The Democrats think centrism will re-elect Biden. That’s a dangerous assumption
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There are still quite a few pundits determined to pretend that America’s two great parties are symmetric — equally unwilling to face reality, equally pushed into extreme positions by special interests and rabid partisans. It’s nonsense, of course. Planned Parenthood isn’t the same thing as the Koch brothers, nor is Bernie Sanders the moral equivalent of Ted Cruz. And there’s no Democratic counterpart whatsoever to Donald Trump.
Moreover, when self-proclaimed centrist pundits get concrete about the policies they want, they have to tie themselves in knots to avoid admitting that what they’re describing are basically the positions of a guy named Barack Obama.
Still, there are some currents in our political life that do run through both parties. And one of them is the persistent delusion that a hidden majority of American voters either supports or can be persuaded to support radical policies, if only the right person were to make the case with sufficient fervor.
You see this on the right among hard-line conservatives, who insist that only the cowardice of Republican leaders has prevented the rollback of every progressive program instituted in the past couple of generations. Actually, you also see a version of this tendency among genteel, country-club-type Republicans, who continue to imagine that they represent the party’s mainstream even as polls show .. http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-national-gop-primary .. that almost two-thirds of likely primary voters support Mr. Trump, Mr. Cruz or Ben Carson.
Meanwhile, on the left there is always a contingent of idealistic voters eager to believe that a sufficiently high-minded leader can conjure up the better angels of America’s nature and persuade the broad public to support a radical overhaul of our institutions. In 2008 that contingent rallied behind Mr. Obama; now they’re backing Mr. Sanders, who has adopted such a purist stance that the other day he dismissed Planned Parenthood .. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/planned-parenthood-bernie-sanders-218026 (which has endorsed Hillary Clinton) as part of the “establishment.”
But as Mr. Obama himself found out as soon as he took office, transformational rhetoric isn’t how change happens. That’s not to say that he’s a failure. On the contrary, he’s been an extremely consequential president, doing more to advance the progressive agenda than anyone since L.B.J.
Yet his achievements have depended at every stage on accepting half loaves as being better than none: health reform that leaves the system largely private, financial reform that seriously restricts Wall Street’s abuses without fully breaking its power, higher taxes on the rich but no full-scale assault on inequality. [...] [ Screw America for partisan political and personal gain, was the GOP House cretin's chorus in the Caucus Room Restaurant on Obama's first inauguration day. And still. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=101317597 http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=110124244 ]
And the question Sanders supporters should ask is, When has their theory of change ever worked? Even F.D.R., who rode the depths of the Great Depression to a huge majority, had to be politically pragmatic, working not just with special interest groups but also with Southern racists.
Remember, too,that the institutions F.D.R. created were add-ons, not replacements: Social Security didn’t replace private pensions, unlike the Sanders proposal to replace private health insurance with single-payer. Oh, and Social Security originally covered only half the work force, and as a result largely excluded African-Americans.
Just to be clear: I’m not saying that someone like Mr. Sanders is unelectable, although Republican operatives would evidently rather face him than Mrs. Clinton — they know that his current polling is meaningless, because he has never yet faced their attack machine. But even if he was to become president, he would end up facing the same harsh realities that constrained Mr. Obama.
The point is that while idealism is fine and essential — you have to dream of a better world — it’s not a virtue unless it goes along with hardheaded realism
[Calling B402 to attention on that. Can't have everything. To argue you want this and that reflecting some Democrat values, yet still say you will vote Republican does not compute. It's contradictory,]
about the means that might achieve your ends. That’s true even when, like F.D.R., you ride a political tidal wave into office. It’s even more true for a modern Democrat, who will be lucky if his or her party controls even one house of Congress at any point this decade.
Sorry, but there’s nothing noble about seeing your values defeated because you preferred happy dreams to hard thinking about means and ends. Don’t let idealism veer into destructive self-indulgence. -----------------------------------------------
David Sirota
The party has settled on a new playbook: shifting right and hoping demoralized voters are repulsed by Republicans Mon 1 May 2023 20.00 AEST Last modified on Mon 1 May 2023 23.50 AEST
‘This time, it’s even more risky because this is not a race against a sitting Republican president.’ Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters
The Democratic party’s political class has developed a rote formula over the last decade: ignore rather than channel discontent among the party’s rank-and-file voters, prevent competitive primaries where those voters can act on their dissatisfaction, and then hope to eke out general election victories on a wave of voter disgust with the Republican party’s outlandish nominees.
This isn’t just a fleeting tactic. This is now The Formula of Democratic Politics™, one with mixed results. In 2016, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, publicly bragged .. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chuck-schumer-democrats-will-lose-blue-collar-whites-gain-suburbs/ .. that the Formula would result in flipping enough moderate voters to secure a victory – just before the Formula’s epic failure handed Donald Trump the presidency.
Four years later, though, the Formula seemed to work – Democrats united to quash the primary against the quasi-incumbent Joe Biden, and Trump’s horrific first term allowed Biden to eke out a win with a flaccid campaign based on a meaningless platitude .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/us/biden-trump-soul-nation-country.html .. about “the soul of America”.
[Insert: Not quite meaningless, David.]
Now Democrats .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/democrats .. seem intent on using the Formula again – only this time, it’s even more risky because this is not a race against a sitting Republican president. In 2024, Biden is the incumbent playing defense, and data suggest that there’s not much enthusiasm for his re-election campaign, even among his own party.
A stat from the Washington Post illustrates this larger problem: “Biden has less support for renomination among Democrats than Trump, Obama and Clinton had from their parties,” the newspaper reports, noting that surveys show just 38% of Democrats want Biden to be the party’s nominee in 2024. CNN’s polling .. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/06/politics/cnn-poll-biden-reelection-2024/index.html .. shows that right now, just one-third of Americans believe Biden deserves to be re-elected – lower than where Trump was at around this stage of his first term.
If there was a healthy, genuinely democratic culture among the Democratic party’s political class, the response to the prospect of depressed voter enthusiasm .. https://rollcall.com/2023/04/28/joe-bidens-first-2024-foe-his-enthusiasm-problem-with-democratic-voters/ .. might be a serious primary challenge. There might be a traditional top-tier candidate – maybe a senator, a governor, or even a member of the House – who is both ambitious enough to run for president and worried enough about a Biden failure in a general election against Trump.
Such a primary would serve the additional benefit of testing Biden’s own re-election viability, and making sure he can handle the rigors of a campaign before he’s already the nominee.
But that hasn’t happened. The response has been the Formula.
[How many of the above would have disappeared if the Dems had another Sanders in place of Manchin. But that's silly, eh. So lean back on, didn't they do as well as they could considering Manchin combined with the GOP 'block every bill' attitude.]
With voters now understandably ticked off, here comes the Formula’s primary-crushing phase.
So far, this phase of the Formula has been successful. Though Marianne Williamson and Robert F Kennedy Jr, are promising primary challenges, no elected official in the party seems willing to vigorously support even the concept of a primary, much less run in one.
No doubt every Democratic officeholder is deterred by the cautionary tale of Senator Bernie Sanders, who was shamed for the crime of momentarily considering a primary challenge to Barack Obama while the incumbent was bailing out banks amid the foreclosure meltdown. For his part, Sanders provided an early Biden re-election endorsement, not even holding out for any policy concessions.
So far, this part of the Formula has been successful in manufacturing a sense of inevitability and creating the illusion that there is no other path – even if voters might want one. As the Washington Post’s .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/24/biden-2024-presidential-election/ .. headline put it: “Democrats reluctant about Biden 2024, but they see no other choice”. Or as Sanders told MSNBC about his Biden endorsement: “I don’t think one has many alternatives here.”
Assuming Biden is the nominee, the Formula’s final phase will probably be anchored in Schumer’s 2016 assumption. Democrats will presume that come general election time, disgust with the Republican nominee will cure all the discontent, demoralization and disillusionment sown by a feeble left-punching incumbent and by the party’s heavy-handed primary suppression tactics.
Maybe that’s what ends up happening. Maybe voters will see the Republican nominee as so flagrantly grotesque that Biden will get four more years. But there’s mounting evidence .. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/trump-could-definitely-beat-biden.html .. that the opposite could happen, and that 2024 could be more like 2016 than 2020.
[STILL - they keep winning special elections. See reply.]
That’s hardly surprising. As gross as Republican politicians are, Democrats’ formula may not be sustainable over the long haul. There may be only so long that a party can ignore and suppress mass discontent and then just hope the other party’s extremism generates revulsion.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of The Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign speechwriter
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