This is a quickie, but here’s a thought as we head into Super Tuesday and high drama: our party needs a primary exit strategy. The demand will be a little bit soft because withholding votes is the sure path to disaster. But I’m sure there are some things that will make the pain of seeing our preferred candidate go a bit less, and feel more like a compromise on priorities and approach than like a capitulation.
I’ll go first as a Bernie supporter. In Hillary’s own words (roughly): “You don’t change hearts; you change laws.” I have to say that I do like her pragmatic approach on that front. It matches my own when making professional changes. I don’t aim to win everyone other — I aim for a critical mass and then let the superiority of my approach drive the rest into obscurity or adaptation.
So here’s what I would like to see about the concerns Bernie has raised about a cultural and monetary capture of the Democratic party by the corporate world, finance in particular:
- A pledge to assign no cabinet-level officials or Council of Economic Advisers that have been a major officer at a financial institution in the past ten years
- A pledge to balance remaining second-tier posts between so-called “freshwater” and “saltwater” academics
- Include at least one heterodox practitioner on the CEA, preferably a behavioral economist, in order to challenge groupthink
- Name a non-financial specialist in risk to the head or deputy position at SEC — I’m thinking someone from the FAA or NTSB would be a nice choice as someone who knows how to ask the “Show Me” question without being culturally captured by the Street
- Have one weekly address every two months using her exquisite foreign policy knowledge to teach Americans how the world actually works; I’d be particularly interested in her description of the New Cold War between Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel
- Whenever the topic of military intervention comes up, hopefully she would then be able to cast the rationale to a weary empire on a consistent rather than expedient basis
- EDIT: I forgot one: No Republican Department of Defense head … that recent tradition of putting the GOP in charge of Defense really undermines our party image as one that can be serious about these things
These all seem like reasonable requests that do not take away too much freedom of action from a victorious candidate but would be concrete steps to assuage key concerns.
Now as the group activity — what would you like to hear from the candidate other than the one you support in a “welcome back to the fold” speech?