Democrats Are Their Own Biggest Enemies Going into 2020

I have given this rant before, but it bears repeating as the Democrat field of would be presidential candidates becomes increasingly crowded.  The short form of the message: nominate someone electable to top the Democrat ticket and then get behind the nominee whoever it may be.  Wonderful policies and wonkish command of facts and figures mean NOTHING if the candidate cannot get elected.  Sadly, this basic message which ought to be seared in every Democrat memory after 2016 when some holier than thou Democrats refused to back Hillary Clinton and thereby handed the election to Donald Trump.  We - and the nation - cannot stand another such debacle that could end up re-electing Trump, the most foul, anti-democratic and vile individual to ever occupy the White House.  A piece in Politico looks at the danger of Democrats defeating themselves through an intra-party civil war that loses sight of the ultimate goal. Moderate advances under a Democrat are better than more Trump, yet some do not grasp this simple concept.  Here are article highlights: 

I’ve lived through a Democratic Civil War before. In fact, I’ve been in the middle of two of them. The first was in 1968, when I was the research director for Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. The second was in 1980, when I was Jimmy Carter’s policy director.

Both times, I watched pressure from the party’s liberal wing tear the party apart and bring down a Democratic presidential candidate. Both times, the Republicans took the White House. Both times, liberal dreams were shattered.

Today, I fear it could all be happening again.

As President Donald Trump moved the Republican Party sharply to the populist right, early entrants to the Democratic Party presidential contest have veered sharply to the left, along with several energetic new Democratic members of the House. The left’s new avant-garde has properly identified the need to confront serious national challenges, from rising income inequality and inadequate health care coverage to climate change.

But successfully dealing with these problems demands pragmatic solutions that can gain support from a majority of Americans and do not play into Trump’s false narrative that Democrats are socialists. Speaking from experience, by demanding the moon, their proposals will crash on the launching pad and lead to nowhere good.

Humphrey’s challenger from the left, Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had castigated Humphrey for the Johnson administration’s handling of Vietnam, didn’t get the nomination that year. But McCarthy failed to reconcile with his fellow Minnesotan and led his supporters back into the fold only after it was too late. Richard Nixon exploited the divisions in the party and the country and was elected by the thinnest of margins in November. His election led to an extension of the war Humphrey would have ended; during the next four years another 21,000 American soldiers were killed. Carter showed what moderates can accomplish. But, throughout his four years in office, Carter never got full credit for this record. He was criticized by women’s and civil rights groups, social welfare advocates and the party’s union leaders for not doing enough. Consumer groups failed to mobilize for him even though he appointed many of their leaders to regulate big business. The “greenest” president in American history got little credit from environmentalists even as he doubled the size of the national park system, made conservation a centerpiece of his energy policy and championed solar energy, even installing a solar panel on the White House roof.

But the big sticking point for the liberal wing of the party was health care. To obtain support from liberal labor unions in the primaries in 1976, Carter agreed to broad principles for national health insurance, but in office refused to accept Senator Ted Kennedy’s single-payer, government run bill at a time of raging inflation. Over many days of negotiations I had with the senator in his Capitol office, we came close to agreeing on a bill that would have substituted a government-run program for a privately managed program and full coverage phased in over many years. But in the end, Kennedy bowed to labor’s demands and refused to back Carter’s own bill, which looks much like Obamacare today: employer-mandated insurance, health care for children, catastrophic coverage for major illnesses and a major expansion of Medicaid. By asking for too much, health care reform stalled for decades.

In 1980, Kennedy decided to challenge Carter from the left. The senator’s liberal supporters gummed-up the 1980 convention with more than 50 minority floor amendments to the party’s platform, demanding more and more spending and full-blown national health insurance. Kennedy lost, but the damage was done. His challenge irrevocably split the party. Will the liberal wing this time around realize the damage a similar split will do to Democratic chances of regaining the White House? Maximalist ideology is a prescription for division and defeat. It would be better to focus on policies that can gain broad public support: Expand health care under the framework of Obamacare, encourage more investment in low-income neighborhoods, endorse affirmative action based on socioeconomic need, offer more government contracts to minority companies, repair the shredded social safety net, increase funding of Head Start for poor children and elementary and secondary education in poverty-stricken districts, and broaden Pell Grants to help make college affordable. It is a misreading of last November’s midterm elections to believe the House was flipped to Democratic control by the election of a few arch-liberals, most of whom displaced centrist Democrats. The greatest gains were made by moderate Democrats capturing Republican districts. A successful Democratic presidential candidate might take a leaf from Carter’s playbook, even more successfully accomplished by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to appeal to both sides of the party’s coalition to attract and hold moderate Americans tired of partisanship—Americans who want the highest ethical standards in the White House, who will respect and strengthen the institutions that represent our values—from the FBI to the press to our public schools. A successful candidate will eschew identity politics and want to unite Americans rather than divide the country into warring tribes, will strengthen, not weaken, our worldwide network of alliances, and will recognize there is a big country with its own problems that must be addressed between the two coasts. The Democrats must iron out their differences and present a united front against Trump, who will have the advantages of incumbency, a positive economy and the support of a united Republican Party. If these progressives keep their eye on winning in 2020, they can be part of a broad coalition to shape their politics into laws which tackle the problems they have identified—which is why they took up arms and won their way to Washington in the first place. Otherwise, we could witness another divided Democratic Party leading to another Republican victory. And the progressive left will have accomplished nothing.

Very well said.  Frighteningly, I suspect the message will fall on deaf ears among those in the far left of the Democrat Party.

Wake Up, Millennials, and Back Hillary Clinton

As the father of three (3) Millennials myself, I know that Hillary Clinton may not be their ideal candidate.  That said, they realize that Donald Trump poses an existential danger to America an, therefore, will be backing Hillary Clinton.  Perhaps their pragmatism comes from having grown up surrounded by political activism (the youngest helped on literature drops beginning at age 4 and liked to help work the polls on election day) and the reality that one often has to pick the better of the candidates one has to pick from.  They may also correctly see a vote for a third party candidate as a wasted vote or a de facto vote for the least acceptable of the two major candidates.  Sadly, too many Millennials seem to be blind to the fact that a vote for a third party candidate in 2016 is tantamount to a vote for Donald Trump.  An op-ed in the New York Daily News makes the case of why Millennials need to back Hillary Clinton.  Here are excerpts:

I am a so-called millennial today, a member of a generation that, having grown up with a disaster stamped in our psyche, now seems poised to make a disastrous mistake.

Millennials are poised to elect Donald Trump as America’s 45th President. In 2012, Barack Obama won the 18-to-29-year-old demographic by a landslide of 60% to 37%. Right now, Hillary Clinton has a minuscule 31%, less than even the losing side in the last cycle.

Millennials have gravitated in huge numbers to the third party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, who together are garnering some 36% of support from this cohort, putting Hillary only slightly ahead of Trump in a cohort that she needs if she is to win.

It seems so obvious to me that Donald Trump is unfit to be President that I don’t know where to begin in making the argument to those of my contemporaries who will throw away their votes on a third- or fourth-party ticket. To me, Trump is a clown, an ignoramus, a racist, a bigot, a liar, a misogynist — a moron who somehow, through an act of collective madness, has managed to rise to the top of one of our two major parties.

But so many millennials don’t seem to care. It’s not that most of my contemporaries don’t recognize Trump’s manifest deficiencies. But to some of them something else is far more important. It seems that for those backing Johnson and Stein, politics is an exercise in creating morally pure world.

Bernie Sanders promised them just that with his political revolution and they swooned. Now that the prospect of purification has vanished along with Sanders’ candidacy, they are angry and feel both excluded and vengeful.

This leads them to dismiss Hillary Clinton as a quintessential representative of the unacceptable status quo. Many of the millennials I know trot out the usual complaints: She’s insincere, she’s a johnny-come-lately and phony progressive, and a neo-con stooge. They fault her for having supported criminal-justice policies that led to mass incarceration and for voting to bring America into war in the Middle East.

The same contradiction leads them to view Trump as merely a blunter expression of the same unacceptable collection of qualities they find in the former First Lady.

I want to suggest that, even if all their complaints about Hillary were true, they would still be irrelevant to the important decision that lies before us on election day — and not only irrelevant but deeply pernicious.

A failure to make distinctions can lead to catastrophe. German Communists in the early 1930s fought the Social Democrats with the same energy that they fought the Nazis, declaring that both parties were roughly equivalent forms of “social fascism.” Hitler benefited enormously from this disastrous and false equivalence.

Trump is no Hitler — he’s a lot more ridiculous and therefore less menacing — but he does relish violence, foment inter-group discord, spew falsehoods, brandish irrationality and foster a cult of the personality.

In a world in which there are genuine dangers of the kind that I saw with my own eyes as a child, how could we possibly gamble on giving such a problematic individual the immense powers of the American presidency? If one’s purpose is to make the world better, as so many millennials profess, it would seem that a first obligation would be to avoid making it dramatically worse.

In a curious way, the millennials voting for Johnson and Stein share an outlook with Trump supporters in their eagerness to tear down existing structures with the expectation that something new and better will arise in their place. That’s not a real choice before us.

Hillary Clinton does not walk on water. She will not solve all or most of America’s problems. She will certainly not bring about the kind of revolution that some of my contemporaries are dreaming about.

But at this juncture, she is the only alternative to one of the darkest figures in all of American history. If millennials vote en masse for Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, decades from now they will have a difficult task of explaining to their children their terrible miscalculation.