The Democratic Party is dead.
Let’s just say it, bury it, and get it over with. The Democratic Party is dead.
It has been in the intensive care unit for decades, but, now, after eight years of mostly happy-face executive orders to make Democrats feel better about themselves, the net Obama era legacy is the remains of a political party so weakened that it has nothing going for it as a force that captures the public imagination, much less public policy.
Given hundreds of millions of dollars, the absolute worst opponent that the human imagination could conjure up, and a strong showing of party unity amongst its “best minds,” the result is an election fiasco of unimaginable proportions, made even huger by the preposterously bad campaigning that led to a solid popular vote victory and an electoral loss.
As Zach Carter points out at HuffPost, a convocation of Democratic stalwarts at a Florida poolside inaugural mourning event laid out the huge disparity between a party fixated on only the White House and convinced that James Comey is the source of all of their problems, versus the wreckage of state-level Democratic Party politics in the wake of the Obama/Clinton machine’s self-centered strategy. The party elites are in their own corporate-padded private Idaho, while a nation suffers.
[UPDATE] To quell the knee-jerk reaction to this post’s photo, I submit the following quote from Carter’s piece to put it in more context:
“Everyone in that room agrees that absent the Comey letter and absent WikiLeaks, [Clinton] wins,” said Jon Cowan, president of the Third Way think tank. “It’s a close race. But you can’t start from that if you’re going to rebuild the Democratic Party …. Democrats are in their worst electoral position since the Civil War.”
The result is that handful of elites trying to wrestle for the top levers of power in the nation, and everyone else in the Democratic political area scrambling for their own political lives beneath a barrage of well-funded right wing attacks from corporations and billionaires. When is the last time that we had a Democratic Congress that really acted like Democrats? I mean, really? And when what the last time that “flyover states” were considered something other than just that by party elites?
Dr. Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy? Tossed in the dumpster by Obama and others as soon as they gained power. Build up state-level politics at the retail level for a new generation of Democrats? Naw, too messy, easier to send out some tacky feel-good Instagram photos and buy some ads on CNN. And Hillary Clinton, though undoubtedly the most unfairly treated and most qualified candidate for President in centuries, was never able to rid herself of the corporate and global insiderism that is at the heart of the Clinton Foundation’s ambiguous goodness, and James Comey’s Ahab-like pursuit of the Clintons.
As Mark Sumner pointed out recently on Kos, Comey’s obsession hearkens back to Bill Clinton’s pardons for Marc Rich and Pincus Green, shady insider traders who just happened to have given a boatload of money to Clinton campaigns. OK, we get it, money makes politics run, but we forget too often that the Democratic Party impeached Richard Nixon for dirty money politics not too far removed from Clinton’s bogus backers. Comey was obsessed, and vindictive to the point of risking the future of the nation itself, but, sadly, his prime motive was not unfounded.
There is no battle plan for victory. There is no Milton Friedman of the left, with thousand-page battle plans for how to transform both the U.S. and the world in the image of an overriding philosophy. Today, the philosophy of the Democratic Party could be summed up thusly: Mollify the corporations who donate to us, mollify the average people who have hopes in us, and when you get some modicum of power, find out how little you can deliver while not jeopardizing your corporate donations. And oh, yes, never really take global corporatism to task head-on.
Right now we are stuck with the Clinton/Obama party, a party without a message (“hope” or “I’m with her” is just baloney for PR purposes — not a fundamental unifying political message) and the Sanders movement, which is a message without a party. I am not sure that I want what’s behind either door number one or door number two. I am waiting for what’s behind the curtain, Monty, and I hope that it’s someone with more than a lick of horse sense, someone who can fight with the best of them, and someone who can help us to appeal to more than just a bunch of mimosa-sipping, poolside worrywarts.
The Democratic Party is dead. Long live the Democratic Party of the future. Or whatever takes its place.