We have a U.S. senator here in West Virginia who was elected
as a Democrat but thinks he has to run a pro-Trump campaign to get enough votes
to be re-elected in a deep red state.
We’ve got liberals here and all across the country who are running
away and hiding from their own agenda because they fear it’s a losing
proposition in the age of Trump.
We live in a pseudo-fascist country now led by a
narcissistic, authoritarian moron who wants to be president for life, but people
slough this off as acceptable while declaring that “Socialism” is a dirty word.
And we have polls showing that Democrats believe their best
chance to take back the White House is a former vice president and (twice) unsuccessful
candidate who will be 77 years old when we vote again in November 2020 and 78
before he could ever take office.
For the love of god, man! It’s time for the Democratic Party
to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
A little background: I used to be a Democrat before I became
a journalist, when I switched my registration to Independent to avoid the appearance
of party favoritism. After I left the newspaper business, I switched back until
2008, when for two years the Democrats controlled the White House and both
houses of Congress, yet failed to enact or even push strongly for the policies
it claimed to represent in its official party platform.
Did they get us sensible immigration policy? No.
Did they end wars in the Middle East? No.
Did they take actions to secure Medicare and Social Security
for the long term? No.
Did they significantly increase the minimum wage? No.
Did they do anything
they said they would do? Not much.
Why? Because their leaders were afraid that much of their
agenda was “too liberal” for America and that their best option was to move
everything to the center. Well, maybe it was too liberal and maybe it wasn’t,
but we never found out, because they never really tried to get it approved. I
lost confidence in Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and, eventually, I lost
confidence in the Democratic Party as a whole. That’s when I became an
Independent once again.
Now, the faux-president of the United States is a New York
real estate mogul and financial con man who bankrupted five casinos on his way
to becoming the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Let me say that
again. A man who wasn’t competent to operate a casino now controls the American
military and is in charge of our entire foreign and domestic policy.
Are you thinking about this at all? I mean, have you ever
looked at the casino business? How hard can it be to succeed in the casino business,
where people go with the expectation of losing money…and usually do? For every
person who makes a hit in a casino there are thousands who give up their money
willingly, shake their heads and move on to the next game or machine with the
full and complete knowledge that the games are tilted to favor the house...and
that they will probably continue to lose.
I have a feeling that almost any idiot could run a casino
and make millions of dollars, but we elected the one idiot who failed to do
that five times. This is the guy the Democratic Party could not defeat in the
most important presidential election of my lifetime, and now that guy is going
to stack the Supreme Court with judges who will do whatever he wants done for the
next 40 years or so.
Coming up in November is a mid-term election in which a “blue
wave” is predicted to sweep Democrats into the House and Senate again. Forgive
me if I say, “I’ll believe that when I see it," because I don’t know how you can have a
blue wave when half your party is out surfing and the other half is sleeping on
the beach.
A 28-year-old woman who was a bartender a year ago recently
won a Democratic primary for House of Representatives in New York by running as a Socialist. She even said
the “S” word out loud. She campaigned for universal Medicare, a federal jobs
guarantee, immigration reform, elimination of ICE, fully funded public schools
and universities, housing as a human right, justice-system reform, a “New Green
Deal” to combat climate change and an overhaul of campaign finance rules. (Read her platform here.)
Sure, it was New York, one of the bluest of the blue states,
but she beat an entrenched Democrat thought to be in line for Nancy Pelosi’s
job if the Dems ever took back the House. I like her platform 100 percent, and
I’ll vote for anyone who advocates those same policies and ideals, but by all
means, if you want my vote, don’t be afraid to tell me who you are.
So here is my advice to Democrats: Figure out
what you believe and do it quickly, before you lose another election to the worst
presidential candidate in American history. Then, tell the rest of us what it
is, and push your agenda hard right up until Election Day. Take a position and
tell the voters how your policies will give them better lives. Don’t back down (or roll with him in the mud) when Trump starts tweeting insults and take your message to the people who count the most.
Don’t issue page after page of complex policy statements. Just come
up with five or six good things that will benefit all Americans and make sure
the people know about them in advance. Like an editor once said to me, "When you write a news story, it should tell more than just what happened. It should tell the reader why he or she should care." You’ve got to sell yourself to the
people who always vote, the ones who sometimes vote and especially the ones who
didn’t vote the last time around because they didn’t know who you were.
If you do that, you have a chance to win this election and other
elections to come. If you do what I suggested and you still don’t win, it’s
because the American people don’t want what you have to sell, and frankly, that’s
how democracy is supposed to work.
If you’re not willing to go all in, then I suggest you save
your money and don’t waste your time propping up candidates who are caught by
their suspenders while sitting squarely on the fence. That approach won’t take back
Washington, and honestly, I don’t even think that it should.
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