Get Over Him
Dems can win again only by letting go of O
POLITICS has become so mindless I’m almost ready to watch soccer. On the left, Trump is the root of all evil. On the right, the pro-Trumpers mostly just repeat themselves. So to make things more interesting, let a Trump supporter tell you how the Democrats can win an election.
Spoiler: It’s not Bernie Sanders holding the party back; it’s Barack Obama.
I know at this moment, it looks pretty hopeless. I don’t think socialism is the ticket, or open borders either. And the “Abolish ICE” crowd makes it seem as if the party of FDR and JFK has a death wish.
But the wheel turns and somehow yesterday’s big loser eventually ends up on top. In Britain, you have the impossible Jeremy Corbin, but faced with a feckless Theresa May, Corbin’s Labor Party nearly won the last election. So anything can happen.
After the Goldwater debacle in 1964, people wrote the obituary for the Republican Party, but it came roaring back in 1966 and won the presidency two years later. We saw the same turnarounds in 1974, 1980 and 1992. Parties reinvent themselves when they have to. They have only two options, the ones in “Moneyball”: Adapt or die.
So how could a “Moneyball” Democratic Party adapt and win the presidency? Not easily. The economy is booming, jobs are up and consumer and business confidence are through the roof. The Mueller investigation seems increasingly unlikely to come up with anything.
On the other hand, the Trump revolution is incomplete, and this is an opening the Democrats could exploit. Congress is where Trump’s plans for health-care and immigration reform went to die. We’ve arrested the growth of wasteful new regulations, but seem incapable of cutting back the enormous number of old ones. Peter Navarro has sparked trade wars that threaten to reverse the economic gains from the 2017 tax reform.
So there’s an opening for the Democrats, and here are some things they could do. Health- care reform, including a form of single payer for people with preexisting conditions, is popular with voters. The Republicans can’t do it. Let the Democrats step up to the plate.
Progressive Democrats could also respond to the crisis in student loans that have made debt slaves of many millennials. The burdened students should be given the right to burn off student debts in bankruptcy, as they could have before 1978. This should have been an issue for Republicans. It wasn’t, so expect the Democrats to take it up — and while they’re at it, cap tuition at America’s colleges.
Trump promised to drain the swamp, and was lucky enough to run against a candidate who seemed knee-deep in it. But now we’re 18 months into his administration, and the swamp is still there. The lobbyists on K Street are flourishing, and there’ve been no calls to curb their influence. American voters care about corruption, and these are issues that, if they’re not addressed by Republicans, could elect a Democrat.
We liked Trump’s rough edges when he was running for the nomination. We’re tough, too. But we also remember things like the Pablo Casals concert at the White House back in ’61, and we’re sorry that that’s not happening today. A cultural outreach to the great artists of our time might seem of little importance, but it really does matter. It’s about our self-image, as reflected in the person we elect to the highest office. We’d like to think we’re not complete schlumps, and we’d want a president with a cultural agenda.
These are matters on which the Democrats hold the edge. Now if only they could return to the earlier Democratic Party, with its exhilarating confidence in our country’s nobility, justice and above all greatness.
So what’s stopping them? It’s not Bernie Sanders, and it’s not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Instead, the barrier is Barack Obama, who radicalized the party with his pessimism, who reminded us of past sins, who told Americans they should feel ashamed of themselves.
His charisma enabled him to win despite the moralizing message. But his successors don’t possess his personal charm, and his legacy burdens his party. If it can’t get over him, it won’t adapt. It will die.