“Comfort is the enemy of progress.” – P.T. Barnum

The Democratic Party likes to label itself the “big tent,” where everyone is welcome and we do our best to make sure everyone’s basic needs are taken care of… that’s the ideal, anyway.

In the Summer of 2024, though, we watched as a group of sideshow entertainers let loose the lions and tigers and bears of the party, attacking our Ringleader in a vicious and senseless way, and 107 days out, amid incredible political pressure and turmoil, he tossed his hat out of the ring. The very people that demand loyalty without question to their words and beliefs, who coined the phrase, “Vote Blue, No Matter Who,” told us that our President was not capable of winning and they wanted a change.

They wanted a change. Without consulting the voters on the ground. They wanted a change.

It was a move that angered and hurt many of us who have worked for years in the background – who were working on the campaign in various capacities across the country. What hurt even more is that these same people were hoping to have a rushed primary, voiding the Vice President as the only option that should have mattered.

You see, we have a process for challenging a seated President, even if that challenge comes from within their own party. None of the individuals named by Hunter Biden even attempted to bring these issues up in 2023 or fight for a candidate to run against President Biden then. It would have been all but career suicide – dangling off the high wire or forcing their heads into a tiger’s mouth, without practice. The very people that tell us this is not to be done, that tell us to rally around the leader, waited in the background, until Joe Biden was at his most vulnerable.

I could have respected an official primary challenge to Joe Biden. Primary challenges are supposed to strengthen the party, but more and more they end up where the very people that attacked our President want them to… and, the question is… should they?

We don’t know which candidates the players mentioned had in mind as they relentlessly pushed a man into his retirement, but it was exceedingly clear that the candidate they had in mind was not Kamala Harris. The grassroots backbone of the party had to organize and make it known that if it was not Harris, not because she was the Vice President, but because she was elected as Biden’s running mate in the primary, that they would not be participating in the election at all.

Here’s the thing, though… those same individuals, have built their own tent. They exist in a group of wannabe ringleaders, feasting off of past victories they either experienced twenty or more years ago, or that they were tangibly responsible for: meaning, a great candidate at the right time walked in and they took the credit and have built incredible wealth from their fellow Democrats, as a result.

These people have been feasting off of these “accomplishments” for years. And those that are angry that Hunter Biden read them for the filth they are, who want to preach about party unity right now, are telling on themselves about how often they’ve given money to those same players to give advice that is long past its best by date.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” Carville’s favorite phrase, was essential to President Clinton’s 1992 victory. The problem is, it’s not “the economy, stupid,” to the voters. It’s rent. It IS the cost of eggs and how hard it is to fill a gas tank. The American worker is continually being squeezed by a minimum wage that is no longer competitive for the cost of living. Nowhere in this country can you live in a 1-bedroom apartment, by yourself and still afford groceries, utilities, and transportation. Yet, the individuals Hunter called out, have lived so comfortably that they don’t see how bad the wealth gap has gotten.

They don’t talk about how it’s multi-millionaires and billionaires against the rest of us or how they’re using immigrants and trans people to cause division. Because they suck up to those same multi-millionaires and billionaires for donations and allow the divisions to continue because it is profitable for them to do so.

When we talk about the Party elite, we are talking about these very same people that have wrapped themselves in a ring and tell us we can only participate in the process – OUR process – if we agree to everything they say and are selling. We’re not allowed to have debates or a difference of opinion, because these people are making money by being on the inside of the outside party. Their advice is only valuable if there is a challenge.

These people have become comfortable repeating the same advice over and over again from bygone eras. They live in the past, but with new clothes, new cars, million-dollar homes, a disconnected juxtaposition who keep promising us that if we just listen to them enough and do what they say, we’ll be in power again.

Only, we’re not any closer to accomplishing those goals with the advice they continue to repeat.

We no longer know what this country is, to be honest. We keep hearing that “progressives can’t get elected,” and while that is true in some parts of the country, it’s not true everywhere. Those progressive values and that turn back towards social programs that enabled this country to build itself out of a great depression have somehow taken a backseat. Maybe if we hit rock bottom again, they’ll come back? What a needless gamble for the average American.

It’s not just Carville, Clooney, Dunn, Axelrod, Tapper, or the Crooked Pod Bros. It’s anyone playing inside baseball who is upset by what Hunter Biden had to say, thinking his attacks were on the party instead of the people that have looted it for years, not just of money, but the voices of the voters who they drown out in the tent with an echo chamber loud speaker that gets louder as it gets repeated.

Hunter Biden tapped into what many voters sitting at home are saying and have said for several election cycles now. But with data-centric campaigns, that information only flows one way, from campaigns to voters, with very little grassroots effort made to understand what people are experiencing in their daily lives. Then, we wonder why voters no longer listen to us or even want to try to communicate because they can’t be heard in that big tent echo chamber where they’re being told which part of the Democratic Party wins elections, what messaging works, what they’re thinking and, strangely, what their needs are with the audacity of someone who doesn’t have to be worried about an unforeseen emergency they can’t afford.

Voters know what’s going on, even if they don’t “know” the details. They know because these people in the Party, the people that are listened to and paid for their advice have long been out of touch with voters on the ground.

These people live in comfort in their big tent where the echo of their own voices continually drowns out the sounds of the crowds, those crowds whose lives are harder now than they were before any of these players made their moves or had success.

The players live in comfort and they are the enemy of progress and pretending otherwise is to continue the echo that is drowning the big tent in quicksand.