To
paraphrase from a song popular after the Great War “Sixty-Five million
Americans can’t be wrong.” That’s how
many United States voters cast their ballot for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic
Party candidate for President on November 8, 2016. She won the vote but not the election. And since then the pundits and consultants
and those with their own political agenda have waxed eloquent in their attempts
to determine what is wrong with the Democratic Party. As Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out only in
America would those who won two and one half million more votes than their
opponent ask what they are doing wrong?
Let’s
reduce this election to the simple fact t that just as in 1888 the Electoral
College system resulted in the election of the candidate who received fewer
votes from the people for President.
Donald Trump thus joins that illustrious list of President's chosen not
by the people but by the system devised in 1787: Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin
Harrison and George W. Bush (although most historians would agree that the
first and last of those were actually chosen by actions outside the electoral
college.)
The
message of the Democratic Party, the most progressive platform in a century was
not rejected by the American people -- it was in fact endorsed.
The
messenger of the Democratic Party, with all her misperceived warts, was not
rejected by the American people - but by a system devised when it seemed
difficult to imagine a national electorate. And so the Republican Party already
in control of the House of Representatives due to congressional and state
legislative gerrymandering of districts, and the Senate due to the
malapportionment of that body now controls the national governing institutions.
The Democratic Party remains with only one indicia of influence -- the support
of the majority of the American people.
Will
2016 be 1828 or 1932 and usher in decades of party dominance of the American
political scene. Or will it be 1928,
1964, 1972 lopsided victories were followed by the opposition returning to
power in the next election?
As a
Democratic Party activist I recognize that there are things my party needs to
do. Things they should have done had
they won but most likely in that case wouldn’t have. The party needs to return to its historic
roots. It has spent the past fifty years fighting, successfully, to extend
civil rights to those so long denied - African Americas, women, the LGBTQ
community, the disabled, native Americans, and Latinos. But
while doing that it appeared to forget the needs of those who made it possible
for the Democrats to accomplish this historic inclusion of all in the American
way of life - the white working class, the Euro-American ethnic groups, the
Catholic sons and daughters of immigrants and the evangelical Christians of
rural America.
The
traditional Democratic principle of economic justice for all and opposition to
the uber-rich combined with the struggle for social equality would have kept
that coalition intact and in fact could have expanded it. But in the 1990's led
by the Clinton inspired democratic leadership council the party moved its
economic positions to the center and embraced globalization trade agreements
that lifted other societies up and a detente and bonding with the magnates of
wall street. This new relationship led int he last year of the Clinton
administration to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act a New Deal measure that
even Reagan and Gingrich couldn’t repeal.
And,
when the bubble burst, the American people responded to the crash of 2008 with
the election of Barack Obama whom they expected to be another FDR. Instead they
found themselves with a 90's Democrat - liberal on social issues and centrist
on dealings with the powers of Wall Street: sort of a combination of Jimmy
Carter and Grover Cleveland. His signature accomplishment domestically was the
Affordable Care Act which brought health insurance to many millions who had not
had it but never resonated as a benefit for all those who already had.
Winning
the next national election and remaining relevant to American democracy
requires that the world’s oldest political party take some actions:
1)
Adopt fifty state strategies asking why we lost where we did and what we have
to do to win there. No one size fits all manual that instructs political
neophytes how to run a campaign but tried and true tactics that meet the
conditions in each state (and within the state, e.g. Pennsylvania, 67 county
strategies not a failed 15 county strategy).
2).Advocate
for and fight for the progressive platform of 2016 recognizing the party’s
historic commitment to economic justice for all as embodied in the platform of
1896 and FDR’s four freedoms and second bill of rights.
3)
Replace my generation of baby boomers from leadership positions at every level
and replace them with fighters in their fifties and forties and open the doors
of the party to those under forty to be full participants not merely sometime
votes.
4)Using
every means possible struggle to expand the franchise with early voting and
same day registration; fight to change the anti-people aspects of the American
political structure - the electoral college and district gerrymandering.
5)
Expose the outside forces such as the FBI and the dictator of Russia who
interfered in the election and to some extent determined its outcome. And
remind Americans again and again that It Shouldn’t Happen Here.
Finally
Democrats should remember the injunction of Andrew Jackson that “One man with
courage makes a majority” and realize that sixty-five million Americans with
courage can make a nation.
3
December 2016.
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