All righty, got a new headline that I hope is less offensive than the old one. I expected a lot of heat from some of my fellow kossaks for what I have been saying in these diaries and I sure have been getting it. The bearer of bad news always gets heat and while I am certainly not masochistic, I am from the generation whose parents or coach would sit you down and tell you that there was no hope in you taking more guitar lessons because you have been taking them for two years now and can not play recognizable tune. You just are not talented in this regard and you seem to be interested in other things so why not direct your focus on those things? Yes there was some ego bruising. But after a while, most kids feel relieved from the burden that had been lifted from their shoulders. Others, like Michael Jordan, would go on to emphatically prove their coach wrong.
I have been a faithful participant in the Democratic party for over 45 years. That’s a long time. I was a child when LBJ rammed the Civil Rights bill through Congress and willingly and knowingly sent the Democratic Party into political oblivion because the morality of what he was doing was too important. After the bill passed, I saw my father change from southern racist to a passive racist to a supporter of civil rights. Doing this freed him from the hatred he had learned to display so he could be accepted in white, southern society. He owned a tractor dealership in Virginia. And after his metamorphosis, he hung a letter that he had received from Ralph Abernathy in the lobby. It thanked him for his support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I asked him if this would cost him business and he said he didn’t care.
I guess that’s where I am now with DailyKos. What started out for me 11 years ago as a Democratic Party reform movement has evolved into a Trump bashing and liberal bashing entity. In these eleven years I have evolved from a southern conservative Democrat to a liberal. I support with all my heart and resources liberal issues: livable minimum wage, universal health care, a woman’s right to choose, universal college education; I support these issues not because they are politically expedient or easy to achieve, but because they are the right the thing to do.
Now, there are numerous polls that clearly show that most people support us on these issues when they are decoupled from the Democratic label. So they could become politically expedient if we can find a way to improve our messaging. So what is the problem? Where is the disconnect? Why don’t we do this? I think it’s because what Kos said eleven years ago is true today. Our party leadership is so immersed in collecting large donations from corporations and ultra high income earners that they have forgotten about the working class and what is important to them. The result? The working class is forgetting about the Democratic Party as a means to advance their economic and social interests.
Let’s look at our two most advanced party leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. First a disclaimer, I love Nancy Pelosi. She has wit and grace. Under her leadership, the Democrats in the House perform like a well oiled Singer sewing machine on all types of legislation. She has pulled the country out of the fire on numerous occasions both as Speaker and Minority Leader. I love her and because I love her, I advocate replacing her as a public spokesperson for the party because she is not at all talented in this regard and her considerable talents for organisation and whipping the vote are legendary and she should continue in this role.
So what about Hillary? She could be a healer and architect of a new Democratic Party but that is not what I am seeing her pursue. I supported her in 2008 against Obama when I was more conservative. I admired her for accepting the loss and accepting the position of Secretary of State in the Obama administration. After reading Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, I saw her strength: Hillary is a real, honest to goodness policy wonk like no other. She has detailed plans for all her goals and when she tells you she can do something there is a very good chance that it will get done. On the other hand, people like myself who support Bernie, have goals without detailed plans and we still advocate pursuit of the goals merely because we think it is morally the right thing to do. Shattered tells us that when Bernie met with the editorial board on the New York Daily News, Pulitzer Prize winner Art Browne, asked Bernie exactly how he would go about breaking up the big banks and Bernie didn’t have a clue.
he didn’t have a plan with what to do with the banks after they were broken up and there was already existing authority under the Dodd-Frank law to wind down banks.
And this has always been one of the rubs between liberals and conservatives hasn’t it? Idealism vs pragmatism when what we need is both. We need to have ideals and stick to them and we need to have pragmatism to achieve these ideals. What we don’t need is to change our ideals to serve pragmatism which is what the Democratic Party leadership has been advocating for forty years. And it hasn’t worked at all.
The only path to victory IMHO, is for pragmatists in our party to take our goals to heart and not request that they be changed in the name of pragmatism. And we need idealists to accept a less than perfect solution after the pragmatists have done 99% of the work and actually delivered something useful. As an idealist, I am ready to do that. As a pragmatist, I am ready to raise a flag and say “Hey, what we are doing isn’t working. Let’s get back to our values and ideals which most people support”.