Well here we are. Sigh. Like nearly all of you I believed the polls and believed in the American people to make the decent and sane choice. I voted for Clinton and we won in the end but the system — the media coverage and the electoral college had other ideas. So now the recriminations begin and the post mortem panic sets in as we fight amongst ourselves while the neo-fascist barbarians bash down the gate and take heights. We know we are in real trouble now. Things, always on a knife edge, are getting real. The losses will be real. If we mismanage this next period the damage could be fatal to many of us.
If we think that Clinton was the best candidate for this election regardless of the outcome and that Sanders would have failed even worse than that dictates certain steps going forward. We should focus on refining the current message but the key steps will be technical. Should we work on eliminating the Electoral College? How do we manage the filibuster? But mostly that we don’t need to change the message, we just need to find a better way to get it out there.
If Sanders would have been the best candidate then that indicates a vastly different strategy, and ultimately a harder one. We need to change the message and we need to change the guard at the DNC before we can do that. So that is why we are having an internal battle when it feels like we should be united to fight a real danger that threatens all.
I would very much have liked to elect the first woman president. But the office is, after all, the central purveyor of policy and policy matters. Heather “Digby” Parton said the following in a post on a piece by Mike Lux: Understanding the Apocalypse
The lesson is that women's equality will never be that old time religion. Democrats will have to find something else. The first woman president will be a hard right Republican. That's the only woman who won't be met with overwhelming misogyny from the other side and will be defended by their own male allies. They are "the deciders."
I have to disagree with this statement and I don’t disagree with Digby lightly. The issue with Clinton was that she was a political insider when this was a shake up election where people wanted outsiders. People are looking to the Democratic Party to be the defender of working people and when over and over the message is that Democrats are corrupt tools of corporate capital it is very hard to motivate your own side and very difficult to convince others not on your team already that you’re going to change their situation. Yes, racism and sexism were huge parts of Trump’s victory and that is a very sad and unexpected realization to come to terms with — that your fellow countrymen are STILL so animated by this stuff or at least willing to sell out their fellows in the search for an alternative.
Digby also said this in her Lux post:
His (Lux’s) observation about Trump's use of the new media is very apt. He is a man of moment who recognized the zeitgeist better than anyone. What confused us was that he's such a throwback to the 1970s, a man whose worldview is grounded in a period that only people who are my age or older would recognize. What I failed to see was that to his fans, his worldview is fresh. His use of the media of the moment to portray that was really quite brilliant. And to the older folks my age, he's just like them, reminding them of the good old days when they were young and had that same haircut.
To me Sanders also felt like an old but fresh message, a return to the New Deal when the party looked out for the average worker and Roosevelt “invited” the hatred of the monied elite as a sign he was doing the right thing.
I think the end result is that Sanders’ message and policies should be the one we adopt as the face of the Democratic party. There is very good overlap with the key parts of Clinton’s agenda and the progressive Democratic Platform encompassing reproductive rights and equality but with a renewed focus on the democratic socialist elements of collective problem solving that used to be the hallmarks of he Democratic Party. We have good organizations like DFA and the Hillary and Sanders campaigns...these should not be dismantled but put forward and unified as the organizing bodies for a 24/7 fight for our political futures against the madness unleashed upon us by the Trumpkin hoards.
We need a new Democratic Party manifesto that
— Eliminates, fearlessly, the acceptance of corporate money, lobbyist money to run campaigns. NO exceptions. Individual donations only with the stated policy to seek federally funded campaigns with guaranteed TV time for ALL qualified candidates. NO opt outs.
— We need to have a clear conflict of interest rule regarding government employees working for industries they regulate and vice versa.
— We need to have a clear mandate to connect job growth with renewable energy development and redirecting energy capital back home.
— We need to eliminate the electoral college.
— We need to make trade policy reflect the needs of Americans: wage and benefit security, environmental protection.
— We need to return to the fairness doctrine for broadcast media.
— We need to focus on quality of life issues that matter to people — the complexity of bureaucracy in bills, taxes, healthcare, etc. needs to be reduced so that people feel like society is working for them.
I’m sure there are many, many more important elements to craft a robust, corruption resistent political organization for the 21st Century.
I look forward to more in the comments.
Thanks for reading.
