AOC Right, DCCC Wrong

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: “AOC is right as rain here,” I re-tweeted Sunday.

And what was the usually all-wet U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) right about?

“By stymieing primaries,” the freshman representative had tweeted at her own party’s congressional leaders and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), “you deny most voters their best chance at choosing their representative.”

On purpose.

Ocasio-Cortez refers to the recent DCCC announcement, first reported by The Intercept, that “warned political strategists and vendors . . . that if they support candidates mounting primary challenges against incumbent House Democrats, the party will cut them off from business.”

Isn’t the goal of the DCCC to elect as many Democrats to Congress as possible?

No.

“The core mission of the DCCC is electing House Democrats, which includes supporting and protecting incumbents,” reads a new form for party political consultants. “To that end, the DCCC will not conduct business with, nor recommend to any of its targeted campaigns, any consultant that works with an opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus.”

In short, if you want to make money, and most political professionals do, don’t dare work for a Democratic challenger against a Democratic incumbent.

“If the DCCC enacts this policy to blacklist vendors who work with challengers, we risk undermining an entire universe of potential candidates and vendors — especially women and people of color,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, another Democratic freshman who defeated an incumbent Democrat, tweeted on Saturday.

The policy has been enacted and is in full effect.

Among Washington Democrats, incumbency trumps everything . . . even diversity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. The National Republican Congressional Committee has long had this same total fixation — mutatis mutandis — on re-electing incumbents. In fact, the newsworthiness of this latest DCCC strong-arming of consultants seems to be only that the insider power-play is more “open” than ever before.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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