party's future is in places like Arizona and Nevada, and even Georgia and Florida, while, except for Sherrod Brown, god bless him, Ohio is a lost cause. It was an outlier even in its own geographic area. There were Democratic—and progressive—victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois. Ohio and, yes, Iowa, were loss leaders.

This did not stop Moulton, who declines to challenge Pelosi himself, from spouting off in Roll Call that he and his group have the votes to block Pelosi's elevation to the speakership on the floor of the House—although, as has now become customary, Moulton declines to provide details on exactly how many members of the House have signed on here.For those members, old and new, who oppose Pelosi from the left, the #FiveWhiteGuys are offering a sucker's bet. The #FiveWhiteGuys are of the school that believes that the Democratic Party's needs are best served winning back all those disgruntled folks at diners in the Mahoning Valley, a theory fairly well demolished last Tuesday. It is very unlikely that a Green New Deal or Medicare For All is high on their list of priorities. The only argument that the #FiveWhiteGuys have that might resonate with their new progressive colleagues is that Pelosi is old and has been in Congress for a long time. Period.

So what the #FiveWhiteGuys are flirting with is not a brawl within the party, but a three-way brawl in which the progressive side and the #FiveWhiteGuys side both work to bring Pelosi down, which would set the stage for an absolute bloodbath between those two forces for the right to pick her successor. (And, strictly from a provincial standpoint here in the Commonwealth—God save it!—we are preparing to have Richard Neal as chairman of House Ways and Means and James McGovern as chairman of House Rules. If this attempted coup screws that up, Moulton's going to have some serious 'splainin' to do back home.)


https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25093451/nancy-pelosi-speaker-democrat-opposition-tim-ryan-seth-moulton/