It’s about the people
As described to me, the Washington County Democratic Women’s organization was until this year a quiet and insular society mainly comprising two to three dozen longtime true partisan believers.
It met regularly for dinner and a perhaps a short program.
But at its first meeting this year, it confronted the surprise attendance of about 80 unrecognized people who hadn’t signed up to attend. Their presence forced a quick relocation from a small meeting room at Mermaid’s restaurant to a bigger one.
The reason, of course, was Donald Trump, the preposterous second-place Republican president who had scared, offended, infuriated and otherwise motivated all manner of previously inactive Democratic leaners.
The organization had what members said was a record crowd Tuesday night in Fayetteville. From the head table, where I sat as the evening’s speaker, it looked like nearly 200 people, including dozens of men.
The motivation, more than ever, remained Trump. At this point he flirts with enough clumsy inappropriateness that his administration is under a special counsel’s investigation.
What I did in my remarks was probably the last thing the audience expected or wanted. I advised it to de-obsess from that thing that motivated it—that thing being Trump.
(For the record: I’d offer free advice to Arkansas Republican groups, too, but I can’t seem to gin up much interest.)
My point was that the investigation of Trump will turn out one way or the other.
Either he will be driven from office, in which case Mike Pence will present a more conservative presidency that, in freshness, would stand a good chance of election validation in 2020. After all, Gerald Ford nearly beat Jimmy Carter in 1976.
He most likely would have won had he not pardoned Richard Nixon.
Or, Trump will survive any indictment or impeachment and emerge at least partially rehabilitated to proceed to his re-election campaign surely no more feared or dreaded than when he ran and accidentally got elected the first time.
Trump’s victory as well as Bill Clinton’s in 1992 demonstrate that presidential races are about the people—working-class folks, mainly— and not a person, meaning a candidate assailed by an opposition making as its campaign thrust that the candidate is personally unfit.
Republicans in 1992 said Clinton was of low character. In a town-hall debate, that low-character candidate recited the going prices for a carton of milk and a loaf of bread and said he felt people’s pain and understood their hunger for change. George H.W. Bush looked at his watch.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 said Trump was temperamentally unfit to be president. She followed the advice of her campaign advisers to make the race about that unfitness. The idea was to appeal to suburban voters and Republican women.
Her campaign slogan—or one of them—was “I’m with her.” She lost because a few tens of thousands of working folks in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan were more persuaded by Trump’s “make America great again.”
“I’m with her” was about two people—the supporter and the candidate. “Make America great again,” hollow nonsense though it was, encompassed everybody.
Democrats waste emotion and effort by rooting for Trump’s personal demise. A special counsel is getting well-paid to deal with that. Democrats instead need to be explaining to people the meanness in, and the hurt to come from, what Republicans are intending to do to health care, as well as in Trump’s budget on student loans and to farmers’ crop insurance.
Talk to the people about the people, not to each other about Trump.
Ialso think Democrats ought to be touting a specific and pragmatic fix to Obamacare, although current political wisdom is that you never do such a thing as a minority party because it’s more fun to poke holes in what the governing party is having to propose than to invite by your own option the poking of holes in yourself.
Proposing a fix that made tough choices would allow Republicans to deflect criticism back on the Democratic plan.
Such is the dysfunction of our modern brand of partisanship. Such is the loss of statesmanship.
Someone needs to be righteous, even if in defeat, because nobody wins them all and fortunes have a way of turning.
During the meeting a woman stood and pointed out that ours was an old crowd. She wondered why young people in their 20s weren’t in it.
It probably was that this was an old mainline Democratic organization listening to an old mainline speaker.
I was told afterward that the Fayetteville area is positively teeming with young people newly active in Trump-resistant politics—and in gun-resistant politics on college campuses. I was told these youngsters tend to be progressive first and Democratic second, or maybe third after the Indivisible movement.
A convergence of those interests could be formidable, but only with a message about people—not that person, preposterously our president though that person be.