Hey, Democrats…who are you and want do you want to be?

When I registered to vote in 1968, in West Virginia, you had to pick a party if you wanted to vote in primary elections. I registered with the Democrats because they offered more choices than Republicans. As near as I can remember, that was the only reason. It wasn’t a philosophical choice at the time because at age 18, I had no political philosophy to speak of.

The voter registration differential back then was at least 2-1 Democratic and as a result, Republicans didn’t even offer candidates for a lot of state and local offices. I mean, why should a Republican spend the money to run for office in a state where he couldn’t win, and why should I want to vote on a ballot with blank spaces where candidates ought to be?

We didn’t have red and blue states in 1968, but if we had, none would have been bluer than West Virginia.

It was my first election since becoming eligible and I probably voted for Democrat Jim Sprouse in the primary governor’s race, but I’m pretty sure I voted for Republican Arch Moore in the general. My parents thought Arch Moore walked on water, and I was just a stupid kid who didn’t know politics from shinola. (I can’t remember voting for any other Republican in any other general election.)

Anyhow, I remained a Democrat until two things happened: (1) I started working as a journalist, sometimes covering political news, and I thought that party affiliation could give the appearance of bias on my part, and (2) the law was changed to allow Independents to vote in primaries. So I became an Independent.

(Where is this going, you ask? Trust me, I’m getting there. Just hang on a minute.)

Somewhere along the line, after leaving the news business, I became a Democrat again for what must have seemed like a good reason at the time, but that all changed in 2008-2009, when Barack Obama was elected president and took office with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. I wasn’t satisfied with the leadership of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate and I didn’t think the party was taking full advantage of its opportunity to make real progress during Obama’s first two years.

For example, we wanted universal health care but got the B-side Affordable Care Act instead. We wanted same-sex marriage but only got benefits for domestic partners. We wanted a coherent energy policy that would also address climate change, but couldn’t get it through. I felt the Democrats could do better, but more than that, I felt they didn’t know who they were or what they wanted to be. The result was a middle-of-the-road approach that really didn’t make anybody happy. We asked for peanut butter and jelly on wheat but settled for jelly on white...and pretended that was what we had wanted all along.

I decided then I could no longer identify with the Democratic Party or its lack of focus on a winnable agenda, so I became an Independent again. Yes, I'm a liberal Independent, to be sure, and I still don't vote for Republicans, but I'm an Independent all the same.

Fast forward a decade. It’s now 2018 and I still don’t know what the Democratic Party wants.  (I told you I’d get here.) We’re less than three weeks away from the most important election in my lifetime and I can’t tell you the Democrats’ message. Other than “we’re not Trump” and “women are pissed,” I don’t know what they want me to support. I don’t even know who the leaders are or who is really in charge.

In the last two weeks alone, the party’s most recent presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has defended her husband’s sexual promiscuity and claimed it did not constitute an abuse of power, and Elizabeth Warren, one of the most outspoken members of the Senate, decided to soft launch her presidential campaign for 2020 by getting down in the mud and rolling around with Donald J. Trump, the all-time champion mud roller among presidents of the United States, about her dubious claim to Native American heritage. Real Native Americans were not amused.

It's almost like #MeToo has become #ExceptForMeAndHer.

That they’re doing this is bad enough, but they’re doing it at a time when Democrats are counting on women voters to parlay outrage over Trump’s misogyny to cast Republicans out of office and sweep them into Congress atop a supposed blue wave. Having two prominent Democratic women say such stupid things at this critical time in the election cycle is not helpful to the party. I wish they would both go away until at least next year, and maybe longer than that.

On top of that, if someone came to my door this morning and asked me to describe the Democrats’ message, I don’t know what I’d say. I mean, which message do you want? The Bernie Sanders message? The Elizabeth Warren message? The Cory Booker and Kamala Harris message? Chuck Shumer’s? Nancy Pelosi’s? That young Kennedy? Or old Joe Biden? Listening to Democrats is like hearing the dissonant sound an orchestra makes when it’s tuning up. Just call me when the concert is ready to start.

In the meantime, Trump is more than happy to share his version of the Democratic platform, calling them traitors and an angry mob bent on stealing your money, inviting terrorists into the country, threatening your national security, killing puppies and kittens and starting World War III. The fact that he’s lying through his teeth to the gullible low-information crowd who attends his pep rallies is irrelevant when this is the only messaging that people hear.

I realize that in House races and even the Senate to some extent, the message differs from location to location. Conor Lamb, who won a House seat in a red Pennsylvania district, and Doug Jones, who beat Roy Moore in Alabama, are both more conservative than I am by far, but they appealed to the voters in their districts and states and got themselves elected. I hope that continues through November 6 and beyond.

Still, as a friend of mine said, Democrats need a platform to stand on that doesn’t start with “Trump bad” and end with “not Trump good.” It’s going to take more than that to win back our country from a party that cares about money and the consolidation of power and doesn’t give a flying fig for the normal people they are supposed to represent. I hope they find one soon.

Meanwhile, don’t even get me started on probable 2020 presidential candidates because it’s way too soon for that. (I’m looking at you, Elizabeth Warren.) I’ll just say one thing now and leave it at this: Please nominate someone who won’t be an octogenarian before the end of their second term. You need to do better than that.