Vulnerable Democrats denounce socialism, spend the same week wooing Nantucket's donor class

…(cont) Five days later, Fox News is reporting on the same party's leadership out on Nantucket. Hakeem Jeffries is named. Jon Ossoff is named. So is a Democrat by the name of Josh Turek — the wire item doesn't give him a title, just lists him among the Democrats it says are "flocking" to the island, their word, to meet with what the story calls deep-pocketed donors.

I drove out to the toll plaza this afternoon, had a check to deposit at the bank on that side of town, and my E-ZPass reader's been acting up since spring — needs something replaced, the guy at the shop wasn't sure what — so I sat there a while working the coin machine instead. In about two hours parked off to the side, I counted six cars go through the fast lane without slowing down at all. Six, in two hours. Not one of those six pulled over to make the case for why they took that lane instead of mine. That's just what the lane does. You don't stop and explain it. You go through it.

I'm not saying a floor vote is a toll booth. I'm saying I noticed the same shape in both places: two lanes running at the same time, and only one of them makes you stop and account for yourself.

The thing sitting with me — and I'll only put it this plainly the once — is that a resolution denouncing socialism and a fundraising swing through one of the most expensive zip codes in the country landed in the same calendar week, by the wire's own dating. Not the same year. The same week. First to the sixth.

Two days into that stretch, on September 3rd, the Washington Examiner had Democrats split on how to counter the Republican midterm convention — split on messaging, is how it's described there. I don't know if that split is the same one running underneath the other two stories or a separate one entirely. I just know it sits right in the middle of those five days, like a marker somebody left in the road.

What's different about the two events, if you look at what each one actually required to happen: the resolution needed a majority in the room willing to say aye on socialism. It's a floor vote — nothing in the record shows it costing the government or the party a dollar. The trip to Nantucket needed a plane ticket, a hotel room on an island, and a list of donors wealthy enough to be worth flying out to meet in the first place.

Oh — hold on, before you go. Of the two things this party did with its week, only one of them needed money to happen at all. The vote against socialism cost nothing. The room full of donors cost whatever it costs to get to Nantucket and be worth talking to once you're there. So of the two — the free vote or the expensive room — which one, going by where the actual effort and the actual dollars went that week, is the one this party built its whole week around?