Yeah, that’s right, an empty chair. Clint Eastwood had Democratic National Committee Chair (ahem) Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s model for the presidential campaign down pat, only he was four years early. Just look at that debate schedule again:
That’s one prime-time debate two months after the Republicans had started, followed by three debates in a row scheduled on times when we know that the people we need to reach the most aren’t going to watch, and then the next prime-time debate takes place all the way out in the second week of February, after the Iowa caucuses. Meanwhile, the Republicans are showcasing their candidates half again as many times.
Between the bad timing, the paucity of debates, and the DNC-issued rule promising to ban from the official debates candidates who would dare participate in non-official ones, it has been a game of hide-the-candidates, of ceding public discourse to the Republicans and letting them drag popular opinion ever rightward, of forfeiting the free publicity in which our own candidates should be basking, to the point of making it harder to win come the general election.
This shouldn’t be anyone’s game. And better democracy should start at home, in our Democratic Party. That means a party primary electorate informed by debates, by the candidates’ on-the-spot responses to questions and to the other candidates’ views.
So why do this? Why run roughshod over even other Committee members, never mind over the candidates themselves? Because Hillary Clinton, Wasserman Schultz’s favored candidate, is currently ahead in the polls and has the political-economic establishment’s support locked up for the party primary, and the 2008 Clinton campaign co-chair now in charge of the process—the very same Wasserman Schultz—apparently won’t countenance the slightest hint of a contest. Even if it’s a blatantly favoritist move. Even if it means real, lasting detriment to the ability of the people of the party to choose a candidate in as democratic a manner as possible. Even if it means potentially tilting the table toward the opposing party next November.
When puzzling over this kind of apparent self-sabotage, one is often safe to chalk it up to the Iron Law of Institutions and leave it at that:
The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.
Yet that may not be the worst part. The rot goes much, much further. Go to the top of the DNC website. See that prominently-featured “2016” header tab?
Stop for a sec and ask yourself, what do you think you will get when you click on it? Photos of the declared Democratic candidates for President, perhaps from the first debates? An accompanying montage of Democratic candidates for Congress? A sampling of the most topical points of the Democratic Party platform? Some heads-ups on fast-approaching state primary election voter registration deadlines?
You might want to be sitting down for this. (Conveniently, the DNC has a vacant chair handy for you.) Ready?
Here is what you see when you click on "2016" atop the DNC website:
That’s right. It shows you the Republican candidates. All of them, even the jackasses who already gave up. With a link to a “baseball card” oppo profile for every one of them. (Hey DNC, another one just bailed—better get on updating that website right away. Hop to it!) No Democratic candidates or ideas anywhere to be seen.
Isn’t that sad? Pathetic, even? How could this be?
In case the website didn’t make the point clearly enough, Wasserman Schultz told the party rank-and-file directly and in person:
What’s more important? Focusing on Republicans or arguing debates?
And there you have it. The headline message of the Democratic Party for the 2016 primary election is, “Those Republicans are soooo bad.”*† Gee, so inspiring! Just makes you want to leap out of bed in the morning and welcome each fresh, new day by spreading the good word to everyone you come across: What a delight it is to have Democratic candidates vying to lead our fine country… because they suck less than the Republicans. Now put a smile on your face, get out there, and vote! Yay!!
(Of course, you can find policy highlights and other information elsewhere on the DNC site. Whoop-de-doo—the negative emphasis comes across loud and clear. Even makes one wonder whether the party leadership wouldn’t much mind if primary election turnout were on the low side. Consider whose odds of coasting into the general election that might benefit.)
More widely, and even more importantly, the debate schedule, the website, and Wasserman Schultz’s own statements evince the Democratic Party leadership’s abject refusal to stand for any cohesive ideals or principles, for any explicit morality. Oh sure, they’ll trot out “laundry lists” of policies on health care, wages, civil liberties, and the whole gamut of issues, yet all the while they won’t talk directly about the “why.” They might hint and imply, but they won’t really explain the moral and, yes, ideological basis for those policies, and they won’t show how it all fits together.
For example, why is health care a political issue? It’s not merely about getting a better deal on seeing a higher-caliber doctor. We don’t just call Ron Paul mean and leave it there (though, actually, I don’t remember any Democratic politician explicitly doing even that). It’s because, in a modern society, access to health care is a right derived from what should be the exalted value of every human life, from our mutual compassion for each other. It takes substantial government involvement—including some degree of what’s effectively wealth redistribution—to guarantee universal health care because government is ultimately accountable to all of us Americans, because charity is insufficient to the need and can be fickle, because non-profit insurers have a history of turning into for-profits, because the free-market price for life-saving treatment is everything you’ve got (and all your relatives and close friends’ money too), and because “shopping” among complicated plans issued by a few giant players is a cruel joke. It’s not just about better health care for more people, it’s about good health care for all people, yes, out of our individual self-interests, but also and out of love and our common humanity. When we people gather to act for our mutual benefit in an organized way… that’s government.
The “why” is truth, truth that shows how we people of the United States deserve more power over our lives and the corporate chieftains less, truth that makes it unbearable for those chieftains and the political leadership to stand against our demands—demands that we make in solidarity with each other—for equality and justice.
When the likes of Wasserman Schultz define the Democratic Party exclusively as what it’s not and what it’s against, when they (and make no mistake, this includes an assenting Clinton, who could have forced that heinous calendar above to change, single-handedly) deny us opportunities to see our candidates grapple with the issues of the day in the most public and candid ways possible, when they suppress the “why,” they do more than damage our party’s electoral prospects. They rob our lives of meaning. That awful feeling in the pit of the stomach when you heard about the debate schedule? That’s what it was, the deprivation of meaning.
It’s like the way that the party leadership robbed us of our language when they forfeited the word “liberal,” like the way that they echew the term “socialism,” the political philosophy from which, yes indeed, much of the Democratic Party’s ostensible policies are derived. In some ways it’s like when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, the event that Rick Perlstein characterizes as a momentous American turn away from coming to terms with reality and toward embracing either wishful thinking or cynicism. You see, don’t take events, facts, and morals to their logical conclusions, or else you might get ideas. The party leadership would rather lose than have us win that way. That way would mean more power for us and less for them and their corporate backers.
Oh, I know, we rabble aren’t savvy to the way the world really works. We should leave it to the professionals. We can’t be allowed to muck up the campaign because we wouldn’t handle it right, we’d just screw it up with the “wrong” candidate, and it wouldn’t work anyway (persuasion, what’s that?).
That sounds straight-up anti-democratic to me. The entire premise of a representative society, the very legitimacy of us entrusting power over ourselves to an elected government, rests upon a well-informed public.
DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz, stop robbing our lives of meaning. Resign and make way for leaders to take your place who, rather than stifling democracy, may cultivate it, revel in it, and lay the groundwork for a more perfect union.
* This would be the same party leadership that in the last election season brought you the “We’re DOOOOOOOOMMMED!!1!” method of campaign motivation.
† Come to think of it, unfortunately the front page of a certain orange-encrusted site at times fits that description a little too closely.
Addenda
About the debates, there is also the small matter of finagling the admissibility criteria to keep out a certain other candidate: Lawrence Lessig, running on campaign finance democratization. The rule came down that the candidates had to hit 1% in three national polls leading up to a debate. After Lessig did in one poll, the pollsters stopped including his name. The DNC didn’t exactly complain. To add insult to injury, CNN offered a debate podium—call it an onstage empty chair—to non-candidate Joe Biden.
To extend something from the main post, many “moderate” Democratic politicians have more in common with corporate Republicans than with you and me. If you doubt it, consider how Wasserman Schultz withheld support for Democratic challengers to certain Republican congressional candidates in her own state.
Earlier on Daily Kos:
Egberto is Right, “Corporatocracy IS Scared of Sanders.” But MSM Loves Emperor’s New Clothes
By thirty three and a third, Oct 19, 2015
Relevant reading:
This is still Bernie Sanders’ moment: He’s right on the big issues, now he must communicate it
Hillary's a solid debater. That doesn't make her right or honest on the substance. That's Sanders' opening
By Bill Curry, Slate, Oct. 18, 2015