[rad-green] Iowa Wasn't a Technology Failure. It Was a Failure of Democratic Values.

*https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/04/iowa-wasnt-technology-failure-it-was-failure-democratic-values
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/04/iowa-wasnt-technology-failure-it-was-failure-democratic-values>Common
Dreams          February 4, 2020*





*Iowa Wasn't a Technology Failure. It Was a Failure of Democratic
Values.This kind of behavior undercuts the Democratic Party politically. To
put it in today's corporatized vocabulary, "democracy" is the party’'s
brand—and lately they've been trashing it.by Richard Eskow*

[image: Troy Price, Chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, addresses the
media about the delayed results from last night's Iowa caucus at the Iowa
Events Center on February 04, 2020 in Des Moines, Iowa. from last night's
Iowa caucus at the Iowa Events Center on February 04, 2020 in Des Moines,
Iowa. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)]

*Troy Price, Chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, addresses the media
about the delayed results from last night's Iowa caucus at the Iowa Events
Center on February 04, 2020 in Des Moines, Iowa. from last night's Iowa
caucus at the Iowa Events Center on February 04, 2020 in Des Moines, Iowa.
(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)*

What we saw at the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucuses wasn’t a failure of
technology. It was a failure of values.

This failure casts a shadow on the party’s ability to carry out its basic
responsibilities. Worse, it suggests that its leaders care more about
helping their friends than serving the public interest.

It’s no exaggeration to call this a crisis of legitimacy. Like the GOP, the
Democratic Party holds a position that is unique among democracies. It is,
in effect, one half of a state-sponsored duopoly that controls electoral
politics. That kind of unaccountable power is detrimental to democracy. As
long as it exists, however, it confer an obligation to serve the interests
of democracy.

The Republicans have made it clear they couldn’t care less. But the GOP’s
abdication places an even heavier burden on Democrats to uphold basic
democratic standards: by rejecting cronyism and oligarchy, promoting
transparency, and ensuring that every person’s vote counts.

They failed to uphold this burden in Iowa, and not for the first time.

This kind of behavior undercuts Democrats politically. To put it in today’s
corporatized vocabulary, “democracy” is the party’s brand—and lately
they’ve been trashing it.

Shadow Play

On its face, the level of incompetence leading up to the Iowa fiasco seems
almost incomprehensible.

First, a party that has spent the last three years talking about data
hacking took a manual process and shifted it onto on one of the most
hackable devices in the world: a cell phone.

Then, having created a vulnerability where there had been none, it spent
more money protecting itself from this self-created vulnerability.

The technology in question was then rushed into production without proper
training for its users, when the stakes for democracy were high—and the
whole world was watching.

Crazy, right? Actually, no.

It all makes perfect sense—once you realized that the software was only a
secondary concern for the people involved. Max Blumenthal
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth-klarman-iowas-voting-app/>
reports
that Shadow Inc, the software company that produced the app, had ties to
the Buttigieg campaign both as a contractor and (through its top funder) as
a donor. (“Shadow Inc”? Really? Were all the best evil names taken, like
“Spectre” and “Hydra?”)

Shadow Inc’s website says that its employees are veterans of the Clinton
and Obama campaigns, as well as the DNC—although, like the Men in Black, it
refuses to identify its operatives by name. This reinforces the sense of an
insider clique with an interest in the caucus results, rather than a team
of the most qualified tech experts.

As Blumenthal observes, “the conspiracy theories write themselves.”

The technology failed, but the deal-making worked just fine. Its underlying
purpose wasn’t to produce an app, or any other product. The deal was the
product. The app was merely the residue of an agreed-upon cash transfer
among insiders. Its functionality was a secondary concern.

Machine Failure

Not that this was necessarily a conscious choice. I keep hearing that many
of the people involved in these deals are good folks: nice, decent,
friendly, likable. I don’t doubt it. You can be all those things and still
be part of a culture with misguided priorities and broken values. But the
longer you’re part of that culture, the more likely you are to lose sight
of your own basic values—or, worse, to delude yourself into thinking you’re
still living by them.

Nice or not, they take care of their own. What else explains Iowa’s hiring
of Robby Mook, the manager of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign, as a
cyber security consultant? Mook is widely considered one of the nice guys
(I’ve never met him). But his flawed data analysis is seen as playing a
major role in her loss. Later, he even misattributed the actions
<https://ourfuture.org/20170223/its-time-to-reject-the-deep-state-and-fight-oligarchy-not-each-other>
of
Macedonian teenagers to Russian government operatives. That doesn’t suggest
an excess of cybersecurity talent.

That, too, is secondary. The party establishment runs itself as a private
fiefdom, one whose primary purpose is to take care of its centrist allies.
Think of it as a Jobs Guarantee for people who are against a Jobs Guarantee
for anyone else.

The Democrats may present themselves as the party of meritocracy—a
neoliberal notion that can be found in its longstanding rhetoric about a
“level playing field” and “giving everyone a fair chance.” Within the party
itself, however, merit often takes a backseat to connections and cronyism.
The centrist Democratic belief that competition breeds excellence—a variant
of what Thomas Frank called “the ideology of professionalism”—doesn’t seem
to apply to its own operations.

Sure, most political machines take care of their own. But even the most
corrupt, like Boss Tweed’s in New York, also managed to do things with at
least a modicum of efficiency. If you handed your alderman a few bucks and
told him the sewers on your street needed fixing, he’d take your money. But
the sewers would get fixed. This machine takes your cash and hires
consultants.  Maybe the sewers get fixed, maybe not. It doesn’t matter much
either way, as long as the right people get the gig.

That’s why so many Democratic campaign managers run one failed campaign
after another, and keep getting hired anyway. There’s nothing wrong with
letting consultants make a decent living (as long as they don’t get greedy
and make millions doing ad buys). But shouldn’t they earn these important
jobs with a record of accomplishment?  Where’s that “level playing field”
we’ve heard so much about?

The Worst Worst-Case Scenario

The *New York Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/us/politics/iowa-caucuses-hacking-security.html>*
reported
last month that Mook’s firm ran a “drill of worst-case scenarios” on
cybersecurity for Iowa’s Democratic and Republican parties. “We ran them
through the ringer and pushed them really hard,” Mook was quoted as saying.

By consulting on cybersecurity threats, Mook was cashing in on a wave of
exaggerated fear he played a major role
<https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-the-russia-spin-got-so-much-torque_b_5906e5f6e4b03b105b44ba15>
in
creating.  And while everyone focused on cybersecurity, the Democrats
neglected basic functionality. Some reports said that party officials
didn’t even want anyone to download the app or be trained on it until the
very last minute, because they were so worried about interference
<https://ktiv.com/2020/02/04/caucus-organizers-had-just-hours-to-test-new-app/#.XjmGwI5scH9.twitter>
.

That seems like a metaphor for the last three years: Democrats focused on
outside threats while overlooking their own job duties.

It’s not that they’re indifferent to those duties—like winning elections,
or crafting policies that serve the majority’s interests. On balance, most
insiders would undoubtedly prefer winning to losing. And they’d probably
rather accomplish good things for the electorate than not. It’s not that
they’re indifferent to these things. They just don’t let them interfere
with their self-interest.

Democratic activist Nomiki Konst, who knows a lot about the party’s
operations, tweeted
<https://twitter.com/NomikiKonst/status/1224708393320972291> that “All
roads lead to budget oversight and conflicts of interest… Who signed the
contract for this app? And what bidding was there?”

She’s right, and rules changes
<https://twitter.com/NomikiKonst/status/1224584615316348928> like the ones
she proposes are urgently needed. But that’s only part of the solution. The
Democratic Party must confront this crisis of legitimacy by changing an
insider culture that serves it, and the public interest, poorly. If it
doesn’t do that, and soon, the result may well be another victory for Trump
and his party.

They may deserve that, but we don’t.

*Originally published at www.patreon.com/thezerohour
<https://www.patreon.com/posts/33747474>*

Richard (RJ) Eskow <https://www.commondreams.org/author/richard-eskow> is
Senior Advisor for Health and Economic Justice at Social Security Works
<https://socialsecurityworks.org/> and the host of The Zero Hour with RJ
Eskow <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcnNWp-tx3-FaCWV4pMFTAg> on Free
Speech TV. Follow him on Twitter: @rjeskow  <https://twitter.com/rjeskow>

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