Spare Me the Progressive Purity Police

Like many, I fear that the left of the Democrat Party will alienate moderate voters and intentionally or not re-elect Donald Trump in 2020 - a result that will guarantee policies and agendas that are the exact opposite of what these "purity" police claim to want. Elections are about winning and achieving the possible as opposed to unreachable goals.  Sometimes incremental change proves possible while massive change proves impossible. Yes, complete, full instant gratification is sublime, but if you cannot win over the middle, you will end up with nothing.  A column in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd makes this point and issues a warning that Democrats need to heed in the run up to 2020 if a circular firing squad is to be avoided.  Here are excerpts:

WASHINGTON — After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps.

Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.

I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.

If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.

The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter.  They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan.  The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

My father stayed up all night the night Truman was elected because he was so excited. I would like to stay up ’til dawn the night a Democrat wins next year because I’m so excited to see the moment when the despicable Donald Trump lumbers into a Marine helicopter and flies away for good.

But Democrats are making that dream ever more distant because they are using their time knifing one another and those who want to be on their side instead of playing it smart.

House Democrats forced Robert Mueller to testify, after he made it clear that he was spent and had nothing to add to his damning yet damnably legalistic, double-negative report, because they were hoping the hearings would jump-start howls for impeachment. . . . I never want to hear about the “O.L.C. opinion” again. The Republicans were impressively craven and hypocritical. They are sticking with Trump, and no pallid reminder of his turpitude, his trellis of obstructions and his unpatriotic embrace of foreign interference in our elections, will change that.

The recipe for emotional satisfaction on the part of the progressive left is not a recipe for removing Trump from the White House.  The argument about whether Trump is impeachable is the wrong argument. Mueller settled that. We know Trump did things worthy of impeachment. That is not the question we should be asking. The question is: Should he be impeached?

The progressive Puritans think we must honor the Constitution and go for it because it’s the right thing to do. . . .The attempt to impeach Trump is one of the rare cases in which something obviously justified is obviously stupid.

Unbelievably, Pelosi — long a G.O.P. target for her unalloyed liberalism — is derided by the far left for her pragmatism. But she has been through enough Washington wars to know that idealism, untempered by realism, is dangerous.

An impeachment could return Trump to power. The highchair king from Fifth Avenue would exult in his victimhood and energize his always-ready-to-be aggrieved followers.

It could also lead to Democrats losing the House as their moderates fall and help Republicans hold the Senate. No Republicans would vote for impeaching Trump and some Democrats might refuse as well. Even if the House acted, Mitch McConnell would smother it in the Senate, just like he did Merrick Garland.

It’s better to pull out Trump by the roots in the election and firmly repudiate him. The Democrats should focus on the future, not the benighted past that we have been relegated to under Trump.

Will Far Left Democrats Help Re-elect Trump in 2020?

One of my biggest fears as thing heat up in the 2020 election is that the far left of the Democrat Party will drive candidates too leftward to make them electable in the 2020 presidential general election.  What we are witnessing is akin to what one sees within LGBT activism where wealthy gays living in liberal cities and states are clueless as to the reality on the ground in most of the country and want an agenda that simply is not realistic in terms of legislation that can be actually enacted and what will play well with a majority of voters. In the context of the 2020 election, some far left Democrats are showing a similar blindness as to what can garner 270 electoral college votes and play passably in moderate and more conservative states.  Add to this the purity police and the no forgiveness ever mindset we have witnessed in Virginia over the last two plus months, and Trump must be smiling with glee.  A long piece in Vanity Fair looks at this very real danger of far left Democrats sabotaging more moderate candidates who could actually take on Trump and win.  Here are article highlights:

Ideas that once seemed out-of-bounds are now creeping into the mainstream of Democratic politics, with social media acting as the accelerant. Democrats, in the rush to appease the noisiest voices on the Internet and grab onto any gust of fleeting attention, so far have shown they’re willing to jump on a bandwagon of ideas that Barack Obama would never have endorsed on his way to winning two presidential elections: backing reparations, abolishing ICE, getting rid of the Electoral College, running away from the word “capitalism.” As The New York Times put it on Tuesday, “activists are leveraging the early stages of the Democratic primary, creating pseudo-litmus tests for candidates eager to respond to the energy that is driving more extreme policy proposals.”

These “extreme” litmus tests get re-tweeted online with emoji claps from activists (and journalists whose reporting often veers into activism). Many of those same people point to polls showing that progressive momentum is on their side: a survey last week from the Des Moines Register showed that “more than half of likely 2020 Democratic caucusgoers [in Iowa] say they would be satisfied with a presidential candidate who wants the U.S. to be more socialist.” Times have certainly changed since Obama ran for office. There’s great hunger among Democrats, from New Hampshire to Arizona, for bold policies designed to empower the middle class and fix a grossly distorted economy in which the richest 1 percent of American families own 40 times the average family’s wealth. Once-forbidden ideas like Medicare-for-All and a wealth tax sound both audacious and common sense. Democrats of vastly different cultural backgrounds, whether they shop at Whole Foods or Piggly Wiggly, seem united in their contempt for unaccountable billionaires and corporations.

But this Democratic primary is about to test something else: whether burgeoning public support for daring economic policies coincides with support for more hot-burning cultural issues that seem to dominate Twitter in the Trump era. In other words, Democratic voters are very down with Medicare-for-All. But do they want to be talking about reparations or socialism in a head-to-head against Trump next year? Already, at least one prominent Democrat, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, is sounding an alarm, however gently, about a presidential primary in which the current rule of the game appears to be chasing the latest shiny metal object on Twitter to win over the most plugged-in and fashionable online.

“I want our candidates to start thinking about the general election and how you’re going to win the general election,” Brown told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday. “Of course we play to the progressive base,” Brown said, “but we’ve got to talk to workers. I don’t think our candidates are thinking of the general election.

Brown—who voted against NAFTA, opposed the Iraq War, and supported marriage equality before most every Democrat in his party—is no one’s idea of a moderate. But the Ohio senator, who last week decided against a presidential bid, also won four statewide elections in a culturally conservative state by keeping a tireless focus on kitchen-table topics, not the gurgles of Twitter. “I get gun owners votes in some significant numbers in Zanesville and Mansfield and Lima, Ohio, because I talk about education, and I talk about keeping their health care, and going after the drug companies and how to send your kids to community college.”

He believes that winning back the White House means reclaiming the Midwest—including Obama voters who flipped to Trump and African-Americans who were iffy on Clinton. Put another way, he knows that it would be folly for Democrats to abandon their former Electoral College strongholds and bank everything in 2020 on winning the “rising electorates” of Arizona, Texas, and Georgia.

Brown, somewhat obliquely, was suggesting that there seems to be a rush among the Democrats to respond to whatever the Twitter hive mind is demanding on a given day, without hewing closely to a consistent message that can appeal to voters across Iowa and South Carolina and California. Playing to short-term national attention on Twitter, when it’s off-brand and reactive, is a surefire way to get in trouble.

A host of Democrats, including Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, embarrassed themselves by rushing to defend disgraced actor Jussie Smollett on Twitter after his staged hate crime in Chicago—with Harris and Booker calling it a “modern-day lynching” without any set of facts at hand.

What Brown knows is that having a set of organizing principles and a clear message can be enough to inoculate a politician against the minute-by-minute demands of professional activists and angry tweeters. Candidates who make policy-by-Twitter, the ones who chase every micro-news-cycle, risk losing sight not just of what voters care about, but also why they’re running for president in the first place.

[I]n our era of forgetting everything that happened yesterday, what doesn’t get mentioned in these conversations is that Democrats have generally had a favorable view of socialism for almost a decade, well before Sanders emerged on the national stage. In a 2010 Gallup poll, 53 percent of Democrats reported a “positive view” of socialism, a number that has since crept up only slightly, to 57 percent. What has changed are the Democratic views of capitalism: In 2010, 53 percent of Democrats had a positive view of capitalism. By 2018, that number had dropped to just 47 percent.

But does that mean Democrats are ready for socialism? Is America yearning for a planned economy? It’s hard to tell if voters in these polls know what “socialism” or “democratic socialism” actually means or implies. Is Barb in Council Bluffs saying she’s open to socialism because she’s been up late reading Michael Harrington and scanning Twitter for red rose avatars to follow? Or is Barb saying she’s open to socialism because she likes how Sanders has presented it: as an audacious but common-sense message to fight income inequality and provide access to basic services? It seems like the latter. At the very same time socialism is claiming a moment, a Harris Poll released last month asked voters, “Which label do you most identify with as a Democrat?” Almost half of Democrats chose the labels “Obama Democrat”—anathema to the emergent socialist left!—or “moderate Democrat.” Less than 10 percent picked “Socialist.”

Almost half of Democrats in Iowa said Sanders was “too liberal.” Confused? Same here. Twitter tells us that a “moderate” cannot win the nomination. Neither can a white man. But actual conversations with voters tells us that Democrats just want to beat Trump with a candidate who generally excites them and aligns with their values. Ideology and identity aside, Democrats are eager to hear from every candidate about how to best do that.

Do not tell any of this to the Democratic Socialists of New York City, of course. Empowered by Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in a single Democratic primary in a safe House district last year, plenty of them are bathing in newfound attention from the media, mostly online.

But their political muscle is decidedly smaller than their attentional powers on social media. Socialism might pack a punch in some congressional districts and state house races, but its reach is decidedly more limited when exposed to a bigger Democratic electorate that doesn’t stare at smartphones all day. Case in point: socialists in New York rallied behind Cynthia Nixon’s primary challenge last year to Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, a corporate centrist fairly reviled on the left despite his progressive stances on social issues. But in spite of Nixon’s Instagram-friendly liberal politics and a gush of flattering media coverage, Cuomo clobbered her by almost 30 points, thanks in large part to African-American primary voters who lined up with the governor. In a statewide primary in the bluest of states, the unlikeable moderate guy beat Nixon with ease. Twitter, once again, was not real life.

Trump is already gearing up to weaponize the word socialism for a pretty obvious reason: because plenty of Americans are still frightened by it. That’s why two Democrats—Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi—were quick to their feet with applause during the State of the Union Address when Trump declared that the United States will not become a socialist country. The goal posts are moving on the left, but despite what you read about those despicable neoliberals on the Internet, they aren’t moving fast enough for a sudden political realignment.

[T]he convulsions of everyday Twitter, a small club of media elites and professional opinion-havers, are plainly disconnected from the concerns of most Democratic voters. There’s a real risk that otherwise smart, promising 2020 candidates begin to self-sabotage in their haste to appease this microscopic cluster of social-media activists just because they’ve got a megaphone. Democrats won the House last November—and a bucket of governorships—not by charging to the left, but by flipping Republican seats with so-called “moderate” candidates who were attuned to the concerns of middle-class suburbanites and working-class white women, primarily health care. Socialist, capitalist, feminist, white, black: the voters of 2018 cared little for labels. And those voters offer the best sample set for Democratic politics moving into 2020.

What Townsend and Carter are saying—one an old-school labor Democrat and the other a young socialist—is more or less what Sherrod Brown was arguing for on MSNBC earlier this week. Having a message that speaks to middle-class fairness is the most powerful tool one can brandish in Democratic politics. It’s a boring superpower that’s been proven time and again. Economic fairness is an argument that cuts across race, demography, gender, disability, and age. Nor does a focus on “middle-class” issues have to come at the expense of fighting for racial and social injustice. Those cultural battles become easier to fight when candidates have a reason for running: they can be folded into the message and a biography, if it’s a good one.

Politics on Twitter, generally, is about making you feel bad. People are shamed for going to certain schools, for practicing a certain faith, for their gender, their race, or for using the wrong words, regardless of intent. Politics at the presidential level, the successful kind, could not be more different. Winning campaigns find a way to build coalitions, to unite people with shared values under an umbrella of charisma and a succinct message that rises above the din of Washington. This is how Democrats have won the presidency in the past.

Will Democrat candidates wake up to these truisms and remember what worked in 2018?  I hope so.

The Myth of Bernie Sanders’s White Working-Class Support

As the 2020 Democrat primary begins, one issue that will be critical, in my view, for Democrats to keep sight to the reality that politics is all about having your team – flawed or not – in control of the executive branch of government, especially if you do not hold complete control of the legislature.  One cannot wait for the perfect candidate.  The bottom line is to win elections and field the candidate best positioned to win.  Who that candidate will be is as yet unknown,  That said, I see two as un-electable: one is Elizabeth Warren who despite some good ideas, has far too much baggage.  The other is Bernie Sanders, who in my view, should not even be allowed into the Democrat race given his jettisoning of the party immediately after 2016. Sadly, this reality is lost on Bernie Sanders supporters who, in my view, delude themselves into thinking that Sanders has broader support than he has in fact, especially among working class whites, and without factoring in some of Sanders' extreme positions of the past.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the myth of Sanders' working class support.  Here are highlights:

The Sanders campaign has circulated a strategy memo proclaiming their candidate would compete with Trump not only in Michigan and Ohio but even in states like West Virginia, Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Montana. Sanders “is popular with traditional, working-class, industrial workers in those places,” asserts his adviser, Jeff Weaver. “Bernie Sanders,” raves Bhaskar Sunkara, “is the only one capable of reaching millions of working Americans with the message that politics can indeed improve their lives.”

Their evidence is the persistent support Sanders amassed during his struggle against Clinton. But there is something eerily familiar about the pattern of Sanders’s support in 2016. Nate Silver, diving into the numbers, finds that about a quarter of Sanders voters were what he calls “Never Hillary” voters. They leaned conservative, and many of them voted for Donald Trump in the general election.
 How big a factor was the Never Hillary vote for Sanders?  Pretty big. They made the difference in eight of the states he won, finds Silver. Without that protest vote, the entire narrative of Sanders as the rising voice of the party’s authentic base would never have taken hold. And that basic misreading of the data created the foundation for a flourishing socialist dream that the American white working class is poised to turn against neoliberalism if only presented with a pure and sharp enough critique.
 Ironically, Sanders supporters have made the same analytic error the Clinton fans made after 2008. They looked at their growing strength among the white working class and saw a future base they could pry away from the GOP, never realizing that the only reason those voters had ever supported them was that they had already lost.

It is absolutely critical that Trump, should he run, or Mike Pence, be defeated in 2020.  Sanders simply is not the one to do that.

Bernie Sanders Needs to Go Away

Sanders worked against Virginia's winning gubernatorial candidate. 

Is it just me or are others tired of Bernie Sanders, who pretended to be a Democrat to run for the 2016 nomination, but left the party once he returned to the Senate and who has sought to sabotage solid Democrat candidates such as Virginia Governor Ralph Northam by pushing a rival who in my view could not have won the November, 2017, general election?   Sanders - and Elizabeth Warren who also sought to meddle in Virginia's Democratic Party primary - doesn't get it that to effect change, one has to win general elections and that to do that, one needs to win the middle.  I support many of the liberal wing of the Democrat Party, but if one cannot win, then the field is ceded to Republicans who will pursue policies that are the antithesis of what liberals claim to support.  An Ed Gillespie win in Virginia would have been an unmitigated disaster, yet Sanders and Warren tried to set the stage for such a loss.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at the continued sniping by far left liberals who seemingly put ideological purity over actually winning elections. Here are excerpts:

[T]he Democrats are gaining momentum toward retaking Congress in the 2018 midterms. What’s interesting is that the two trends don’t seem to be intersecting: so far, the blue wave isn’t a Bernie wave.

In rural western Pennsylvania, Conor Lamb won a narrow special-election upset in a heavily Republican district by running a largely centrist campaign: in favor of fracking, not in favor of single-payer health care. In suburban Chicago, incumbent Dan Lipinski, a throwback Blue Dog Democrat—anti-abortion, anti-Obamacare—won a primary in a reliably liberal district by defeating a Sanders-endorsed progressive challenger, Marie Newman. And while dozens of Sanders-inspired candidates are on Democratic primary ballots this fall, their chances generally don’t appear a whole lot better. The reasons are as varied as the 435 congressional districts, but one consistent hurdle appears to be unchanged from the 2016 Sanders-Clinton presidential battle, despite provoking so much controversy: state parties, and the Democratic National Committee, are weighted in favor of entrenched candidates and traditional big-money interest groups.

[S]ays Corbin Trent, a former Sanders operative who is now communications director for Justice Democrats, one of the most prominent groups launched in the wake of the 2016 election to try to elect progressive Democrats. “When we have a Democratic Party that won’t stand behind candidates with a huge capacity to generate grassroots donations and activity, they’re not interested in letting the democratic process shake out.”

At the moment, however, fear and hatred of Trump seem to be motivation enough to elect Democrats in many midterm races. And Bernie Dems still haven’t broken through in many contests where they need to appeal across more diverse geographic and demographic terrain; Sanders himself is now trying to fix his glaring weakness with black voters. “The Bernie crowd went all in against Ralph Northam last year in the Virginia governor Democratic primary—and lost,” says Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat. “And Northam, the more centrist candidate, went on to victory in the general in November, so it’s obvious the Democrats chose the most appropriate candidate. The progressive agenda should absolutely be respected as important to the future of our nation. But it remains to be seen how potent a force the left will be in primarying Democrats. And I think we’re close to being able to say that the swing to the left has been overhyped and is not electorally effective.”