Democratic Leaders to Liberal Candidates: Get Lost, We Prefer Moderates

Liberals have realized for a long time now that the leadership of the Democratic Party is beholden to business interests and therefore is only as liberal as corporate America will allow. Nobody has felt that more than liberals who dare to primary the Central Party’s chosen candidates. Now one of them has struck back.

Levi Tillemann, a former official with the Obama administration’s Energy Department, moved to Colorado to run against vulnerable incumbent Republican Mike Coffman. He wasn’t the only Democrat attracted by Coffman’s weak grip on the seat. The party’s preferred candidate is Jason Crow, an Army veteran and a corporate lawyer at a powerful Colorado firm. Tilleman naturally wanted the party to stay out of the primary, and he met with Steny Hoyer, House minority whip, to argue his case, pointing out that Coffman has defeated moderate Democrats repeatedly. Unbeknownst to Hoyer, Tilleman taped their conversation and gave the tape to The Intercept.

Hoyer had his own message he wanted to convey: Tillemann should drop out. … In a frank and wide-ranging conversation, Hoyer laid down the law for Tillemann. The decision, Tillemann was told, had been made long ago. It wasn’t personal, Hoyer insisted, and there was nothing uniquely unfair being done to Tillemann, he explained: This is how the party does it everywhere. Hoyer bluntly told Tillemann that mobilizing support for one Democratic candidate over another in a primary isn’t unusual. Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., chair of the DCCC, has a “policy that early on, we’d try to agree on a candidate who we thought could win the general and give the candidate all the help we could give them,” Hoyer told Tillemann matter-of-factly.

Tilleman wanted people to know that the DCCC makes these decisions months before it acknowledges doing so, preserving an illusion of allowing the voters to decide while putting its thumb, or more like its leg, on the scales. In short, it feels like liberals have to paddle upstream against the Democratic Party because they do.