The announcement by Bernie Sanders that he is once again seeking the Democratic nomination for president triggered flashbacks to 2016. Daily Kos was blowing up as it fractionated into fierce partisans for/against Sanders and Clinton (plus those who championed their own favorites.) And it’s not over, as this diary on the rec list attests.
But apart from deja vu all over again, can we try for something different this time?
Cutting to the Chase
In the interests of those who don’t wish to wade through my overly wordy pontifications, I’d like to propose some suggestions to get us through to 2020 and taking back the country. (You can still read on if you choose.) Here goes:
- It’s early days yet. Go ahead and start supporting the candidate of your choice — but also keep in mind that most of them will fall by the wayside in the months ahead. Your candidate may be one of them. Purity tests are all well and good, but don’t expect a candidate to check every box. Be prepared to consider someone else — and support them.
- Don’t let ratf*cking lead you astray. Every Democratic candidate will be put under a microscope by Republicans (and likely the Russians) looking for anything that can be used against them. Kevin Drum has proposed a 20-20 rule. How candidates respond can demonstrate their character and their ability to handle difficult situations. Watch and learn.
- Watch how candidates deal with their competitors for the nomination. Do they attack on personalities or policies? Can they frame differences as to why they are better, rather than as why their competitors are worse? Everything they say can and will be used against Democrats by Republicans. Let’s not give them any ammunition.
- The media will not be on our side — 40+ years of determined demagoguery by conservatives has the press predisposed to doubt the viability of progressive candidates, the whole “America is center-right nation” thing. Fear of leftist ‘extremism’ is a default narrative heavily pushed by the right every day. Don’t feed the narrative but don’t be intimidated either.
- The media hasn’t learned anything from 2016. Watch for horse-race reporting instead of serious examination. Watch them chase trivia and regurgitate GOP talking points. Beware the “very serious people” explaining at length why X will not work, why it will be too expensive, etc. etc. Don’t panic.
- Don’t forget the Trump wild card. The Mueller report will surface one way or another. The investigations in the House will start to drag stuff into the light at last. Trump and the GOP will get even more desperate — and who knows what extremes they will go to? Expect more outrageous behavior. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. Watch how the candidates respond.
- Climate Change is not going away. There will be more weather-related events, more disasters. The need to address it will become harder to deny. The refusal of Republicans to deal with it will be the subject of more and more ridiculous justifications. Democrats are coming together on this: go with it — and see who is making the best case for the Green New Deal.
- It will still be the economy, and there’s even more stupid. The ‘economic anxiety’ has been exacerbated by Trump’s trade wars, broken promises on jobs, and the tax return surprise so many people have gotten this year. The stock market is overdue for an ‘adjustment’. The deficit is exploding on the GOP watch. “Are you better off today than you were in 2016?” Again, GND — because it’s not just about climate. Which candidate can best get people to make that connection?
- It’s not just about US; under Trump the United States is no longer regarded as a trustworthy ally or the leader of the free world. If the current world order is breaking down, who are we going to see reshape it? China looks like the best bet — but what ever country winds up setting the agenda, they can not escape what climate change and competition for resources is doing to the planet. In more ways than one, we are looking at existential threats. The US can regain leadership the old-fashioned way: leading by good example. We need to remember this coming election has implications for the entire planet.
- Daily Kos is not the center of the universe either. Keep in mind that what you see and hear here and elsewhere on social media is only part of the story. What’s happening in the real world may be a different one altogether. Don’t let fights over ‘electability’ or some other test be the whole story, and don’t assume everyone shares your enthusiasms/dislikes. Remember also that some people will never abandon Trump, so don’t waste energy on them. Eyes on the prize, which brings me to my last point.
- Job One is simple. We must defeat Republicans at every level — not just the White House. We need to take back the Senate and keep the House. We MUST put judges on the courts. We need to take the states (New districts will be drawn up following the census — no more RedMap projects.) If your candidate does not make the cut, suck it up and do your best to make sure the winner is a Democrat, because the worst Democrat is better than the best Republican. And don’t think it’s over after the election. That’s when the real job starts: turning campaign promises into action.
Any questions? Feel free to comment.
A Few More Thoughts: An Embarrassment (NOT) of Riches
There is no shortage of Democratic candidates this time around — Hillary Clinton has not declared a candidacy, so the Democratic establishment doesn’t have a default candidate (unless you want to count Joe Biden, who has yet to declare despite urging.) The superdelegate factor has been addressed. Debbie Wasserman Schultz doesn’t have her thumb on the scales. No emails. No Uranium sales or child pizza parlor prostitution rings.
But who knows? Hillary may be occupied — Trump and the Republicans may yet try to put Clinton and other “Enemies of the People” on trial. They’re getting that crazy. And if they don’t have Trump to run in 2020 (fingers crossed), they’ve got nothing but Trump wanna-be’s.
Bernie Sanders has now re-entered the fray with a lot of pluses — and minuses. He already has a base of supporters. His agenda is no longer seen as a fringe offering; the Overton window is shifting. You can tell by how hard the Right Wing propaganda mills and the GOP are warning about evil Socialism, screaming we’ll become just like Venezuela!!!
You can also tell by how many Democratic contenders are adopting comparable talking points. The conversation is shifting. (They’ve all largely stopped running from healthcare for one thing — instead they’re talking about how to improve on Obamacare, and pushing the Green New Deal.)
Bernie may have reshaped the playing field — but he doesn’t own it.
Sanders still has baggage. He failed to appeal to some core Democratic constituencies last time around. He is an old white guy at a time when that is not necessarily a plus. His age is troubling — turning this country around is going to be a huge mental and physical task that would daunt someone 30 or 40 years younger.
There are those who blame him for Clinton’s loss because a chunk of his supporters stayed home on election day, and others decided that if they couldn’t have Bernie they’d go with Trump. AFAIK he is still not registered in the Democratic Party. And so on. Plus there’s another factor.
The War Between the Sexes
Give Hillary Clinton credit for this much. After seeing what happened to her in 2016 and what has happened to women in general since Republicans took control of everything in 2016, women are motivated like never before. They’re running for office — and winning. They’re seeking the nomination for the presidency — without running on family or establishment coattails. A woman is now in charge of the House of Representatives — again. (And Clinton did get a majority of the votes, after all.)
But the old obstacles are still out there. Is America ready for a woman president? Is there pushback against the #MeToo movement? Sexism is alive and well, if getting really defensive. A woman candidate is still faced with tests men aren’t.
Kirsten Gillibrand has been fighting for justice on gender issues for some time. When Al Franken turned out to have bad behavior problems, she ended up in the lead role in calling him to account for his actions. Franken resigned — and there are those who can’t forgive her for her role in that. The problem is, their outrage at Gillibrand has some real problems of its own.
Any woman who is intelligent, assertive, confident, and ambitious sets off reactions at an unconscious level in most Americans. What are seen as strengths for men too often are seen as negatives for women. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is driving Republicans nuts because she seems to be defying those stereotypes. Nancy Pelosi has been dealing with this crap her whole career. Can their examples finally smash the glass ceiling for women in politics when it comes to the Oval Office?
And don’t even start on the appearance thing. The moment the press starts talking about how attractive a woman candidate is, it has a negative impact. Just don’t go there, okay? Even Obama stumbled on this one. it doesn’t help.
A study released Monday sheds new light on last week's foofaraw over President Obama's comment that his friend and supporter California Attorney General Kamala Harris was "the best looking" AG in the land.
Sponsored by
Name It. Change It., a project of the
Women's Media Center and
She Should Run, the March survey of 1,500 likely voters nationwide found that no matter what is said about a female political candidate's appearance, it has a negative impact on what potential voters think of her.
(In a related aside to this, Democrats really need to develop a set of default positive ways to characterize themselves and their issues, in a counter to the way Newt Gingrich weaponized language. Democrats all need to be on the same page on this.)
Republicans are running on the Handmaids Platform, catering to poor, threatened males under attack — like Brett Kavanaugh. They’re characterizing efforts in blue states to nail down the abortion rights of Roe v. Wade as ‘baby murder on demand up to the time of birth’. Any Democratic candidate, male or female, has to be ready with a strong, no apologies counter. This is not a new problem for Democrats, but the context is changing — especially since Obamacare tried to address systematic discrimination against women in healthcare.
The Color of Change
Demographics have Republicans on the run. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” for a lot of his base is all about “Make America White Forever”. Many of them still haven’t gotten over 8 years of Obama in the White House — or how well he was received by the rest of the World. (If Donald Trump has any core agenda other than his own aggrandizement, it’s reversing everything Obama did.) Racism is on the rise, and it’s right out in the open.
It’s why Republicans are putting so much effort into gerrymandering, restricting voting eligibility, outright fraud, and packing courts with conservative judges who will turn a blind eye to it all.
It’s not just women who are feeling empowered. The Democratic field to date is also open to people of color (Thanks Obama!) — some of whom also happen to be women. Getting out the vote, making voting easier, motivating people to vote — all of that is critical and none more so than the last. Time and numbers are on our side. Remember that.
The Challenges Await
Democrats, especially progressive Democrats have a real opportunity here. Two years of Trump and Republican rule of all three branches of the federal government is too horrible an example to waste. The urgency of Climate Change is growing. If ever there was a time to change the course America is on, the time is now.
And there is one more great challenge we need to face up to. Charles P. Pierce laid it out for subscribers to his shebeen in an email. This Nation Cannot Afford Any More Absolution Without Confession
...More recently, we’ve seen absolution without confession, without penance in how the war criminals of the George W. Bush years have escaped reckoning. (Most of them are doing quite well, actually.) We’ve seen it in how almost no American responsible for the near-cataclysm of the world financial system has spent a day in jail, and we’ve seen too big to fail get even bigger. And the country has moved on.
In so many of these cases, the process bespeaks a fundamental distrust among our political elites about the sturdiness of our democratic institutions, a distrust that weakens them in turn and renders them less sturdy. Ford explained his pardon of Nixon as a way to close the wounds of Watergate. Nixon should have been tried. The country would have been able to handle it. Instead, the people in government tempted to criminality just learned from Watergate and got better at it. That’s how Iran-Contra happened.
And there is now no bottom, not after George W. Bush, and definitely not in the age of Donald J. Trump. Obama told us to look forward, not back — but here we are again. To confront the failings in our government, our institutions, will be hard — but we must find the courage to do so or fail the test of history.
Per Lois McMaster Bujold, this quote sums it up pretty well.
“I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honour
I ran across this in a comment at the NY Times which gives some additional perspective:
Trump is:
* A weak person's idea of a strong man.
* An ignorant person's idea of a smart man.
* A coward's idea of a brave man.
* A poor person's idea of a rich man.
Should we fear confronting Trump and all he represents? Should we withhold accountability? The rot goes deep through the administration. It goes all the way back to Reagan and Nixon. Trump 2020 would be the epitaph on the American Experiment. We do not have the luxury of waiting 4 more years or pursuing moderation.
Eyes on the prize. Forward momentum. Never give up, never surrender. Resist!