The Deal with Russ Feingold's new advocacy arm of Progressives United (Run, Russ, Run)

Our favorite potential candidate to run against the President in the 2012 Democratic Presidential Primary continues to do the peoples' work. And do so very effectively. What we like most about this new advocacy group is the way the former Senator from Wisconsin is going to manage the reporting. This type of organization, a 501(c)(4), can spend and raise an unlimited amounts of money and do so without disclosing the identities of the individuals and/or organizations who donate. This is not the Russ way. He will walk the talk. The tight disclosure standards he has put in place will set contribution limits and allow for public access to the identities of all funds raised and spent.

Transparency of money in politics. There's a concept.

The following article comes to us c/o The Huffington Post. It closes by stating Feingold and his people will be deciding on whether to run for the open WI Senate seat left by Sen. Herb Kohl by the end of the Labor Day weekend holiday.

The Democrat Deal was made aware earlier this month that this is not precisely case. The former Senator was a great Senator and would undoubtedly serve with equal distinction if re-elected. However, there are different dynamics afoot.

Democrats are more and more vocal about their displeasure with the Presidents performance. The recent sell-out to the Tea Party controlled Congress is a palpable case in point. It is no longer just the progressives and party activists who are clamoring for an alternative to the President in the 2012 Democratic Primary. Presently, the majority of all Democrats want a primary challenger. Among the field of viable men and women who could step into history and reclaim the Democrat Party and reclaim America for working families and the middle class, - one name has been gathering the most buzz: Russ Feingold.

To the people of Wisconsin, we agree, Russ would be a stellar choice for the Senate. But we ask you, for the sake of our country, help us send your prodigal son to the White House. It is time for a democrat in the White House, it is time for Russ Feingold for President.

for the original Huffington Post article go here.
for the unofficial Russ Feingold for President 2012 website go here.

Russ Feingold Expands Progressives United, Launches Advocacy Operation
by Amanda Terkel
WASHINGTON -- Former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold is expanding his Progressives United operation, launching a 501(c)(4) and a new website on Monday morning. The organization will now consist of a political action committee for political work and a nonprofit for advocacy efforts. And although a 501(c)(4) is allowed to spend and raise unlimited amounts of undisclosed money, Feingold is promising to practice what he preaches by setting up strict disclosure requirements and contribution limits for his group.

Feingold launched Progressives United in February. Since then, it has raised more than $2 million. The organization was designed to support progressive candidates at the local, state and national levels, as well as hold the media and elected officials accountable on combating corporate influence in politics.

The PAC has raised more than $200,000 for the Democratic candidates in the Wisconsin state senate recall elections, and it organized a campaign calling on President Obama to fire General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt as the head of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The new nonprofit arm will allow the group to do more advocacy work, allowing the PAC to concentrate on political work. The PAC will be posting new endorsement criteria for candidates and asking supporters to nominate possible individuals they would like to see Progressives United endorse.

"It's clear people are fed up with the way corporations are running our politics and our government. Progressives United is taking the next step to fight back," said Progressives United Executive Director Cole Leystra.

Feingold has been one of the Democratic Party's most vocal critics on the issue of whether to accept corporate contributions.

Speaking at the annual Netroots Nation conference for progressive bloggers and activists in June, Feingold said the Democratic Party was "in danger of losing its soul" if it did not adopt stricter regulations on campaign contributions. He singled out Priorities USA, a new Democratic independent expenditure group, or super PAC, that is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of corporate cash for political purposes.
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The nonprofit that Feingold is forming, known as a 501(c)(4) in the U.S. tax code, is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of undisclosed money as long as its primary focus is not politics.

But Feingold is placing extra restrictions on his new organization. It will disclose 100 percent of its income and will not knowingly accept any money from corporations, national banks, labor unions, federal contractors or federal or state lobbyists. It is also swearing off independent expenditures, electioneering and the "issue ads" that are popular with outside groups. No contributions above $10,000 per individual per year will be accepted.

The group says it is also putting up firewalls between Progressives United Inc., the nonprofit, and the Progressives United PAC. While they will share resources and staff, they will be financed and fundraised for separately, and they will engage in distinct activities. On Aug. 1 of congressional and presidential election years, all non-administrative operations will be conducted and financed through the PAC.

On Monday, Progressives United supporters will receive an email announcing the launch of the new website.

"With elections coming up in Wisconsin next week and around the country soon -- and with corporate money already flowing into politics through shadowy front groups like Karl Rove's Crossroads -- we had to launch our new website right now to get these important grassroots tools into activists' hands as soon as possible," reads the message.

Feingold has said that he will decide by Labor Day whether he will run for retiring Sen. Herb Kohl's (D-Wis.) open U.S. Senate seat in the 2012 elections. Progressives United staff insisted that the new announcement is an extension of the senator's long fight for campaign finance reform, not any indication about his political future.

The Case for a Primary Challenge Against Obama

 c/o The Atlantic

July 8, 2011
by Conor Friedersdorf

It looks like Obama is to Boehner's left..  Perhaps a smidge. (photo credit: Reuters)

Ask a typical tea partier when his discontent with the political establishment began. Often as not he'll point to the Bush Administration. The list of grievances is long: the profligate spending, the new entitlement for prescription drugs, the Harriet Miers nomination, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Most tea partiers now think compassionate conservatism itself was ill-conceived.

So where were all the protest rallies back when Bush was president? It's a question tea party critics love to ask. The implication is that the protest movement is motivated by partisanship and antagonism to Obama more than principle. In fact, discontent on the right during the Bush years was genuine. Tongues were held for reasons including these: a desire to support the president in the war on terror, misguided partisan loyalty, a conservative movement that acted as unprincipled apologists and attack dog enforcers for the president, and perhaps more than anything else, a dearth of options. Circa 2003, when Medicare Part D was enacted, a primary challenge against Bush was unthinkable. What was an upset conservative to do, vote for John Kerry?

By their lights, he'd have been worse.

Liberals should understand that predicament. It's exactly the one in which they now find themselves. President Obama won't face a serious primary challenge prior to Election 2012, but that isn't because he has governed as the left would've wanted. He is trying to keep American troops in Iraq beyond his own withdrawal deadline. His executive power claims are every bit as bad, and sometimes more extreme, than the excesses the left blasted when Bush was responsible for them. The prison at Guantanamo Bay remains open. Warantless surveillance on innocent Americans continues. Whistleblowers are in greater legal jeopardy than they were. The economy is terrible. Health-care reform was more corporatist than progressives would've preferred. We're now waging an illegal war in Libya that'll cost over a billion dollars, even as we prepare deep cuts to social welfare programs. Despite promises to the contrary, the FBI is still raiding medical marijuana dispensaries in jurisdictions where they're legal under state law. Promised advances in government transparency haven't materialized.

The left would be justified in lashing out, given the Grand-Canyon-sized chasm that separates the rhetoric of candidate Obama from the behavior of President Obama. By and large, however, they've kept quiet about the abuses and unlawful behavior of the man who occupies the White House, with a few notable exceptions, compared to their volume and passion during his predecessor's tenure. That's partly because they've focused their attacks on the tea party, and politicians like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. The truth of the matter is that even if a conservative like Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, the soft spoken advocate of a truce on social issues, won the nomination, the vast majority of liberals would support President Obama's reelection anyway.

It is their feeling that they've got nowhere else to go.

Is there any way out of this cycle, whereby every president is virulently hated by the opposition and proceeds to betray his ideological allies, who submit for lack of an alternative? Are we condemned to a political establishment that has failed all of us? If things proceed as before, perhaps Obama will win re-election, continue to betray his base and the ideals he articulated in 2008, and sow the seeds for a left-leaning tea party equivalent. There is, however, one flaw in that plan: isn't the rhetoric of candidate Obama mostly what those people want to hear from a champion?

In a provocative essay, James Poulos lays out another possible future. It's deeply counterintuitive. He argues that the existing tea party can appeal to the whole political spectrum if its leaders and rank-and-file have the will to make it happen:

Democrats have not been so disillusioned with a sitting president of their party since Robert F. Kennedy ran in 1968 to unseat Lyndon Johnson. Liberal confidence in the most basic principles of Democratic rule have been shaken to the core by Barack Obama's intensification of Bush-era policies that even divide the right. The left cannot field a challenge to what increasingly strikes good-faith liberals as the rule of a corporatist police state. The Green Party is a husk. The radicals are a rump. Outside the right, there is now no viable political alternative to Obamaism -- the greatest partisan disappointment in generations.

But until Republicans make some fundamental changes to their party platform, the left is prepared to accept from the Democratic Party many generations of abuse and depression. This is why liberal elites are deep into a crash program to hardwire the public mind with their caricature of Tea Partiers as a virulent, violent fringe peddling moral hatred and social suffering. At the present moment, it sounds farfetched to say that only the Tea Party can address this concern in a way that can attract liberal voters to Republican candidates. But does it sound any less farfetched to say that establishment Republicanism can gain the support of any liberals worthy of the name?

His theory has this going for it: Tea partiers and disaffected liberals have in common a mistrust of the political establishment, a plausible critique of centrists, a desire to hold candidates they elect to their promises, and legitimate grievances with widespread appeal. As a student of partisan media, however, it is unthinkable to me that they'd join forces to elect even a reformed version of a Tea Party Republican. In a better world, ideological movements wouldn't rely on vilifying adversaries as the people who are "destroying America" while advancing their own causes.

But our world is one where there is not only a psychological temptation to do so, but huge financial incentives for people like Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Andrew Breitbart, Mark Levin and Michael Moore to stoke the pathology. If the other side is as malicious in their intentions as these entertainers say, it would be folly for the non-establishment right and left to join forces.

Thus failed "centrists" keep hanging around.

What I'd like to see, apart from everything else, is a return to strong primary challenges against sitting presidents. It's easy to understand why they don't happen. But hard to argue that we wouldn't be better off if President Bush had been forced to worry a bit more about fiscal hawks, and President Obama was worried a bit more about anti-corporatists and the anti-war, civil libertarian left.

Here's the Deal with Russ for President:

the "candidate to be"

Today marked the launch of a new organization and website spelling out what has been whispered about in progressive circles for some time. There may well be a Russ Feingold Presidential Campaign in the preliminary stages.

Recently, a "draft Russ for Senate" campaign in WI has come up short. No one from his inner circle to state political pundits are expecting him to enter the senate race, a race polls show he would take by a landslide. Why? Is it that he has set his political sights higher?

While the former Senator may not enjoy the name recognition of Gov. Dean (neither did Dean til he ran for President) few individuals are held in higher regard by the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.  A champion of civil liberties, worker's rights, a public health insurance option, peace overseas, a David to the Goliath of corporate influence in Washington, Sen. Feingold has been busy with his PAC, Progressives United since leaving office. A direct response to Citizens United, a corporate funded right-wing PAC repeatedly charged with ugly yet effective disinformation campaigns, Progressives United seeks to separate corporate money from the political process and promote greater transparency and accountability in government.

The fact is, many democrats are feeling disenfranchised after two and a half years of the Obama Administration and looking for a way to channel that frustration in a positive way. Recent polls show a majority of Democrats would like to see a primary challenger to Obama than would have him run unopposed. Russ 2012 may just be what they are looking for. We sure could do much worse.

For what it's worth, Mr. Feingold, consider us very much on board.

Find the Russ in 2012 website here.

The President's Empty Pulpit: Andrew Kimbrell echos The Deal on our Centrist Administration.

For the past year, our articles at The Deal have oft visited the lack of traditional Democratic values reflected by the Obama Administration. Or, to place accountability where it is due - with the President himself.

Whether highlighting the disparity of promises and policy between candidate Obama and President Obama, or calling upon the President to seize the opportunity to become an agent of change by demonstrating leadership on civil rights, or ending the Bush era tax cuts that have cost the U.S. twice the monies spent in both Iraq and Afghanistan; The Deal has advocated for a return to what Gov. Howard Dean referred to as the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." While party leaders, such as the former governor from Vermont, have been shown great care in avoiding dissonance within a party that holds the White House, they have done so at the cost of the Party and the citizenry.

Support in MA for WI. photo by Ed Needham

As a result, within the first two years of Obama's Presidency, an ineffective GOP minority managed to quickly and quietly piggy-back on a Tea Party representation of Obama as a radical Socialist from Kenya. At the mid-terms, the Dems lost the House of Representatives and took a serious hit at their Senate majority. The once promising first two years of Obama's Presidency with majorities in both houses were lost to an underwhelming approach to an economic crisis and healthcare legislation that became a win for the insurance industry with the elimination of a public option.

In both substance and style, the current administration has failed thus far in communicating and leading reform along traditional Democratic lines. The fact that a Tea Party dominated GOP may produce a conservative unpalatable to the majority of Americans, or a lackluster alternative candidate following vicious infighting, will further ensure a centrist-dominated second term for the Administration.

Thankfully, some democrats have taken a different path. Former Senator, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin has launched Progressives United, a political action committee dedicated to fighting corporate influence and upholding traditional Democratic values. Grass-roots progressive advocacy groups have also largely remained on course despite the lack of grass-tops leadership. The nationwide appreciation and acknowledgment of labor in response to thinly veiled attacks to collective bargaining in Wisconsin and Michigan demonstrates the enduring relevance of the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and the SEIU to a corporatist-leaning government. The deafening silence of the White House in both states' struggle to protect the rights of workers is a prime example of a bully pulpit wasted for want of leadership.

Support for workers. photo by Ed Needham

In his article in Tikkun, The Empty Pulpit: The Obama Problem, author/lawyer/advocate, Andrew Kimbrell, concludes:

"There is no immediate panacea to the “empty pulpit” problem we now face with the Obama administration. However, as we approach the next presidential election it is important, at a minimum, for progressives to challenge the president in the primaries. Not because there is a serious chance of having more progressive candidates at this time. But rather so that progressive narratives and voices so critical at this time can speak to an America that I believe is truly hungry for this vision of our society and ourselves."

That, friends, is The Deal. We couldn't agree more.