Pierce: A Few Words About What Happened in Kansas [View all]

[mcar]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a54461/kansas-special-election/

...These districts are open because, in all three cases, the incumbent congresscritters were chosen for Cabinet positions in the current administration. (The Kansas district belonged to Mike Pompeo, who's now running the CIA, which must be gangs of fun at this point.) There is only one way for the Democratic Party to avoid benefitting from Tuesday night's surprising win against the spread, and that's to cram the result into the tedious template of the 2016 Democratic primaries. Thompson ran as an unapologetic Bernie Sanders liberal. That is a good thing. The formal Democratic apparatus largely left the work to various independent groups (the Daily Kos community was particularly active), so, naturally, as soon as the results came in, we heard the same tiresome establishment-vs.-revolution squabbling that made the last presidential campaign such a joy to be around...

Is this never going to stop? Is this weird dynamic in which the actual leaders—Bernie, Tom Perez, and Keith Ellison—all get along, but their supporters insist on an endless food fight, ever going to run out of steam? Are we never going to be rid of that dismal, stumbling exercise in petulant score-settling and mock populist posturing? Some people have a vested interest in keeping the campaign—and the attendant grudge-holding—alive. In a few cases, the interest is pecuniary...

What happened in Kansas should be an occasion for unalloyed celebration. There are good arguments to be made that had the Democratic National Committee come tromping into that district with both feet, it would have done more harm than good. Leaving things to local activists, augmented by boots on the phone from all around the country, was a very sensible strategy. And it almost worked in a district so ridiculously conservative that one of the Koch brothers actually lives there. The impulse within some progressives to skunk up the garden party is a wonder to behold. Truly, it is.