Democratic friends and progressive independents, we need to talk. And listen to each other. The blaming, baiting and name-calling needs to stop.
First things first. All the available data show that President Obama would have won a third term if he could have run. Of course, we’ll never really know. All the would haves, should haves and might have beens are unprovable speculation. What we know for sure is that Americans respond to a charismatic leader and President Obama has it. He connects with people at an emotional level. He has that special something that even crying babies respond to. He reassures them. He soothes them. In seconds they are smiling. President Obama has the magic touch.
Obama’s votes in 2012 would have beaten all the candidates this year. We lost because turn out was down in multiple demographics of the Obama coalition. None of the candidates this year had Obama’s charisma and ability to soothe an anxious nation.
I feel terrible for Hillary and her supporters. In particular, I feel terrible for my son-in-law’s father Ron who has known Hillary since law school. He has been working hard for her since the earliest days, working in pain and delaying neck surgery until after the New Hampshire vote. He has testified that she’s a warm, wonderful, caring person. Her public image isn’t who she is. I have little doubt that the decades of ruthless attacks by the media and right wing operatives have forced Hillary to be very emotionally guarded so we don’t see her feelings in public. This, more than anything else, is how the Republicans beat her. All the hard work in the world and all the best plans are no substitute for an emotional connection with the American people. I trust Ron that Hillary is the warm, compassionate person that he knows, but most Americans never felt the emotional connection he did. The decades of attacks made the general public see a caricature, not the real Hillary. She was not able to make the emotional connection to get past the caricature because the hurt she felt from all the pain over all the years made her guard her emotions. The media held her to a different standard because she was an ambitious woman.
I supported Bernie in the primaries always planning to support Hillary after she won them. Democrats and Hillary supporters were helped, not hurt, by Bernie’s campaign. It would have been all Trump all the time for a year if not for Bernie. The notion that the Sanders campaign hurt Hillary is not supported by the evidence. Hillary’s campaign against Obama was bruising but Obama came out stronger. and won. Hillary came out stronger after the primaries and won the popular vote. She won almost all of Sander’s active voters. But, she suffered a large drop off in the turn out of young voters who needed to be motivated by a charismatic candidate to get out to vote.
Speculation about whether Bernie would have done better than Hillary is pointless. Both Hillary and Bernie carried heavy baggage. The corporate media would have ruthlessly attacked Bernie’s past, just like they ruthlessly attacked Hillary over the e-mails. We need to look at Bernie’s message, not Bernie. I firmly believe that Democrats need to recapture the spirit and message of FDR, but put it in a 21st century package. Otherwise, they will be like Seinfeld, a show about nothing. (Actually, Seinfeld was a love letter to NYC, a show about a caring community in the big city.) Bernie did a fantastic job of reviving the spirit and message of FDR. He helped bring that message to Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic party. I believe that Bernie helped Hillary win the popular vote. I believe that Bernie had the winning message but neither messenger had anything close to Obama’s ability to deliver the message. Obama won, despite the racist haters that have always been here, because he appealed to people’s hopes and dreams not just their intellect. Bernie was right to appeal to hopes and dreams. Hope always beats a well-made detailed plan because you have to win people’s hearts before you can win their minds.
Every organization and and every community has two kinds of contributors, the doers and the dreamers, the Marthas and the Marys (the Myers Briggs SJs and NTs, respectively). This web site has always attracted both. During the campaign this site appealed more to the Marthas than the Marys. Jesus, in his appeal for women’s leadership of the nascent church, said that Mary’s part was the best. A political campaign works because there are thousands of Marthas doing the hard leg work but it wins by appealing to people’s hearts. A political party (and a web site like this one) must be inviting to thinkers and dreamers to stay alive intellectually. The alternative to liberal thinking and dreaming is conservatism, authoritarianism and order. A political party becomes functionally conservative the minute it becomes top down no matter what ideology it claims to support. So does a community web site like this one. Now that the election is over this site needs to bring back the dreamers, the visionaries, and the idealists to revive the Democratic party. We have seen the epistemic closure of the right. Don’t let that happen here. Democrats will always need the hard work and good cheer of the Marthas but the party will lose its heart and soul, and ideals without the visions of the Marys.
I don’t have the answers. I know we are in for a world of hurt. My wife, who delivers health care to women at a community health center in North Carolina is terrified at what Republican control of all branches of government will do to women’s health. The sudden jump in the maternal death rate that happened when Texas cut women’s health services may be repeated nation-wide. It takes many years of work to build up an effective health delivery system. It takes months to destroy it.
I know we are in for a world of damage to the environment. The Paris agreement, which is aspirational, was very unlikely to keep global warming under its target goal of about 3ºF. However, if Paris is outright rejected and all American limits on fossil fuel consumption are scrapped, the sky’s the limit on warming. Once a species goes extinct, it’s gone forever. Once a pristine place is exploited or developed it’s never going to be what it was. Our political system may be resilient and our society may be resilient, but the natural systems that support us may take generations or ages to restore.
We need to talk to each other. We need to listen. We need to come up with creative ways to communicate our ideas to the world and resist the coming onslaught against the modern world that will soon be launched by conservatives, who want to take us back to a patriarchal 1950’s fantasy world that never existed, a world of horrors for anyone but conservative, straight white men.
Please be kind. We all have something to contribute. And I’m sorry my forecasts were so wrong.