On Sunday, Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Virginia) of the Senate Intelligence Committee got on CNN and said, “There is a lot of smoke. We have no smoking gun at this point, but there is a lot of smoke.”
What if there is no smoking gun? What if the Russians engaged in some low-level propaganda, without direction from any Trump administration officials, and Trump was elected because of a badly run Clinton campaign and a surly and angry electorate?
Have Democratic leaders spent the last six months engaged in the worst type of political grandstanding? The kind that we, as Democrats, rightly condemned when Republicans cried birth certificate and Benghazi for months on end? If so, the cynicism will not prove to be a good political strategy. Just like Obama’s birth certificate, when no smoking gun of Trump involvement is found, independents will start to distance themselves from the crazies in the Democratic Party that can’t let the conspiracy go. They will turn away, take whatever enthusiasm they had with them, and our chances for midterm gains or a real change in direction will be squandered.
Look across the pond at Theresa May’s Tories. May isn’t a pompous blowhard reality TV show dimwit with alarming skin features and freakish hair. But her government is cold-hearted and cruel. It wants to cut funds for the care of Britain’s elderly, it wants to privatize its schools and cut crucial public services. It vigorously supports wars in Yemen and Syria in the name of fighting terrorism, while accepting financial bribes from the Saudi government -- even as terrorists commit unspeakable acts in the name of the Saudi ruling family’s religious philosophy.
But, Jeremy Corbyn, who many in Britain and almost all the commentariat on this site ridiculed as unelectable, is now within 1 point of winning. He’s run an issues-based campaign, focused on a clearly laid out Manifesto containing some familiar themes:
- Financial regulations that break up the big banks.
- New investment in public health.
- Strengthen the rights of workers, including so-called “gig economy” contractors.
- Increase funding for education, and make higher education tuition free.
- Pay for it by taxing top earners.
He is inspiring Britons to vote Labour by being inspiring about what Labour represents. He is returning to a political message that, since FDR, has always served as a foundation for the Democratic Party:
There are two ways of viewing the Government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776
But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party. This is no time for fear, for reaction or for timidity. Here and now I invite those nominal Republicans who find that their conscience cannot be squared with the groping and the failure of their party leaders to join hands with us; here and now, in equal measure, I warn those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past, and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time, that they are out of step with their Party.
- Franklin Roosevelt, Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1932
The Democratic politics of triangulation, privatization, public-private partnerships, health care “markets”, school choice, “all of the above” energy policies, and “humanitarian” interventions in name only are over. No national campaign will be won on these dinosaurs. They are out of step with the Party.
The future of the party’s winning political strategy is found in places like California, where Democrats are fighting, often against other Democrats, for universal health care. Or, in New York, where, despite many flaws, New York families can send their kids to public universities without paying tuition. Or, in Seattle, where all workers receive at least $15 for their work. We are developing a winning platform, right now, that can mobilize nationwide support. We will continue to expand the list of winning issues, probably through well-organized local campaigns, so that in 2020 we can point to tangible policies that voters will actually like.
To be honest, it’s going to look a lot like Bernie’s 2016 campaign platform. Not because Bernie is going to manipulate the party into supporting his vision, but because his vision is what people in this country want. In American democracy, there are only two options for political parties. They either find a message that resonates with voters, or they die a deserved death.
Don’t let the Democratic Party die while yelling “Putin!!!” It would be an inglorious end to a party that, throughout the 20th century, has inspired such profound, positive social and economic change.