At Politico Matt Lattimer offers some advice to Democrats that is almost sure to be ignored:
Like Inspector Javert or, perhaps more appropriately, Wile E. Coyote, the Democrats remain fixated on getting their man, Trump, and proving wrong the voters who elected him. At first glance, the daily drip of new and shocking revelations over Russia looks like a mounting shadow over the White House, and it very well may prove to be its undoing. But the instant scandal—it seemed to start the minute Trump was declared president-elect—also threatens to further decimate the Democratic Party. And Democrats don’t seem to know it.
There is an odd sort of process of mental transformation. You go from wanting to accomplish certain goals to wanting to accomplish those goals while defeating your political opponents to just wanting to making your political opponents miserable.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the state of Illinois. We are now going on three years without a budget. Why? Because Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner has proposed a handful of reforms, each of which is anathema to the Democratic leadership. For most of the last three years Democrats have held supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. In other words they could have enacted a budget over the governor’s veto any time they cared to. Rather than doing that they have elected to do nothing.
They have no program. They have no policies. Illinois is losing population, jobs, and, not insignificantly, tax base. Chicago is the only major city that is actually losing population. The cost of borrowing both for the state and for the city is skyrocketing (another way of saying that their credit ratings are falling). Increasing taxes, presumably the go-to solution, will not solve any of those problems and may well aggravate them.
What do Illinois Democrats care about, other than defeating Gov. Rauner and keeping their phony-baloney jobs? I have no idea.
My condolences.