[Peace] Markey defeats Pelosi by ten, doubling Khanna's prediction

[Robert Naiman]

Recall: Khanna predicted that Pelosi's endorsement of Kennedy against
Markey would backfire, causing Markey to win by a bigger margin:

https://twitter.com/rokhanna/status/1296520774891835395

[image: image.png]

Today, the NYT reports
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/us/politics/ed-markey-kennedy.html>:

Forging a coalition of younger and more liberal Democrats, the sort of
voters who once formed the core of the Kennedy base, Mr. Markey was winning
about 54 percent of the vote
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/01/us/elections/results-massachusetts-senate-primary-election.html>
when
Mr. Kennedy called him to concede.
===

Why this matters for us: because 73.2% of the problem we face in reforming
the foreign policies of the Democratic Party in the direction of ending and
preventing wars and ending "crippling economic sanctions," which is war by
other means, lies at the confluence of two rivers:

1. Pelosi's fundraising relationship with corporatist-militarist power
centers in the Democratic Party;
2. Pelosi's domination of the House Democratic Caucus.

Of course, we could have tried to end-run around this problem by nominating
someone for Dem POTUS who was articulating a fundamentally different
vision. That door is now closed. Now we have a "war of position": house by
house, block by block, alley by alley, street by street.

In this war of position, we must continuously undermine Pelosi's domination
of the House Democratric Caucus. We must encourage people to openly
challenge her political judgment, as Khanna did here, because the excuses
she routinely makes for her warhawk foreign policies are
electoral-political.

Why wasn't the House allowed to vote on Cicilline's Venezuela War Powers
provision to prohibit the U.S. invasion of Venezuela that Bolton was
gunning for? Supposedly, because Florida 2020 election. That was the claim;
there was no argument; it's all about Florida, so sit down and shut up.
What if that wasn't actually true? What if that was just a Pelosi story, to
justify a choice she made for other reasons? We'll never know the answer to
such questions, so long as there's an unjustified culture of deference
among DC Democrats to Pelosi's political judgment. Just because Pelosi says
something is true, doesn't make it true. Just because Pelosi says her
motivation for a choice was X, doesn't mean that her motivation for the
choice was X.
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