Blame the Progressives

As Democrats size up their losses and the future of the party, the last thing they consider is the possibility that they might bear some responsibility for discontent leading into the 2022 midterm elections. As usual, there’s a convenient whipping boy. As usual, the criticism couldn’t possibly be less justified.

DMZ America Podcast #74: Post-Election Analysis and Pre-Election Prediction Mea Culpas

Two of America’s top cartoonists perform their postmortem on the 2022 midterm elections. Ted Rall and Scott Stantis discuss what happened and, more importantly, what will happen going forward into 2023 and divided government, and a certain former president’s plans for the near future. They also revisit their pre-election predictions which were, (as Bob Uecker might say), juuuust a little outside.

 

 

How the Democrats Messed Up. What They Can Do Now.

           You can’t blame the Democrats for spinning the fact that their losses fell short of worst-case scenarios. But elections are arithmetic, not calculus. A loss is a loss. Democrats lost the midterms.

            Why They Lost

  1. History: In a two-party system, voters express anger and annoyance by lashing out at the party in power. They elect a president, get pissed at crimes of commission and omission, and punish the incumbents by voting for the other party two to four years later. This tendency worked against them.
  2. Weak Leadership: We live during an era of unprecedented connectivity. You can place a phone call to Mongolia for free. You can see a picture of what someone in Botswana had for dinner a minute ago. Voters want to hear from their president more than ever before—yet Biden, no doubt due to his advanced age and fading mental acuity, followed the longstanding trend of chief executives who give fewer primetime presidential addresses and press conferences than their predecessors. No wonder the number of voters who think Biden cares about people like them keeps plummeting. They feel disconnected from him.
  3. Denying Voters’ Reality: Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes? Voters’ top issue this year was the economy, specially inflation. Biden dismissed rising prices as a temporary blip while—political malpractice alert!—failing to emphasize a far more important economic indicator, low unemployment. Citizens worried about rising violent crime; Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) dismissed their concerns as “people’s feelings” while accusing Republicans of being “dishonest” about the issue, and almost lost a race that should have been a cakewalk. Even if you don’t have a solution for their problems, voters want to be “seen.” Donald Trump didn’t do anything about deindustrialization but Rust Belters loved him for being the first president to call out NAFTA.
  4. It’s the Future, Stupid. It’s nearly impossible to win a political campaign in the U.S. based on past grievances, yet that’s what the Democrats did in 2022, running against Trump, tying GOP candidates to the former president in ads and reminding voters about the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot. Yet investigations into Trump ranked 16th in the list of issues voters cared about. Voters want to hear politicians acknowledge their present problems—inflation, healthcare, gas prices, crime, gun violence, abortion rights—and offer a credible plan to fix them in the (near) future. Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act didn’t pass the smell test, Biden’s release of petroleum reserves addressed a dollars problem with cents of relief and had no credible solution to the Dodd SCOTUS decision with which to motivate angry women voters. P.S. If you don’t have a solution to a problem, say so. Voters don’t want magicians. They want elected officials to try.
  5. They Sounded Self-Serving: It took the hammer attack/home invasion against Paul Pelosi, a personal friend of the president, to bring him to the mic for a primetime address about crime—crime against politicians. Likewise, the Democrats’ pitch that voting GOP would lead to the end of democracy-as-we-know-it fell flat. Democrats should have been fighting for we, the people. They came off instead as fighting against Republican voter suppression—in other words, they fought our right to vote for Democrats. The democracy argument might have landed in a multiparty parliamentary democracy—but vicious Democratic lawsuits to keep the Green Party off the ballot ensure we don’t get that.

What Democrats Can Do Now

Act how House Republicans do when they’re out of power. It works.

  1. Obstruct! Newspaper pundits’ conventional wisdom says that voters dislike obstructionism, love compromise and want both parties to work together to get things done in Washington. History says the opposite. Recently, you need only look at the GOP’s relentless ankle-biting of Obama to see that a minority party that relentlessly blocks the majority’s agenda can be effective—ask Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland—and drive its acolytes into such a spasm of loyal enthusiasm that it later recaptures the majority. “This strategy of kicking the hell out of Obama all the time, treating him not just as a president from the opposing party but an extreme threat to the American way of life, has been a remarkable political success. It helped Republicans take back the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and the White House in 2016,” Politico noted in 2016.
  2. Veto! Democratic voters don’t send Democratic politicians to Washington to give the Republicans what they want. They want that stuff shot down, with extreme prejudice. Biden should pull a Gerry Ford and veto every crazy bill the Republican Congress sends to his desk.
  3. Executive Orders! Executive orders have become abused and are overused and antidemocratic and—get real. End-runs around the legislative branch are here to stay, so Biden should go nuts doing stuff that will shore up his party’s progressive base and drive the Republicans to distraction. Pardon Edward Snowden and other political targets. Pardon every nonviolent drug offender and commute the prison sentence of every nonviolent criminal in federal custody. Tell states and cities that refuse to do the same that they’ll lose federal highway funding; that’s how we got the national drinking age of 21.
  4. Quorum Theater! The House of Representatives needs a quorum of 218 members present in order to conduct business. Democratic representatives should stick around for most matters. When Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his merry band of bigots try to pull something truly cruddy (ahem national abortion ban cough) there’s no reason for the Dems not to leave town on a secret road trip. Call your buddies in the Texas state legislature; they did it to bring attention to a GOP effort to suppress voting.
  5. Open Field! 75% of Democratic voters don’t want Biden to run again. Anyway, obviously, he can’t. He’s too feeble. So, politically, is Kamala Harris. Only 28% of Democrats want her to step in as their party’s nominee in 2024. That’s pathetic. The lame-duck #1 and #2 must step aside, open the field and refrain from issuing endorsements. The strongest nominee is, by definition, the winner of the primary process. Let a battle-tested candidate with the most support within the Democratic Party go on to face Trump or another Republican standardbearer. Abolish superdelegates. Dutifully sticking with a doomed sacrificial lamb, like Bob Dole in 1996, would be the height of idiocy.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

A Premature Postmortem of the Bernie Sanders Campaign

Establishment media is ridiculing Bernie Sanders for stating some simple truths: establishment media was out to get him, the DNC was out to get him and young voters who support him haven’t been good about showing up at the polls.

But that doesn’t mean that Bernie Sanders didn’t make mistakes. So let’s take a look at those.

No matter what happens between him and Joe Biden, and it isn’t over yet, Sanders deserves credit for some remarkable achievements. In the face of formidable establishmentarian opposition, Jewish, with a speaking manner that is anything but conventional in U.S. politics, relying only on small individual donations and promoting a political agenda many Americans would consider radical, Bernie Sanders currently controls 42% of the Democratic primary vote against a recent sitting vice president. Much of his agenda, including making college affordable, increasing the minimum wage, and improving the healthcare system, has become mainstream Democratic Party policy after many decades during which the party didn’t even pretend to give a damn about normal people. Bernie Sanders is running an issue-based campaign, not one based purely on personality. Even if he loses, historians will mark this election as evidence of the strength of progressive and left-leaning electoral politics.

But he’s not perfect. There are things that he could have/could still do better.

Politics is first and foremost about framing, and Sanders isn’t great at it. “Medicare for All” is meaningless to millions of Americans who have had no contact with Medicare and don’t know anything about it. “Free healthcare” would have been easier to understand and would not have turned off or confused union members who already have decent healthcare plans. “Free college tuition,” on the other hand, tells too little of the story. Sanders’ plan only helps low-income college students but many voters seem to still think that he wanted to use their taxes to help out children of wealthy people. The “Green New Deal” hasn’t been defined or well-publicized beyond the fact that it would be expensive.

Sanders’ plan for student loan forgiveness was also presented in a problematic fashion. Many Americans don’t have college degrees; they wondered, why should we pay for those who do? Many other Americans went to college, took out student loans and then paid them back. Why shouldn’t millennials do the same? There are good answers to those questions: millennial student debt is many factors higher than Generation X and Baby Boomer debt because tuition has skyrocketed at a rate much faster than inflation. Student loan forgiveness would stimulate the economy by freeing up young people to buy cars and homes. People who already paid their loans should have been added as beneficiaries of his plan so that they didn’t feel like suckers due to a simple accident of birthdate. Most importantly, Sanders should not have proposed student loan forgiveness without coupling it to a free college tuition program and/or job retraining program for people who are older and don’t have college degrees or need retraining in order to retool for the 21st century.

Speaking of costs, I found it endlessly frustrating that Bernie Sanders never seemed able to clearly answer the question of how he would pay for his proposals. Generally, he should simply have said: “I’ll take it out of the Pentagon budget.” Maybe this wasn’t true. If it wasn’t true, he should have made it true. Not only is the defense budget bloated, most Americans, including people who favor strong military, know about the $800 toilet seats. I’m not sure why he didn’t bash the military.

He also hasn’t been good about explaining Medicare for All. What he should have said was, everyone is going to pay less for healthcare, so much less, that even though your taxes will go up a bit, you’ll still come out way ahead.  And if you got hit by something catastrophic like cancer, it would all be covered. Instead, he talked about how European countries somehow managed to pay for national healthcare plans. He’s right about that, but Americans have been told that Europeans pay high taxes. He needed to explain in plain language that that would not happen here.

He ignored my advice to own and explain his self-described “democratic socialist” label. He probably assumed that it would be more of a problem in the general election against Donald Trump, but what he underestimated was the Democratic Party’s long history of red bashing as well as the well-established fact that other people will define you if you don’t do it yourself. He should have followed the example of JFK when he gave a speech assuring Americans that he would not take orders from the pope as a Roman Catholic. Sanders should have given a speech entirely about democratic socialism.

Some things, it’s hard to do anything about. A campaign has the candidate that it has with a personality that he or she comes with. Bernie Sanders has an underlying vulnerability and warmth that his tendency to bellow often covered up. The media had a field day portraying him as a guy who likes to yell a lot. This is where something like “The Man from Hope” video that the Bill Clinton for President campaign created would have come in handy. A biographical look at Bernie’s roots in Brooklyn, his childhood struggling in a working-class family and the premature death of his mother due to poor healthcare would have helped to humanize a very human person.

Images of him being manhandled by cops during his participation in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s couldn’t have hurt him with African-American voters who ended up turning out for Joe Biden.

Of course the biggest mistake Sanders made may not have been a mistake at all. He ran inside the Democratic Party. They were never going to let him have the nomination.

He had to know that.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Bernie.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Now, A Postmortem By Someone Who Actually Saw Trump’s Win Coming

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You’ve read post-election analysis by the discredited corporate pundits who thought Hillary was a shoo-in. Since I saw Donald Trump’s “upset” coming, my take on what happened and why may be of more interest.

As with any large-scale disaster, the ascent of a spectacularly unqualified buffoon to the most powerful political office on earth came about as the result of numerous system failures and operator errors. Here’s a bird’s-eye view of what went wrong.

System Failures: Problems Hardwired Into the Machine

  1. Democrats took their progressive base for granted.

Following George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972, the Democrats’ conservative southern wing seized control of the DNC and other leadership apparatus. Center-right Dems won four presidential races with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but at a cost. Election after election, liberals and progressives — the party’s base and thus its greatest potential source of votes, donations and enthusiasm — were taken for granted as the party moved right in search of swing voters. Where else, the Clintonian Brahmins asked smugly, could lefties go? The answer was nowhere: snubbed, unmotivated and disgusted, they stayed home this November.

  1. No safety net for workers displaced by globalization and deindustrialization.

NAFTA wasn’t the beginning; it was the last nail in the coffin of the postwar boom that elevated blue-collar manufacturing jobs to professions paying enough to finance the American Dream. Year after year, millions of workers lost good jobs and were forced to make do with two lousy ones. Inner cities, and not a few suburbs, rotted and died. Neither major party talked about the Making of America Not Great Anymore, much less tried to do anything about it. Trump scored big Rust Belt points merely by acknowledging the long-ignored pain of millions.

  1. In media coverage of the horse race, some candidates are more equal than others.

If you were designing American democracy from scratch, you’d probably make it a rule that every candidate for office receives the same attention from the media. (France does this.) But we’re light years away from that ideal. Trump received more TV minutes and column-inches than his Republican rivals because he was (a) outrageous and (b) a celebrity. Clinton’s coverage overshadowed Sanders’ because media gatekeepers were (a) enamored of their pre-fab “first woman president follows first black president” narrative and (b) couldn’t imagine that an elderly socialist from Vermont could be a serious contender. Who would be president-elect today had Rand Paul, Carla Fiorina and Bernie Sanders been given a fair chance to make their cases to the voters? Probably not Trump.

Operator Errors: Screw-Ups By Individual Politicians and Organizations

  1. Hillary’s campaign partied like it was 1996.

Campaigning has changed since the Clintonian heyday of the ’90s, but Hillary’s strategists didn’t get the memo. Trump ad-libbed outrageous vidbytes at his rallies, making them must-see TV and earning billions in free exposure; Hillary stuck to her deadly dull stump speech, doomed to be ignored. While Trump worked Twitter like a tween at 3 am — ensuring that story-hungry editors would see his hilarious rants when they arrived at their desks — it took 12 Clinton staffers to compose a single tweet whose made-by-committee provenance made it dead on arrival. She spent many millions on a repeat loop of anti-Trump TV ads featuring clips everyone had already seen. Considering that she barely survived Bernie Sanders’ primary challenge, it should have been obvious to her team that the Democratic party has moved left (as has the nation). So why did her 2016 campaign follow the old Dick Morris move-right-for-the-general-election model from 1996, moving right in order to “reach out to Republican megadonors“? Meanwhile, Morris himself understood the new reality. “But Trump is doing more than driving populist Democrats into Republican arms,” Morris wrote. “He is separating the establishment left of the Democratic Party from its populist base. His candidacy separates the blue-collar social populists from their partisan moorings even as his economic populism appeals to the Sanders left.” He wrote that in May.

  1. The DNC ignored polls that showed Bernie was a better candidate than Hillary.

Trump’s “surprise” win wasn’t shocking to people who were paying attention. Throughout the primary and general election, the DNC brushed off head-to-head tracking polls that showed that Hillary Clinton never enjoyed a commanding lead over, and sometimes fell behind, Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, consistently held a double-digit lead, sometimes as high as 20 percent, over Trump. As it turned out, Trump would have lost to Sanders. In a change year when Americans were in the mood for radical populism, Sanders offered all the stuff voters liked about Trump — his anti-free trade message, economic populism, opposition to stupid foreign wars, the fiery, outspoken energy of a loud New Yorker — minus his manic loopiness and offensive comments about women and minorities. Granted, Bernie’s poll numbers would have suffered under an onslaught of ads depicting the Vermont senator as the second coming of Stalin, Soviet May Day parade footage and “The Internationale” playing incessantly. But the Cold War is over. Americans are more afraid of cost-cutting CEOs than commissars.

  1. Hillary Clinton didn’t appoint Bernie Sanders as vice president, or to a cabinet position.

Democratic voters wanted Hillary — a lifelong right-wing Democrat — to balance the ticket by choosing a progressive running mate like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker or her rival Bernie Sanders. But she never considered any of them, going instead with some guy who’s name I still struggle to remember. Ironically, no one understood the disastrous implications of Hillary’s choice better than right-wing blogger Wayne Allyn Root in The Blaze: ” Hillary desperately needed a shot in the arm; an exciting and edgy vice president by her side…Tim Kaine isn’t just boring… Kaine is an affront to every Bernie Sanders supporter – which happens to be all the youth and energy in the entire Democrat Party.”

(Ted Rall is author of “Trump: A Graphic Biography,” an examination of the life of the Republican presidential nominee in comics form. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

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