THE DEMOCRATIC CRACK-UP – AT 2:08 P.M. ET:   The Democratic Party may do reasonably well next week, but the fact is that it is a divided, embittered party that is primed to split apart over basic values.  From the Politico, the finest piece I've read about the Dems recently:

Perhaps the most dramatic new development on the left has been the rise of the “democratic socialist” banner, a once-fringe political label embraced by Bernie Sanders, which increasingly has drawn enthusiasm from college-educated voters since the 2016 election. Socialism in its serious form involves significant changes in society—in theory, much higher taxes on the rich, which are paid out in the form of much more generous welfare programs for the less well-off.

But upper-income Democratic voters, especially older ones, have never shown much appetite for deeply redistributive policies. In 2015, when President Barack Obama proposed ending the deduction for college savings accounts—a tax break whose benefit goes almost entirely to upper-income voters—he was shot down by liberal powerhouses Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. It’s one thing for progressive candidates to call for free college, Medicare for all, a jobs guarantee or universal basic income. Those remain abstractions and don’t touch the lifestyles of the well-off. Propose a new tax on household incomes above $100,000 a year—the top 25 percent of households, a group overrepresented in some of the bluest districts in America—and see how well it goes over.

And, about our little Evita from the Bronx:

Ocasio-Cortez, the young Latina who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, hadn’t been all but vaulted into Congress by the party’s diversity, or a blue-collar base looking to even the playing field. She won because she had galvanized the college-educated gentrifiers who are displacing those people. “It was the Bernie Bros,” one top Crowley adviser said as he surveyed the wreckage the day after the election. “They killed us.”

“He didn’t lose. New York lost,” says Moin Choudhury, a Bangladeshi immigrant and the president of a local political club, who credits Crowley for intervening several years ago to get a client of his out of immigration detention. “To have somebody in that position, a big leader in Congress, maybe a speaker who could represent us in Congress, to lose in that moment—New York lost. I don’t know what is going to happen next.”

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It is filled with insight and excellent reporting.  Turns out our little Evita is more the darling of the rich than the darling of the "workers."  And that is the fault line in the "new" Democratic Party.

October 30, 2018