Waiting for a story

Today’s offering continues the theme of Tuesday’s. It could be called “National Democrats are Mercury and Arkansas is Pluto, Part Two.”

I wrote Tuesday that the youth-driven and incrementally socialistic dynamism in the national Democratic Party was widening the canyon between it and an isolated, inert Democratic culture in Arkansas.

Here, Democrats have been reeling since 2010, owing to the nationalization of our state politics. They could better claw their way back with a centrist, personality-driven Democratic politics than one being pulled generationally to the left on the national level.

Reaction included comments from several people who said I ought to go to state Rep. Clarke Tucker’s campaign headquarters and look around at all the energetic young people volunteering there.

The movement I was citing as further separating Arkansas from Democrats was actually taking place at ground zero of Tucker’s Democratic bid for Congress against French Hill, they said.

I understand that there is uncommon youthful excitement about Tucker’s campaign. A Church of Christ preacher came to me recently to tell of a young female congregant and former Republican aide who was intrigued by Tucker’s candidacy and wanted advice about connecting with the young Democrat’s general-election campaign.

I think Democrats have something going on in the Second District with Tucker.

So, yes, the Tucker campaign has an uncommonly high energy level that is significantly youth-driven. But I am more persuaded by the broader and more contextual view of a veteran Democratic operative who got in touch to say: Tucker benefits locally from a version of the youthful national energy I cite. The only problem is that there is not enough of those people to push him across the finish line. They can merely help keep him in the race until the top of the stretch. Once there, Tucker can only win by augmenting that youthful energy with personality-driven appeal to good ol’ boys in Perry, Conway and Yell counties who haven’t seen a Democrat come around since Bumpers, Pryor, Clinton and Beebe that they could take a natural liking to.

We’re talking about people who’d cast a Donald Trump-Tim GriffinClarke Tucker ticket. Those kinds of people used to do more than exist in Arkansas. They thrived. They weren’t outliers. They were the norm.

Their votes were personal, instinctual, policy-oblivious and, to them, perfectly logical.

Tariffs will not be a part of their consideration. Iran and Russia won’t, either. For Tucker to compete, those folks will have to conclude from a media narrative and personal campaigning that he is a very nice and impressive young man and that French Hill seems a little wooden, a little too much the Little Rock banker, not so quick on the local uptake.

It could happen. I’m not thinking it will. I’m predicting it won’t. But it could.

Meantime, in the national context, David Brooks wrote a column Tuesday in the New York Times about these same Democratic trends. But he went smartly further to say nothing matters until it gets encapsulated in a story, one most usually driven by a candidate.

In other words, intra-party movements and tugs-of-war are interesting, but what matters more is a presidential candidate who offers a story and incorporates, or doesn’t, that movement.

Donald Trump’s story was make America great again. Barack Obama’s was hope and change for a dramatic new day. George W. Bush’s was a compassionate conservatism. Bill Clinton’s was a new kind of Democrat stressing personal responsibility. Ronald Reagan’s was morning in America. Jimmy Carter’s was that he’d never lie to us.

I could go on, but you get the point, which is that those with stories win and those without lose, no matter the percolations within their parties.

Hillary Clinton’s party had youthful and liberal percolations from Bernie Sanders, but she alienated that energy in the primary and was too shop-worn in the general election to capture anyone’s imagination as something so fresh as the first woman president.

In the end, her story was that Trump was a madman who couldn’t be allowed near the presidency. Compelling and accurate though that be, it came up short, as it might again.

We’ll see in the November midterms whether there’s something real happening in the national Democratic Party. We’ll see if, in Arkansas, Clarke Tucker can finesse it.

But we’re not going to know anything about 2020 until there is a candidate with a story—Sanders with an old socialist’s last gasp, or Elizabeth Warren with a near-socialist’s female insurgency, or—my personal favorite at this point, a generational choice, I’m sure—Joe Biden’s tragedy-marked life story and good ol’ rural Pennsylvania working-class heritage and saucy straight talk and populism.

If Trump has taught us nothing else, it’s that political parties and their philosophies are mere dormancies waiting for a strong personality to write a story that either mobilizes or neutralizes them.