Toughen up, Democrats

Why the party will live to regret its hasty purge of Al Franken

Sen. Al Franken’s heartfelt announcement that he will be resigning his office in response to charges of sexual misconduct demonstrates a stark contrast between the Republicans and Democrats. It will be recorded that he was pushed out by his own party even as a man guilty of more serious sexual misconduct sits in the Oval Office and Senate Republicans prepare to welcome sexual predator Roy Moore with open arms.

This division between the two parties isn’t just about morality or hypocrisy; it’s about having a fundamentally different view of the world.

Democrats are idealists while Republicans are realists. Of course this isn’t true in all cases; Republicans idealistically claim to love liberty, worship the Constitution as James Madison wrote it, and assert that sacred principles guide their policies rather than crass pandering to their contributors and primary voters, which is really the case.

But they know they are lying and it’s all for show.

By contrast, Democrats seldom ever climb down from Mount Olympus to engage in political hand-to-hand combat. They whine and wring their hands about the dirty tricks Republicans constantly play on them, but on the rare occasions when they have some political leverage, they seldom use it effectively.

In the end, Democrats are constrained by responsibility while Republicans will do whatever it takes to win at all cost. It’s not a fair fight.

This is not a new problem. All democratic governments that respect individual rights, permit free speech and assembly, and are responsive to the will of the people expressed in free elections are vulnerable to ruthless enemies from within, who use democratic freedoms to undermine and destroy those very freedoms.

It’s worth remembering that Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany quite openly and legally, as were other dictators and strongmen around the world.

It is hard for small-D democrats to respond to internal threats without believing they are sacrificing their core principles in the process. Sometimes a foolish consistency makes those who support liberal values balk at actions clearly needed because they necessarily involve illiberal policies.

Going to war is the most obvious example, and great Democratic presidents like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and, yes, Lyndon Johnson struggled with the inherent contradiction between their ideals and their actions.

Republicans, of course, have no such qualms. They are like the ancient followers of Manichaeism who saw everything as black and white, dark and light, good and evil. There was never any gray, no nuances to confuse issues. There was one path and it had to be followed.

The Republican attitude succeeds in part because it is easy to understand. Most people have neither the time nor the expertise to study an issue well enough to have an informed opinion. They depend on political parties to sort through the issues for them and tell them what to think.

It’s like following a movie reviewer. If over the years you have found that you enjoyed and hated the same movies, you are inclined to trust her judgment. So too with parties. When the acquisition of information is costly, it is reasonable to economize.

The problem is that unscrupulous people or those with poor judgment sometimes get control of your party and lead otherwise good and honest people down the wrong path.

That has happened to the Republican Party, my former party and also the former party of a growing number of my friends from the days when I worked for Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Just the other night at a holiday party, one of these old friends whispered to me that she was no longer a Republican, but asked me to keep it to myself. A prominent Reagan biographer at the same event confessed his hatred for the man who now occupies Reagan’s former office T in the White House. his is not yet a movement, but perhaps the beginning of a counterrevolution. The problem is that you can’t beat something with nothing, and right now those in the GOP and the country as a whole looking to return to a sane, reasonable and compassionate Republican leader have no one to look to.

Those who could possibly be such a leader, such as Sen. John McCain or Mitt Romney, seem to find party ties too tough to break and, despite occasional spasms of conscience, mostly get along and go along no matter how ill-considered the GOP policy.

While obviously Republicans deserve primary blame for the disgusting state of their party and have principal responsibility for fixing it, Democrats are not without blame.

In many cases they have offered poor opposition to Republican policies, put up bad candidates in winnable elections, fallen back on time-worn slogans rather than finding creative new ways to advance their agenda, failed to create organizations and institutions to counter the Republican echo chamber, turned their attention too quickly to new issues and given Republicans a second shot instead of finishing the job, and permitted their ideals to overwhelm political common sense.

The Franken problem is a perfect example. Over the last two months, ever since the New York Times broke the story of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sick sexual behavior, a number of stories have detailed indefensible sexual behavior by many others in the entertainment industry and politics. Many more will follow. Franken, a longtime professional comedian, straddled both worlds and was an obvious target for those in the media and Republican dirty tricksters like Roger Stone to dig up dirt on. Sadly, they found incidents that could perhaps have been defended or overcome in the pre-Weinstein era, but were indefensible in today’s political environment.

I am not going to defend Franken’s actions, and of course I agree that sexual misconduct must be punished. But it doesn’t follow that forcing Franken to fall on his sword was the right way to handle his situation.

As many others including Cathy Young here in The News have pointed out, Franken was essentially tried, convicted and sentenced without any semblance of due process. There was no investigation. The charges against him, some of which were anonymous and some of which he denies strongly, were simply accepted at T face value. his is not only wrong but politically stupid. Democrats now have no defense against completely bogus charges ginned up by nefarious right-wing characters such as James O’Keefe, who has already tried once to manufacture a phony sex scandal.

Moreover, the political situation in Minnesota is such that Franken’s departure has now put his seat in jeopardy. It may well go to a Republican next year, according to political analyst and Minnesota native Norm Ornstein.

Democrats are convinced that they have seized the high ground and this will hold them in good stead when they oppose seating Roy Moore, should he win his Alabama Senate seat.

Maybe so, but they may also lose the support of reasonable people who believe Franken was railroaded and made the victim of obsessive Democratic identity politics. Conservatives like Fox’s Laura Ingraham and Newt Gingrich are already reaching out to such people by defending the liberal Franken.

Many Democrats insist that Franken’s treatment is demanded by having to do the right thing regardless of the cost. But as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell eloquently pointed out last Thursday, where were these principled Democrats when New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez went to trial for corruption?

Surely the evidence required to bring him to trial exceeded the threshold of the hearsay and anonymous charges that got Franken thrown under a bus. The only difference, it seems, is that a Democrat

will name Franken’s replacement while a Republican would have named A Menendez’s. competent political party would at least have tried to get something in return for Franken’s sacrifice. For example, Democrats could have used the occasion to call attention to Donald Trump’s admitted sexual indiscretions or those of other Republicans such as Representatives Joe Barton, Trent Franks, and Blake Farenthold.

Franken made glancing mention of Trump and Moore in the floor speech announcing his retirement.

But for the most part, Democrats decided instead to adopt a policy of unilateral disarmament, making Republicans pay no price for their hypocrisy in continuing to defend Trump and Moore.

During the Cold War, Democratic Presidents understood that even if you are willing to disarm unilaterally, you should still try to get something in return. But for Democrats today, virtue-signaling is its own reward. I know Democrats think they will be rewarded — perhaps not instantly, but over time, including in 2018 — by voters for their principled stand against sexual harassment. I don’t buy it. Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged about groping women against their will, was known to virtually all voters before the election, and it didn’t seem to have any impact except on people who had already decided to vote against him.

I think Democrats need to toughen up if they hope to win in the Trump era. Yet many Democrats seem to think that being tough requires being mean, underhanded and unethical.

I often joke that Democrats are the class nerds while Republicans are the school bullies. Maybe in the long run, the nerds will become the rich software developers while the bullies are doing manual labor, but in the short-run, the bully is winning.

The nerds must study the martial arts if they hope to win.

Republican success today is built on a foundation they have built since the 1970s, financed by right-wing billionaires such as Charles and David Koch, Robert Mercer and Rupert Murdoch.

They are systematic, and they are ruthless. They created institutes, organizations and media outlets that relentlessly promote their agenda and give well-paid employment D to professional right-wingers. emocrats and progressives depend on the universities, the mainstream media and ineffectual organizations like the AARP, which went AWOL during the recent tax fight. The Republican strategy can be copied without sacrificing progressive principles to create a more powerful, effective and aggressive opposition to GOP efforts to restrict abortion rights, slash programs that aid mothers and children, despoil the environment, gut consumer protections and take other actions that hurt women just as sexual harassment does.

In my opinion, sacrificing the best and brightest of the Democratic Party in a vain hope that some uncommitted voters will care and reward them looks like another losing strategy.

Bartlett was a Republican insider for many years who became an independent 10 years ago. His latest book is “The Truth Matters.”