Ken Martin, new Chair of the Democratic National Committee

Ken Martin June 23, 2011

Ken Martin is a Minnesotan and I have been familiar with his career since he became chair of the Minnesota DFL in 2011.  At the time, I was an active and founding member of the DFL Senior Caucus, on whose Board I served from 2006-2016.  I didn’t know Ken personally, but I certainly knew him professionally.  He will serve very well.  The Wiki entry about him gives a reasonable description of who he is.  The photographs are mine, from his first year as DFL chair.

Democrats are a diverse lot, which is a strength, in my opinion.  We don’t always agree, which can be very frustrating, but Ken Martin seems to have handled the political issues very well over the years.

Jim commented last evening: God bless Ken Martin, and godspeed to him.  I feel badly for him.  He has been planning for this for YEARS (it was kinda obvious even when I was a State House candidate’s point-of-contact with him in (I think) ’12.  (I remember fondly a long conversation I had with him about then Texas Governor Rick Perry.  I was worried Perry would be a Presidential election juggernaut.  Ken told me almost EXACTLY how Perry would implode…  Ken has really good instincts.)  But he could not be getting the DNC job at a more challenging time.

What the party REALLY NEEDS is leadership that is willing to say “NO!” over and over again, and very publicly, to the ultra-left progressive activists who destroy our chances to win, and be effective at thoroughly marginalizing them in the public’s mind’s-eye.  And I know him to be so predisposed.  The media touts his early ties to Wellstone, but his REAL affinity was to Dayton – A more cautious and careful “pragmatist” than even you… than even ME!  

BUT… He has been totally ineffective in MN with the DFL, over the last ten years, in rallying the rest of the party to defeat that fringe and marginalize them.  In fact, they functionally dominate the DFL.  It’s the only part of the MN job he has NOT done well… so, of course… it’s the only part of the job that absolutely needs to be done effectively at the National level as he steps into that job.  That’s life!

I hope the “change of scenery” improves his luck.  The realist in me, though, acknowledges that there is no reason whatsoever to EXPECT that he can get this done…  since he has utterly failed to get it done in MN, even though he has tried.

Do you have thoughts on this?  [Dick: my feeling basically are in intro and photos….  I think Ken is a great choice.  More comments from Jim and others at the end.]

Gramee commented earlier today: “Eventually, the destruction wrought by this new regime will be undeniable, even to some of its supporters. But breaking a country, unfortunately, is a lot easier than putting it back together.” [quote from Michelle Goldberg column in NYT 2/3/25 “The Familiar Arrogance….”.

Humpty Dumpty Syndrome. The only good news of the week is, in my opinion, the choice of Ken Martin as DNC Chair. The time for wishy-washy expired four years ago, but no one seemed to be paying attention. As I probably told you, I know Ken. If there’s even such a thing as the right person in what will be the job from hell, it will be Ken. For whatever that’s worth…

At State Capitol, July, 2011, at news conference for persons with disabilities.

John Garney and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

I would urge you to pay close attention to developments with the threatened destruction of USAID, a long standing U.S. agency.

It is easier to attack a thing, than a real person, which is what all organizations ultimately are – groups of human beings.

For me, AID’s face is John Garney, who I first met in the 1980s, when we were both doing family research and found that we shared great-great grandparents who came to Minnesota in the early 1850s.

John was a career AID staff person with postings in many countries.  His obituary at his death (2017) is worthy your time, and will help put a face on this agency.

I had a side personal experience with American foreign aid, which presumably involved AID as a recipient.  The experience came in the wake of a 2003 visit to Haiti, and a news release in early 2004 from the George Bush Department of State about a $50 million grant to Haiti.  You can read my ‘adventure here.  (The link is mine, and the reference to the State Department communique is in the section which begins SECRECY.)  Long story short, I was not able to get an answer to my simple question: where did this money go?  I wrote and actually talked with some staffer in the State Department, but it soon became obvious that people upline from him did not want to reveal anything about the specific destination of the publicized funds.  I was stonewalled.  I assume the $50 million did go somewhere, perhaps under the name of AID, but where, and why?  I’ll never know.  My life experience teaches that most mischief and malfeasance happens somewhere in the chain of command, not at the ‘boots on the ground’ level.

So, to me AID is more than just some words.  The John Garney’s of the world do an immense amount of good.  The politics at the front end, including the official communications about it, is what is suspect, in my opinion.

The above two ‘frames’ are what I’ll be using as I watch the attempted destruction of USAID.

COMMENTS RELATING TO USAID:

 from Suzanne (her Dad is John Garney):

Oh, Dick, thank you so much! You don’t know how much this has lifted my spirits, as I have been so distraught these past few days. To hear one’s father being called a “criminal” and a “lunatic” by Trump and Musk is just too much to bear.

I can’t believe what is happening to our country. I tried so hard to warn people that this was coming, but my progressive friends thought Harris and Trump were the same, so they wrote in names, and there was no hope of convincing my conservative friends (most of them didn’t vote for Trump, but they didn’t vote for Harris either).

Hamse Warfa in Minnesota Star Tribune Feb 4: USAID Hamse Warfa Strib Feb 4 2025 

Abdulrahman Bindamnan another point of view Feb. 5:  USAID Minnesota Star Tribune 2 6 25

from Suzanne, responding to the articles above:

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COMMENTS RELATING TO KEN MARTIN:

by John Rash Minnesota Star Tribune Feb 5, 2025: john raah Feb 5 25 Minnesota STrib

from Jim (expanding on his above comments about Ken Martin):

Sure.  Feel free to share that – and this – if you want to.  I “get” the “overwhelmed” thing… it’s real for a lot of people.  But, personally, I’m energized.  I have my first meeting tonight for my first campaign since ’17 where I am to be on the “core team”.  Back in the saddle again!

I think the overwhelmed/energized thing has a LOT to do with where one’s politics are.

The MAGA folks, of course, are energized because their guy is IN, and this time, he obviously arrived with planners on board who had actual plans, AND are people of action.  If one can set aside the things one feels about WHAT they are working ON, and focus on HOW they are doing things, they are doing a great job.  They are doing things IN WAYS that I have long wondered – since teen-age, really – “Why doesn’t someone do THIS?  Why doesn’t someone try it THAT way?”  As I’ve said to you before, I really wish I could go back in time to about, oh, 2005, when Trump was still a Democrat in NY, and DO something that would change just enough of history that he, today, was OUR guy and not theirs.  Because, really, he HAS no left-right “ideology”.  He’s a strange phenomenon, politically.  And (like Eisenhower!) “Which party?” coulda gone either way.

The Country Club Bush-Romney Republicans, are overwhelmed.  They have no idea what hit them, but they do know that when they go home to their districts, their own voters HATE them unless they are willing to talk as though they love Trump and MAGA.  So, not knowing what else to do, they talk the talk.  It must be really difficult.  Even though these folks remain the ones I most deplore in politics and most fear in government (we forget how scary Paul Ryan was at our peril!), I have a certain sympathy for them on this.  They are just holding onto their political jobs and hoping the fever breaks sometime soon.  And, in fairness to them, that is really ALL they CAN do.  The alternative for each of them is to become the next Liz Cheney.  (…may her political relevance Rest In Peace…)

On our side, both the Far Left Progressive Activist wing, and the Center-Left wing are in even stranger places.

It either IS, or SHOULD BE, evident to the Far-Left-Progressive wing, that they will not win again on the national level in a generation, at the least.  No political movement has so repulsed the REST of the electorate in our lifetimes, Dick.  Not even the combination of Civil Rights and Anti-War riots, with cities burning, in the late 60’s, turned the electorate so thoroughly away from The Left, although that comes in a close second.  And that brought the end of the long grand 36-year Rooseveltian era of US politics, and ushered in the 24 year Nixon-Reagan era.  Carter almost doesn’t count… whatever one thinks of his one term IN office, he was elected during a thoroughly Republican/conservative era by presenting himself as unlike any Dem the voters had ever known.  And then they knew him.  And out he went.

The problem for the Far Left Progressives is that (as House-Speaker-for-Life Tip O’Neill used to say) “all politics is local”.  Right now, though the Far Left Progressives are hated in most of the country, they are only in “controlled retreat” from their dominance in places like San Francisco and Portland, and they still haven’t even peaked in some places, with Minneapolis being perhaps the prime example of that.  So they are dead, but do not know it yet.  It’s a Zombie Politics, today.  So this wing is both overwhelmed AND energized.  In parts.  From person to person, from place to place, how one in that wing feels, differs.

Same for the Center-Left Dems.  Only in reverse.  Many of us – MOST of us – tucked our tails between our legs and all but disappeared for the last ten years as the Far Left Progressives took over everything – the culture, the academy, “The Groups” (who ever DREAMED that the ACLU would be “selective” regarding Freedom of Speech, as it now is?  Certainly not me…).  And, of course, they thoroughly took over the Democratic Party, both nationally and locally.  It’s been breathtaking.  NOW, due to the nascent reversals of fortune in places like SF and Portland, and the drubbing we took nationally last November (which started, let’s not forget, all the way back in 2016), Center-Left Dems are feeling it might be safe to come out of our bunkers and give politics another try… but we’re all kinda like The Groundhog… whether we stay out of our holes or go right back in is going to depend on what we see when we stick our heads out.  We are CAUTIOUSLY energized by the PARTIAL defeat of Far Left Progressivism.  I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I know folks who think it’s “too soon” and that letting the Far Left Progressives FINISH self-destructing is the way to go if one takes “the long view”.  I figure they may be right, but I, personally, am too old already to play it that way.

And about the 2024 “drubbing” I referred to above:  One of the things I keep reading is apologists for the Far Left Progressive wing trying to paint the 2024 election as “close”.  This is SO wrong!  Like with economics, one can look at politics ON AVERAGE, or AT THE MARGIN.  And, like in economics, looking at phenomena marginally is almost always more important, and carries more information – and carries MORE VALUABLE information.

We live in an era where cultural warfare has rendered the electorate very polarized.  It is almost impossible for a Democrat, of either flavor, nationwide, to do worse than 47-48%, and the “floor” is about 43-45% for the GOP, whether MAGA or Country Club wing.  What just happened is that Trump won a vast, VAST majority of the voters who were actually persuadable in the first place.  Analyzed AT THE MARGIN, the 2024 election was a LANDSLIDE of historic proportions.  The fact that the Electoral College, or the raw vote, was not as lopsided as Johnson-Goldwater, or Nixon-McGovern, or Reagan-Mondale, is totally irrelevant.  In those elections, the winner got almost all segments of the electorate that were even remotely “gettable”.  And Trump did that too.  He did that in ’16, and then, because that election, and the next 8 years, actually broadened his base, when he did it again in ’24 he had even bigger numbers.

We Dems view this as a “close election” or a “temporary setback” at our peril.  It was a change-for-a-generation type landslide, viewed at the margin, and if we don’t face that reality, J.D. Vance (another guy I have “wished was ours” ever since I read his book when it first came out), or someone who figures out how to outmaneuver HIM, will lock this in, in 2028, for at least 20 years.  We Dems can probably still DO something about that, or we can keep internally arguing over alternative realities – which is never a good strategy…

from Norm, to Ken Martin:

Monday Feb. 3 is two weeks after the Inauguration of #47 on Jan. 20, 2025. At the end of this post is what I wrote Jan. 18&25.  If you are interested, here are my posts from Jan 18 forward to now (just select archive for January 2025 at right): Jan 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 29, 31.  Also see Feb. 1, titled “Oh Canada”.

Looking ahead, to the best of my ability, I am going to redirect during February, Black History Month.

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A suggestion:  Take a little time this month to visit AMillionCopies.info, a simple website I inaugurated in spring, 2008, dedicated to two personal heroes, Lynn Elling and Dr. Joseph Schwartzberg.  A movie, there, from about 1970, is free and on-line.

You can watch interviews of Mr. Elling and Dr. Schwartzberg here.   They were both stellar activists.  They are both deceased, 2016 and 2018 respectively. (The interviews were by two Pakistani Fulbright Humphrey Fellows in 2014.  Read the short intro to the interviews before watching.)

I would also suggest taking the time to watch the film “The World Is My Country”, the story of peace activist Garry Davis in the WWII era.  The website is here.  Davis merited a page one obit in the NYTimes when he died in 2020,

Elling, Schwartzberg and Davis were all citizens who made a big difference.

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Where do you fit in?

Remember: only about 30% of eligible Americans voted for the new King Nov. 5, 2024.  That is hardly a landslide.  Near 170 million eligible voters did not vote for #47.

I will keep writing, and for sure I’ll keep informed, and absolutely stay engaged, but my posts for the time being will be on personal preference rather than focused on the disruption and chaos we will likely continue to see this month.  Keep this ‘blitzkrieg’ in perspective.  It will fail, ultimately, as have all such efforts over history, if the targets – most of us – get to work.

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POSTNOTE: January 18: “A House Divided“, one week ago, I wrote: “Two days from now will be the inauguration of the U.S. President.  It feels, today, much like being in the eye of a hurricane.  All seems calm.  But no one knows for sure exactly when the chaos of the hurricane will resume and who it will damage worst or how.  The prudent persons have prepared for the worst, but if they’re unlucky the preparation will be in vain.  The hurricane is all of us.  We will determine it’s strength or weakness.  We’re all in the path of the storm.”

Added January 25: …a tsunami, intended to demoralize and defeat – call it “shock and awe”.  Thus far, it has been worse than expectations.  This is a madman with a wrecking ball and the building permit to destroy.

COMMENTS:

from Remi (in Canada): The Americans last attempted to “conquer us into liberty” during the War of 1812. We sent them packing and burned down the White House. My grandmother’s great-grandfather, Denis Collet, was part of the French-Canadian militia involved in that event. This time, it seems that millions of Americans will lose their jobs.

from Molly: Here, from AP: But–hey–what could possibly go wrong?  Sigh, and some cuss words,