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House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) in some regards might be considered the second most powerful Democrat in the country right now. He is second-in-command in the chamber behind Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and he was given a primetime speaking slot before last week's vote to impeach President Trump. Yet Hoyer is also about to become the latest prominent Democrat to face a serious primary challenge.

The House leadership is simply not cutting the mustard, Hoyer's challenger, McKayla Wilkes, told The Week in an interview. A young black woman from a working-class background, she says current party leaders are out of touch with the country and their own districts. "Hoyer and Pelosi are leading the party badly," she said, "because they're taking tons of corporate money, not standing up to Trump, and they're not championing crucial ideas like Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal."

Wilke's challenge is rightly seen as part of a growing leftist insurgency within the Democratic Party. If she manages to knock off Hoyer, it might be the strongest signal yet that the movement is winning the battle for the future of the party.

To be sure, party leadership was always going to be a challenge after Democrats won control of the House in 2018. The rise of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren has demonstrated that the party's previous moderate consensus has fractured. There is a large appetite from progressive voters for more confrontational, left-wing politics, particularly among younger people, a sentiment which is only growing as Millennials reach early middle age and Generation Z reaches voting age. It was these voters who largely propelled the victories of fresh faces like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.

And yet, the House leadership including Hoyer, which essentially holds institutional control of the party so long as President Trump remains in office, has done little to capitalize on this movement. Instead, they treat the left wing much as they did in the 1990s: as annoying gadflies to be ignored whenever possible.

Instead of a full-bore attack on Trump, they opted for a narrow impeachment focused solely on the Ukraine scandal and only after dragging their feet for months. Instead of locking Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, or Mike Pompeo in the House basement to force them to testify, they proceeded with the impeachment vote without hearing from some of the central conspirators. And they have largely ignored Trump's wildly corrupt and unconstitutional profiteering off the presidency, not including it in the impeachment inquiry or any other major investigative hearing.

Their legislative priorities have also been less than bold. They passed a trade deal with Mexico and Canada that allows Trump to claim victory in his favorite policy area. And while they have passed a number of messaging bills that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promptly bottled up, even there the leadership has stymied the left. House leadership froze out progressives from negotiation over a bill to ostensibly lower drug prices, pushing a weak version that included one absolutely loony provision that would increase drug costs outside of Medicare so that program could get more money. That was removed only when the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatened to vote against the bill.

This brings me back to Hoyer's home turf, Maryland's 5th District. It is a very comfortably blue area: In every election since 1998, none of Hoyer's various Republican opponents got over 36 percent of the vote. Yet Hoyer is squarely in the middle of the Democratic caucus, and on its right in some areas he voted for the Iraq War, is a firm partisan of Israel, voted for Wall Street deregulation in 2000, and voted to give China permanent normal trade relations that same year.

All these are major reasons why Wilkes is running. "My vision of the Democratic Party is a party that doesn't take corporate money and instead of triangulating to reach 2 percent of swing voters, does a ton of organizing to reach people who don't normally vote."

Her campaign is also about specific Maryland concerns on which Hoyer has failed to deliver. Wilkes supports a massive program of 7 million new social housing units not just because her district has a severe housing affordability problem, but because "I have friends, actually, who live in the woods in an abandoned school bus," she says. She supports sweeping criminal justice reform not just because of the mass incarceration crisis, but because she has personal experience with the Kafkaesque prison bureaucracy, having once been jailed without bail for the ridiculously piddling offense of driving on a suspended license. She supports Medicare-for-all not just because it is good policy, but because she personally knows "people struggling with long-term care, preventative care, and drug prices." Wilkes supports the Green New Deal not just because of climate change in general, but because her district's coastal communities are under dire threat from rising sea levels. "In Anne Arudnel County, in St. Mary's County, people are concerned about the level of the sea rise. People have homes that are on the water," she says. "It's actually amazing that we haven't been wiped out by a massive flood, because there are parts of Maryland that are surrounded by water."

World greenhouse gas emissions reached yet another record high in 2019. Neither the 5th District nor the country as a whole can afford more Democratic Party dithering as happened during the Obama years, with minor subsidies for renewables coupled to an epic fracking binge that made the U.S. the biggest producer of oil and gas in the world.

It's a bit hard to understand the mindset of the Democratic leadership. Age is certainly one factor. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (who has a primary challenger herself in attorney Shahid Buttar) is 79 years old. Hoyer is 80. Majority Whip Jim Clyburn is 77. At that age, it's rather common to get stuck in one's ways.

But it's not the whole story. Bernie Sanders, the most famous leader of left-wing Democrats, is 78. Elizabeth Warren is 70. Clearly being old in itself is no barrier to progressive politics or to being enormously popular among young people. No, the issue with Pelosi and company is not their age so much as how long they have been in politics, and particularly how long they have been at the top of the party.

Both Hoyer and Pelosi were elected in the 1980s, and both have been in and out of various House leadership positions for decades. Top Democrats of this generation internalized the Reagan revolution believing that the New Deal was dead and buried, that capitalism is basically good, and that America is an unalterably center-right country. Hence left-wing candidates always lose (1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2016 notwithstanding) and the best that be done for the American people are fiddly tax credits and janky market-friendly schemes like ObamaCare. And while it is always possible for someone to change their mind, the top House Democrats plainly have no intention of doing so.

The only way to change direction, it seems, is to knock the leadership out of their individual seats, and put in some fresh folks with fighting spirit. A leader can't "be a leader in just name only. You have to be a leader and actions have to show that. We have to be bold and we have to be brave," says Wilkes. Leadership is about "sticking your neck out there for the people who actually elected you." Her primary is April 28.

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Democratic leadership should be afraid of McKayla Wilkes - The Week

In 2010, banks foreclosed on more than a million homes.

In 2010, banks foreclosed on more than a million homes. The jobless rate for the year hovered just under 10%. But billionaire investor Stephen Schwarzman knew who the real injured party was: the wealthy.

When the Obama administration proposed closing the carried interest loophole, a tax break exploited by those in private equity, Schwarzman couldn't contain himself any longer. "It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939," he claimed at a New York City gathering.

This wasn't the tea party, hiding its elite funders under the cover of representing the common man or woman. This was one of the wealthiest men in the United States stepping forward to loudly, proudly and angrily claim he'd been done wrong.

Schwarzman quickly apologized. But if we want to understand how the Great Recession led not to an economic overhaul but to record-breaking inequality and the election of Donald Trump - a-to-the-manor-born serial con artist and practitioner of the 1% whine nonpareil - it's helpful to remember Schwarzman, who turned out to be patient zero for what might just be the decade's ultimate grift: the rise of millionaires and billionaires as victims.

The Great Recession was supposed to embarrass the wealthy into slinking away embarrassed, grateful they didn't land in jail or worse. "There's an angry mob with pitchforks assembling, and they want to see some heads on pikes," Fortune opined in 2009. But as the stock and real estate markets recovered, so did the self-regard of the most moneyed among us. Shame? That was so Dow 7,550. It's now over 28,000.

Schwarzman has many a compatriot. Elite gatherings such as the Milken Institute's Global Conference and the annual World Economic Forum in Davos have become all but encounter sessions for misunderstood multimillionaires and billionaires to agree with one another in the face of calls that they pay their fair share. There's private equity mogul Leon Cooperman, who actually began to cry on CNBC when complaining about Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax on fortunes in excess of $50 million. "I don't need Elizabeth Warren telling me that I'm a deadbeat and that billionaires are deadbeats," he said.

The rich victims are all around us. Craig Hall, the real-estate tycoon owner of the now infamous ostentatious Northern California wine cave where Pete Buttigieg held a high-dollar fundraiser? He told The New York Times about the criticisms, "It's just not fair." Jacqueline Sackler, wife of a Purdue Pharma heir, the company in part responsible for the opioid epidemic that's taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans? The Wall Street Journal got a hold of an email in which she complained of what she calls the "situation" is "destroying" the family's reputation, and "dooms" her children.

And no one is more practiced at the art of billionaire self-pity than our president. He's the victim of a Democratic "witch hunt." Impeachment? "More due process was accorded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials." Yet he signed into law a tax plan so favorable to billionaires in general, and real-estate interests in particular, it might as well have been tailored precisely for him.

But according to Republicans, the obscene gains of the wealthy aren't the problem. In 2012, GOP presidential nominee and multimillionaire Mitt Romney, speaking to a group of big-money donors, referred to 47% of Americans who didn't pay federal taxes and needed government benefits to get by as "takers," adding, they believe "they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name it." (Entitled to food! Imagine that.)

The Trump administration, which boasts the wealthiest presidential Cabinet ever assembled, has spent almost three years attempting to make it harder for people to receive Medicaid, food assistance and even a free lunch at school. They are aided by self-appointed watchdogs, too, such as Minnesota retiree Rob Undersander, who outed himself as a millionaire so he could publicize the supposedly pressing issue of people who have six- and seven-figure net worth receiving food stamps because their income is below eligibility thresholds. (In fact, survey research shows such households account for about 3% of households receiving assistance via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).

Meanwhile, of course, the wealthy make out. Studies show, not surprisingly, that their opinions carry much more weight with politicians than those of more ordinary voters. But the claim of victimization is one way they seek to protect themselves from some popular anger and the financial consequences they might otherwise face, ensuring their power, wealth and privilege remains intact while they can continue to promote their self-perceived unique virtue and smarts. Here's one telling example: Despite Trump's campaign promises, the carried interest loophole remains a part of the federal tax code. Steve Schwarzman, your infamy was not in vain.

Helaine Olen is a contributor to Post Opinions and the author of "Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry."

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Column: Decade of the billionaire victim - Milford Daily News

Decades, of course, are arbitrary classifications, but they can help make sense of what would otherwise be an endless churn of chatter and conflict.

As the second decade of the new century draws to a close and Coloradans brace themselves for the advent of the Roaring Twenties, its instructive to consider the personalities who have shaped the states politics in the last stretch.

No politicians have better embodied the tensions and triumphs of their parties over the past 10 years than Democrat John Hickenlooper and Republican Ken Buck.

Both moved to Colorado from the Northeast, perhaps fitting in a fast-growing state where more than half of all residents were born outside its borders.

Hickenlooper grew up in Philadelphia and earned degrees from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, soon landing in Colorado to work as a petroleum geologist during one of the states regular boom-and-bust periods.

Buck hails from Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, and earned a degree from Princeton University before heading west to get a law degree at the University of Wyoming.

In 1986, Hickenlooper was laid off from his job at Buckhorn Petroleum and began considering what to do next, eventually starting a brewpub in Denvers Lower Downtown neighborhood.

That same year, Buck went to work for then-U.S. Rep. Dick Cheney on the Iran-Contra investigation and later took a job in Washington, D.C., with the Justice Department before settling in Colorado to work as a federal prosecutor.

At the dawn of the 2010s, both men were long-serving local officials mounting their first statewide campaigns.

Hickenlooper, serving his second term as mayor of Denver, jumped in the race for governor in 2010 after the incumbent, Democrat Bill Ritter, set the political world on its ear with a relatively late announcement the former Denver district attorney wouldnt seek a second term.

Buck, the district attorney for Weld County, had been criss-crossing the state for months in a long-shot bid for the 2010 GOP U.S. Senate nomination to challenge Democrat Michael Bennet, who had been appointed to the seat a year earlier.

They both burst on the statewide scene in an unpredictable midterm election year dominated by a national backlash to the Obama administrations aggressive moves to address a financial crisis whose effects were still palpable.

It was a roller-coaster year that saw sure-things go down in flames once Republican voters had a chance to weigh in former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis lost the GOPs gubernatorial nod to newcomer Dan Maes, and Buck wrested the Senate nomination from former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton.

Maes most clearly manifested the spirit of the Tea Party, which emerged to rail against government bailouts in the wake of the Great Recession but swiftly turned on GOP elites, leaving establishment picks like Norton in its wake.

Hickenlooper, who famously launched by taking a shower with his clothes on in an ad decrying negative campaigns, lucked out as the Republican Party tore itself to pieces over Maes, and former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo joined the field in late summer as a third-party candidate.

Although Hickenlooper and Buck carried their respective partys banners that November, their fortunes diverged on election night, with Hickenlooper winning the three-way race by a wide margin and Buck losing to Bennet by a hair.

Fast-forward to the end of the decade, and both remain among the enduring voices of their parties, though not without plenty of vocal challengers.

Hickenlooper won another term as governor in 2014 and reportedly made the short list for Hillary Clintons running mate in 2016. After running for the White House for a while this year, Hickenlooper gave in to pressure from national Democrats and declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

Hickenloopers evolving position on fossil fuels over the decade from a cozy relationship with oil and gas interests to declaring climate change the defining challenge of our time mirrors the Democratic Partys, though some of his fellow party members complain the geologist didnt get on board fast enough and hasnt gone far enough.

In 2014, Buck won the first of three terms representing the heavily Republican 4th Congressional District in Congress, where he's belonged to the conservative House Freedom Caucus and has been among President Donald Trumps most vocal defenders.

Earlier this year, Buck was elected chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, fending off a challenge from a state lawmaker whose grassroots supporters charged that Buck had grown too cozy with the establishment.

Like Hickenlooper, Buck is said to have his eye on the U.S. Senate and could be positioning himself to challenge Bennet in the 2022 election.

Other politicians have gotten more votes from Coloradans than Hickenlooper and Buck.

Cynthia Coffman was the first Republican to receive more than 1 million votes, when she won her only term as attorney general in 2014. Her total, however, has since been surpassed. The GOP candidate who has gotten the most votes in Colorado is Darryl Glenn, the 2016 U.S. Senate nominee, followed by Donald Trump in 2016, and attorney general nominee George Brauchler in 2018.

Coffman, notably, was the only one of the top vote-getting Republicans who won their race in Colorado.

On the Democratic side of the ledger, Bennet holds the record for the most votes received in the state, in his 2016 win over Glenn, followed by Jared Polis total in his 2018 win for governor and Hillary Clintons 2016 win over Trump.

Among the hundreds of Democrats and Republicans who vied for the titles this decade, two runners-up stand out.

Republican Cory Gardner broke a decade-long losing streak by Republicans at the top of the ticket in Colorado in 2014 when the two-term congressman won election to the U.S. Senate. And he accomplished that by unseating Democrat Mark Udall, marking the first time since 1978 that Colorado senator was denied re-election.

Hickenlooper is hoping to deny Gardner a second term in next year election, but theres no denying a contention made by veteran Republican strategist Dick Wadhams that if Gardner hadnt won in 2014, the Colorado GOP could have been ushered into the wilderness for the rest of the decade.

Battles over taxes, energy and education have consumed plenty of oxygen this decade, but nothing influenced the political climate like the raging debate over health care, and no one incarnates that among Democrats more than Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera.

The Broomfield Democrat began the decade by losing her bid for a third term in the state House to a Tea Party Republican but regained her seat in the next election and won another term after that.

A four-time cancer survivor, Primavera served as CEO of Komen Colorado before Polis picked her as his running mate. Soon after they were sworn in, he named her to head the governors Office of Saving People Money on Health Care.

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TRAIL MIX | John Hickenlooper, Ken Buck epitomized their parties this decade - coloradopolitics.com

Mark Shields:

I think others are tempted to follow.

I think Lisa Murkowski, let's first acknowledge, she is unique. In the past 65 years, exactly one United States senator has won as a write-in candidate. She did that in 2010, after she lost the Republican primary to the Tea Party candidate backed by Sarah Palin and Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin and all sorts of other distinguished Americans.

And she came back and won as a write-in. So she stared into her political grave already. I mean, she knows. I mean, she's not a bed-wetter or a nervous Nellie, or whatever you want to call it, when it comes to anxiety.

So, I think that that gives her a certain independence that many of her colleagues in both parties don't have.

And I think I think it's significant. I think David's point about Mitch McConnell is an important one, that Mitch McConnell is strictly an inside player. He can't take it outside.

In other words, if it's a debate about outside, Mitch McConnell loses. He's a very formidable operator inside the Senate, sort of when nobody's looking in procedures and this and that.

But, I mean, this is a question. Are they going to just rush to judgment, ignore any witnesses, ignore testimony, and live by the lie which the president is telling, that is, I want these people to testify, I have forbidden them to testify, but I want them to testify, because I want it out in the open?

Well, you can't have it both ways.

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Shields and Brooks on 2019 in review, 2020 predictions - PBS NewsHour

Has a tiger come to tea at the Lupus film studios? No, but an equally disruptive guest has turned up. There are dozens of people beavering away on each floor of this smart London townhouse animators, producers, artists when my two-year-old daughter Romy arrives for a sneak preview of what theyre working on: an animated version of Judith Kerrs beloved childrens book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, which turned 50 last year.

Providing a rampaging toddler doesnt accidentally unplug all their computers, the animated story of Sophie, Mummy and the unexpected stripy visitor who eats and drinks them out of house and home will air on Channel 4 on Christmas Eve. But rogue two-year-olds are not all the team has had to contend with.

Three months ago, says producer Ruth Fielding, the colouring process was proving so time-consuming she doubted they had the money or time to finish it. The swift recruitment of 20 students from Middlesex University solved that problem. There was also trouble over a scene from the book that shows the tiger picking up a teapot and pouring scalding hot tea straight into his mouth. We had to add a line for Mummy that says, Be careful, its a bit ... hot! says Fielding. It makes for a comedic moment, but it was actually borne out of Channel 4 worrying that it could be classed as imitable behaviour.

There was also, more sadly, the death of the storys creator, aged 95, in May. Kerr had been very involved: advising on the script, approving the cast, even chipping in on the precise shade of red used for Sophies coat. And, before all this, Lupus first had to convince Kerr they were the right people to bring her story which has sold more than 5m copies to the screen. The hand-drawn aesthetic that made their version of Were Going on a Bear Hunt such a treat helped their case, while the fact that Kerr was allowed to weigh in on the film was doubtless another factor.

Initially, there were a few more lines for the tiger, says Robin Shaw, the director. She wasnt having any of it and she was bang on. The Tiger only says two things in the book, but you dont ever feel hes lacking in presence or character. The minute you put words in his mouth, he becomes someone else.

Shaw hit it off with Kerr: theyd talk endlessly about pencils, lines, the use of perspective. He remembers telling her how clever it was that the Tigers eyes are always perfectly aligned with the vanishing points and the focus of the page.

And she said, Oooh, really? I didnt realise Id done that. says Shaw laughing. It was all natural for her.

Was it hard to carry on after she died? Of course it was sad she wouldnt be there to see it finished. But, in a strange way, it was motivating it made us want to do an even better job.

Its time to take a tour of the building. Romy has been temporarily distracted by a tea party the team have put on for her, so I sneak out with line producer Adam Jackson-Nocher. He shows me a vast storyboard pinned along the corridor, with each panel colour-coded to show where theyre all at. Its head-spinning stuff. There are 20,000 individual drawings all needing sketching, tidying, colouring and finessing to make this 24-minute film. Technology plays a part a nifty brush has been designed to paint instant furry tiger stripes but for the most part its drawn by hand.

The team talk me through a scene where the camera is looking down from the ceiling, spinning around as buns tumble towards the table. Computer-generated animation would speed things up here, but it would also give everything a consistent correct look and that is not how Kerr drew the book. Entire kitchen units would change or even disappear with a turn of the page, depending on how Kerr wanted things to look.

To make this charming inconsistency work, an 80-strong team had to draw under strict guidance, each fully understanding not just how the tiger should look but how he moved and what sort of character he was. Hes the Roger Moore of tigers, shouts Shaw from across the room. I laugh but it turns out hes serious: He breezes in, affects everyones life, manages to get exactly what he wants, then breezes out again leaving everyone feeling kind of used but happy with that. Hes a seducer, a charmer. Hell only do something if he wants to, and will only give something if it looks like he might get something in return. Completely selfish, but in the nicest possible way.

Its time to test the magic, so we head back to the tea party room for a screening. Things get off to an unpromising start when I walk in to find Romy ignoring the biscuits and fruit juice in favour of playing with the offices fancy Fortnum and Mason china tea set. I clench my teeth as she bashes the delicate cups together.

Then just as Im cursing myself for breaking the golden never-bring-your-child-to-work-unless-you-absolutely-have-to rule the screen catches her attention. Seeing the characters shes grown to love come to life mesmerises her, even though many have still to be coloured in. Occasionally, they disappear altogether, to be replaced by handwritten notes. Despite this, its clear the story hasnt lost any of the warmth of Kerrs original. The tiger retains the slight edge of menace that makes him so captivating, and theres excellent casting in the voices of David Oyelowo (Tiger), Tamsin Greig (Mummy) and Benedict Cumberbatch (Daddy).

To turn this very short story into nearly half an hour of animation has involved a bit of licence, most notably the addition of a glorious musical interlude sung by Robbie Williams, who fell in love with the book after reading it to his daughter, Teddy. Again, Kerr had an input into this musical passage, suggesting that its references to such foods as pizza were replaced by more traditionally British items, such as ice cream and chocolate cake.

Most people who have read The Tiger Who Came to Tea will have a favourite illustration. For many, its the evening scene after Daddy comes home and, realising theres no food left in the house, takes Sophie and Mummy out to a cafe. Sophie is dressed in her nightie, coat and wellies, but just behind her sits a stripy, ginger cat in the glow of the street lights. For Fielding, one of the animations key illustrations isnt actually part of the story instead, it features on the inside sleeve of some versions of the book. It shows Sophie and the tiger drinking lemonade together through straws.

There was a bit of a eureka moment when we were writing the script because we realised that Sophie could imagine what it would be like if the tiger stayed for ever. So she recreates him going to school and sitting on her bed, then comes to the realisation that actually it would be ridiculous you cant have a tiger at home. Judith responded really well to this idea, meaning were not confined to the four walls of the house.

Indeed, if the book itself is about one thing then its imagination. The huge amount of white space on almost every page invites readers to let their own minds run free. Perhaps this is why the story lends itself to so many different readings, from feminist ones (is the Tiger the male of the house who does no housework?) to Michael Rosens notion that the stripy visitor is an intruding Gestapo officer. (Kerr grew up in Germany but the family fled to Switzerland and then Britain as the Nazis closed in.)

When we first read the book to Romy, my wife was pregnant with our second child and it was hard to avoid the metaphor: here comes a new guest to upend the nice time you had planned with Mummy. But Kerr always insisted the story be taken at face value, that its about a childs most wonderful fantasies. Romys reaction is testament to that and ever since shes seen the tiger slinking around the screen she hasnt stopped wanting him to come for tea.

The Tiger Who Came to Tea is on Channel 4 on Christmas Eve at 7.30pm.

Link:
'He's the Roger Moore of tigers!' how The Tiger Who Came to Tea came to TV - The Guardian