His mission: Bring Dems into future

You see and hear how it goes now. We’re expected to believe that without new travel bans there is no way to keep us safe, as if bad guys — but only bad guys from seven countries! — have been pouring into the country for eight years like Barack Obama gave them all an E-ZPass. And we’re expected to believe at the same time that anyone who opposes Donald Trump’s travel ban is an enemy of the state, and that includes federal judges. It is as if there were terrorist attacks in Obama’s America as often as there were mass shootings.

“San Bernardino!” you hear. “Orlando!” you hear, even though two of the three people involved in those mass killings were born in America — one of them, Omar Mateen, the screw loose in Orlando, in the same borough, Queens, where Trump was born.

But any Democrats who speak out against any part of this, or the way the country just in a month is being run — as if the new President is still trying to win over the people at his campaign rallies — are just whiners and obstructionists. They could not possibly be speaking out or standing up on principle, the way these judges who have gone against the President could not possibly be ruling on principle. They are just out to get the President the way CNN and The New York Times and Nordstrom are.

Less than a month into this, there is such general lousiness you sometimes don’t know where to start. And no room for honest dissent of any kind. No. There is apparently just complaining from the sore losers in the Democratic Party, none of whom know anything about keeping America safe, because only the people in the new administration do.

But then out of the lousiness comes someone like Jaime Harrison, 41-yearold chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party who is a long-shot bet to be the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee; who fights for the future of his party these days because he honestly feels that is a way of fighting for his country. So many big Democrats look like the past, and sound like the past. Not Harrison. Once nobody knew who Obama was.

“I’m not thinking about what race I might want to run next,” Harrison is saying Saturday afternoon. “I’m doing what I’m doing what right now because I’m thinking about my son. He’s a 2-yearold. I’m fighting for his future, because he’s going to be a young black beginning to grow up with a despot as a President. I feel like I have to be one standing up (to the President) from our side, because nobody with a spine is standing up to him on the other side.”

He speaks to people in a way you wish Hillary Clinton had, and believes he does have a puncher’s chance of beating out Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) or Tom Perez, the former labor secretary, when the Democrats go to Atlanta at the end of the month for their winter meeting and elect the next chairman. But whether he wins or not, Harrison is going to be around, in the Senate or Congress or maybe even the governor’s mansion. He is somebody who needs to lead Democrats into the next generation, because there are too many in the party who look to the world like crypt-keepers.

“This is not the time for business as usual in the Democratic Party,” he says.

He is a great American story, the product of a single-parent home in Orangeburg, S.C., who, when he became the first in his family to go to college, went to Yale. He ended up working for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) when Clyburn, an AfricanAmerican the way Harrison (photo inset) is, became vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. When Clyburn became majority whip, Harrison ran Clyburn’s operation, the first AfricanAmerican floor director for top leadership in the House of Representatives.

Now here he is, trying to remind his party what it once meant to so many voters who went running to Trump this time.

“A huge problem for our party,” he says, “is that over the past decade we’ve been doing a whole lot of telling and not much showing. We’ve said we’re fighting for working families. But we haven’t done enough to show that to them. Somehow we have to earn back the trust of those people.

“Listen, we can demonize Republicans all we want. And we saw how they were obstructionists with President Obama at every turn. But one of the big reasons they have the power they do right now is that they demonstrated to their base that they didn’t just have values, but were willing to fight for them. And that became a winning message for them, one that helped carry their guy to the White House. Along the way, eight years after Obama, it was Trump who was seen as the candidate of hope and change.”

So many big Democrats really do look like the past. Harrison, new face out of South Carolina, someone who learned from the tough, old values of James Clyburn, is the future. You know how you talk to

voters? The way he does.