Playing to Win: An Update
A year ago I wrote about the need for the Democrats to take an aggressive approach to governing. They haven't done it.
A few months after Joe Biden was inaugurated as President, it was obvious to me that the Republicans were dusting off the obstructionist playbook they used during the Obama years. "The nation is at an inflection point,” I wrote, and “the Democrats must recognize that they must play to win. “
Perhaps the pandemic is serving to put issues in relief. Public faith in government institutions is at a perilously low level. While President Biden pursues a restoration of the public’s faith and trust in those institutions, that effort ultimately depends on passing legislation through Congress.
I, like many in the public sphere, urged the Democrats to address the systemic characteristics of our government that magnified its intrinsic unwieldiness. Eliminating the Senate’s filibuster was at the top of my list. To adjust to modern technological society, it is imperative to reform and revitalize our political institutions. It was the reason the Framers included Article V (amendment procedures) in the Constitution. This is the point at which the Democrats repeatedly come up short. As the journalist, Alex Pareene pointed out last week,
For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch. -The AP (Alex Pareene) Newsletter
This feckless approach by the party occupying the White House and clinging to slim majorities in Congress zoomed into sharp focus again this week when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer orchestrated a vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion. With all 50 Republican Senators on record as opposing it, the bill had no chance to reach the 60 vote threshold required to overcome a filibuster. (The final tally was 49-51 (with Democrat Joe Manchin voting with the Republicans.) It was purely an exercise in performative politics.
If the Democrats wanted to get the Republicans on record as opposing a woman’s right to choose, a more limited bill with wider public support was a better tactic. It may have even attracted a few Republican votes from pro-choice Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. At the very least, a bill granting that right in cases of rape, incest, or if the mother’s life were endangered would not only play better with a public that overwhelmingly favors leaving Roe v. Wade in place, but could be used against GOP Senators up for re-election.
(I can’t help but think that such Democratic Party strategies resemble Russia’s clusterfuck military operation in Ukraine… Except, of course, the Russians are relentlessly brutal.)
This has been the consistent difference between the parties for decades. The Republicans, the minority party in terms of registered voters, the party of the big business and other monied interests, enlarged their voting base in the Reagan years by embracing evangelical Christians as partners. Combined with Southern Democrats who changed parties after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s, the GOP mustered enough electoral heft to win national elections. The plutocratic class had very clear objectives: undoing the New Deal, reducing the size of government, lowering taxes, and reducing regulation. To motivate their new allies, they began to rely on cultural issues. They needed to win elections but could not risk running on their business-friendly policies.
Campaigns became a combination of fund-raising and negative advertising. George H.W. Bush‘s campaign manager Lee Atwater gave us the Willie Horton ad. When Republicans took the House in 1994, Newt Gingrich implemented a take-no-prisoners approach that marked the end of bipartisanship. These were only the most visible evidence of a robust right-wing movement. Out of sight of the public, rich donors and activists were funding think tanks and PACs to further a conservative agenda. The courts were a prime target and, as I wrote here last week, the conservative project is about to realize a 50-year obsession, the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
The conservative movement has been working toward this victory for decades, and it has been made possible not simply by its determination and a few fortunate accidents, but by the haplessness of its opponents. Many in the center of the Democratic Party have been paralyzed by the belief that they might “do popular stuff” and coast to victory without having to get their hands dirty fighting the opposition, while its left-wing critics too often forget that democracy is an ongoing process, not a battle that ceases after casting the right vote once or twice. In both cases, the right has been fortunate in having opponents who argue themselves into complacency. -Adam Sewer in The Atlantic
The Democrats have never grasped they are in a war. If the Gingrich movement did not awaken them to the danger, the Tea Party eruption of 2010 should have. While it began as a grassroots response to the bank bailouts after the economic collapse of 2008, and eventually linked itself with the racist reaction to a black man as President, in hindsight the Tea Party was a movement quickly co-opted by the conservative project. Disaffected working-class whites became a target for Republican appeals.
In early 2016, with Donald Trump headed toward the Republican Presidential nomination, Amanda Taub of Vox wrote about authoritarians. In this case, the term refers not to the leader, but to the voters who were prompted “to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.”
Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.
A candidate like Donald Trump.
It was this group who helped put Trump into the White House. With the Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress, a conservative government was in position to solidify its position for the foreseeable future. The consequences of having the least-qualified (and non-conservative) President in the nation’s history were the appointment of 3 Supreme Court Justices, a budget-busting tax cut for the wealthy, a trade war with China, and a mismanaged public health crisis. Persons recommended to him by conservative groups populated the Executive Branch of government with predictable results.
None of this is to deny the past accomplishments of Democratic administrations. Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus. Under Obama, the Affordable Care Act was passed. Biden has in many ways- covid vaccines, job growth, rebuilding our foreign alliances- accomplished a great deal. But there remains a sense that the Democrats, both in action and in messaging, shy away from taking off the gloves and being aggressive.
“Boldness is superior to timidity in every instance…” -US Marine Corps field manual
In abstract terms, we tend to associate concepts of strategy and tactics with the military. War is after all the ultimate competition, a life-and-death contest. The gathering of information, the planning, and preparation, however, is endemic to most human endeavors. It is when those endeavors involve winners and losers- as in sports or politics, for instance- that the analogy to the military is most apt. It is boldness, not complacency, that wins out more times than not. Think of Washington leading his army across the Delaware to surprise the Hessians at Trenton; or FDR, entering office in the midst of the Great Depression and using the power of the government in novel ways to deal with the collapsed economy. Our history is full of such examples.
So, in what circumstance will the Democrats jettison their timidity and take bold actions? Elections are months away: Do they have a winning strategy or will they cling to their uninspiring messaging and the policy prescriptions that cause people’s eyes to glaze over? Are they willing to run videos of the January 6 insurrection in campaign ads against every MAGA candidate? Will they spend their money on winnable races or squander it on hopefuls? Realistically, the Democrats could not only retain their control of the Senate, but extend their number beyond the current 50-50 to a true majority… If they make the effort. And, in spite of the Republicans thinking they will take back the House, the Democrats have a fighting chance to retain their majority.*
A fighting chance… But will they take advantage?
Here’s a challenge and some suggestions. It goes without saying that Democrats must make a massive get-out-the-vote effort. Since overturning Roe v. Wade seems like a done deal, hang it around the neck of every Republican running for office. Every insane comment made by the right-wing crazies- Greene, Boebert, Gosar, et al- must be part of the messaging.
Please use the Comment section to add more suggestions. Be creative and be bold.
*The source for projections on both the House and Senate races is https://www.racetothewh.com/
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