I wanted to flag your attention to this Dave Weigel piece in Semafor. It’s about an event (“WelcomeFest”) put on by a centrist PAC called WelcomePAC, which is presenting itself as a kind of latter-day Democratic Leadership Council or punchy and centrist group focused on picking fights with the party’s leftwing. It’s a kind of set piece for a lot of stuff that’s going on among Democrats right now. The big push is to defang the power of “the groups” and then on a secondary level get the party away from various litmus tests and speech policing. Then there’s a secondary push for “abundance” politics. They brought together several centristy members of Congress, Ritchie Torres, Jake Auchincloss, Elissa Slotkin and then commentator Matt Yglesias, data influencer David Schor and former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson and others.
As Weigel reports, moments after Torres starts his remarks this happens …
