Ah. Yeah; the party does have an unfortunate habit of treating "fundraising ability" as a proxy for "electability". I don't love that strategy; it does tend t

Ah. Yeah; the party does have an unfortunate habit of treating "fundraising ability" as a proxy for "electability". I don't love that strategy; it does tend to skew them away from more progressive candidates. It's very much arguable that it's the wrong tack to be taking in 2018 (and 2020), and I'd agree that it's a big part of what lost them the presidency in 2016. But it's equally arguable that it's just facing up to electoral reality. Winning elections costs a lot of money, Citizens United is a thing that exists, the other side has a lot of billionaires willing to bankroll them, too many voters still choose based on whose face they've seen on TV the most, and if you can't afford enough ad buys you're probably going to lose. (And some of what's being cited in that Intercept piece is just plain sour grapes. The quote from Zephyr Teachout leaped out at me in particular: the district she ran for is the next county over from me, and I've been volunteering with a group trying to get Faso out in 2018. It's a mix of long-time party members and volunteers, angry Berniecrats, DSA radicals, and newbies to politics who had their Oh Shit! I gotta do something! moment when Trump was elected. (I fall into the last group.) One of the not-very-many things that everyone in that room agrees on was thank gawd Teachout isn't making another run at it. She'd be a fine candidate for a solidly blue district, but the party was absolutely correct to work against her in NY19; she was 100% not going to win that district against anyone who knew the words "librul" and "carpetbagger".) But I digress. Look, I agree with you: the Democratic Party is a deeply flawed institution with a talent for unforced errors and own goals; they've been parasitized by too many expensive "consultants"; there's a gazillion things I wish they'd do differently. But "they're not changing quickly enough" or "they're not selecting candidates in the way I personally would prefer" doesn't translate to "therefore the whole party platform is a lie." For me the Trump year has been a (sobering and sometimes humiliating) exercise in working with the situation we have, rather than the situation we want to have. And the situation we have right now is, frankly, a choice between that flawed and often disappointing party on one side, or barely-figleafed kleptocracy on the other. There just aren't other viable options right now, much as we might wish there were.