I am confident that Gallego won’t be another Sinema because Sinema was an ineffective and incompetent politician. As I’ve said before her decisions were dumb to the point of being Green Party dumb. Nothing is 100%, but I doubt whether many will be emulating single-term Senator Krysten Sinema.
Also Andreessen wrote Mosaic, which became Netscape, which became Firefox. Matt Yglesias is center-left, a co-founder of Vox.com, and an interesting and careful writer when he’s not shitposting on twitter.
“My brethren, soldiers may leap out of that statue tonight and kill me, but what’s leaping out at me right now is our total disregard for norms.”
Much more relevant these days is that Andreessen is another MAGA billionaire crypto bro.
A few days ago a friend told me that Chuck Schumer thinks he’s a minority leader but he’s actually an opposition leader. …
That seems to me like a fair assessment.
… A friend mentioned yesterday that a rising star Dem who may run for Senate next year went out and said that Chuck Schumer should step down as Senate Majority Leader. She’s right. It’s not something I’m really focused on. It’s not my call and he’s done lots of good things. Great guy. But he’s not up to it. I’m not even mad, as the Will Ferrell character says. He just doesn’t understand the moment. End of story.
More generally:
We all collectively have to do better, be tougher … but more than tougher have the flexibility, the elasticity of mind to confront the present moment.
Schumer thinks 2 steps ahead, which is prerequisite for effective party leadership. All sorts of bad things may have actually happened if the Dems voted against cloture on the CR without any preparation five or six weeks earlier. That’s where the error was made. Gifted Josh Marshal, 2 days ago:
In my mind, the real failure wasn’t even so much the one people watched play out a week ago. The real failure was in the preceding six weeks. I still think they should have refused the continuing resolution for all the reasons we discussed at the time. But by that time the Democrats really were in a jam. By laying no groundwork for the coming confrontation, they’d made it a much harder choice. In the internal hand-wringing I picked up in the 24 hours before Schumer’s cave, people were saying, “Yeah, we should be fighting. But it’s basically too late.”
It was crystal clear even well before Inauguration Day that March 14th was the critical and really sole moment of leverage. I wrote countless posts about this. That reality became explicit. It got talked about. The leadership argued that they would make demands. Eventually. But the idea was that they didn’t want to get into it publicly in early February. Why make the story about themselves…
This is a perfect example of clever tactics devoid of a larger strategy.
I saw Senator Mark Warner jumping on the Signalgate issue, so perhaps a few of the Senate Dems are waking up.
The Democrats are going to make tactical and strategic errors, but it helps the Trumpists if we hold grudges against each other. So let’s not.
When you have a member of the ‘team’ like Fetterman who is literally undermining the party from within and in full-on compliance with Trump’s agenda, purging them is a necessity; that is at least one valid lesson the Democrats can learn from the GOP. And a uselessly compromising turd like Chuck Schumer is still desperately clinging to the notion of playing by an obsolete rulebook and hoping that his Republican ‘colleagues’ will come around to opposing Trump’s worst impulses needs to be replaced by someone who will demonstrate actual leadership.
Stranger
It really isn’t. Fetterman won a swing state. He announced his position way ahead of time, creating zero problems for leadership if leadership wanted to align themselves with the fight caucus. Fetterman is not Sinema, at least so far. I’m guessing this will all be moot though: I’m guessing that Fetterman won’t run for reelection in 2030.
Generally speaking, look to Josh Marshall at TPM for a solid commentator who grasps the dominance game aspects of public messaging, unlike most (all?) Dem Senators and possibly most (not all) Dem Reps. But politics also has a granular aspect to it, and part of that granular aspect is getting policy right lest reality bite you in the ass. Which it does. For that turn to Matthew Yglassias at the Slow Boring substack. I also like Noah Smith at NoahOpinion for economic analysis, despite the brickbats that have been thrown at him here. Paul Krugman often has an uncanny grasp of the fundamentals.
If the big print media grasped the changing landscape, substack might not be a viable platform. But apparently NYT, WAPO, etc is run by paper-heads and click-bait heads.
ETA below: “Way ahead of time”, means, “Enough time for the Dem leadership vote counters to make his positioning irrelevant”. That would be about 3-5 weeks before the vote. As for the election, part of Fetterman’s talent was to combine centrism with leftie stuff, wrapped in aggressive posturing. This is very much worth studying, though his medical issues now complicate this strategy.
Please define “way ahead of time”. I remember him campaigning on the opposite of every thing he now stands for.
Name three major stances which have changed.
That was already addressed. In this post
Which contained this link
To name just one position- He has gone from calling Trump “crazy” and ‘fascist’ to being a big supporter of him.
Fetterman definitely won’t run for reelection in 2030, because his term runs out in 2028.
As for the Guardian article, Fetterman deserves monitoring but so far none of his votes or positioning has been decisive or close to it, unlike Sinema and Manchin. That’s an important distinction. All the same, the vote for Bondi as attorney general was bad. I wouldn’t call Fetterman a supporter of Trump though, never mind a big supporter. Many of the snippets traced back to paywall articles; the Guardian article lacked depth.
New poll: AOC leads Schumer 55-36 in a hypothetical primary challenge.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/04/schumer-aoc-poll-primary-new-york-030621