Goodman Speaks

Well, I’m giving you another reprise of my stuff, this one from 2017. It demonstrates how little has changed for the Democrats over these 7-plus years. Today these very same issues are being debated after a withering election. The years have brought us myopia, hibernation, and head in the sand denial of political realities. Sadly, the Dems are still fumbling with their insularity. What’s now emerging are the compromisers.

I should say it used to be my party. The Democrats lost me even before the [2017] election: I thought both Sanders and Clinton were bad candidates and said so here, among other places.

Elections in America are built on fraud in its various forms. People accept that they have to buy in because as both parties are structured voters have no truly democratic choices. Or a Hobson’s choice as in 2016 for the Democrats. With Clinton they have a candidate who has been on the wrong side (by my standards) of many issues. But her political life was enabled by the transformation of the Democratic party to one that cultivates money and elitism in its many forms. The party abandoned the working classes, its real constituency, many years ago—yes, even before Bill Clinton, who put the cap on it.

Bernie’s ideals would seem to be at great variance with those of the neoliberal Democrats. Yet he is now one of them. That in itself is a kind of hypocrisy. His calls for a revolution are ridiculous: this guy is no Che Guevara. If he truly wants a revolution, let him start speaking out to black people, the immigrants, and the white working (i.e., nonworking) classes who have been sold out of the action for years.

I spent years working for the party at the local, state and national level. In Washington I did a stint at the DNC working on the Clinton healthcare campaign in ’93-’94, producing a series of videoconferences for Hillary. You can read about that here. It was important, hard work even if we lost the battle.

Now we are getting a slew of articles with nostrums and correctives about the chaos in the Democratic party, and here am I adding to the clutter. Donna Brazile, who caused some of the problems, chimes in, telling how the DNC was in the tank for Hillary all along. Which was pretty obvious from the start.

The issues for advocacy facing the Democrats are both social and economic in the broad perspective of electoral politics. Yet they seem to prefer debating issues of ideal politics and identity politics. They still don’t understand how to deal with the kind of economic populism that got Trump elected. Nancy Pelosi and the old guard have not yet proposed any kind of message that might conceivably attract voters of all stripes. It would be trite but true to say that the party needs to rebrand. But so far the best message they have come up with is “A Better Deal”—like something you’d get from Walmart.

Practical (not ideal) politics is about winning elections, and the Democrats need younger candidates who focus on issues that are real and vital to a majority of people. A number of fresh-faced challengers, like Kelly Mazeski in Chicago, are in the field but they need a driving message and the backing that only the national party can provide. Healthcare, which affects everybody, is the obvious issue for the party in 2018—that is, a fiscally sound universal program perhaps like the German system, not the unaffordable Medicare for All that has been proposed.

In other words, the best hope for Democrats is to speak intelligently to a real and comprehensive need.

The only path to success for the Dems is to offer up a vision of the future that will include, well, everybody—as Pope Francis said in his recent TED talk. There are two proposals that have been in the air for years that would be key not to just winning the next election but to serving the wants and needs of all the people. (Which in fact should be the key to winning elections—the reverse of identity politics.)

One idea is to develop a viable scheme to provide universal basic income (UBI) and make it available to everyone who votes. The other is universal health care. Before you laugh me out of the room, consider that the major controversy over both these ideas is not over whether they are needed but how to implement them.

The party has also failed to explain just what and whom it stands for. And they have called for litmus tests on things like abortion, opening up an old wound. There are too many whiners and not enough killers, according to David Krone, Harry Reid’s ex chief of staff. The Dems have few trained attack dogs or counter-punchers. . . .