Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

All year, Rep. Seth Moulton has insisted it was time for a “new generation of leadership” who would put “people over politics.” The Massachusetts Democrat created the Serve America PAC to endorse candidates he felt fit that bill, starting with military veterans like himself, then broadening to other “service-driven leaders.” He not only raised $8 million for the people he endorsed, he also forged relationships with them by stumping in their districts and providing strategic counsel.

Moulton’s electoral agenda for the midterms ran alongside his long-standing goal of ousting Nancy Pelosi from the House Democratic leadership. He kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism throughout the year, and just before the election, he dismissed the idea of Pelosi serving a few more years as a “transitional speaker” if Democrats won the House. And when 20 of his candidates won, within hours he was burning up the phone lines to assemble his network of candidates, organize a revolt and block Pelosi’s reclamation of the gavel. Two days after the election, Moulton declared that his crew was committed to voting against Pelosi on the House floor, where only a handful of renegade Democrats would be needed to deny her a winning majority. The following week, he said he was “100 percent confident” he had the votes, and Pelosi’s time was up.


And yet she’s still here.

Pelosi strides into Wednesday’s House Democratic Caucus elections with her head held high, and her high heels on Moulton’s neck. She remains without a Democratic challenger. She has unleashed a wave of support from the Democratic faithful, from Barack Obama on down. She turned two of Moulton’s allies who had, just days before, stated their opposition to her. A third opponent suggested he’ll vote for Pelosi on the floor if no other Democratic option emerges. And she has kept several other Serve America PAC alumni from jumping aboard Moulton’s rickety bandwagon. While Pelosi isn’t completely in the clear for the final vote on January 3 on the House floor—with Moulton clinging to 14 fellow holdouts and eight other Democrats in the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus playing hard to get—she unquestionably holds the whip hand.

Dumping a historic figure like Pelosi, the first female speaker, after she weathered a Republican blitzkrieg to help her party win back the House, was always going to be a tall order. (And don’t say I didn’t warn them!) But Moulton’s operation has been, to borrow some military jargon, FUBAR. He’s poised to not only lose his battle with the party establishment, but to lose in such humiliating fashion that it could ruin his reputation and douse whatever presidential fires may be burning in his belly.

Just how did he botch this so badly? Let us count the ways:

Too much Moulton: The Pelosi critics have bristled at the attempts to dub them “#fivewhiteguys,” referring to Moulton and four of his top allies. Defending himself at an Amesbury, Massachusetts, town hall this month, Moulton defended himself by saying, “I think it’s kind of sad people have turned this into a sexist argument, because women have been leading it from the very beginning,”

But if that’s the case, why do I keep seeing Moulton’s mug on TV? Why is Moulton the one giving most of the public whip counts? Why was Moulton, in the immediate aftermath of the election, speaking on behalf of newly elected Democrats and declaring, prematurely, what they would do?

If Moulton didn’t want his effort to look like a mansplaining young punk taking down a vastly more experienced woman, then he shouldn’t have placed himself in the spotlight. He should have found a woman prepared to be the public face of the effort, ideally someone prepared to run for the post, and then gotten out of the way.

Too much misguided identity politics: Moulton has also tried to deflect the sexism charge by insisting that what he really wants is to wipe out the whole lot of geriatric Democratic leaders, in the name of diversity. He urged Rep. Marcia Fudge, an African-American woman, to run for speaker, noting on CNN that, “We've never had a leader of the House who's a woman of color.”

This was before Fudge, whom Moulton called his “mentor,” dropped her opposition to Pelosi in exchange for a subcommittee chairmanship. But even before Fudge’s flip, Moulton’s explanation didn’t hold up. If the problem of the Democratic leadership is a lack of diversity, why target only a woman, and ignore the current minority whip, Rep. Steny Hoyer, who is the lone white male in the Democratic House leadership?

Moulton’s strained attempt to position himself as a diversity champion also fell flat in a recent CNN.com op-ed. He argued that the seniority system backed by the current Democratic leadership was hurting efforts to diversify the ranks of committee leaders: “ … many of the ranking members have been there for years, and the vast majority are white. Only three ranking members are women. We can't expect anything to change if we keep putting the same people in the same positions.”

That’s misleading. Here are the women and people of color slotted to become committee chairs in the next Congress: Reps. Nita Lowey (Appropriations); Bobby Scott (Education and Workforce); Maxine Waters (Financial Services); Bennie Thompson (Homeland Security); Zoe Lofgren (House Administration); Raul Grijalva (Natural Resources); Elijah Cummings (Oversight and Government Reform); Eddie Bernice Johnson (Science, Space and Technology); Nydia Velazquez (Small Business); and Mark Takano (Veterans Affairs). That amounts to nearly half of the available House committee chairs.

These incoming chairs are decidedly not part of the “new generation of leadership.” Most are at least 70 years old and are getting their due after toiling in Congress for years. That’s because of the establishment’s seniority system, not despite of it.

No coalition: Moulton’s shrinking band of renegades does not come close to encompassing the whole spectrum of Pelosi critics. Some Democrats further to the left complain Pelosi has been too compromising with Republicans and too close to fat cat donors. They still grouse that in her first stint as speaker she helped pass the 2008 Wall Street bailout, and imposed “PAYGO” rules intended to constrain spending.

Meanwhile, the nine Democratic centrists in the Problems Solvers Caucus have been threatening to withhold votes for Pelosi if she doesn’t accept their proposals for rules changes that are designed to facilitate bipartisan legislation.

Moulton failed to unite these factions. There is only one Congressional Progressive Caucus member on his public letter opposing Pelosi, and only one member of the Problem Solvers.

Pelosi can’t bank on the Problem Solvers yet, but since they are operating separately from Moulton’s group, both holdout factions lack strength in numbers. If they had joined forces, along with a contingent of progressives, the total size of their coalition would have been more imposing, potentially making it harder for Pelosi to whittle down the opposition with individual side deals.

Of course, such coalition building is easier said than done. It is very difficult to get such disparate factions to agree on a common set of principles, let alone a single alternative candidate. But if you are going to claim that you speak for the Democratic Caucus, then you should probably do a better job of uniting its factions than the person whom you are trying to defeat.

No cards: Moulton is prone to giving Pelosi backhanded compliments, such as, “God knows she’s a good arm-twister.” But being dismissive of her vote-counting and deal-making skills, instead of emulating them, hasn’t served him well. As a two-term backbencher with little legislative accomplishments of which to speak, Moulton may have failed to appreciate that while Pelosi has a pile of cards to play, he has few to none.

Moulton can’t offer chairmanships, as Pelosi could to secure Fudge’s support. He can’t promise to prioritize a congressman’s pet piece of legislation, as Pelosi could to nail down former opponent Rep. Brian Higgins. Maybe a live candidate for speaker would be able to match Pelosi in such offers, but Moulton doesn’t have one of those. All he has is a claim that Pelosi is bad baggage for Democrats, in hopes of appealing to congressional members’ base political instincts.

But that argument is fundamentally flawed.

No case: Moulton had the chutzpah to downplay this year’s election results, and Pelosi’s role in the victory, by arguing on MSNBC that “she’s won three elections in the last 12 years … we have 30 fewer seats than we did when she took over, so this actually really hasn’t gone well.” Few Democrats are buying that Pelosi doesn’t deserve credit for this year’s 8-point popular vote margin and a net gain of up to 40 seats, due in large part to her aggressive fundraising ($127 million more than Moulton scraped up) and her forceful exertion of message discipline. And most of the Democratic candidates that flipped Republican seats actually did not express opposition to Pelosi, undermining Moulton’s claim that she’s forcing new members to break pledges on their first vote.

Beyond the weakness of their political argument, Moulton and his allies sabotaged themselves by failing to articulate a substantive critique about Pelosi’s tenure as speaker and minority leader. Most of the time, they preface their criticisms by showering Pelosi with praise for all her past legislative accomplishments, but that only makes their subsequent complaints look petty and empty. Without evidence of poor job performance to justify Pelosi’s ouster, any calls for a “new generation of leadership” rest on little else but age discrimination.

No slate: It’s a big problem Moulton failed to recruit a challenger to run against Pelosi. It’s an even bigger problem he failed to recruit a slate of challengers to run against the entire ruling troika of Pelosi, Hoyer and Rep. Jim Clyburn.

If Moulton had a diverse slate of candidates ready to announce the day after the election, he could prove he was not singling out a woman for scorn. He could accommodate all the various ideological factions with grumbles about Pelosi. He would have a team that could at least try to outdo Pelosi in the favors game.

Instead, the target is strictly Pelosi, and the strategy, as articulated by Moulton ally Rep. Kathleen Rice, is to first show “she cannot get to 218” and then “challengers will emerge.” That is a bluff just crying out to be called. With Pelosi already picking off opponents, few believe she cannot get to 218, and in turn, no challengers are emerging. Without a growing coalition, without a compelling argument and without the support of any prominent Democratic constituencies, Moulton’s forces will face enormous pressure to surrender before the first ballot is cast in hopes of avoiding chaos on the House floor.

With that strategy flagging, Moulton is moving the goalposts. The Washington Post reported on Monday that now he wants to talk to Pelosi about backing replacements for Hoyer and Clyburn. He’s a little late for that conversation. Hoyer already has lined up sufficient public support to become majority leader, and a brief challenge to Clyburn by Rep. Diana DeGette failed to generate interest, so she folded. If Moulton had a full slate of challengers in the first place, he might have made matters more interesting.

Perhaps Moulton always knew what an uphill battle he was fighting, but thought he would at least burnish his brand as a young military veteran ready to bust up the Washington establishment. Instead of being introduced to the public as the kind of “service-driven” candidate that performed well in the midterms, he now looks more like a caricature of the “mediocre white male,” brimming with unwarranted confidence and trying to steamroll over more qualified women.

Though if that’s really the case, he probably runs for president anyway.